Rebuilding the Garden

Faith. I’ve been struggling with it.

Faith seems silly and foolish. Why believe something without experiencing it yourself? It could be a lie. Then why do we believe our science and history textbooks? Because the authors have citations and degree letters after their names? Those people could be lying, too, and often they are.

The obvious solution to the possibility of deception is skepticism. The only problem is, skepticism robs the world of joy. You must experience everything, touch everything, or else not care at all and fall into apathy. I know both these extremes, and both stem from a lack of trust. Trust may get us hurt when we trust humans, fallen sinful changeable humans, but it will never, I repeat, never, get us hurt when we trust God.

But back to the basic premise. How can we even know there is a God if we don’t have physical, substantial proof? Well, we do. That’s a topic for another article though, because the primary way to trust in God is through faith. We are obliged to believe things when we can’t see them at the moment. We are obliged to believe the word of mouth and word of thousands of other people on the idea of God.

See, that is the beauty of logic. It’s relieving that we have a built in scanner for reasonable claims. We can examine the process of deduction or elimination someone asks us to follow and determine if it is right or wrong.

At some point we must go beyond logic, for obsession with rational step-by-step thinking is confining. That is what has led to this wild embrace of lawlessness and “freedom” in our current society, or spur-of the-moment decisions and the live-it-up mentality. Rules, guidelines, fences, paths, are confining in themselves. After all, if you follow the path, you never see the rest of the forest. It takes trial and error for  us to sometimes understand that the path was chosen because it was the best one. We have to move beyond a self-centered point of view and realize someone before us was wise. Of course, not every human path is the best, and exploring off roads may lead to a better one, eventually there may be many good paths all crisscrossing about in the woods. The important part, though, is that they reach their destination. A path that goes in circles is no good at all. This is where I must depart from the path analogy.

Look at these pictures. These are the virtue of Faith. They all relate in a way as apparently complex and yet as simple in intent as that spider web. How?

God, as St. Thomas More said, made man to serve Him wittily in the tangles of his mind. The tangles, the spider web of seemingly infinite complexity, the billions of choices we make in our lives, the subtle influences of our body chemistry, our neurotransmitter levels, our hormones. Yet He, with a Mind so far above, so far beyond, so encompassing in comparison to ours, sees each and every fragile strand that has been created since he started us spinning, and to Him it is all incredibly simple. So He is constantly giving us little nudges, little tugs on our strings to remind us, “Hey, back here. This way. This is where you are going.” And slowly we my wander and weave our way back to him. The heartrending beauty of it is, however, that we may not. Being the obstinate little spiders//creatures that we are – only because He made us with free will – we may tug back  and pursue our own direction, walking in a straight line away from him or going round and round the same one. Eventually, we wear out. He never does. We either give in or stubbornly shut our minds entirely off to His warning pulses.

There has always been something lacking, a shallowness, not about profound beauty like a sunset or a field of wheat in late August, but in my experience of it. I’ve striven to unite myself with it, and felt helpless and frustrated with this lack within myself. Sometimes, seeing the golden-red rays of a sunset spill across house fronts on my way home from work, I look away. I don’t know what to do with such beauty. You can only stare so long, and the feeling does not go away, that frenzied desperation and simultaneous silent awe.....

I can only be at peace with intense beauty, I have found, when, like intense pain, I lift it up to God and let it go. Stop trying to understand why it provokes such reactions in me. Stop trying to wrap my peabrain around its depth. In fact, I would argue the only way to properly see beauty, to appreciate without the blinding wince that arises from our lack of comprehension, is to understand first that it is a mere shattered fragment reflecting God. In other words, all we see must me ordered to lead us to God, if not in its very essence at least in our perception of it. If we look at horrific ugliness, at the hideousness of evil acts, the squalor of suffering, “with the right eyes,” it will not disturb us. Faith’s armor, or clarifying pair of glasses, if you will, protect our souls from the  fallen emotions associated with the object. If we look at magnificent, transcendent beauty, at a breathtaking scene in a master’s painting or that particular crystal silence of a dawn by a mountain lake, with the eye(glasses)s of faith, we will not feel hopeless or hurt. Oh, the beauty might wound us. Faith’s eyeglasses are not sunglasses. To look at the sun through them would be only to increase its dazzling, terrible brilliance. But we would see the truth, for the glasses of Faith do not obscure, do not dim, do not confuse. They do not change the world, they correct a fault in our vision. Just as a nearsighted person does not see a distant horizon as it really is, unless he puts on his convex (concave??) lenses, we cannot see anything for what it really is unless we put on the corrective sight of faith.

It’s a negative thing sometimes, not a positive, so far as the definition of those words is mathematical. Often Faith is not so much an embrace but a turning away. This is a fundamental part of accusations against religious or faithful people; that they bury their heads in the sand, ignore facts, blind themselves. The truth of the statement remains despite their skewing of it. Think about it. To have faith in its essence we must turn away from doubt, and to protect our faith we must turn away from evil things. To have health we must protect against sickness. To lose weight we must turn away from junk foods as well as turning towards exercise. To overcompensate one way and slack at the other leads to a weak body or a body that is working against itself. If we were to pursue the ideal body (not that we should…bodies shall never be perfect and it is foolish to seek perfection in them. This is an analogy) we would have both to their full extent: demanding yet not destructive exercise, and the healthiest diet possible. Like G.K. Chesterton said, the Church has a healthy hatred of pink: it is both red and white together she loves. Two extremes are both possible and healthy for the soul. To borrow another analogy from Mr. Chesterton, it is possible to fiercely love life and to walk into the face of death; in fact, one implies another.

Thus faith cannot be reduced to belief. It is belief and refusal at once, and it does take up enormous amounts of emotional, mental, and spiritual energy when one is struggling to do either. However, at times when we become overwhelmed, we can merely lift up our burden to the God we have been working so hard to trust and believe in, and it is in those moments that we have truly experienced faith. When the battle becomes too much, and we realize we cannot fight alone, well, that itself becomes a source of Faith.

If that is hard to follow, let me expound. I have recently been undergoing things which no doubt seem trivial in words, or in comparison to the darkness others have experienced, but which have all but devastated me: for I had put Faith in the theoretical center of my being, like a peaceful garden which I supposed nothing might disturb, and when its foundations began to upheave, my whole self was thrown into turmoil. But now I realize God was merely tilling the soil to expand His garden, to plant more and greater fruits and flowers. It was indeed up to me, partially, to force myself back into that place that had become painful to even think about, once so beautiful, then so desolate and destroyed. But, in realizing that I could not rebuild it alone, my Faith was restored. This garden could not have been something I constructed. It could not be false, either: it had existed. Therefore, somebody must have helped me, for I am too weak and not motivated to build any such thing. At that point in time, I decided to desire God’s help again, to ask and plead for Him to rebuild my garden. Just as C.S. Lewis compared the soul to a cottage. God does not want to repair that cottage. He wants to make it mansion, even if it means tearing down all the walls. And even if He did not start right away, my Faith had been restored. The reconstruction had begun.  

The toughest part of all of this is honestly maintenance. While God has given us a beautiful place to rest, we must at once spring to uproot any weed that may enter it. I guess my garden had become quite weedy, for I had grown complacent and taken it for granted. “Oh, it will always be there. Nothing can disturb God, why should anything enter there?” Well, I was wrong.

Faith is definitely not passive. Sure, we may put it on like a pair of glasses given to us by an eye doctor, but assuredly the air and our fingers make them dirty if we do not take care. Even if we do take care, we must wipe them down often, or our vision will be imperfect. Our natures have been made dirty like the air by means of original sin. Their touch will obscure our faith, it is inevitable. Those glasses can even break. That does not mean the eye doctor doesn’t exist, or that he was wrong. It means we failed, we forgot about the glasses at night and let them fall, and we sat on them in our back pocket. “Oh, they’ll always be there. They’ll be fine. They are indestructible!” No, for glass is fragile, and our human natures are as of glass, dim glass. But why should we doubt the very existence of a creator simply because creation was not perfect?

Infidelity, doubt, seem silly to me now, not Faith. Yet I never know what my future holds, what choices I will make, what silky spider strands I will follow. Only He has seen the entire span of my life as I will make it. This co-creating, co-shaping role fills me with awe and fear. Why would He even trust someone like me, a failure, with such a huge responsibility as the eternal welfare of my soul? I am like a bowl, so riddled with vice that I cannot hold the water of Faith. (even now, I write this in pride, hoping for it someday to be read, for my genius to be admired. Fickle, self-loving soul! So I ask any person who reads this to account of it all as divinely inspired, and not to speak in my praise. Take my ideas and spread them if you find an element of truth, of God. Do not credit any source but Him. And offer a prayer for my soul) but He is the clay that will fill not only fill my holes, but soak me until I am a quivering glob of slimy mud in his hands, and spin me round into a more perfect vessel. Provided I do not case myself into the kiln.  The reason He entrusts anything to any of us lowly beings is so that we realize our misery. We must appreciate how much, how dearly we need Him. Only then will we have discovered the light, the salt, the water of faith. Only then will others be able to drink it from us.

He allows us to walk alongside Him not because He wants us to trip, but because it is the most adequate expression of perfect Love. Love (and hope) spring from our Faith.  First we believe, and then we will, and then we trust.  If we were robots, if we were programmed to do only what He directly put into our minds, we could not love nor hope. For love is free….

But that is the subject for another essay.

The Modern Pagan and Ancient Christianity: Thoughts on Chesterton's Ballad of the White Horse

One of the pleasant surprises of reading classic literature is that it actually applies to the present time. “How modern!” one might think upon discovering, hidden within the pages of an assigned book, a truth applicable to his own situation. Timeless would be a better word, for there are certain truths and insights into human and divine nature which surpass confinement to the knowledge of one age, one person, one movement. Perhaps that is due to our modernist arrogance, but It may seem almost uncanny how accurately writers long dead have predicted the faults and crises of our age, in literature we consider outdated.

 Such is the case when surveying Chesterton’s epic poem The Ballad of the White Horse’– or any of Chesterton’s work, for that matter. The despairing unreasonableness of our neo-pagan culture is reflected in the ancient pagan beliefs of the Norsemen, and diagnosed directly in the Catholic King Alfred’s sad prediction that “In some far century, sad and slow….The heathen will return.” Chesterton vicariously, through his protagonists, both predicts and soundly defeats all the tenets of pagan thought that have resurfaced as theories ranging from Nihilism to determinism to hedonism.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

The natural underlying tenet of pagan culture is that pleasure is the only way to achieve happiness. In the Ballad specifically, the Danish chieftain Harold sings of his philosophy that “the whole huge world [is] a toy”, praising wine, cloaks, gold, and women from all ends of the ancient world.¹ He claims the Wessex line of kings has been emasculated by Christianity, because the English men no longer “lust nor smite”( 131) according to natural urges, they are weak. Harold disdains sacrifice and meekness, favoring indulgence and power-seeking instead. Since without Christian revelation, paganism must assume that life is ultimately useless, it follows that worldly pleasures must be the greatest good, and by such a philosophy, to eschew them would be foolish. 

This attitude has been resurrected in the modern worldview of hedonism. In a world often termed “post-Christian” that has, in any sense, abandoned the transcendent good of the Gospel, the only good left is immediately and consistently evident: pleasure, the rush of serotonin, dopamine, and other chemicals through the human brain wooing it with a “feel-good” illusion. Therefore, those who deny the existence of all things not immediate and biologically explainable – i.e. the “modern pagans” - have taken this pleasure principle to be the key to life. The pleasure may be carnal, epicurean, intellectual, emotional, or any combination of these, but the principle is the same: satisfying or satiating basic desires is the only way to find joy and meaning. Of course, the problem is that, when overly stimulated, these reactions subsequently require greater and greater stimulus to occur, never leaving the soul fully satisfied.

A thirsting, dissatisfied soul makes it easy to see the world in a black light, and from this arises another pagans error: thinking that a dark fate controls the gods or the world, entropy is in control, and hate and destruction are natural.  Ogier, the pessimistic chieftain of the Danes, laments that fate, “the gods behind the gods” is cruel and hopeless. His response is to relinquish control to “fury, that does not fail,” looting and raping with rage and death in his heart, for he believes this is the natural and understandable destiny of man. (194) Freud brought to the modern world his theory that the human mind is comprised of a reserve of dark unacceptable impulses, or the id, and the forces which seek to restrain it. What followed was “detail of the sinning, and denial of the sin” through attempted justification of man’s fallen tendencies. From there man can justify any “unacceptable impulse” he feels, so is it surprising that the urges to kill or destroy others who are dissimilar to us came back with new vehemence? For of course, it is easy and just to do so, and our own race or culture must survive! Determinism stands up and declares that man’s bad actions are completely predictable and understandable based on his psyche and his previous actions. The world, affected by this incorrect definition of sin, either trivializes or glorifies evil rather than despising it.

 On the polar opposite of justification, less subtle but just as harmful, lies preoccupation with demons, the idea that evil is powerful, majestic, and worthy of fear if not respect. Because the goodness of creation and an almighty good creator have been denied, it is easy to assume spiritual forces of darkness are in control. If the whole world is destined by man’s behavior for a certain fate, what reason have the pagans to believe it is a joyous or wholesome one?

In fact, it easily follows in pagan thinking that life has no ultimate meaning, especially since it is difficult to imagine people surviving death. The Norse chieftains’ harp songs ignore the truth about death, in different ways: Harold by his childish seeking of sensual pleasure, Elf by the dramatization of human tragedy, and Ogier by allowing passion and anger to be the dictators of his life. Guthrum, however, more educated and older than the others, correctly sees that death is inevitable and nothing can solve it. He is skeptical and jaded of the present world, saying man will eventually “hunger without hope/even for evil gods”( 254-255), i.e. there is nothing beyond the hopelessness of death. For the modern pagans, this idea is taken even further, and what is beyond the immediately sensible (sight, touch, hearing, etc.) is assumed to be nonexistent. Materialism, Nihilism, Anti-intellectualism, and other such philosophies deny transcendent realities, and thereby deny final meaning in life, simply on the basis that they haven’t experienced these realities, or that science cannot predict and measure them. Life after death is a transcendent reality that on its own may be difficult to believe, and they therefore reject it as impossible. 

However, a world with no higher purpose than to satisfy the self’s basest urges, in which nothing exists beyond the material, cannot be fulfilling to the human soul – and if this life is not fulfilling, and no other can be perceived, who can say that long lasting fulfillment is possible at all? This abyss of meaning corresponds with the new pagan’s idea that life cannot go on after death. Thus, there must be nothing worth living for besides the self, and so goes the circular, self-confirming logic of heathenism. No wonder cynicism is the curse of this generation, and that its most prominent fruit is despair!

                                                                                                                                                                                             

It is clear that the destructive ideas of the modern age are not new evils, but tiredly resurrected shadows of paganism have erupted from its dormant grave. How have such errors spread? It is true they are no longer learned from a pre-existing pagan culture, nor violently forced upon people conquered by heathen warriors. Considering that Alfred and the Danes lived in the age of conquests, whereas we live in the age of information, the answer is obvious: the pagans now are warriors of the intellect, their weapons technology and the written word, or “scroll and pen” (281) Chesterton warns, just because the new methods may seem “mild as monkish clerks” (257)  does not mean they are not devastating; in fact, he predicts they will make Christians look back on the past and long for the days “when pagans still were men.” (261) For this battle will be even more challenging than Alfred’s. The Danes were brave, having a culture with noble elements, and worshiped false gods merely because they knew nothing better. Some, like the chief Guthrum, tired of hopelessness, might have been open to conversion. Pre-Christian pagans saw Christianity as something new, maybe foolish, but interesting and worthy of conquering, where by contrast, proponents of Freudianism, Hedonism, Marxism, and the like sneer at Christianity as something old and restricting. To the modern mind, infected by these philosophies, the Church is not a worthy enemy to soundly beat in battle, but an ancient oppressor to shout out against, mistrust, and overthrow. Some even, rather than acknowledge that “fate is cruel,” pretend that their dark worldview is filled with light and it is She who spreads darkness.  Some embrace the darkness as their god, and reject redemption in the form of charity and sacrifice.

 With such a convoluted battlefield, it is clear Christians need the trust and daring utilized by King Alfred and his men in The Ballad of the White Horse more so than ever before. Comfort, even may be found, in the knowledge that the devil, inventor of all false dichotomies past and present, is the same villainous liar, and Christ, whose side we stand on, must rise triumphant over all forms of evil in the end.