Having recently finished Ian Nathan’s biographical work on the famous Spanish filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro, I couldn’t help but note the overlap between Percy’s Bink Bolling and Del Toro’s own storied history. Boiling is a man caught between the devout dogmatism of his mother’s side and the cynicism and skepticism of his father’s side, finding himself bound to this “search” for truth and meaning in a world where the concept of God has been thrown into turmoil and confusion. A search that sustains itself through his love and fondness for the movies, and which mires itself in the tensions of conflicting expectations, the insistence of his aunt, whom chides him for wasting his life in menial tasks when he should be living up to his greatness by going to medical school, and the insistence of his step-cousin, which throws such meaning-making constructs into an existential crisis. For Del Toro this tension was his love for art versus the demands and expectations of the hollywood machine, a tension born from his childhood caught between the hard Catholic Grandma and the skepticism of his father. For him, it was his mother who disrupted this tension and gave him a way forward.

Perhaps the two stories, one biographical and the other fictional, are asking similar questions with similar conclusions. For Bolling, the search is something that colonizes your life, leaving you to wrestle with the idea of escaping the reality of the meaningless and mundanity, which has its own sense of comfort, versus the idea of succumbing to it. The only thing he seems to know is that to not be searching is to settle into a kind of despair, comforting or not. To be awakened to some new truth or awareness in the midst of this despair is to find onesself in the search. For Del Toro the search is the storytelling.

Perhaps the search, which is arguably the true protagonist in this story, can be summed up in this line:

“Does a scientifically minded person become a romantic because he is a leftover from his own science?” (p76)

It’s a fascinating question, as it seems to dig underneath the essential quandry- how is it that we can reduce the world to scientific terms without losing the knower in the process? Perhaps it is the very fact that knowledge seems to need the knower that forces our search to be recast through a different lens. After all, isn’t this what the emergence of the romantics reflects on a historical front? A seeming disillusionment with the world they were handed from the rationalist fervor of the enlightenment?

Or there are the reflections on repetition and time. As Boiling muses,

“There was this also: a secret sense of wonder about the enduring… The enduring is something that must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.” (p69)

And yet, the measure of time by way of repitition, by way of enduring, also awakens us to another quandry- the existential crisis. What does this repitition give us clarity of? A world of meaning? Or a world of meaningless? What flows from this for Boiling are questions like the following:

“Do you think it is possible for a person to make a single mistake- not do something wrong, you understand, but make a miscalculation- and ruin his life?… I mean after all. Couldn’t a person be miserable because he got one thing wrong and never learned otherwise- because the thing he got wrong was of such a nature that he could not be told because the telling itself got it wrong?” (p99)

Which, as The Moviegoer suggests, plays into that uniform answer that the world seems to want to provide- an appeal to happiness as the aim and ends of life. This is what throws Boiling straight back into the crisis. How can this be? Does happiness come through achieving that which will make one happy, or through the basic acceptance that life is in fact miserable? Does it hinge on that which we do or do not know, or is it even a knowable or true thing at all? Which of course plays into the pressures and expectations pushing in on Boilings life from the outside, thus emerging through the life he experiences on the inside. What, in the end, is this search for, and can it even be named. To name it, Boiling suggests, is to no longer be searching and thus be given back to despair.

And yet this world must be knowable for the knower to make any sense at all. Why would one search if it could not be known?  Perhaps it is simply the restleness of the knower that is most necessary evidence of truth. This comes through vividly when Boiling expresses his inner fears for realtionship-

“How good to think that there are reasons and that if I am silent, it means I am hiding something. And how proud I am when I do find secret reasons for you, your own favorite reasons. But what if there is nothing? That is what I’ve been afraid of until now- being found out to be concealing nothing at all.”

This fear isn’t contained to his reasons to love another. It flows out and intersects with the whole of life. It can be spoken to existence itself. What is that nothing? That nothing could be conflicting motivations. Motivations that betray what we thought was an honest search. It could be bias. It could be disguising fear or apathy or indecision or failure or weakness. It could be the betraying of the fact that we are not who we see ourselves to be, and indeed what that could mean for our existence. Or it could betray the truth that there isn’t actually anything true to search for at all, just the reality of social structures that hold us in its grip along with the demands they place on us to construct our place in it. Better to give ourselves to the ordinary than to be deluded by false promises.

Or… perhaps the sheer presence of that restlessness is what awakens us to truly be free of the constraints of those scrutures. Perhaps it is in the mundane where we find the truth of God. How often does the search assume that we are searching for something new, something constructed from our need for grand revelations or achievements. How often do we assume that our starting point is a world without God, and that God must be revealed in a way that that suggets the thing one is searching for is somehow not already present. Which of course creates an illogical conundrum. Here Boiling arrives at this illuminating space:

“Starting point for search: It no longer avails to start with creatures and prove God. Yet it is impossible to rule God out. The only possible starting point: the strange fact of ones invincible apathy- that if the proofs were proved and God presented himself, nothing would be changed, Here is the strangest fact of all.”

I have no idea how Macfarlane would feel about this basic matter of fact, but his works have been greatly influential for the way I understand my faith in God. As far as I know Macfarlane would categorize as a naturalist, albeit one who flirts with the appearance of a kind of pantheism (he has never said as much, but it often sounds as though he is). And, truth be told, he is generally made to be exclusive to the common household atheist.

And yet, I find two things to become incredibly aware in his writings- his books act as a welcome and I think astute critique of the common atheists allegiance to rationalism, and second, if nothing else, what he tends to underscore is the need for a more coherent foundation if we are to attend for both the natural world and our place in it.

As he writes in the introduction to his newest work, Is a River Alive?, a book that hits at one of my great loves (rivers),

“This book is a journey into an idea that changes the world- the idea that a river is alive.”

Changes the world. Not by adding another idea, another data point, into the mix, but by necessarily recasting it through a different lens. A different worldview. A different way of seeing and explaining and making sense of the world we observe and experience. He wants to “daylight long-buried ways of feeling about water, both in history and in us- and to see what transformations occur when rivers are recognized as both alive and killable.” (p18) Meaning, how we see rivers is deeply connected to how we see the shape of the world. Indeed, how we relate to the world we believe to be true.

The first important point- this is how lenses work. A fact that I find gets lost in appeals to rationalism. Rationalism is a product of a reductionist point of view, the act of reducing the world and its constructs to the same basic material properties. To reduce the world is, in this view, to know the world in a way we can rationalize, And yet appealing to knowledge in this way, as Macfarlane helpfully brings to light, can only ever have one aim and result- manipultation and control. As he calls it, “the conquest of nature…” (p18) Which ironically, doesn’t actually require us to know the world at all. In fact, manipulation and control often disguises ignorance. In this sense, a “hard boundary” (p19) has been established between life and non-life, precisely in order to reframe the world as resource without losing ourselves in the process.

“For those who, like me, have been largely raised on rationalism, to imagine that a river is alive in a way that exceeds the sum of the lives it contains is difficult, counter-intuitive work. It requires unlearning, a process much harder than learning.”

He fruther describes the problem in the following way: 

“We might say that the fate of the rivers under rationalism has been to become one-dimensional water. Rivers have been systematically stripped of their spirits and reduced to what Isaac Newton called “inanimate brute matter.” (p19)

He uses blunt phrases like “entrap nature as a calculable coherence,” pointing out that in this approach “nothing is good in and of itself; everything must be good FOR something.” Meaning: knowledge reduced to date points that can be manipulated and controlled as resource.

Which of course brings up the question: what do we do with ourselves, the knowers in this equation? Where do we situate ourselves in a world that has been reduced to resource?

“Meaning, as well as water, can be impounded: can still and settle behind dam walls of thought… WE have become increasingly waterproofed…. One of modernity’s many vanishing tricks is to disappear the provisionality of its own conclusions.” (p20)

I love that line. “Disappear the provisionality of its own conclusions.” In other words, the justification for modernity’s appeal to rationalisim, the conditionalism that its conclusions rest upon, are made immune to critique, unable to get beyond the basic fabric of its own reductionism. Here he uses words like homogenization and disenchantment to define the ultimate outcome of such an approach, relating this distancing rationalism creates between meaning and facts directly to the truthfulness of our language. The language we use to define and describe the world we inhabit.

Here he finds the act of applying a different lens, one that he feels is more coherent with the world he observes and experiences, to be a liberating process. As he puts it, “Hope is a thing with rivers.” So it is with rediscovering our own place within the natural world. “I began these river-journeys in doubt and uncertainty. I knew the question to which I wanted a response to be a formidably hard one, even as I wished it to be simple.” (p31)

Indeed. One of the most difficult processes for me personally was learning how knowledge of the world was deeply dependent on my lens. When you feel like the lens you were handed no longer makes sense, its not just a matter of letting go of a world you once thought you knew, its a matter of losing your place in that world. And yet this also leads to rediscovery. To greater knowledge. To, in Macfarlane’s words, transformation. This is why, as he puts it, “how we answer this question matters deeply.” Yes, I do come to slightly different conclusions than Macfarlane. I question whether the natural world has the ability lay claim to its own worth and identity. And yet I have been deeply appreciative, especially as he explores one of my great loves, of his approach and his critiques of the worldview (rationalism) that once held me in its grip. As I said at the top, although atheists tend to claim him as their own, his work remains a deeply rooted critique of the coherency of that position and its often blind dependency on rationalism. The invitation to breathe life back into the very world it has deconstructed is a powerful one. One that continues to awaken me personally to the existence of God.

Both sets of my Grandparents have since passed, given now to the problematic nature of memory. Memory is a subject of which I’ve long been fascinated by. Some of that is rooted in an experience. Previous posts in this space have outlined that, but the summarized version is- I had what I call a Word from God calling me to give myself to the task of remembering.

That task is also fueled by what it has been uncovering in the years since. Who I am. Who God is. What this world is. How it is I can say I know anything at all about these things. It’s all rooted in memory. For my past self, who had been convinced knowledge could be redueced to propositions, that was a troubling notion. Even more so, perhaps, a defeating notion. Because, if all I have is a set of propositions, how can I trust such knowledge to actually make sense of the world I am remembering?

One of the breakthroughs for me personally was understanding what memory is- narrative. This is what flipped things around for me. How is it that we kow anything about these things? Propositions arrive as information. Or, if you will, “memorized” information. If all I have is information, the sort of information I can recall on a given examination, and dictate at an instants request, can I truly say I know what that thing is? As I’ve come to be persuaded, its possible to recall all the information in the world and still not actually know anything about it. That’s because there remains a distance between the thing being known and the knower. In fact, the relationship between those two thing becomes completely uneccessary when it is reduced to propositions. Which of course creates a logical problem- how do we attend for the knower in that equation if knowledge is reducible to information? I don’t believe we can.

Narrative on the other hand, is built on the relationship between the thing being known and the knower. For information to be translated or interpreted as knowledge it needs a narrative. That’s the only way for us to truly know something- we engage a thing as participants in a story. It is not the information that defines a thing, but the way it makes sense within the story we embody that does.

In Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer, he is using a ficitonal character to reflect on certain philosophical truths regarding how we live in this world. In the first few chapters he describes this idea of living  as a “search.” When this idea occurs to the book’s main character, it is in the midst of despair. As he writes, “A man can look at this little pile on his bureau for thirty years and never once see it. It is as invisible as his own hand.” This is the nature of the despair he is talking about. To be so “sunk in the everydayness of (ones) own life” that life gets reduced to its demonstrable function. And yet, despair has another side to it. It can also be the space in which something can become visible. As the character in Percy’s novel suggests, “once I saw it, the search became possible.”

And, “to become aware of the possiblity of the search is to be on to something.” That is how we move from despair to knowledge.

But what is that something that we seek? Here the character notes the fundamental obstacles that prevent us from “seeing” that which has been clouded by despair-

• the fear of exposing our own ignorance
• the fear of social hiearchies- “For as everyone knows, the polls report that 98 percent of Americans believe in God and the remaining 2 percent are athiests and agnostics- which leaves not a single percentage point for a seeker.”

The second point is anchored in this idea that to name that which i seek is to either “set myself a goal which everyone has reached,” which means raising a question for which no one else has interest, and equally to be found dead last to knowing the truth. In reality though, it is the first point that gives fuel to the second- to seek is to be exposed.

Here the seeker in Percy’s The Moviegoer is left wondering- what is the difference between naming that which we seek and being so certain about the information we have as to call it knowledge? Wouldn’t such a thing simply lead to despair? To have the information means to “be sunk in the everydayness” to which despair belongs. It means that one is no longer searching.

But this only leads us back full circle- how is it that we can then know anything, truly know anything, at all. The answer here comes back to memory. To narrative. To seek is to need a story. Seeking is a participatory act, not a propositional one. This is, in fact, how our brains work on a scientific level. Our brain takes informaiton and weaves it into a story we can comprehend and make sense of. We call this narrative memory. Without that, reality would be a incomprehensible void made up of functional data. Thus, to seek is to also TELL a story. A story that makes sense of the world we observe and experience.

Which is simply to say this: all knowledge is rooted in that story which makes the best sense of the world we observe and experience. This gives us the necesssary lens through which to “seek” through. A story we tell using the language of our senses. It is the narrative to which all information we aquire belongs.

So, to come back to where I began, with my grandparents. Why was I remembering my grandparents? As it is, in the middle of my own routine, my own despair if you will, I stumbled across something I had not truly noticed before. As such things are prone to do, it disrupted my routine. That thing was a simple question. A question I noted was asked by all three of us in our housebhold on a daily basis, simply in our own words. For me it is, “How do I know that the actions I do lead to better outcomes and a better world?” Can we ever truly “know” such a thing?

Which led me back to my grandparents. In their own way, I can recall them asking this same question growing up. And there were always two sides to this coin. The first would be, the world their generation handed us is not the world they thought they were making before the world wars hit. They were on cusp of the great accomplishment of the western enlightenment- the creation of the free world. Only to have this world come crashing down through the ebb and flow of their accomplishments eventually creating a landscape of failure. The world they handed my parents was a world my parents were supposed to reimagine and remake on the other side of that despair.

The world my parents handed me, the world my grandparents were wise enough to look at with well worn suspicision, was a world created by the industrial age, one shaped by the technological revolution that had been handed to them, and a true celebration of the enlightenments modernist approaches built on institutions. Institutions that, as I came of age, reframed the western wolrd once again against its monumental failures and corruption. This was the world handed to us, the world we were expected to remake and reimagine, this time with the internet in one hand and our smartphones in the next. We needed to dismantle the institutions using our new technological world.

Only to discover that the world we reshaped and reimagined brought its own return to despair. Unprecedented rates of depression, addiction, and suicide. Feelings of meaninglessness. Phone addiction. Disconnection. The toxic nature of social media. A world shaped by a world once again at war. Endless political division. The loss of institutions and trust of institutions and their leaders. All of these things are a product of what my generation handed the next, all in the name of believing “our actions make a better world.”

Now, this is purely anectdotal, but it is something that I’ve undeniably seen, felt and experienced. In the midst of our own despair, where do we go back to? The past. We go back to the world of our grandparents. In this case, not to institutions, but to nature. To the environment. Why? Because somehow it feels like whatever our parents deconstructed and handed down to us lost something valuable. Their world becomes our scapegoat. And because it seems equally necessary to know we are rebelling against our own parents, that generatonal gap feels like a needed safety measure. Distance that allows us to say that we are unsatisfied with our world and that we week something better. Nevermind that the world we feel we are rebelling with is the one that our parents gave us.

Which creates a kind of ironic tension. On one hand, like every generation that has come before, this present one finds itself stuck in despair trying to figure out that which it seeks. In the present narrative of the western world, this is “a better future.” Or progress. The undying belief in the notion that “what we do makes a better world.” But here is the question that has been plaguing me in my own seeking. Can I justify that narrative when I look at how these three generations are connected.? When I look at history? Can I genuinely say that what we do, or what I do, handed the next generation- our kids- a better world? Can I genuinely sell them on the fact that what they do will bring about a better world?

Here I find myeslf wondering whether we are actually seeking anything at all in these cycles. Have we instead, at the emergence of the enlightenment, named that which we seek (the promise of progress and a free world built on propositional truth), and in the process given ourselves to despair? And if so, how do we break from that despair and become seekers once again?

I don’t know the answer. This is simply what that observation set in motion for me over the last while. However, I do feel like I know this- the story we tell matters. The narrative our lives belong to matters. Without that, as Percy would say, we cannot seek, precisely because we cannot see.

I often say, the key to good history is a good narrative. As the famous quote goes, of which I’ve forgotten the source, “all history is narrative.” If this is the measure, Gordon has written a very good history about the Bible.

One of the marks of a good narrative is thematic cohesion. History books that are basiclaly one big data dump I find, beyond having very little to actually say about that data, ignore the fact that the historian is never cut off from the necessary function of interpretation. If all history is narrative history, all history is interpretation. Gordon gives us as readers a clear thesis and clear aim. It could be summarized in the simple statment that what defines the Bible is the necessary tension that shapes it. That tension is between the need to wrestle it down to certain truths, and the truth that the Bible cannot and refuses to be wrestled down, owned and contained. This is the conclusion that we come to in the final chapter:

“The global book remains deeply personal and local, often creating tensions between individual and corporate reception. It defines and shapes those who seek to actualize its words in their lives, to capture its model of holy living. Yet it will not be owned by anyone and continues to defy all efforts to anchor it in fixed interpretations. It inspires striving but rejects posession and exclusivity.” (p434)

“For Christians there is no greater fear than getting the Bible wrong, an anxiety that has inspired great faith and inflicted devastating damage.” (p434)

“In grasping to understand its words and is silences, for over two millenia the Bible’s readers have found hope. To borrow from the title of a 1965 film, the Bible tells the greatest story ever told. Its words have comforted, inspired, sickened, and haunted humanity. Its text belongs to the global world of sacred texts, with which, today more than ever, it is in conversation… The Bible remains inexhaustible.” (p437)

The author summarizes that idea in this wonderful statement,
“The Bible dictates its own history, which is without end.” (p433)

Thsi conclusion acts as the answer to the books introduction, and indeed the first chapter, where Gordon talks about the relationship between the Bible, described as a “book of books,” and interpretation. In this way it is a book without end. Citing Gregory the Great, “The Bible is, as it were, a kind of river, if I may so liken it, which is both shallow and deep, wherin both the lamb may find a footing, and the elephant float at large.” Or as Gordon puts it, “Every translation is contingent, a product of a moment that, unlike the Bible, is not eternal. At that moment the Bible holds something back.” (P64) That holding back is what allows it to speak, and allows us to seek.

What the Bible is, in this way, is necessary to uphold if we are going to step into the wild world of the Bibles formation into canons (yes, that reads plural), translations, debates, and denominational divides. Here I found an important and helpful reminder for not only what the Bible is, but how it retains its place as a sacred text within this historical framework. There is something about noting that larger narrative as a tension that makes that push and pull come alive. We need to formulate convictions based on our engagement with the text. And yet for the Bible to be alive and for the Bible to speak, we also need to understand that the minute we do, such actions need to be shaped by the critique. The whole of history is shaped this way. And yet, to be sacred also means holding something, some foundation, to be true, lest this tension slip into relativism. When it comes to the Bible, it is simply this- the Bible is a sacred text. If its not, there is no need to give it that sacred and formative place. Here Gordon makes this point rather subtly, which goes hand in hand with the fact that he is doing his best job to tackle a subject with immense internal significance, by standing at a distance. This has both weaknesses and strenghts. But in my opinion we need both. It is extremely helpful for me to have a voice like Gordons brought into the mix of my own internal wrestling with the Bible as a Christian. And yet, I come to this knowing that the internal process, the nuances that shape the actual practice of engaging the sacred text from the inside, is going to sit outside of Gordon’s perspective standing at a distance. This is what a life of faith is after all- not blind belief but an actual “lived” (faithfulness) belief. The only way we can truly come to knowledge of God and the world.

Another truism that runs through this book is the fact that all of this wildness, which the first chapter called “Becoming a Book” helps to outline, is tamed by its relationship to the past. We might call this Tradition. Tradition is not dogma, it is, rather, a commitment to a historical narrative that all constructions, be it denominations, theologies, or the Bible, have a thread that lead backwards. Which is to say, just because we can point to a dated “composition,” does not mean that this is where something is brought into being. Rather, that becomes a window into the thing that precedes it. And at its most fundamental level, the existence of a sacred text opens us up to a world not of the second and third and fourth and 18th centuries ect, but to the history that gave this life. Meaning, the logical conclusion of the Gospels existence must and can only ever be the existence of the seeds that gave it life. Which is hugely important, because its a reminder that “the Bible” was never contained to “a book of books.”

Some defining aspects of the Bibles history that Gordon touches on. First, he writes that “it is striking how many of the momentous developments of the Bible were the work of individuals or small groups in peril.” (p176) The Bible emerges from the margins, and is shaped by a story that gives life to those on the margins. The worst parts of its history are when it gets coopted by the worlds Empires. The enduring parts of its history are when it stands as the necessary critique to Empire. Perhaps one of the great examples of this push and pull is American slavery. That the Bible both functioned as peoples justification for slavery and its abolition is precisely how the sacred text has always worked. If it could be contained, it would always be contained by the shape of Empire. If it has enduring power, it will always critique the shape of Empire. This is the narrative history.

A second key facet of the Bibles history relates to the books title- a “global” history. Recognizing the relationship between the Judeo and Christian componants of the narraativer, Gordon writes that, “The Christian revolution was that scripture was meant for all, whether literate or not.” If we are looking at the Bible purely on a historical front, we can see that in the movement from scroll to book, it is both moving from Jerusalem into the whole of the world, and likewise into the hands of the common people. Which is to say, the thing that gives birth to the reformation finds its roots in a patterned history. As Gordon writes, “The Bible’s global ubiquity doesn’t imply global familiariaty.” (p432) Meaning, its presence precedes its embrace, often in profound and fascinating ways, but always with a coherent sense of how and where this happens (on the margins). One of the more interesting points of historical information to this end was the fact that China is the worlds leading source of making and printing and producing Bibles. Looking at how the sheer presence of Bibles translates to familiarity simply underscores the persistance of the sacred text in the margins, defined in its own particular way within the borders of China.

One final observation in terms of those key facets- the Bible grew organically into canon in relationship to devotional practices. These two things cannot be detached, lest we lose any and all sense of what the Bible is. The text is sacred not primarily because it can be studied and torn apart and analyzed, but because it offers us a story to be shaped by. This is, perhaps, the single most important facet, something, as Gordon points out, which has perhaps been lost in a wrong understanding of the Bibles transformation in an age of science and reaason:

“It is tempting to think that, with the arrival of the age of science and reason, the story of the Bible had reached its zenith- that what remains is a tale of decline. Not so. The rise of natural philosophy and the Enlightenment brought to the fore the relationship between the Bible and reason…. There were of course skeptics, (but) other leading lights of the age, such as Galileo, Bacon, and Newton, transformed our understanding of heaven and earth and did so with the Bible in hand. Indeed, as a panoramic view of the most important scientific, political, and philsophical thinkers of the age will show, efforts to marry religion and the Bible with science were far more prevalent than we today often take to be the case. The question with which thse thinkers grappled was not really whether the Bible was still relevant in a world in upheaval but how it was so…. It would be a mistake to see this period as one of rejection or repudiation of religion. Transitions are generally slow and complex, and many of the most important Enlightenment thinkers, to say nothing of the common people, were resolute in their belief. The Bible retained center stage and, in most cases, was reconciled with what was being learned about science and history” (p179; p208))

The sacred text is alive, and it gives us life through our participation in it. The crticisms (meaning, proper academic tools) are important and are relevant, but one of the great mistakes these criticisms often make is assuming that the Bible it is disecting and deconstructing is somehow contained to a book. That to critique the book is to somehow do away with the book, or to domesticate it. This couldn’t be further from the truth. It should awaken us to why we come to it at all- to be shaped by something that is not only alive, but invites us into the practice of translating it into our lives. One of my favorite parts was when it talks about the medieval age and its own attempts to recover the long standing practice of midrash, of writing in the margins. The bibles of this time were presented, long before our modern commentaries were a thing, a a conversation with the past. Present translations set alongside notes from previous ones, with open margins to invite fresh observations. I thought it was a beautiful picture of how the evolution of a “book” could marry itself to the simple practice of inviting the text (or the spirit behind the text) into our lives and allowing it speak.

“Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace.” (Colossians 3:15)

“And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:7)

“For God is not a God of confusion but of peace.” (1 Corinthians 14:33)

“Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ…” (Romans 5:1)

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

“The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.” (Romans 16:20)

Usually I spend my sunday mornings walking the dogs and listening to podcasts. Three of them this past week were on the subject of peace.

One wouldn’t think the idea of peace could be misunderstood or overly complicated, and yet it didn’t take long for all three of these podcasts to underscore the need to dig underneath the surface, beginning with some of the common usages of the word in our present day.

For example, we might think about peace in the sense of “peace and quiet.” In this sense it evokes the absence of noise and distraction.

Or we might think of peace in terms of “world peace” or “justice of the peace,” or peace officers, peace treaties, peace corps, all which would evoke the absence of violence, war and conflict, or the subsequent justice or agreement or reconciliation that accompanies different ways of precievably bringing this about or solving the problem.

There’s the phrasing “peace out,” or simply “peace,” which, if outdated, carries the connotation of goodbye and good luck. Which is perhaps not far off from the phrasing “peace be with you,” which indicates a blessing.

Looking backwards from the English usage, which interestingly replaced the old English word for “happiness” (English frið, also sibb, which also meant “happiness.”). The old English comes from the old French word pais, which comes from the old Latin word Pax (also a Greek Goddess). All of these usages flow from the essential concept of a treaty or a rule and any subsequent agreement or Law. Or more specifically, to borrow from the original definitions, “freedom from civil disorder” or “internal peace of a nation.”

In the Greek, the word translated peace is Eirene. In the Hebrew the word is Shalom, both words writer Hugh Whelchel does a good job unpacking in his dual articles, “What is Shalom According to the Bible,” and “Are Shalom and Eirene the Same.”

According to Whelchel, the Hebrew and Greek’s strongest association is to that similar state of Rule and Law (or order), but it retains a much deeper thematic interest relating to wholeness or completeness. Thus it reaches beyond circumstance and speaks to the narrative idea of fulfillment.

It is this last distinction that is important for understanding peace in a Judeo-Christian sense. What is distinct about peace in this particular narrative is the particular nature of God’s “redemptive” work and the shape of God’s established rule (or Kingdom). The word peace cannot be understood outside of this story. Further, it is distinctly used to proclaim this story in the midst of cirucmstances that write otherwise. In this sense, it reaches to a greater Truth beyond it’s realization, which plays out into how one lives their life according to this peace.

I also heard mention of the Hebrew word Shalom’s connection to the Arabic word salam, which adds the conceptualization of peace as a space in which to bring about new creation, a space that is dependent on a moment of true reconciliaton between that which is divided. In the Judeo-Christian story, the creation-new creation narrative sits at the heart of the story, with Jesus framing the moment in which a divided creation, heaven and earth, is brought back togther, proclaiming peace on earth.

There is another facet of this that stood out for me- peace is not something I obtain for myself, rather it is something that is given. It is a reality that exists external to me. What is given precisely? The proclamation of this completeness, this wholeness, both in the larger narrative framework of new creation and in the particularness of reconiliation and restoration between the inhabitants of this present creation. This is the Gospel of peace.

Thus, peace in the Judeo-Christian sense is about contrasting rules, or contasting realities. It is also about how that which peace opposes and serves finds an answer. In the Judeo-Christian narrative, Christ’s rule opposes the rule of Empire. It also opposes how Empires concieve of peace being brought about and to what ends. In the Empire sense of the word, peace is something one does. In the Judeo-Christian sense of the word, peace is something one recieves.

In other words, peace is a narrative of hope.

But it is an embodied hope. Meaning, the giving of hope is so that we might bear it out in our lives, in the world. And here comes that important aspect of the narrative- in a world were peace has not yet been realized. Where else can the proclamation that peace is both realized and found in Christ find its power? Its meaning?

Or more importantly, where else can we find an answer to the divisions we find within the body of Christ, or within Israel? Within the whole of humanity and God’s creation? What else allows us to live as though reconciliation is a thing even where the division reigns? What frees us to forgive even where relationships remain broken? What frees us to serve and to give and to attend and to help, even where such actions can only ever bring about a world that remains mired in brokenness and conflict?

As someone with a very real anxiety disorder, the more I listened, and then contemplated, and then read, the more it became deeply aware to me- I have a complicated relationship with the word peace. Perhaps its my deeply rooted cynicism, which I confess was only made more aware and more vibrant by my foray into atheism and some of its most popular belief systems like secular humanism and positivism. Here I think of the endless conversations I’ve had with my older brother, perhaps one of my most timeless sparring partners to this end (although these days he has stepped out of the battle). As one of the most devoted positivists I know, his life is driven by a seemingly unshakeable belief in the ability of humans to bring about a changed world. When I pushback on this basic notion, bringing up science and history and the study of social and societal evolution to demonstrate that this most certaintly cannot be the case the will never be the case, I am typically met with some form of an answer that reduces peace to personal happiness. Which makes the shared connection between the two words all the more interesting. And yet, happiness is an illusion. It does not require peace, it requires manipulating our sense of what this world actually is. It requires reducing this world to something we can control, and finding our motivation to control it by appealing to false narratives. Poke that bubble using science? Using logic? Or have it burst by the simple awarness of reality itself, and the cloak comes off. And more importantly, when that cloak comes off, it reveals the kind of anxiety this secularized approach to really represents, taking the fear of hell motifs from relgion and appapplying it to to trhe self made life, or the self made world and all its systems and constructs.

This had me thinking- if peace is something that can only truly be given, what about anxiety? What about fear? If it is the case that both peace and axiety are things that are given, it begs the question, from where do these things come from? In the Judeo-Christian narrative, peace come from the gift giver, the faithfulness of God in Jesus. Within this narrative, peace relates directly to the establishing of God’s Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, the fulfillment of the new creation promise. Within this peace also speaks to the outcome of this fulfillment, which is reconciliation between all things.

This same narrative then locates anxiety, or fear, in a different rule, a different reality. A reality that it names the Powers of Sin and Death, which bind us to a different narrative. One of the great marks of the modern world here in the West, which isn’t all that disimmilar to what we find in the promises of the Roman Empire, is that the answer to anxiety is us. We conquer our fears. We reshape our world. We control our outcomes. This is, I believe, where anxiety, an epidemic in the modern world, truly gains its voice. Peace is no longer given, it is earned, accomplished, constructed, achieved. And anxiety an outcome of our own failures.

But here was my thought. What happens when I locate peace not in circumstance, but in, to borrow from Marilyn Robinson, the givenness of things? What happens if we locate peace and anxiety within different narratives of this world, of reality, a given hope as opposed to human accomplishment and failure?

I suppose we get to the question, of which is the true narrative and which is the false one. Or perhaps its more than that. Perhaps its a question of what we are rooting our hope in, and how it frees us to proclaim peace. Logically. Rationally. But also experientially.

What frees us to proclaim peace and what frees us to embody it.

Every once in a while you come across an idea that sort of reshapes the way you see the world or think about the world. A couple of years ago I read a book, a kind of travelogue, that offered a philosophical observation regarding how we experience the world. Everyone is shaped by two essential qualities when it comes to the spaces we occupy- the space in which we live, and the space we are drawn to visit. There is something about the way we structure our lives that needs both of these things to be somehow different, but also in conversation. Equally a part of who we are.

Of course, there are lots of ways to break down the spaces in which we live. We typically inherit it, be it through birth or through opportunity. The space where we live becomes known through the liturgy of the ordinary every day, the traditions and routines and investments that anchor is in a “home.” Part of what frees us to participate in this lived space is the necessary restlesness that a desire, a longing represents. That persistant draw to something other is what helps illuminate our lived space and inform it. It keeps where we are from being reduced to mundanity or meaninglessnes. It reminds us that we are part of a larger story.

The observation insisted that we all have this. In fact, we can apply this same concept in many different ways to the different facets of our lives. When it comes to the spaces we occupy however, it was not difficult for me to locate my draw. I long for the ocean. Not to be on it, but to be by it. For many people it is the mountains. For me the ocean is the antithesis of the mountains, In the beauty of the mountains, which yes, they are beautiful, my mind is constantly looking for a way out. It can’t handle the feeling of clausterphobia. It feels restrictive and confining. At the ocean I find an invitation. To stand at the ocean front is to feel like the whole world is opened up. It invokes the imagination, for both the terror and the beauty. It embraces the sunrise and the sunsets like a cradle rather than, like the mountains, concealing it and blocking it out. And of course, knowing this is where I am drawn just opens up the constrast of where I live, landlocked in the center of the Canada, where the distance between me and the ocean on all sides couldn’t be further. And yet, I love where I live. The embrace of my city’s small time vibe. The simple pleasures of my favorite coffee shops and bookstores. The preserved turn of the century arcitecture that’s practicatly in my backyard. The way the praries mimic the ocean’s openness. My favorite drives. My neighborhood walks. But my love for where I live is also framed by the space to which I am drawn. When I go to the river, which is less than a 10 minute walk from my house, I long to be by the riverside, and that longing is framed by the lake from which it is drawn, a 40 minute drive from where I live. And that lake draws me to the bay, which draws me to the ocean. To drive the tanscanada in either direction is to know where it leads, to have it come alive in my mind. To look south is to find the great Mississippi river, a virtual symbol of this draw to the great emptying into the gulf.

There’s another aspect of this for me too. When it comes to the ocean, the Atlantic inparticular has a special place in my imagination, as it holds together the history of civilization. Between its two sides we find the division of history that locates me where I am, and to cross it  is to grasp that which roots this history in a singular story. Equally true is the restlessness I have long felt this side of the Atlantic between the worldview I inhereted from the enlightenment, a reductionist, materialist view of the world in which reality is reduced to scientific data, and the world that this view detached itself from, framed by a more expansive view of reality not reducible to mere data points. This is part of why I am drawn to imagine these spaces which haven’t forgotten, in the ways the West often does, that we are shaped not by data, but by narrative.

This is a big part of what drew me to John Haywoods Ocean: A History of the Atlantic Before Columbus. It felt like a must own for me on both fronts. And the initial chapters helped me make sense of why. This is a book about bringing the prehistory of the Atlantics shaping to light. A preshistory that is shaped by narrative, by story. Narratives that find humanity on the shores of this mysterious place called the ocean and contemplating the true nature of this world against its chaos. It was an invitation to wonder, as the author says, and it is this wonder that drove people to broaden their view of the world. But, as the book equally draws out, this wonder meets with the hard reality of the enlightenments vision and interests when it arrives on the opposite shore. Here this wonder keeps getting reduced and reduced until this new space becomes the figurative “ends of the world.” And not just the ends, but its percieved center. A center defined by progress. To have discovered the whole world gives way to mastering it as a resource. Not supriisingly, what this has unearthed is what we might call a crisis of meaning. Absent of wonder, what we have is a functional world absent of meaning. More and more, it seems what is happening now is people, figuratively speaking, are finding themselves back at that Atlantic shore looking back into the history of humanity, and indeed our world, and trying to recover those narratives that got left behind. Trying to recover that imagination.

The first portion of this book is all about bringing those myths to the surface. Those shared stories tied to the history of civilizaztion, helping us to see and understand the true shape of this world, this reality. Opening up our imaginations. And indeed, the first half of this book had me so hopeful, so enthralled. But then I hit the back half, and particularly the final quarter. This is where prehistory collides with modernity. And the further we get into this portion, the more I started to wonder abouit the hands this story had been placed into. After all, an enlightenment thinker will always and forever see history as necessarily driving towards what they see as the truth- the raitonalist west. Such a thinker will inevitably see the narratives of the past as the thing we are meant to let go of, a product of a more “religious” and more superstitious age, buitl on stuff that the modern world has done away with in favor of truth. It’s just my opinion, but its improtant at the very least for such a thinker to be upfront about their interpretive biases as a historian. I don’t think Haywood was. Given where the final chapter lands, I actually felt a bit decieved by the fact that Haywood is, indeed, playing to that enlightenment bias.

However, it was also possible for me to contextualize that when it came to my overall experience. I could take his information, and even portions where his own need and attempt to compartmentalize the world of narrative on his way to reducing it to scientific data, actually betrays the uncertainness of precisely what to do with this history. I could note his uncomfortableness with sitting inn these spaces, these stories, too long, which to me underscores their narrative power. Their refusal to let truth be reduced to something it is not. To me, this book reminded me about the profound nature of these “shared” stories, all anchored in a belief that something true exists. That simple belief is what keeps wonder as a key, guiding force of our ability to know and grow in knowledge. Something even Haywood accepts and notes.

Even at three out of five stars, this was a read that helped open up why I love the ocean, and inparticular why I love this particular ocean. It brought to life my longing, my desire, in a fresh way.

Is there irony in the fact of a renewed Christian not only locating his hero in a proposed angry athiest, but finding in his heros art a pathway to God?

Maybe. On the surface at least it feels contradictory, and yet this is nevertheless true of my relationship to Spanish filmmaker/artist Guillermo Del Toro. A man with an incredibly storied past featuring three polarizing personalities pushing in from the outside in ways that would leave even the strongest of us mired in confusion and incoherency and complication- his strict and forceful Catholic Grandmother,whom saw his fascination with monsters as demons needing to be exorcised (quite literally as part of their daily routine), the hard disposition of a staunch materiliast and nihilistic father, and the alluring mystique of a mother immersed in the dark arts of tarot reading.

These three points of view, all converging on one another in the mind and life of a young boy striving to understand a world shaped by monsters, of notions of good and evil,, would ultimatlely come to a head when he came upon a scene of dead corpses piled up on one another. Here is where he describes the seeds of any potential faith in his inherited catholicism lapsing, leading him to conclude,

“Death is the ultimate goal of life… Good or evil we all end up as rotten garbage.”

And to underscore this further, he adds,

“I believe in two things- God and time. Both are infinite, both reign supreme. Both crush mankind.”

In an article written by Mike Duran, he notes something similar when it comes to his own fascination with and love of the “angry atheist” and his art.

Art does not occur in a vacuum, even if that vacuum is an atheistic one… (but) Call me narrow-minded, whenever I see an artist of del Toro’s caliber profess godlessness, it breaks my heart. There is something natural, right, about a talented individual acknowledging Something / Someone outside themselves — even Fate or Fortune — that has blessed them. Otherwise, it’s like painting the Cistene Chapel in hell — no matter how beautiful, fantastic, or captivating, it just doesn’t matter.

And here in lies the contrast inherent in Del Toro’s body of work.

On the one hand del Toro is critical of theistic forms of belief in God, but yet tells cinematic narratives about alternative magical realities that might be interpreted as spiritual in nature

The article goes on to articulate how this contrast of senses, beliefs and sensibilities forces us to see beyond the limits of the angry atheist which Duran so aptly defines as leading to a singular rational and logical end. The same end that, by first appereance, one might find inherent to Del Toro’s own striking acknoweldgment of the worlds percieved nihilistic framework.

Having just finished Ian Nathan’s definitive biographical treaties on the enigmatic figure, simply titled Guillermo Del Toro: The Iconic Filmmaker and his Work, this is made abundantly clear. With his stated assessment of a world defined by death, his journey as a filmmaker is marked by stories that refuse to let death have the last word. That refuse to let the world be defined by the hsrd reality of his father, even as his films function simultaneously as a biting critique of the abuses of religious institutions. Perhaps that leaves his mother as the reigning influential voice, however he repeatedly roots and owes his beliefs, defined as it is by his emphatic embrace of the monsters ànd the darkness, to the whole, something he is always careful to acknowledge with love. He owes as much to his Catholic framework as he does to his father’s nihilism. Even then, if there is a residing thematic force running through his body of work, it would be stories that appear, if at least through subjective observation, to be convincing him that this world isn’t held captive to either. Mike Duran puts it this way;

In my opinion, he’s an atheist in name only. What he presents in Pan’s Labyrinth — the one film besides Cronos that’s his own original conception — is a kind of alternative Christianity spawned from Victorian fantasy. The Underworld palace where Ofelia/Moanna reigns is a faux Gothic cathedral with a Celtified rose window. He’s suggesting that our world is ruled from an alternative spiritual reality that’s mostly beneficent, even if it’s also populated by morally ambiguous creatures like the Faun and truly dreadful ones like the cannibal Pale Man.

If there was any doubt that Duran is on the right track, we can find this echoed in Del Toro’s own words regarding both his work on the two Hellboy movies and his magnum opus, Pans Labyrinth,

“It’s about the real world mining and undermining fantasy and magic, and how tragically we are destroying magic every day…. I side with the fantasy.”

The angry atheist finding in Del Toro a composite and supporting voice might be tempted to treat his use of the word “fantasy” as stories that are not true, but this would, I think, be missing the point of his films. Things make much more sense when you hone in on the stories he shares throughout Nathan’s biography regarding his experience of the mystical. Stories stemming from unexplainable experiences embedded in his childhood, to stories of “destined” occurances and perspective shaping moments that cover the ups and downs of his relationship to hollywood and Mexico as a filmmaker whom refuses to bend to expectations (as he says, all truth is about necessary disobedience, which could apply just as readily to his atheism as it could to his lasped catholicism). Such as the recovery of his lost notebook that held the future of Pans Labyrinth in its pages. A similar story emerges from outside voices, be it his relationship with Doug Jones, a committed Christian, and Ron Perlman, who’s own spiritual journey and belief in God is described in his auto-biography as shaping the strength of their relationship.

Again, to borrow from the filmmakers own words,

Well I believe… I believe… I’m semi-agnostic. I believe that there are so many things that are entirely unknowable that it’s better to abandon yourself to the wisdom of the universe, or its indifference, as Albert Camus would say.

If his art is a witness to anything, it is a testimony to the power of this wisdom and its refusal to let go of him, to abandon him to the ultimate goal of death. Indeed, that “disagreement” that frames his approach, is a willingness to allow his art to challenge the truth of a world devoid of magic, which is precisely what his stories do. In many ways, what I find in his films and his voice is a rebellion against the illusion of indifference. Like the chalk framed doorway in Pan’s Labyrinth, his visionary stories provide a window into a truer vision of the world, one in which the fantasy, or the myth, cannot be reduced to the sort of materialistic and reductionist outlook that we might feel obligated towards when confronted by a pile of dead corpses. It is interesting that his obsession with recovering and preserving the magic, or even the “fairy tale,” is described almost as a defiant reminder to himself to not let go of the truer vision of the world that a child sees informing the death, This is what Ofelia represents. A marveling at the fact, as he puts it, that supposedly mature adults see growing up and seeing the world more truly as an embrace of death and war, while fairy tales, the stories that recover the world from this reality, get relegated to the realm of the child. “Fantasy,” Del Toro states, “allows us to explain, interpret and reappropriate reality.” Not as a construction, but as a greater truth. After all, if such stories are not anchored in truth, it is the adult quest of death and indifference that should be the thing we aspire to communicate and embrace, not the fantasy. And yet it is the fantasy that captures our spirit, not as escape but as a defining and contextualizing force.

This is what makes him a formative voice for me. This doorway was my invitation to seeing and knowing God more fully. Of siding with the magic rather than the death.. Does that feel like a contradiction? Maybe on the surface. But it doesn’t tale much digging to see what art, and indeed the inherent human journey, compells us towards. Leaves us restless for.

“So much of the evil and hatred in this world could be countered by understanding that in every culture we name our storytellers.” (Alice Munroe in Brianna Labuskes’ The Boxcar Librarain)

Munroe, one of three central chracters in Labuskes’ historical fictional rendering of the true history of the Boxcar Library, finds herself in dialogue with a wandering stranger named Colette, ultimately bringing her on to be the boxcar librarian- an individual who is hired to deliver books to the male workers in the the isolated mining towns cut-off from the city centers.

Social, economic and political concerns lie behind this visionary act of both preservation and protest, but at its heart is a philsophical conviction: Stories, Munroe believes, matter when it comes to how we see the world.

In this particular conversation she pulls inspiration from the shanacie, ancient storytellers whom were keepers or preservationists, of Ireland’s story, Irelands operative mythology. A history I have long been fascinated with given my own Irish roots. So much of this echoes down into the way Traditional societies work, all the way into the ancient world of the earliest civilizations and peoples. As Colette notes in the story, this is comparative to a figurative intersection between a bard and a historian. Or, as Munroe puts it within Labuske’s story, the keeper of a culture. The ancient practice of truthtelling.

Narrative, for me, is the only true counter to propositional approaches, which is what undergirds the world I inhereted from western culture, the world I was born into. I’ve written in this space before about my allegiance to narrative philosophy/theology, I’ve been thinking more about this lately, especially where it concerns the idea of knowledge. How is it that we know what is true and what is not? Propositional approaches, which see truth as inherently rational, reduce knowledge to doctrine, be it secularized or theological forms. Hard facts. Known data. The accumulation of verifiable “information.” 

I have long found this approach to be unpersuasive. There can be only one end to such an approach- gatekeeping, or presuppositionalism. Meaning, it is in a sense its own worst enemy when it comes to seeking actual knowledge, usually resulting in erected walls between the single, most imporant element of empiricism: available conversation with the truth. Conversation is precisely what narrative enables. It is built on the notion of a shared story. As the character of Munroe puts it, “We want to be told stories.” Why? Because it is “human nature.” We intuitively understand that truth cannot be known as propositions. We inherently need to understand this world not as a series of isolated data points, we need to be able to connect it. If science can demonstate anything regarding human funciton, it begins with this quality. Such a world, reduced to isolated data, is left incoherent and unknowable.

Padraig O Tauma, an Irish poet and theologian, cites scholar Jack Niles in his podcast series on the subject, whom once said that “we should have been called Homo narrans, the story-telling primate.” Stories, as Tauma states, “help us understand God and our relationship with the divine, while allowing space for us to encounter mystery.” As Munroe puts it in The Boxcar Librarians, “They (stories) offer explanation… of the world and of ourselves.”

That word “space” is key, as that space is the primary defense we have against the threat of individualism, the primary outcome of a rationalist society such as the west. Propositions are inherently about manipulation and control, be it of nature, of the self, or of the other. The kind of truth it affords us is a reductionist form of reality, which falsely coopts the notion of complexity by recasting it within the myth of progress, or narrative threads that are enslaved to this imposed trajectory that sees us going from knowledge of less facts to more facts, the very opposite of what narrative philosophy/theology is ultimately concerned with.

Which of course only gets us to agreater ability to manipulate and control the world, not to greater knowledge of what that world is. And not suprinsingly, such a world, a world that finds itself detached from a cohesive and coherent narrative. is a world that must remain logically disconnected from the whole.

Reductionism can only ever lead us to the individual. Ironically, this is precisely the place where the rationalist agenda comes crashing down for many of us, as to uphold the individual, a key componant of secular humanism (a propositional approach), requires appealing to an evolutionary narrative that sees humanity as the natural byproduct of progress: this line that leads from worse to better precisely on the basis of its inherent ability to know facts, which it can manipulate and control as part of the main human enterprise. And yet, in this view nature finds itself being necessarily reduced every step of the way, leaving this propositional human swimming in in an empty ocean of its own contradictions and incongruencies. Ultimately, even the human is reducible to the same individual properties upon which all such information is bound to.

To bring this back to the quote I started this with, here is what is most interesting to me. My shifting away from propositional forms of knowledge began with, ironically, challenging the western narrative and finding it wanting. Which just underscores that it betrays its own position from the get go- as the quote states, it needs its storytellers. What narrative philosophy/theology breathes into the mix is an ability to ask the necerssary question, what story makes the best sense of the world we observe and experience. At its heart is that necessary conversation, a conversation that opens us up to logic and reason (or logos). Rather than getting mired in prooftexts, it sees knowledge, or truth, as being sought between contrasting narratives. Which simply means this-  if truth exists is must exist external to our knowledge of it. That’s the only way it can be, by its nature, Truth. Therefore, where our narratives bring us into dialogue, such an approach iassumes that such colisions of differing narratives push us towards that necessary meta-narrative. This is how we move towards knowledge of Truth.

Propositionalists are inherently allergic to that word- meta-narrative. Meta-narratives betray the true aim of rationalism, which is to ensure that reducing the world to facts allows complexity to remain a construct. For as long as it is a construct it can be manipulated and controlled for our own purposes. The real issue is, when we peel back the curtain of this magic trick, it turns out those same propositionalists are in fact anchoring their embrace of those constructs in narrative truth, simply in ways that leave true knowledge enslaved to its own reductionism.

Which is to say, it leaves us unable to say anything about our actual knowledge of this reality, this world, knowledge we intuitively know can only be expressed through narrative. Not least because this is how our brains are designed. Most of all because this is the only way to access Truth that exists external to us.

Most damning in this regard- narrative philosophy/theology undercuts our need for control and manipulation, the root of propositionalism and its main philsophical forms, one of the biggest being secular humanism. Lose that and the logic of the whole human enterprise comes crashing down on its head.

To be in conversation is to name our storytellers. This was the contention of Niebuhr, who once famously penned his work The Story of Lives. Since then it has only gained traction, following names like Hauerwas and Ricoeur and Frei, and continuing to play out in more recent works from scholars like Jeanine K. Brown, John Sailhamer, McGrath, Gorman, or N.T. Wright. Perhaps its most noted rise has been in the resurgence of interest in Eastern Orthodox approaches, a Tradition that places narrative front and center as the main way of engaging and knowing truth. Rowan Williams and Elizabeth Oldfield are strong proponants of this approach.

To name our storytellers is for that conversation these narratives evoke to be able to critique our stories in community, and more importantly to make aware the inhrent value and meaning-making beliefs, practices and systems that are shaping and driving our lives. It is this critique that allows us to wrestle together with that universal story to which we, and indeed Reality itself, all belong. If Truth exists, it must be knowable, but it also must be the case that we can only know imperfectly. Here the full power of narrative theology pushes to the surface. Propositionalism is immediately crippled and compromised by such a clarification. Which is precisely why it seeks to reduce knowledge to facts or data points. To acknowledge that we can only know imperfectly, a necessary precurser to the notion of “growing” in knowledge, leaves the propositionalist forced to concede that logically, then, we cannot actually know anything at all. Because we will always know imperfectly, lest we have grounds to say Truth will one day be fully revealed. After all, if knowledge is the “fact” of gravity, for example, the only thing we truly know is that we experience it. A theory of gravity is destined to change and keep changing for all of time. What we know today, in theory, will be overturned tomorrow. And one of the most striking concessions within this is the idea that even within this “state of fact” that underlays the propositional view, true knowledge is not required in order for one to control and manipulate a thing. And since that is the ends and the means of such a view of the world, the only knowledge that matters is the function.

Narrative Philsophy/Theology on the other hand, actually frees us to know truly even where and as we know imperfectly. Precisely because it shifts the anchor of knowledge. Its emphasis is on seeking to name that which we already know to be true “through experience.” As Tolkien once put it, story is the seeking of  a true myth that can make sense of all the world’s stories. Why do we seek? Because we know, even if imperflectly, and this knowing, this knowledge, binds us to the whole.

I was listening to an interview with Rutger Bregman and The Good Fight Host, Yascha Mounk (Humankind, Utopia for Realists) on his newest book called Moral Ambition.

Bregman is fascinating to me. While I don’t share his philosophy, I agree with much of his approach. More specifically, I find his critique of western civilization, and more specifically the tendency to find in its allegiance to western progress a kind of secularized moralism that is not based in reality, to be spot on.

Moralism: making judgements about others morality

The Problem of Using Moral Constructs To Create Moral Truth

His own philosophical commitments don’t land him here (he is content to uphold some assumed acceptance of the notion of moral progress), but I do think his ideas play with certain logical implications that challenge some of the common rhetoric that we find embedded within the modern, western framework. One of his assertions is that the shape of human history does not require individuals to adhere to particular morals in order for societies to obtain a moral structure. In fact, the idea, which is inherent to the modern western social structures, that humanity has become more moral as a necessary part of its human evolution is not only rooted in a wrong understanding of the nature of humanity,, it produces forms of moralism that create and reinforce the very illusion that this belief is true and necessary, which of course is anchored in us versus them paradigms. This is true even though history demonstrates that such moralism (the belief that better people bring about a better world and therefore must be judged accordingly) is not the thing that brings about social change. In fact, such a belief acts contrary to what we find in reality.

He uses the abolitionist movement as an example, pointing out that actual change came about through numerous appeals by history itself to different and sometimes contrasting concerns on a societal level, including all manners of economic, political, social, psychological and biological interests which could, relative to the moralistic society we find, be categorized as immoral.

This example plays into the bigger picture, intersecting with most aspects of social and societal structure. On a macro level, the ways percieved negative and positive movements bring about inconsistent outcomes, and outcomes that are often dependent on or a product of the other (so a percieved positive requiring the negative to come about, or the negative being a product of the positive), create a muddled landscape when it comes to trying to track down and clear and definitive sense of morality as a consistent and true construct within a universal narrative of progress. Even more so when one needs to justify western superiority, or the superiority of western rationalism, by turning the rest of history or the world into a necessary scapegoat. The only true way forward, on rational grounds anyways, is to locate some sort of universal grounds for morality that exists apart from the fluid nature of these constructs. Bregman, in the interview, tries to argue that morality is really far less controversial and far more shared than we might think, defining it as being rooted in the inherent worth of all life. I personally think he has a hard time justifying this, or at least has a hard time establishing this inherency, even if it does make sense of what we find.

What I mean by that is this: Moral responsiblity is anchored, in his view, not in a given, but in a forward movement. It is moving somewhere, thus why we call it progress. As an equally expressive construct in context of different times and different places, it is developing according to something that is drawing it forward. But this is precisely where things begin to break down for his reasoning. It cannot both be the case that we become more and more moral, and for it to be equally true that morality is driven by some true and inherent nature or foundation. If one cannot locate morality equally and consistently in past, present and future as a non-contingent truth, whatever future we imagine history shaping (see his book Utopia For Realists) remains completely contingent on its emergence, and not only emergence but on the idea of better people making better societies. And as his ideas point out, this notion of an emergent morality shaped by a paradigm of good and bad people or good and bad societies, is not reflective of actual history, of actual reality. It is in fact the very thing he wants to reject. Morality is a construct that remains contingent on its context. Meaning, the construct isn’t what is true, the thing the construct is responding to, rightly or wrongly, is the thing that is true.

I do think that Bregman is kind of on the right track in removing people from the systems that create moral constructs. He does this in order to say that people themsleves are inherently good. The emergence of moral societies occurs outside of them, often in ways that are actually ambivilant to any human awareness or even embodiment of these morals. Rather, he would say that basic intuition. which is built into nature, simply follows the same patterns in recognizing what is good and what is bad, often using contradictory things to achieve a given purpose. Given that he has not established actual grounds for stating any true foundation however, it is a weak argument on his end, even if I find some agreement in the direction he is taking things.

The Problem of Effective Altruism

I was reminded of a movement I became familiar with when I was an atheist called effective altruism, which makes a similar case in regards to the relationship between altruistic behavior and the actual outcomes and effectiveness of this altruistic behavior. This  distinguishes between the belief that what I do makes me a good or bad person, and that good people, whom the western enlightenment progression sees as the necessary and constructed outcome of its bend towards progress, make the world better. In fact, when we assess reality this couldn’t be further from the truth. Such a belief that acts of altruism function this way might make us feel like we are good people living meaningful lives, but such altruism rarely intersects with the truth of what actually brings about change. In fact, much of what makes us feel like we are good people (altruistic acts) makes zero difference and can even contribute to what we might call harmful or negative outcomes (if we can use those labels at all).

The western enlightenment, which is reflected in its secularist approaches, hinges on an unshakeable belief in human potential, or humanism (or positivism), or human created moral and ethical systems. This belief requires an equally unshakeable belief in human progress, meaning our fundamental trust in this world relates to our fundamental belief in the potential of human accomplishment and ability. Such a world allows the central human enterprise (science) to overturn the old world of superstitions. It also allows us to progress to more moral (read: better) societies.

But what do we do when reality challenges this narrative? When it turns out the foundation of this bellef is not rooted in actual truth?

What happens when we find our identity in something (being altruistic) that, according to the science, doesn’t actually make the difference we believe it does? That the very thing that gives our life meaning actually doesn’t have a foundation in reality, and doesn’t make us good people?

What happens when history reveals a narrative that doesn’t require us to believe in anything true at all for it to come about? And in fact, arguably depends on us playing into illusions for it to come about? What happens when we discover that history tends to develop the way it does for any number of reasons not related to our actual beliefs about what is good and bad? That it needs the bad as much as it needs the good?

Things get worse- what happens when reality goes after the lynchpin of it all: the modern western commitment to the existence of a free will? The interview above ends up here because it cannot help but do otherwise. Morality requires our ability to make judgements, and without the notion of a will it seems very difficult, if impossible, to make those judgments.

At one point Bregman notes that he wonders about whether free will is a necessary problem or a necessary illusion. Or both. He uses the example of, in his mind, progress doing away with the need for God by doing away with the God of the gaps. He likewise wonders if we have done away with a need for the will, given that morality is not only driven by systems and structures rather than people, but that people are inherently good, not determined by behavior. Here host Yascha Mounk presses back, saying that if we do away with the will we lose the essential fabric of our participation in these systems. He uses the word “sidetetepping ” to define how he gets around the problem by appealing to compatibalism, which I’ve often found to be a bit of a cop out. It’s also ironic given that Mounk himself also does away with God by using the very reasoning he doesn’t want, or is not willing, to apply to the will.

The Problem of Civilizations

As a final note and observation I wanted to bring in a book I recently finsished by Josephine Quinn Called How the World Made the West. It’s an apt book to bring into the conversation given that his thesis is going after the “us versus them” tendencies that come with turning, what he calls, a history of civilization into a history of civilizations. This same theory could apply to morality being turned into a history of moralisms.

There is a curious point he draws out at the beginning of the book that, while he doesn’t connect the dots directly in this way, seems to me to be all but prevelant in the way he fleshes out the body of his argument within the book. In the introduction he points out how the Judeo-Christian narrative encapsulates what history was before the west turned history into competing civilzations- which is a world shaped by shared origins. A single people sharing a single story. And what we find inherent to the story of Israel is the history of a people in which all of these connecting cultures and beliefs keep converging in this collecation of people bound by and shaped by the liberation from Empire, the very concept that the West would coopt and use to reinterpret the shape of history according to the narrative of progress. Isreal itself is shaped by the confluence of all these influences coming together to bring about this unique identity, creating a society within history that is built on connections, not disconnections or supersessionism.

It is extremely curious to me to see how Quinn then talks around the story of israel in this book, coming back to it only where he is forced to, but otherwise speaking of it in theory by speaking of these surrounding influences and connections. This seemed obvious to me. The result is a book that is quite profound in its observations about the worlds function, but a bit evasive in establishing a foundation. If civilization is a universal truth or idea in which we find the different and unique fabrics of our coexisting social and societal constructs, that universal needs a foundation. That foundation, as the intro seems to betray, is similar to Bregman- the inhernet shared identity or value of all people, precisely because we all share the same source.

I don’t know. It seems to me though that the central problem with Bregman’s thesis is that he wants to locate the potential for a utopia but he is also not quite willing to commit to establishing that foundation. The utopia is easy to imagine, precisely because it has nothing to be held accountable to. It’s just an idealized world that he can argue we need to do the necessary work to invest in and towards in order to bring about. It can evade critique by evading any real definition. A foundation is much more difficult. Perhaps his superficial dismissal of God using the self imposed and very modern rhetoric of the God of the Gaps, an idea that requires modernism to be uphoeld, is not the historical reading he wants or needs it to be. Just like Mounk is not willing to let go of the will, it could be that Bregman’s own argument can’t live and breath without that necessary foundation to keep it afloat. The same for Quinn and his appeal to civlications. Perhaps the necessary key to his own argument is the necesssary foundation of that universsaal narrative he tries to avoid but keeps coming back around to.

Every once in a while I come across a concept or a word or an idea that helps illuminate and make sense of something I already knew to be intuitively true about myself.

The term Orthorexia Nervosa was one of those. It is defined as an obsession with healhy eating that impacts ones life in negative ways. It is classified as an eating disorder, and it is, at least before I understood and knew what it was, something that nearly destoryed me in a myriad of ways. It grew out of my childhood. When my dad first got sick with cancer, my mom overhauled our house, purging it of “junk” food and replacing it with “healthy foods,” primarily defined as organic, all natural, whole grain, and every other catchphrase you can find represented within what has since become an incredibly lucrative field in the homeopathic industry.

When I finally moved out of home in my twenties, this formed a kind of existential crisis. I had adapted to this way of living in my parents home, but I had never actually asked the question why. Thus when I now found myself responsible for my own grocery shopping, perusing the aisles and needing to make my own decisions regarding whether to pay that extra $3 for organic lettuce or not, the only thing I knew to do was to research it for myself so as to understand why I should be making this investment. This research triggered an already preexisting obsessive disorder, married as it was to my anxiety, and before I knew it I was head first in endless articles and diagnosis and information that would come to plaster my wall, fill my drawers, and be stored under my bed- it was everywhere.

To make matters worse, it was also deeply contradictory. When I became convinced something was healthy for me, another article would come out telling it is killing me. And vice versa. Before long all of this information was in my head, and my desperate need to make decisions based on truth and to use that truth to control my life became the thing that drived me.

Until the day I crashed. I was in such a state of crisis and anxiety that I broke my brain. And this was after finding out I was wrecking my body with the different diets and remedies and supplements I had been sold under the name of “science.” I didn’t sleep, and I mean not at all, for a straight 7 days, until a doctor prescribed a pill to rewire my brain. I was supposed to take two. I was distrustuful and took a half. Within minutes I heard a loud audible pop inside my head, and I was out for the count.

I had to throw everything that I had out, including articles and food and supplements, and create hard and fast boundaries for myself. Of course later on I became diagnosed with celiac disease, which is the most ironic thing for someone in my condition. That’s how things go I guess.

Another such term was the term “maphead.” This was first made aware to me through a book written by jeapordy winner Ken Jennings by the same name. It describes someone with a unique obsession and love for maps, and who understands the world best through cartographic representation and philosophy. There are few moments when a personal revelation makes me literally stand up and shout. That’s what I did when I heard his explantion. I would go on to embrace this part of myself in the ensuing years. I no longer needed to feel crazy for my need to have my head in a paper map whenever we went on roadtrips. The thrill I would get over understanding philosophy and politics and geography and history through maps made all the sense in the world.

I came across another word this morning- cherophobia. It’s defined as “an aversion to happiness.” Here it is characterized by someone who responds to feelings of happiness or good situations by repressing them, keeping them at a distance, or feeling guilty about them. For those with cherophobia, something good happening, or a feeling of happiness, means that something bad is inevitably aroound the corner.

I came across this word after a recent conversation with my wife where she was expressing feeling an impending sense of doom and dread and not knowing where that came from. While this term doesn’t apply to her (her’s was situational), when I was researching what that might be I came across this word that most definitely applies to me. In fact, I could locate it in this present moment right now. I have recently been offered an opportunity for full time work, which is an answer to the prayers, hope and attempts to supplement what is right now part time hours at a job I took a chance on when needing to make some changes at my old place of work a little over a year ago. Now that job has formulated into what has the makings of a perfect marriage, giving me the hours I need while being a mere three blocks from my home and with plenty of the necessary access and time I need to still be home during the day with our dogs. I’d still be driving, but I would be taking on more responsibility.

I should be happy and excited. But I have been plagued with anxiety, with any number of negative events entering into my head. I have a deep rooted anxiety over doctors (for good reason). I’ve been able to manage that through intentional distance, but my 5 year medical requirement for my license expires this year. Which means I not only have to go back, I have to find a new doctor and begin what for me is a very tricky process all over again. That begins with the thought that because this good thing has happened, it is inevitable that this forced appointment will be a fateful one.

Or there is my son, who presently is going through some stuff and walking a fine line with being a ticking time bomb in terms of certain choices he is making regarding his own physical health. More than my own visit to the doctors, I fear something happening to him.

And if something happened to me, my anxiety over the future of our dogs, also our kids, is also very much present. I don’t think that my wife has the capcitity to care for these pups on their own given their needs, and they wouldn’t be able to be rehomed given their struggles. I spend days breaking over the thought that my death would be their death.

I have extreme anxiety over whether our life insurance policy would go after my anxiety disorder and the role it plays in my needed and careful balancing act with doctors, especially since I don’t have a direct and official diagnosis (getting one has been near impossible over the years). The problem is, I know that I have a breaking point. I can force myself into a progression of testing with doctors, but only to a point. Eventually the whole psychological approach of gradual dessensitization does the opposite of what that approach is supposed to do, and I lose the capacity to continue to respond. I find myself below rock bottom. And it has been impossible to get doctors to understand this, and to help me with this or to listen to this. And thus my anxiety is very much present in my distrust of insurance companies as well, thinking that this company would somehow use this against me and not give my wife the money she is supposed to get.

I also have anxiety over this new position going badly. Over not getting my book done, my life story. Over finances and bank appointments and vet apppointments and the list goes on and on. My head cannot compartmentalize it all and it cripples me. Thus cherophobia becomes the only method I have for controlling anything. It’s a very real reality, I have discovered, for those who have this disorder. We need it, even though it obviously negatively impacts us. When we think about our reality, our history, this life and how it has unfolded, our brains logically justify these thoughts because they appear to correlate with what is true. It appears rational.

How does one counter this? Become irrational? My mind tells me I must become so. I have to allow myself to feel happiness even though it isn’t true or real, and is even dangerous. This is what makes it tough. Truth gets confused and muddled. I know I’m reading that this is a disorder, and I know that I don’t like this space, but I like the idea of being out of control even less. Even as I feel like everything is out of control. Which I suppose is to say, I don’t know the anwers. I don’t think there is any easy self help process that can say do steps 1-3 and you’ll have happiness. Life doesn’t work that way. I do know however that it always feels like an important foundation, to have a sense of what it is that I am experiencing and feeling and dealing with. Encountering these words feels helpful, at the very least. To have a categorization for all of that, a way to make sense of it. If that’s a small consolation in the moment, I guess I’ll take it.