"What a mighty thing it is to live for God’s kingdom! Do not shrink back. Live for it; look for it, and you will find that it is so powerful it will completely overwhelm you – it will solve every problem in your life, and every problem on earth. Everything will become new, and each person will love the next in Christ. All separation and sin, all suffering and darkness and death will be overcome, and love alone will rule."
That passage is from J. Heinrich Arnold, in his hopeful book, Freedom from Sinful Thoughts.
There are more than a few who would laugh off these promises as pollyanna-ish and over the top.
Actually, no. Those who would dismiss do not laugh as a rule.
It is no secret that I'm Orthodox, and, moreover, of a sophiological bent. Orthodoxy is popularly depicted as a dour sort of religion with candles in the dark, clouds of incense wafting up into the unseen upper depths, long beards and black robes. And the great theologian Fr Sergius Bulgakov himself does not seem to refer overmuch to any comic expression, if at all.
(I may be wrong about Bulgakov, here. I'd be happy to be corrected.)
There are some who say that Christianity is exactly this and not associated with any sort of jester-hood, or idylls in the meadows with the smelling of flowers and poetizing on the rustling in the eaves, reading fairy stories, or especially laughing at some foppish tale of a vapid 1920's aristocrat who is unwittingly duped into the machinations of his "gentleman's gentleman" who, in turn, happens to be a practicing Spinozist.
One who does say this (without any specific grimace about Jeeves and Wooster) is the inimitable Roman Catholic theologian Paul J Griffiths, who wrote, recently, about the spiritual peril of leisure (i.e., otium). In his essay, "Ora et Labore: Christians Don't Need Leisure," he proposed that for Christians, there is nothing between worship and work.
That's right: no leisure, no joking around, no "Wordsworthian idylls." All this, he says, is a descent into the miasma of narcissism.
There was a time in my life that I would have embraced this message and used the words as a verbal blunderbuss at one and all.
Well, this is not that time (nor ever will be). So I counted it a blessing that the best writer and critique of our time -- David Bentley Hart -- set down pen (or typed on his MacBook) and took Griffiths to task. He responded on the Public Orthodoxy site in an "open letter." (I don't know exactly what "open letter" means. I hope it allows for the reading of other people's mail.)
I commend this letter/essay as one of the best things I've read in this troubling year. And frankly, during this present health challenge of mine, it comes as no small anodyne, or "balm of Gilead." So I thank DBH, once again, for his brain and his articulation.
The whole letter is worth your careful reading. But for the purpose of this essay, I'll conclude with this excerpt:
Well…nonsense. Twaddle, tosh, balderdash. Dare I say piffle, or even—more daringly—poppycock? (I don’t want to get too coarse here.) As I say, Paul, the luminous clarity of your mind is an object of veneration for me. But, to be honest, I doubt I have ever come across so egregiously excluded a middle. The dialectical impulse is strong in you, I know, but here I think you need to hew to a more median, Platonic, and analogical rule of reflection. You have so exaggerated one pole of Christian experience as to turn what should be a complementarity into an antagonism, and I cannot for the life of me figure out how you arrived at this bleak chiaroscuro etching of life in Christ. Where does it come from? Certainly, as far as I can tell, not from scripture, and most definitely not from the example of Christ. In fact, it seems to me that your whole “all ora et labora and no ludus makes Jack a good dull Christian” depiction of the faith is an almost point-for-point negation of the Sermon on the Mount. There, recall, Christ explicitly forbids his followers to fret and worry over the day’s needs, or to strive to achieve them, or for that matter to take any thought for the morrow at all; he commands them—commands them—to be idlers, as free of concern as the lilies of the field, lazily certain that God’s abundance will find them and bless them in their repose. To a peasant population crushed by debt and unending labor, Christ proclaimed a gospel of sweet insouciance. He called them to the sanctifying life of Bohemians and truants. To those who travail and are heavy-laden, he did not simply issue the command (to use your words) “Work, then: labora!” (or, I suppose, laborate!); rather, he promised to ease their burdens and grant them rest. Yes, we must labor; but labor is not the law of Christ.
Indeed. Labor (which needs must be) is not, despite this world's necessity, the law of Christ.
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