January | 2013 | Theology and Literature

Jan
29

Where does art come from?

Category: Bibliography, Prose, Reflection Tags: art, asher lev, chaim potok 3 Comments

I told Lauren that I wouldn’t post anything here until I finished a paper that I’m writing, but apparently I lied. Oops.

I’m working up a paper about how faith communities learn to discern together. Though the conference I’m submitting this for is a theological conference, I want to approach that subject through story. Specifically, though Chaim Potok’s Asher Lev stories, which have totally captured my imagination in recent months. In order to get some background help, I’ve been reading interviews with Potok, especially from a collection published as Conversations with Chaim Potok (University Press of Mississippi, 2000).

One of the major themes of My Name Is Asher Lev, and to some extent the second book, The Gift of Asher Lev, is about where artistic inspiration comes from. Set in a Hasidic Jewish community, these novels wrestle with painting as art, but more deeply with calling. Young Asher Lev is a brilliant artist, but his parents and his community have a difficult time deciding the source of Asher’s gift. Is it from the Master of the Universe, or from the dark side? Potok does not make that answer clear; he wants the reader to wrestle with that question even as Asher is a lovable hero.

In response to an interviewer’s question, “Is the artistic temperament from the sitra achra, the ‘other side’”?, Chaim Potok responded,

Yes, that is a fundamental question, and the first Asher Lev book [My Name is Asher Lev, 1972] deals with that. I think that art is from the “other side” but given to us to use with wisdom, beneficently, so that we can judge “this side.” There is nothing in the world that is as powerful an instrumentality as art; we can bring it to bear on the foolishness, the mendacity, the hypocrisy, and the hunger we have to create meaning in ourselves. So the artist has an enormous responsibility. I would agree with Asher Lev that he has the responsibility to do the best that he can within the realm of the “other side” in order to make “this side” a better place in which to live. But you’ve got to plumb the “other side”.

- from Conversations with Potok, 168-9. This is from “A Visit with Chaim Potok” by David L. Vanderwerken in 2000.

Potok is a writer (and also a painter), and in this response he gives us a challenge. How can we as writers and readers of literature and theologians bring that art to bear on our world? How can it help us to find and create meaning?

I am thrilled that this site allows us to ask this question, and I suspect that we will be dancing with this question for a long time ahead.

About Pat Loughery

I'm a software project manager and qa specialist by trade. I also hold a doctor of ministry degree and teach courses in Christian spirituality, both face-to-face and though e-learning systems. My doctoral dissertation looked at Christian spirituality in social networks. And I love to read.

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Jan
26

By Lauren Sawyer

The hour of lead–thoughts on grief

Category: Bibliography, Poetry, Reflection Tags: emily dickinson, grief, pain 1 Comment

After great pain a formal feeling comes–
The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs;
The stiff Heart questions–was it He that bore?
And yesterday–or centuries before?

I haven’t learned to grieve well yet. In fact, I haven’t really had the chance to. My grandparents, maternal and paternal, both died before I could walk. The only deaths I’ve experienced were of those in my stepdad’s family, people I hardly knew. And neighbors. That one crush-from-afar. And pets–rest in peace, Cubby the dog.

I haven’t learned to grieve.

But earlier this week, one of my dearest college friend’s mother passed away, after battling cancer for a few years. I don’t know how to grieve with my friend. Do I tear my clothes, sprinkle ashes? Do I sit in silence, remember? What words do I speak? What kind of trite promises do I make her?

In my New Testament class last week, we talked about God’s Kingdom being here on earth, yet not fully. God may have come. He may have offered things like His Spirit and a new way to live. But biology still wins: we are so weak, so broken, so prone to fear. “And which of you … can add a single hour to his span of life?”

The feet, mechanical, go round
A wooden way
Of ground, or air, or ought,
Regardless grown,
A quartz contentment, like a stone.

In my other classes, I’m learning how to be a therapist (therapist? what do I know?). We’re asked to carry other’s stories, to feel the weight of them, to help them bless their pasts and accept their presents. But again, what words can you speak? What can you say to the weight of pain?

I have no works to speak.

So I turn to the poets, to Emily.

I wonder sometimes if those prayers the Spirit groans for me aren’t poems written by that Massachusetts recluse.

This is the hour of lead
Remembered if outlived,
As freezing persons recollect the snow–
First chill, then stupor, then the letting go.

* “After great pain a formal feeling comes” by Emily Dickinson

About Lauren Sawyer

I am a student of theology and culture in Seattle, Washington. I love coffee, rainy days, and John Updike. Learn more about me at laurendeidra.com.

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Jan
26

By Lauren Sawyer

God needs nothing, asks nothing, and demands nothing

Category: Bibliography, Prose Tags: annie dillard, stars Leave a Comment

God does not demand that we give up our personal dignity, that we throw in our lot with random people, that we lose ourselves and turn from all that is not him. God needs nothing, asks nothing, and demands nothing, like the stars. It is a life with God which demands these things.

Experience has taught the race that if knowledge of God is the end, then these habits of life are not the means but the condition in which the means operates. You do not have to do these things; not at all. God does not, I regret to report, give a hoot. You do not have to do these things–unless you want to know God. They work on you, not on him.

You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.

-Annie Dillard, from “An Expedition to the Pole” in Teaching a Stone to Talk, p. 31

Jan
22

By Lauren Sawyer

Whenever theology touches science, it gets burned

Category: Bibliography, Interpretation, Prose Tags: cosmology, john updike, roger lambert, science 1 Comment

Really, what a preposterous glib hope, his of extracting God from the statistics of high-energy physics and Big Bang cosmology. Whenever theology touches science, it gets burned.

- Roger Lambert, professor of theology in Roger’s Version by John Updike, pp. 32

I’ll apologize now–Roger’s Version is going to come up a lot on this site as I work through my study on it, Karl Barth’s theology, and the writings of the ante-Nicene heretics. But this text is rich with theological questions, many I won’t get a chance to address in my final paper.

I listened to an NPR podcast recently which recorded an hour-long debate between Christian and atheist scientists on the question, “Does science refute God?” I knew from the get-go that the atheists would win–they always do. Science and theology don’t mix well. Christianity is the one that always “gets burned,” I think, agreeing with Roger.

Sure enough, the atheists “won” that debate, gaining more “converts” by the end of the hour.

It’s been my opinion for a while now that those debates shouldn’t even happen–especially when it’s scientists against your average Christian who hasn’t studied science. What the debate becomes is not a debate at all. Both parties are arguing something different. It’s messy, and almost always unfruitful.

For a while I tried to not even think about science, so I wouldn’t have to deal with the messiness. I didn’t want those debates to persist in my own head. I didn’t want to find myself siding with those clueless Christians or the godless atheists. But with a science-loving boyfriend, that became difficult. Instead, I began looking for where God and science could meet.

A few weeks ago I read an article in The Christian Century recently about the “Cosmic Question”–where’s God in cosmology? I appreciated the author’s firm separation between science and theology. In short, science doesn’t refute the existence of God; but theology doesn’t try to describe how the physical world works:

We shouldn’t try to squeeze God into the gaps in scientific explanations. Some try to preserve a role for God in this way, thinking that unless we keep God involved in at least part of the day-to-day business of the natural world, we’ll wind up with deism. The god of deism may start things off, but then just sits back and watches the world go according to the natural laws.

But there is only a slight difference between the god of deism and a god who watches the world go most of the time but every once in a while steps in and tinkers with the natural systems a bit to make them work right and then goes back to sitting and watching during the parts of the processes we do understand. And as science progresses and explains more of the gaps, there will be ever more sitting and watching by such a god.

In that sense, science has exposed a flaw in our theology. We’ve been seduced by our lack of understanding into thinking that God is the sort of creator who designed natural systems that were incapable of being described consistently in natural terms. We’ve thought that God’s interaction with the world has to do with filling in causal gaps that appear in the normal operation of those systems. (This is to say nothing of positing moments of miraculous intervention.) We should allow the success of science to correct this understanding of God. God’s interaction with and sustaining of all creation must operate at a different level than the forces of nature.

We should consider God’s relationship to creation to be more like that of a personal agent, rather than a force of nature. Then we can talk about God’s actions in personal terms like “willing” or “governing” or even “loving,” and we don’t need to worry that a new scientific discovery will prove this wrong. -J.B. Stump, Dec. 18, 2012

Roger’s argument is extreme, a position I’m not ready to take. He believes you cannot see God in science at all–not in nature or biology.

I think God is there, not to be extracted as Roger fears, but to be known. We see God in nature. We see God in the stars, in those giant orbs of gas light years away.

You seem to think that God obligingly is going to rush into any vacuum, any cap of knowledge. … You’re tying God to human ignorance; in my opinion … He’s been tied to that too long. (p. 80)