Apr
24

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And this is a religious sensation

Category: Bibliography, Prose Tags: , , Leave a Comment

Fiction is rooted in an act of faith: a presumption of an inherent significance in human activity that makes daily life worth dramatizing and particularizing. There is even a shadowy cosmic presumption that the universe–the totality of what is, which includes our subjective impressions as well as objective data–composes a narrative and contains a poem, which our own stories and poems echo.

The impulse of praise–or its inverse, lament and execration–motivates literature at its deepest and most simple and noble; even those who see nothing to praise admire in others the results of this impulse. The writer’s most important asset is not wisdom or skill but an irrational, often joyous sense of importance attaching to what little he knows; and this is a religious sensation.

–John Updike, speaking on religion and contemporary American literature at IUPUI in Indianapolis, Indiana, 1994

Mar
29

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The Theology of Comma-And

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In one of my writing classes in college, I was taught to avoid “comma-and” sentences, those sentences that contain two independent clauses, separated by the most-boring-of-all conjunctions: and. There’s no flavor in comma-and sentences. There’s no life! No transformation! You’re just tacking on two ideas as equals, and that’s just plain boring. (See what I did there?)

But as I’ve become a theology student, I’ve come to love comma-and sentences–not for their dullness. I still choose to avoid them in my writing. But I love comma-and sentences for the “andness” of it all.

I have a professor, Dwight, who loves the word and. I guess he has a tattoo of an ampersand on his arm or leg, to remind himself of what he calls &ing, a dichotomy that humans as God’s children experience:

We are bad, and we are good.

We are sinners, and we are saints.

We are weak, and we are strong.

For most of my life, I’ve been told that we are comma-but sentences. We are good, but we’re really bad–the latter negates the former.

Bad Theology vs. Good Theology

My boyfriend Nate and I were eating ice cream the other night when I declared to him that Rabbit at Rest is probably my favorite of the Rabbit tetralogy. (Dr. Brown was right.) I told Nate it’s because of all the humanity in the book. Rabbit’s cocaine-addicted son Nelson goes to rehab and comes back a new man, one who’s finally able to stand up to his dad:

Again, Nelson is silent. Then: “… I keep trying to love you, but you don’t really want it. You’re afraid of it, it would tie you down. You’ve been scared all your life of being tied down.” (p.379)

I wrote “Finally!” next to this passage. Finally someone is able to name what’s true about Rabbit: he’s scared. He’s a flighty rabbit who wants to just get out, to find another hole to bury into.

I told Nate that I love this book because there’s something so real and true about these characters. The plot is interesting, sure, but it’s the characters’ transformation that engulfs me, that leads me to tears by the epilogue.

Nate told me that’s why he loves Wendell Berry’s books so much–what matters is not what’s going on exactly, but who the characters are in relation to other characters, in relation to the time and place.

“See,” I said to him, “this is why I love studying this stuff.” And a pause. “I suppose this is more philosophy and literature, rather than theology and literature.” Another pause. “Or maybe that’s what good theology is–showing people’s humanity, their good and their bad, all mixed together.”

I’m proposing, then, that bad theology is recognizing only one part of our humanity–our saintliness or our selfishness–or raising one side up higher than the other. We are saints and sinners; we are comma-and sentences. One doesn’t negate the other. They dance together.

Dynamic characters are comma-and sentences

Last week I got to write a paper on a fictional couple, analyzing their marriage based on categories given in my Marriage and Family class. I chose, of course, Rabbit and Janice Angstrom, putting them easily in the category of having a chaotic, violent, and yet fabulous marriage. But the bulk of the assignment was not to name which category they were in, but to discover where they exhibit both tenderness and strength.

This was much more difficult.

It took me a while to see where this couple showed strength and tenderness in their marriage. But once I thought of a few examples, I started thinking of more and more. As I finished reading Rabbit at Rest, I noticed that this couple was often strong and tender, even in the midst of ugliness and betrayal.

All well-written, dynamic characters, like humans, are paradoxes. They carry both the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the tender and the strong. They are comma-and sentences.

(And that’s why we relate to them so well!)

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.

Mar
25

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The be-riide of Ke-riist

Category: Bibliography, Interpretation, Prose Tags: , , Leave a Comment

I wrote this post a few months ago, but I decided not to post it until now. For one, I went a little crazy with all the John Updike at first. I don’t need to expose you to my obsessions–wink wink. Also, I just finished the fourth and final Rabbit book, Rabbit at Rest, which made me cry and cry. So now seems as good of a time as any to post this, in Rabbit’s honor I guess.

–

My boyfriend Nate, the skeptic, kept hounding me to come up with a better definition for this site. “What do you mean by theology?” and “How can fiction really influence your theology?”

He knows all about my independent study on the Barthian theology in Updike’s Roger’s Version. But because of how overtly theological Roger’s Version is, Nate couldn’t see how I would let more secular books inform my theology.

So I turned to another Updike book, Rabbit Is Rich (the third in the Rabbit Tetralogy). The book cites, in my opinion, one of Updike’s most crass comments on the Christian faith. I’m a pretty irreverent lady, but I was squirming when I read this.

The Bride of Christ

Rabbit’s twenty-something son Nelson and his bride-to-be come home from a pre-marital counseling session with “Soupy” the “queer” Catholic priest when Nelson explodes:

“He keeps talking about the church being the be-riide of Ke-riist. I kept wanting to ask him, Whose little bride are you? [...] I mean, it’s obscene,” Nelson insisted. “What does He do, fuck the church up the ass?” (pp. 191-192)

So what can we learn about theology from this?

A whole lot, I told Nate. Believe it or not.

Let’s deconstruct this. What is Nelson getting at? He’s commenting on Soupy’s presumed homosexuality–got that. But he’s also commenting on this language, “The Bride of Christ.” What does that mean to us anymore?

It’s all over Scripture. Isaiah cites God’s calling Jerusalem “The Bride of God,” no longer the “Forsaken Land” (Is. 62:4, NLT). Paul makes reference to the church as God’s “pure” bride (II Cor. 11:2, NLT). The language is throughout Revelation as well.

But what has the church done with the language?

For me, as a woman, I’ve been told that I need to be that pure bride for both Christ and for my future husband. As a teenager, sermon after sermon after sermon was addressed to me and other young women about being modest and for “saving myself for marriage.”

This language of being “The Bride of Christ” was so hammered into me as a young adult that I felt guilty for doing anything that resembled impurity. Back in high school, I felt sick with guilty after watching a movie in the dark with my boyfriend. We held hands but didn’t even kiss.

Nelson’s reminding us that language matters. Often in our Christian communities we use language without realizing the damage it causes others. Get a group of former fundamentalists in a room and talk to them about “evangelism” or “saving souls” or “the sinner’s prayer” and see if they don’t cringe.

So back to Nate’s question, How does fiction inform or influence my theology? It challenges me to look at phrases so well-established in my vernacular and hear them through another person’s ears.

Similar Post:

“Whenever theology touches science, it gets burned” (thoughts on Updike’s Roger’s Version)

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.

Feb
9

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Lauren at Rest: after a long week of Updike

Category: Bibliography, Prose, Reflection Tags: , , , , Leave a Comment

This has been a big week. I finished a first draft of my paper on the theology in Updike’s Roger’s Version. I love the thing, and yet hate it, knowing I couldn’t give Barth or Updike (or Roger!) the explanation they all deserve. And I also finished Rabbit is Rich, the third book of the Rabbit Tetralogy, and am on to the fourth and final: Rabbit at Rest. Rabbit dies; I know this. I’m not ready for it. He’s been a part of my life for a year now, and I’ve grown to love the guy. So I’ve been sad and reflective, ready for Rabbit’s story to finish and for my own paper to endure the editing process.

I’ve turned to Lauren Winner for comfort. She is, to be frank, who I want to be “when I grow up.” She’s a brilliant writer, a lover of words, and a professor. She is also, I learned from her most recent book, an Updike fan. Be still my soul. She writes,

Today Ruth and I have come, in the pilgrim economy of writerly tourism, in search of a relic: John Updike lived for many years in neighboring Beverly Farms, and Manchester-by-the-Book received a portion of Updike’s library after he died. [...]

There is, frankly, something of the vulture in me; I want some of those Updike books. I want the books he read, or even just books he kept stacked on shelves in the guest room. [...]

After we have scavenged the fiction, we paw through Updike’s religion books. I make off with three volumes of Barth; two of them I will give away next Christmas, but Against the Stream I will keep. Updike read Barth in his late twenties; he said the Swiss theologian helped him conquer his “existential terror.” He said Barth made him “able to open to the world again,” and Barth shadows Updike’s oeuvre–his novels and short stories, the interviews in which he mostly avoided religious declaration, his poems. In Updike’s fictional world, many of the most compelling characters are admirers of Barth, followers of, or locked in an argument with, the deus absconditus, the God who hides himself. The eponymous hero of Roger’s Version, who invokes Barth at the drop of a hat, knows that God is unknowable–knows even that God’s mystery is somehow tangled up with human hope–but finds that knowledge vaguely unsatisfying. [...] And Rabbit Angstrom is a Barthian, sensing that God is wholly other, that the best proof of God’s existence is Rabbit’s own desire for him, his own undeniable longing.

In addition to those three volumes of Barth, the bookstore’s religion shelves hold one of Updike’s volumes of Buber, some comparative religion texts, and several books about Hasidism, all immaculate, not a hint of marginalia; and then Ruth, who is sharper-eyed than I am, spies in Updike’s copy of Alexander Schmemann’s For the Life of the World a little something penciled on the flyleaf. [...]

What Updike penciled is Deus est qui Deum dat. That is Augustine: God gives us many gifts, but “God is He Who gives God.” This is a good thing to affirm if you live in New England, the land of the hidden God, if you say, as Updike once did, that you find attending church “generally comforting and pleasant,” if you are lauded after dead as a Protestant novelist by an obituary writer who thinks he’s saying something quaint. I keep this book on my bedside table now, this gift from Ruth, and I open it regularly and mostly I do not read what Schmemann has to say about Eucharistic love, though I’m sure what he says is astute. Mostly I look at Updike’s scribble of Augustine and I take it as a good word from a ghost, from someone entered into glory, joined up to the communion of saints; I take it as a benediction from one so keenly aware of the gulch between God and God’s creatures: God is here through our longing for God; God gives us many gifts, but God is He who gives God.

– from “Manchester Pilgrimage” in Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis by Lauren F. Winner

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.

Jan
22

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Whenever theology touches science, it gets burned

Category: Bibliography, Interpretation, Prose Tags: , , , 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)

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.