210-219: Is God Necessary?

The Dewey numbers 210-219 are reserved for the intersection of philosophy, science and theology. Allow me to contrast a sample of the county library's holdings in this section:

with some from our church library:

I'm always up for CS Lewis or John Polkinghorne, but I also selected a couple of items from the public library. 

Honey from Stone, by Chet Raymo, is subtitled "A Naturalist's Search for God." It makes me wonder whether I could be reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in this Dewey decade. It recommended itself to me primarily because of its lovely woodcut illustrations. The search takes place on the Dingle Peninsula of Ireland, a geography about which I know absolutely nothing. The book was published by the Society of Saint John the Evangelist, a monastic order of the Episcopal Church about which I also know nothing. So, prime opportunity to branch out if this is the book I actually read.

God's Universe, by Owen Gingrich, is a slim volume published by Harvard and recommended by Polkinghorne. It looks like it might be appropriate for devotional reading, and, in any case, at 120 small pages, it would be faster just to read it than to try to guess exactly what the author is at. This may be exactly the kind of book I've been looking for-- an intersection of physics and theology. It seems so likely to me that physics IS theology, I've been surprised how much difficulty I've had finding books that would explain it to me.

In Praise of Learning Things You Are Pretty Sure Are Not True: Religious Literacy by Stephen Prothero

After listening to Religious Literacy by Stephen Prothero, here is what I know:
The United States will always be a secular state by law because of the establishment clause. It will always be a religious country by choice because of the free exercise clause. So everyone can stop panicking. The Religious Right (whoever that is) will never make the US a theocracy, and the Godless Commies (or whoever today's Great Satan is) will never outlaw Christmas.

The reason nobody knows anything any more is not because of the Godless Commies. It's because of the Godfearing and truly nice people who thought it would be a good idea to focus on where we agree, not on those pesky doctrinal points that divide us. So back in the first half of the 20th century, Protestants united against Catholics, which meant they had to stop arguing about baptism and predestination. Then Protestants and Catholics united against everyone else, which meant they had to stop arguing about whether salvation is by faith or works and what to do about Mary. Then Jews joined the party and we started hearing about Judeo-Christian values, which meant we needed to stop talking about Jesus (VERY divisive!). And then, after the excesses of post 9-11 hostility towards Muslims, it just seemed so... well, so mean to insist that Islam was substantively different from Judaism or Christianity. After all, it's nice to be nice, and we can all hold hands and feel terrific. And so, while loss of consensus in schools meant no more Bible reading there, a desire to seek greater consensus among people of faith stripped weekend and evening religious teaching of its meatier content.

The fact is, people of faith don't all believe the same thing. We may not even be interested in the same goals. And the more we know about each other, the less we might agree! So, much more pleasant to focus on the big picture. And the more diverse America gets, the smaller the big picture is, until we reach the least common denominator of faith: a "Universe" which we all agree we live in and that we all hope is somehow benevolently disposed. Next thing you know, Christians think Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife, and Muslims think God got married, and we can't even have a conversation that makes any sense. And that's not even counting the growing number of Americans who claim no religion.

But Prothero argues that, like the students in Modesto, California who take a world religions class, we should all pull up our socks and just learn some facts. Even if a given religion, or religion in general, is not important to us, it is important to the people around us. Newsmakers are constantly giving Bible references and claiming religious motivations and practicing their unfamiliar customs in our civic spaces, so it would be worth knowing something about how their religions work. This is the case for religious literacy.

Here's the case against it: We will learn that Islam and Christianity and Judaism cannot all be true, at least not in all particulars, because, for example, they take mutually contradictory views on the identity of Jesus. We will discover that not all disagreements stem from misunderstanding; some of them spring from extremely accurate understanding!

But we're all grown-ups here-- can't we face the fact that people hold differing opinions? Are we that insecure -and that ignorant- of what we claim to believe that we are afraid to even hear other ideas?

As for me, I learned some facts about my own religion from Religious Literacy. Most startling was that the letters of Paul were written before the Gospels, and that Protestants and Catholics divide up the 10 Commandments slightly differently. I also learned some facts about other religions-- I think I almost can explain the difference between Sunni, Shiite and Wahabi Islam, and (at least today) I know the Four Noble Truths, if not the Eightfold Path, of Buddhism. Take this quiz and see if you know enough religious facts to read a newspaper intelligently!

Remember: you don't have to believe an apocalyptic interpretation of the Bible to learn what it is. You don't have to belong to any of the major sects of Islam to benefit from knowing what they are. "The truth will set you free," that's from Jesus Himself. It doesn't sound like He's afraid of information, and you don't need to be either.

200-209: Introductory Remarks about Religion

Many people complain that Dewey's system reflects a limited worldview, and point to the fact that 86% of the digits of the 200's are allocated to Christianity as an example thereof. Of course this is not a completely unreasonable observation; it never occurred to Dewey that English-speaking people would not be much more interested in the Bible than in, say, the Tao Te Ching. However, a quick glance at the 200s in my local library demonstrates that modern librarians are not limited by Dewey's assumptions, and that any religion that has left any record at any time anywhere can be studied in this Dewey decade. Below please find just a small sample of our county library's holdings in this department:

Even though they were available, I did not choose a book about creation stories, goddesses or animals. I chose Spirits Rejoice: Jazz and American Religion, by Jason Bivens, from the New Releases shelf, because my son-in-law is a jazz drummer. Check out the link; it provides a soundtrack to the book! I also chose Religious Literacy, by Stephen Prothero, because it was from the audiobooks collection. Turns out we already own a previous work of his, God Is Not One, dedicated to his theory that all religions are not, in fact, different paths up the same mountain, but rather climbing completely different mountains. 

I've never read God Is Not One and wondered why we owned it, but now I am more intrigued. After starting Religious Literacy, I realize that although I might be able to pass Prothero's little literacy quiz, I really don't know enough about the world's other religions, and maybe not even enough about my own, to properly compare and contrast! So whatever Dewey's original intent or limitations, his system has proved effective at organizing and presenting knowledge in such a way that when I go to the library, I get my limitations and prejudices challenged. 

PS: "JOHO" has a great summary of the complaints against the Dewey decimal system with respect to its handling of religion, along with the reasons that the system still works. Some people like the Library of Congress system better, but the reality is that it is not commonly used in local libraries, so, here we are.

190-199: Modern Philosophers One by One

Since "modern" philosophy picks up pretty much in the 17th century, I could have read about John Locke (from Lost) or Thomas Hobbes (not the tiger), but I went with Kierkegaard, because my husband has been studying him.

My husband's a huge fan. He likes the way Kierkegaard engaged with Socrates. He is interested in how Kierkegaard wrestled with his faith and with the difficulties of his upbringing. What he recommended I read had the inviting title of Kierkegaard for Beginners and was part of a series called Beginners Documentary Comic Books, so that sounded promising. But they aren't really comic books. At least Donald Palmer's overview of Kierkegaard was not. It had more of the vibe of an Usborne book, with pictures and text jumping all over the page, except that the pictures were just black and white line drawings, and rather snarky and unattractive ones at that.

So maybe it was just the graphics of the book, but as I was reading I couldn't help but be reminded of a student's summary of Sartre's comments on the burden of freedom: "So this guy just was depressed and negative and wanted everyone else to be depressed too." Palmer certainly made it seem as if Kierkegaard's philosophy was an effort to take his own maladaptive attitude towards life and make it normative. He presented him as the originator of the sentiment that if you are not depressed, you are not paying attention. As a (sometimes) depressed person myself, I do tend to feel that way, but at the same time we have to recognize that God made people with sunny dispositions for a reason!

Let's give Kierkegaard some credit, though, for inventing a phrase that I use a lot to describe my gloomier states of mind: "Existential Angst." It turns out I've been misusing that phrase, though. It doesn't mean exactly, "having trouble with the fact that you exist and that everything else exists and how sort of complicated and difficult everything appears at the moment." It is more accurately described as "the dread you feel when you realize that you are capable of doing and free to do absolutely anything, no matter how obviously bad an idea it is."

I have certainly experienced that sensation as well, although not as frequently. Based on how people react when I try to explain what it's like, I can state definitively that this sensation is not a universal experience. Most people, oddly enough to me, do not, when they find themselves standing at heights, consider that they might suddenly fling themselves down. Most people, apparently, have never driven down the road and vividly imagined crossing the yellow line into oncoming traffic. And unlike Kierkegaard, I say there is nothing wrong with those people! He and I should leave them alone and let them stay in their sunny land of unicorns and rainbows!

So I come to the end of my journey through Philosophy and move forward into Religion with a renewed sense of why I need transcendental help. It's been fun, but humans just talking to each other about The Meaning of It All can't help but have limited perspectives...

180-189: Philosophers, Ancient, Medieval, and Non-Western, Still Arguing

Out of all the thick treatises and skinny "Aristotle for Dummies" overviews in this section, the only book that appealed to me was Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away. Rebecca Goldstein, the author, exposits five aspects of Plato's work, and then places him in five settings that allow him to expound-- or rather to inquire-- on these topics in contemporary context, supporting the thesis of her subtitle. It's more fun than Sophie's World, which, sorry pretentious millennials everywhere, I could not finish, and more inviting than, say, The Story of Philosophy, of which I may not have read every word.

Philosophy is, by definition, the love of wisdom, and Plato believes that it is inherently a Good Thing that leads to goodness. In fact, Plato says truth, beauty and goodness are the braided heart of the universe, the cause and purpose of the world's existence. Goldstein summarizes this way: "Simply to care enough about the impersoal truth, devote one's life to trying to know it, requires disciplining one's rebellious nature, which is always intent on having things its own way..." Our lower natures don't want objective truth, but only the knowledge that will support our own agendas, so simply seeking reality is a corrective to that egocentric self-indulgence. Goldstein portrays Plato as a huge fan of Google.

Goldstein's Plato would also be a huge fan of Nerd Night: Research Speed Dating Edition, which I attended last night. Researchers sat at tables, prepared to give the elevator pitch for their projects, while our mission was to pepper them with questions. I learned about everything from bumper sticker archives to whether Neanderthals wore jewelry (probably). So I was made to pay attention to things I thought I didn't care about and facts that did not fit tidily into my preconceived worldview, and apparently Plato did recognize great value in that practice. I wonder if the real Socrates would have been as enthusiastic about this event, though, or about Google for that matter, since the vision of Truth, Beauty and Goodness portrayed in the dialogues seems to take a lot of time to uncover and experience-- time that just about anyone who has to work for a living will be hard pressed to find.

In fact, Goldstein does bring up and never satisfactorily dismisses the charge that Plato was an elitist, setting up requirements for the Good Life that could only be met by the small percentage of the population that had the aptitude and the leisure to spend hours a day mooching around chatting. (Ironically, the Socratic method was very important to the developers of the Paideia Proposal, built on the decidedly non-Socratic principle that “All children deserve the same quality of education, not just the same quantity.”) Goldstein also devotes a whole chapter to the practice of pederasty in Athens, which strikes me as being a perfect example of elitism in the form of institutionalized sexual exploitation. 

I am the first to say that we can't usually judge or even label ancient behavior by modern sensibilities, but the very parameters of this Athenian mentoring system with a sexual component demonstrate that it was oppressive to children. The boys are actually instructed to, for all practical purposes, lie still and think of Athens while their mentors do what they like to their bodies. And I say that any time a person is told up front that his best bet is to dissociate, that is not a healthy situation. It's always been very difficult for me to take the Dialogues seriously when they tend to be framed with chitchat about so-and-so's hot new slave, and I think it's because that kind of talk just reminds me that the Athenians did not think that all their high ideals were for everyone. They believed that the mass of men, and certainly of women, existed only to serve them so they could have the leisure to contemplate said ideals. I believe that people of all income levels and IQs can be valuable and can live a good life.

Yet I agree that Plato does still matter, and philosophy does still matter. It is my experience that, although not everyone is constantly tormented by questions like, "Why is there something instead of nothing?" or "How can we know that we actually know anything?" the existence of people who work on such questions is just as vital to our society's functioning as is the existence of people who know how to operate hydroelectric plants or the Federal Reserve. I wish that the inquiries of Plato's friend Socrates had pushed a little further into practical ethics and led that little group to advocate a more equitable society than the one they found themselves in, but Goldstein does make an excellent case that they were asking important questions and starting to pave the way to some useful answers. They did not remain bound by their society in every respect.

For example, Goldstein talks a lot about the question of "mattering." She references the "axial age," a time from 800-200 BC when peoples all over the world began asking themselves what it was all about. What is the meaning of life? What's the point if we're just going to die in the end? (The Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible will get you inside the head of one axial age philosopher's questions, if you don't really understand what we are trying to solve here.) Many ancient peoples concluded that they mattered because of the tribe they belonged to. That was part of Athenian thinking on the subject: Athenians mattered because they belonged to the greatest polis on earth, and thus their glory and their virtue came largely from their participation in political life. Socrates, however, refused to participate in politics. Despite Plato's violent distaste for Homeric poetry, Socrates seemed to subscribe more to the Homeric view that "mattering" was a matter for the individual, and that 100% of one's significance came from one's own personal excellence-- in any field, whether athletics, intellect, war, or whatever endeavor might offer an opportunity to be outstanding.

Obviously, both these definitions of mattering are unacceptable to my democratic impulses. If significance comes from group affiliation, there is no hope for those born on the outside. If significance is only for the outstanding, there is no hope for the vast majority that must form the field in which the exceptional stand. The monotheistic answer-- that significance comes from being made in the image of God, being in relationship with God, fulfilling whatever role God put you in-- is the only one on offer in the Axial Age that contained the seeds of equality. I think too often, though, that modern believers still fall into the traps of tribal or personal exceptionalism. We think that we all have to be special, we all have to find our spectacular callings, or God will be displeased. Or we think that we are already special because of our denominational, political or national affiliation. I, for one, would like to live by what I profess to believe: that every person matters, every person deserves an education, every person deserves to be free, every person contributes, every person is important, regardless of his or her ability to excel or his or her membership in any particular tribe. 

Although I don't agree with Plato's (or Goldstein's!) answers to some of the questions posited in this book, I appreciate the spirit of inquiry that marks it and the thoughts it provoked. By the way, Plato at the Googleplex had the additional and rare virtue of being a page-turner about philosophy! Recommended!

"Service as a Spiritual Practice."

Now that's what I'm talking about. Not just the bad feeling that makes you feel good but doesn't actually put broccoli on the plates of the starving children in Africa, but actually doing something that actually gets something done, all in fellowship with God. That's what I'm interested in, and that's why I was excited about Deliberate Acts of Kindness by Meredith Gould.

Justice work-- cleaning up Gotham-- is kind of like cleaning your house in that it's a superhuman task that is never done-- or at least never stays done for long-- and this book promised to be a practical guide to how to cope with that fact, a book that recognized my humanity. It came out of Gould's experience in 12-step programs, which, although I realize they are no more effective than the Five Pillars or the Fourfold Path in getting me to enlightenment without divine intervention, just don't bug me as much, maybe because they start by admitting that we are powerless! In any case, the book is not so much based on as inspired by the 12 steps, and only has 5 chapters, if we're still counting things.

First, Gould, like Armstrong, defines compassion as it is found in many traditions. I think my favorite was Maimonides' 8 degrees of justice, which began with "1- To give grudgingly, reluctantly, or with regret" and ascended through very detailed increasing degrees of selflessness to reach its pinnacle at "8- To help another to become self-supporting by means of a gift, a loan, or finding employment for the one in need." This definition of the highest form of justice reminds me of the book When Helping Hurts, which I read a few years ago with a church group. The authors, Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert, define three levels of generosity: relief, rehabilitation, and development, and argue exactly the same thing as Maimonides: that the ideal philanthropic situation is one where you are working yourself out of a job!

I really appreciated how Gould distinguishes between caring and codependency. Caring is without expectation of cooperation, appreciation or reward, and (this is what I loved) believes that "compassionate noninterference is sometimes the greatest gift of all." (p. 125) Codependency, on the other hand, rushes in to help whether help is wanted or not, gets its thrills from being needed, and runs on guilt, resentment and recognition. Ouch! Reminds me of what my husband always says: "You can tell you're being a servant when people treat you like a slave."

Gould goes on to offer opportunities to identify where I might serve most effectively. I feel that most people don't set out to be compassionate and then try to find a venue to express that quality; instead, they have a concern about a specific issue and are trying to figure out how to most effectively act on that. Still, I liked some of Gould's exercises here that focused more on one's manner of serving. For example, I'm more project-oriented than relationship-oriented, more short-term than long-term, and I like meeting visible immediate needs. For example: teaching inner-city kids art for 8 weeks? Yes, please! Serving on the board of the Barnes Foundation? Um, not so much.

Gould then digs into the nuts and bolts of service: how to survive committee meetings, how to navigate service organizations (which, sadly, turn out to be staffed by humans, just like every other organization that has ever driven you crazy), how to figure out what your job even is within the group. All useful stuff, if a bit much to take in all at once.

Gould brings up the issue of burnout eventually. I have to admit, I think she breezes through it a little too quickly. You have to start thinking about burnout the day you start to serve-- how can you scale your day, your week, your year so that your service is sustainable? Burnout is one of the reasons I was interested in her book in the first place, but I guess I didn't really need a book to tell me that the exhaustion and apathy I was beginning to feel was a red flag waving.

I really already knew what would help me:  slowing down, quitting a bunch of stuff, doing plenty of physical activity, and giving myself permission to enjoy all the blessings God has given me. I also got a kick out of noticing a new phenomenon in my world. I would become aware of a service opportunity and think with dismay about how that was the sort of thing I "should" get involved in, but how I absolutely could not at that moment stand it. The next time I checked, I would find that someone else had stepped forward and the need was filled! The first couple times this happened, it kind of hurt my feelings, because I was so used to thinking of myself as the center of the universe! But soon I learned to thank God for not needing my help to do His job, and by now it's happened so often I just laugh about it.

Ultimately, a life of service takes many forms, from social justice activism on a global scale to caring for one disabled relative. Participating in deliberate acts of kindness and receiving the kindness of God towards me might just be two sides of one coin. So if service doesn't feel like a spiritual practice but like codependency or just another exercise in sleeping backwards on the bed, maybe there's a better way-- a way that involves humility, trust, and a bit more of a sense of humor about myself!

Compassion Fatigue

When I was 8 years old, I slept on top of the covers, wrong way around on the bed. I had learned at an early age that the world was full of children (and, indeed, adults) who went to bed hungry, or who slept on dirt floors in refugee camps, and I was consumed with guilt that I, who had done nothing to deserve it, got a whole bed to myself and all the dinner I could eat. My guilt didn't prevent me from saying at dinner, as every child does, "Then send this broccoli to China!" But it did make it hard for me to get comfortable under my cozy covers at night. So I slept backwards on the bed, in solidarity with the little refugees on the other side of the world... or maybe in apology to them that I could not share my excessive comfort with their excessive need.

Ever since, I go through episodes where sayings like "None of us are home until all of us are home" are more crippling than challenging. My problem is not that I don't care; it's that sometimes I can't figure out how to care without ending up backwards on the bed again.

And that's why I couldn't finish Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life, by Karen Armstrong, even though I had really been looking forward to it. (The link will walk you through all the steps, if you're curious.) Armstrong has made her name as a what she calls a "freelance monotheist," but to my mind, this book is most directly informed by Buddhist thought, which I find legalistic and therefore depressing. This style of teaching-- introspective, absolutist, insisting on "always, tirelessly, without exception" behaviors and "urgent, determined, consistent" maintenance of certain inward attitudes, all under our own steam, with no help from an empowering God-- seems to me like Bel and Nebo:

"The things that you carry are burdensome,
A load for the weary beast.
They stooped over, they have bowed down together;
They could not rescue the burden,
But have themselves gone into captivity." (Isaiah 46, New American Standard Bible)

This is the kind of thinking that got me in trouble when I was 8 years old, and I just can't go back. I became a Christian precisely because I couldn't bear the burden of constant monitoring of my own thoughts and attitudes, because I knew I needed help every single minute just to be a tolerable human being, because I knew that I had to receive as well as give, and that the well from which I drew had to be deeper than myself or any other created thing. Just as God says:

"You who have been borne by Me from birth
And have been carried from the womb;
Even to your old age I will be the same,
And even to your graying years I will bear you!
I have done it, and I will carry you;
And I will bear you, and I will deliver you." (Isaiah 46, continued)

For me, the first step in how to be good is to give up on the whole project and agree with Jesus that "No one is good except God alone" (Mark 10:18). Eugene Peterson wrote a book called The Pastor: a Memoir about two models of church development, and they could well be two models of any kind of ministry. There is the Ptolomaic model, the one where the sun, the moon, and everything else we can see goes around us. Makes sense, matches our observations. But then there's the Copernican model, where almost everything does not go around us, but around the sun. That model has the great drawback of being something you can't see but just have to believe. But it is true. The earth, even my own small sphere of influence, does not revolve around me but around Someone who is truly tireless and consistent.  The starving and the refugees are not, thank God, dependent on my good intentions. They won't be fed and housed by my gesture of solidarity. Providing beds and bread for all of them was God's concern long before it was mine, and will continue to be His project long after I am gone-- or even if I just burn out and quit.