Concerning matters of religion

So, in case you didn’t know, today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. This is the 40-day period that mirrors Jesus’ sojourn of fasting in the wilderness; in the early Christian church this would be the time, leading up to the celebration of Easter, when new members learned the matters of faith that they needed to in order to be baptised, and those who were estranged from the church could re-enter it through public penitence and reconciliation. Today, we go to church on Ash Wednesday and the priest makes a cross of ashes on our forehead; we might fast–apparently it’s mandatory for Catholics? and optional/encouraged for Episcopalians–and we “give up” something for Lent, usually chocolate or desserts.

What this has me thinking about today is the intersection of ritual and rationality. Ironically enough, the single concept I have the most “faith” in is rationality. I think Aristotle was totally right (not that I’ve actually read Aristotle): reason is what makes people people. And I think that the free exercise of reason is both the essence of freedom and our bounden duty. And one thing that I absolutely believe about God is that God wants us to use our reason without fear or limitations, even and especially when it comes to matters of faith. These are my premises.

So you might naturally think that I would not see the value in doing something that doesn’t have a reasonable basis behind it; that rituals without a firm rationale would not fly in Mary’s world. You would, however, be wrong.

I have, as a teenager/adult, always loved the Eucharist, even at times when I don’t actually believe in the divinity of Jesus, or in the crucifixion as atonement for my specific sins, or even in the afterlife. I just like doing it: saying the words, the call-and-response prayers, the formality and cadence of the language, the sharing the bread and wine, all of it. Luke has, from time to time, asked me about this, and I don’t really have a good response. In fact, there’s a real cognitive dissonance at play: why do I place so much value on a rite that is, apparently, predicated on a complex of ideas that I can only accept partially, at best? That, even if it makes sense to other people, doesn’t make sense to me?

This time around I decided to do Lent right. (We’ll see how it plays out.) I am in sore need of the kind of self-discipline and self-reflection that the season encourages–mostly just to get my head out of my own ass. I don’t give up food products because that just makes Lent a diet, and I diet anyway, and it has nothing to do with penitence and everything to do with the kind of narcissism I’m trying to avoid. (For me, not necessarily for anyone else.)  So I give up unnecessary spending–something that imposes self-discipline and makes my budget happier.  (If I really want to avoid narcissism, I should give up blog posts and facebook status updates. But let’s not go TOO crazy.) So far, pretty reasonable–I can explain the reasons why this self-denial is a good thing, the virtues I hope to inculcate thereby, etc.

I also, however, decided to fast today, and I can’t really tell you why I did that. Okay, the diet might have contributed–but apparently fasting shuts down your metabolism like woah and doesn’t actually help you lose weight unless you do it all the time, and then we call it an eating disorder. So it’s not reasonable on those grounds. I didn’t really expect it to remind me of God and my own mortality but so much. My friend Scottie once memorably noted that after a day of fasting, all she thought about was (surprise) food. I guess peer pressure had something to do with it? Like I said, apparently it’s mandatory for Catholics. Mostly I think I did it because it’s something the bible tells us to do that doesn’t make sense to me, that doesn’t seem like it would work for me in the way the biblical authors seem to picture it working, and I wanted to find out if it made sense when I did it. I wanted to see what meaning I could find in the practice done for its own sake.

Well, it worked and it didn’t work. It didn’t work in that I was basically either hungry and thinking about food, or not hungry and thinking about other things. I didn’t think, “my stomach is rumbling…and that reminds me of GOD.” But I did come to this hypothesis in the car on my way home (wow, that was a long lead-up to one mediocre idea):

I think that maybe ritual acts are supposed to be unexplainable on some level. Was it Edward Albee who, when asked what he meant to say with “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”, replied, “If I could have said it in any other way I wouldn’t have had to write the play”? Maybe these are things that we do, actions we take, that fail to intersect with human reason on some fundamental level. And in performing the ritual, whatever it is, we experience or come to know or intersect with the great mystery of God, who is fundamentally inaccessible to human reason.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to figure out what the ritual “means.” I mean, I don’t think it’s possible anyway–trying to keep myself from investigating a problem usually just makes me grumpy. We are rational beings, and we need to reason in order to understand. So we should talk about soteriology and soma/pneuma and the second Temple communal meals and the Body of Christ and atonement and whatnot. But it’s like a good story, or a good book–you can write as many essays on the book as you want, or you can talk about the symbolism of the story, and that’s important and valuable, but the best part about a really good story is that it’s bigger than any of the essays written about it. It is irreducible. You have to, on some level, swallow it in a big gulp and let it haunt your memories for the rest of your life, and you’ll be closer to what the value of the story is. Maybe rituals are like that: you need to let your reason wrestle with it, but you also have to recognize that its chief value is its irreducibility, its refusal to make total sense. You do it for its own sake, because it reminds you (and I think there’s a stronger bond than that even) that God is both totally inexplicable and very, very near.

Thoughts? I suspect that this will be a problematic stance in several ways.

Tithing and other puzzlers

This is part of an email I sent to a friend recently, describing one church-shopping experience that Luke and I went through:

“Luke and I are trying out churches, looking for one that works with our very different backgrounds. We went to a Methodist church this Sunday, and liked it, except that it was Consecration Sunday and they had a guest preacher there to exhort the congregation to tithe–Luke and I both have tithing as a personal financial goal, but the way this priest went about it made us both very uncomfortable, and not just because his sermon was easily 40 minutes long! (Though that is a black mark in my book any day.) He repeated the necessity of putting God first over and over, which is something I think both of us can get behind, but didn’t really discuss the WAYS in which the church did God’s work. Obviously the first goal is to keep the electricity on and the salaries paid, and a lot of the time this is a hard enough goal as it is, but I don’t think you can really separate tithing from outreach–if the money you’re giving is only going back into things that directly benefit you, well, that’s not really giving it to God, is it? It’s hard to articulate–but his sermon made me feel pretty icky. Also, did I mention that he talked for far too long?”

Yeah, I’m a big fan of the 10 minute sermon. 20 minutes had better be fairly spectacular.

Another thing I’ve been struggling with since arriving at Notre Dame: What does it mean to be a Christian institution? And what does it mean to be a part of an institution whose denomination/religion you don’t share? People (meaning myself) will joke about Episcopalians being “Catholic Lite”, but both Catholics and Episcopalians know it’s not actually a good analogy. And, while I wouldn’t call myself a die-hard Episcopalian, I’m comfortable in an Episcopal institution. I’ve cozied up to our differences, so to speak. Whereas now I am finding my life impacted in very real ways by religious beliefs and decisions that I don’t subscribe to. And it’s making me touchy, which is a bad thing. A friend recently made a comment that could be interpreted to mean that since I wasn’t Catholic, my spiritual journey was incomplete. I’m still pissed off about that–and the thing is, I’m pretty sure that wasn’t what he meant to say.

The best analogy I can think of is the summer I spent in Israel, where I discovered that many of the clothes I had brought–namely, tank tops and shorts–were not commonly worn. It wasn’t like they were banned; it wasn’t like Egypt, where I got hissed at for not wearing a head scarf, but it was just…awkward. I could see in other people’s minds, “This girl is dressed inappropriately,” and it made me uncomfortable…so I just didn’t wear the shorts. (I still wore the tank tops. It was ridiculously hot.)

I think it’s probably good for me to be in the minority somewhere. And I like that Notre Dame is unapologetic about being a non-secular institution. But most of my peers came here to deepen their Christian faith and knowledge. I came here to be an academic. And that makes me feel a little like a fraud.

Being a Christian, part two (navelgazing edition)

So I guess it’s fair to say that I’m a Christian.

You might be surprised at how hesitantly I make that claim, and how many caveats go along with it. Though I am (probably too) fond of telling people that I come from a clan of Episcopal priests and am a 3rd-generation, at least, preacher’s kid, for a significant portion of my life I’ve been at best agnostic. I think part of this comes from the adolescent’s natural inclination to piss off her parents in the best way she knows how, part comes from needing very badly to have God make sense to my mind as well as my heart, and a whole lot comes from having been very depressed for a very long time as a child. In case you don’t know, I had severe bouts of depression from about age 6 onward. When I was 8 or 9 I used to pray that they would go away. Needless to say, they didn’t, and it was impossible for me at that point to reconcile the emotional states I was in–let’s just say they were very intense and very bad–with the idea of a just and benevolent God.

Being depression-free for around two years may have helped–I don’t think of “clinically depressed” as a self-definition any more, and I’m certainly feeling more optimistic. But I think believing in God comes mainly from becoming increasingly emotionally and, perhaps even more, intellectually mature. At some point along the line I figured out that I didn’t need to prove God’s existence or non-existence–I just had to figure out which was the more coherent and convincing argument. Being a humanities major and getting used to the idea that few things of importance are ever really proven helped. Having times where I felt as though I was experiencing God’s presence helped.

But to go from being rationally convinced that God is more likely to exist than not to exist to being a straight-up Christian is another huge leap–and here’s where the caveats come in. I call myself a Christian–but depending on your definition, you might not agree with me. For one thing, I don’t believe that Jesus is divine or preexisting. It just doesn’t make sense to me. It seems less likely than the various alternatives. For another, I don’t really know what I think about the whole ethereal structure, by which I mean heaven, hell, angels, Satan, and the afterlife in general. I don’t think that believing in God necessarily implies the existence of an afterlife, except in the sense that someone is living after I am–I’m pretty sure the world won’t end when I die. I believe that liturgical and ritual practice is important, but I think it’s important to us rather than to God, and I have no idea how it’s important–I just know that it is. I believe that the Bible is sacred in some way, but I’ve done too much translation and study to have any illusions that it’s “infallible.” What does “infallible” even mean? For me, its sanctity is kind of analogous to the sanctity of a security blanket to a four-year-old–the kid loves his blanket passionately, takes it everywhere, turns to it in times of crisis and distress, but he doesn’t treat it with kid gloves. He plays with it, tears it by accident or to see what’s inside, gets it dirty. It is sacred through use–and use, for me, involves critical analysis. If I didn’t take the Bible apart to see what’s behind or inside it, it wouldn’t mean anything to me.

So yeah, I’m a Christian. (Next up: Now what?)