THOUGHTS ON “The Courage of Dauntless Hope” by Ken Zick

1. on “Free Speech”. At what point does the exercise of “Free Speech” become so harmful that it needs to be curtailed, censored, or silenced? The classic defense of free speech comes from Oliver Wendell Holmes, who believed the cure for harmful speech was more free speech, reasoned counter-arguments that a society of critical thinkers could evaluate and decide upon for themselves. Against this thesis Ken Zick cites the controversial work of Stanley Fish, who seems to say that power determines whose speech is going to be heard, and the idea of an even-handed “market place of ideas” is an illusion. Hate speech needs to be regulated in the interest of preserving civilization itself. The whole issue becomes more complex when social media companies assume the role of arbiters of what speech is to be considered suitable for public consumption. Ken Zick acknowledges the complexity of this issue, but asserts that “we must be open to exploring controversial ideas without silencing the speaker.” Participants in a free society must be “open to the possibility that we could be wrong”, and that “Universities should be places to promote civil discourse on painful and emotionally disturbing topics.” Importantly, he also advocates “forgiveness” as a crucial element in making society workable. 
2. The Liberal Arts are essential for a workable democracy. The tendency to evaluate higher education in terms of its future earning potential ignores the importance of a capacity for critical thinking and an appreciation for “beauty, artistry, and wisdom”. “The magnitude of student debt threatens to imprison many students in what one author calls the great American debtor’s prison”. My father, Henry W. Sams, was an academician who advocated his entire professorial career for an approach to higher education that included the humanities, science, and mathematics in every students’ curriculum, regardless of their major interest. Ken Zick argues that “if return on an investment is the measure of a successful college education, the very core of our cultural heritage is endangered.” 
3. What constitutes “wisdom”? “…the empathic capacity for knowledgeable, ethical,and experiential discernment which becomes reflected in superior advice or judgments that capture a transcendent understanding of life, used for the good of others…true wisdom exhibits altruism and sacrifice for the benefit of others.” Humility is essential, along with an ability to not take oneself too seriously. 
4. Aristotle’s concept of “phronesis” refers to the balancing of “the need of the community with that of the individual”. Ken Zick refers to the work of John Dewey, “founder of the the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools”, my Alma mater, as it happens, who wrote that “ education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction.” 
5. Ken Zick offers a nuanced approach to “Critical Race Theory”. It “can provide a useful lens to examine and reform disparate policies and practices. Indeed, it can enlighten. But if the mantra of systemic racism becomes a way of stigmatizing ‘white racism’ instead of edifying our understanding of racial disparities, we have failed to promote the ideal of equality…individuals cannot be forced to accept condemnation because of their racial identity…individual accountability must be based on one’s actions and speech alone.”    I am not sure how this has played out in the academic world, but in my own experience I have been astonished and grateful to find myself accepted, embraced, and forgiven despite my identity as a white male American with a privileged background. I accept that I have benefited in many ways from institutional racism and sexism, at the expense of women and oppressed minorities. It is painful when I find myself “stigmatized” by others because of my identity, but I don’t take it personally. I guess I am used to the idea of collective guilt because of my familiarity with the doctrine of Original Sin. As a godparent at baptisms I “renounce all sinful desires that draw you from the love of God” on behalf of infants who haven’t had opportunity to harm anybody or anything, yet have been implicated in the sinfulness of all humanity simply by being conceived in a fallen world. Being anti-racist and anti-sexist does not exonerate me from being a white male, but it does free me to become part of efforts to dismantle oppressive systems and form relationships with others engaged in the same struggle. Of course, Original Sin is a theological concept that includes everyone of any race or gender, as does the notion of redemption…the black people and women and gay people who accept and forgive me are doing so out of grace, not because I am innocent. There are those who decline the opportunity to forgive, and want revenge and retribution. Such people come in all colors and genders. I don’t blame them for feeling aggrieved…they have a legitimate beef, especially descendants of holocaust victims and Native Americans and African Americans…which makes me all the more grateful for the inclusivity I have experienced among people who have every reason to condemn me for my white male identity. But righteous retribution leads only to more violence and resentment. As Martin Luther King and Desmond Tutu exemplified, reconciliation and forgiveness provide the only hope for a viable human future. As Ken Zick says, “perhaps we all need to forgive each other more than ever.” Amen.
6. Ken also examines the concept of “just war”, and makes the observation that “the threat of terrorism has become a slippery slope to justify all manner of mischief on the world stage.” He cites studies that reveal that soldiers in any army are chiefly motivated to fight by their love and loyalty to their comrades in arms, not by ideology or hatred for the enemy. I expect Ken would have agreed with my father’s position during the Vietnam War, when some of the faculty in the English Department he headed sought to shut down Penn State University as an anti-war measure. My dad defended their right to protest, but insisted that “a liberal education is the best anti-war measure one could possibly hope for.” 
7. Ken Zick also reflects on the pervasive culture of binge drinking and drug use that exists on most college campuses today. He associates this with “a media-saturated world of postmodernism, consumerism, relativism, and individualism [that] lead nowhere but to a culture of irony and the cultivation of cynicism.” I agree with Ken that a culture of addiction reflects a larger “addiction” to heedless consumption, self indulgence, and exploitation. I am not so sure that “irony” is a major culprit. The former Archbishop of Canterbury’s, Rowan Williams, has written about  “pervasive irony” that leads us to be skeptical of our own skepticism, and can lead us to a suspension of disbelief in regard to transcendent realities that our ancestors took for granted. Irony requires a degree of engagement, even commitment, to the reality portrayed in a film or a play. In the Twelve Steps, recovery from addiction requires an acknowledgment of “powerlessness”… an example of irony if there ever was one. For me, irony is not necessarily connected to cynicism, but rather a necessary component of faith and recovery. 
8. “The imprudent use of social media offers plenty of opportunities for magnifying the consequences of mistakes in judgment…an internet culture …provides a high-tech megaphone for every voice in our culture”. The plethora of such loud voices raises the ante in terms of the need for critical thinking, discernment, and access to wise counsel. Ken connects the ubiquity of social media to the emphasis on “self-esteem” that may have the “unintended consequence of elevating individualism over collective responsibility “. He regards the university as a context for teaching how “service to others takes us beyond ourselves and into a domain of concern for the feelings and dignity of others”. 
9. With regard to environmentalism, Ken cites a student who said “if we can’t change entrenched habits at a university…where else can we expect such change”? This was in the context of an effort to organize a campus-wide clean up of trash. “Most of us benignly accept our sense of hopelessness in addressing what we perceive as hopelessly complex global problems…but if the great majority of the world’s environmental scientists are correct, the consequences of global warming will eventually cause such devastating changes that the very existence of a livable planet will be endangered…to solve this global problem…will require a change in culture.” 
10. In regard to sexual morality, Ken Zick quotes a University president as saying “when no one is taught that sexuality is holy, how can we expect sexual conduct to be moral? Our discussions of human sexuality are missing reverence for these passions of the soul and for their motive and their emotive power. This sense of the numinous, the sense of that which is sacred and holy, is present in the act of love. That perspective we must seek to recover.” This reminds me of things written on human sexuality by Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, in which he seeks to regard sexuality as sacramental, and therefore calling for commitment and extreme respect, not casualness and self indulgence. For Archbishop Williams, the legitimacy of sexual relationships is less a matter of legality and more a question of “how much am I prepared for this to mean?” Many of the issues raised in Ken Zick’s book would be greatly impacted if one were to view the world, and human community, as “sacramental”, as “outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace.”
11. In his final chapter, Ken Zick relates experiences serving with Wake Forest students in a mission trip to Zambia. Here his Christian identity and perspective is most evident, when he cites the prologue to John’s gospel, “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” For one who believes that “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” there is always a basis for hope, creative effort, and sacrifice. Ultimately, educational efforts, service projects, social justice activism, and all creative activity have their genesis and their fulfillment in that conviction. 

 

I FEEL I SHOULD WRITE SOMETHING ABOUT my final Sunday as a parish priest. I expect to continue my priestly activity, at other altars in the company of other pilgrims and of the same angels, archangels, and long-departed comrades, but never again will I preside over a habitual gathering of people whose lives I have been privileged to share at their most drastic and mundane moments, whose faces I have memorized and whose names I routinely forget, even when I am familiar with their whole life story. Never again will I experience the flood of joy that comes when a stranger finds a place within the community, or the peculiar brand of disappointment when a trusted 

member decides that they must withdraw. 

    Years ago, while I was pastoring a church in Indiana, I had a dream about driving an old rickety car and pressing so hard on the brake it felt like I was putting my foot through the floor but the car was still rolling slowly toward a sheer cliff. After waking reflection I concluded the dream was about St. Timothy’s, Griffith, and my priestly role there. I was not in control, and never would be.

      That insight does not constitute an excuse for lack of effort. Just the opposite. The careening car may have its own agenda, but it still has to be driven to go anywhere. 

      Once again the car has gone over the cliff with me in it. And we are all occupying another age, having crashed and burned and emerged “whole and sound, and innocent of a great offense”. Well, if not exactly innocent, at least still intact. 

    

Riff on Psalm 18:1-20

RIFF ON PSALM 18:1-20

I love U, O Lord my strength, * my high mountain refuge, the source of any immunity I possess.

When the earth’s crust cracks and realigns, * U are the difference between falling and floating, my safe place, and my equivalent of a monastic cell.

I call upon U, the source of being, to preserve me and those I love * from the swarming viruses around us.

In the overcrowded hospital, death washes over me in waves, * I am baptized in darkness, and I am afraid at the core of my being. 

Estranged, I descend into hell; * there is nothing to restrain my fall; my slide into oblivion is irresistible. 

In my desolation I call out to U, * I call out to U, for there is no other.

If U had ears, could U hear me all the way from heaven? * Ears or not, do U notice any of this?

When the earth shudders on its axis, exposing cracks in its fabric, * is that a sign of Ur taking interest? 

Is the burning forest and seething wind * a flexing of divine muscles, a restless stirring of sacred power provoked into action by heedless abuse?

Ice caps cascade into a swelling sea, * and starving bears wander across garbage dumps.

Tornados blast across the plains and trailer parks.: * Is that U that swoops upon the wings of the wind?

If so, it is Ur shadow, Ur backside, so to speak, because that is most certainly Ur face coming toward me down the hall, * Ur face, shrouded by a mask.

U lift me up and change my dripping bed clothes; * U wait for me outside on the lawn, entrusting my care to anonymous angels and prayer lists.

U reach deep into the abyss and touch me beneath the failing flesh; * U bring me out into an open place, a true, beloved space. 

Maundy Thursday Thoughts In Social Distance

MAUNDY THURSDAY THOUGHTS IN SOLITUDE

Exodus 12:1-14

On this night a ruthless pharaoh met his match

As a ruthless angel passed over Egypt

Striking down the first born in every household, stable, or stall,

That is, except for those behind the bloodstained door posts of the Hebrews’ homes, 

Those the bloody angel skipped, noting the exceptions on a ragged list,

       Parchment or papyrus, a Passover script for future generations to recite.

Now it is our turn to ask the unaskable, to pray that the Unseen Virus pass us by,

Pass over our doorways washed in the blood of that other lamb,

Pass over our scattered children in their homes,

Pass over us all in the whole sequestered land. 

Psalm 116:1,1-10

“How shall I repay the Lord?”

“I will lift up the cup of salvation, calling upon the name of the Lord.”

Lift it up, but not “in the presence of the Lord’s people”.

Not “in the courts of the Lord’s House, in the midst of Jerusalem.”

Lift it up, but at a Distance. 

“Honor our vows”, but in solitude, unwitnessed but for passing angels, spirits

             immune to viruses, or else have already had them all and are pure

              antibodies, unburdened by inconveniences like vulnerability, or air. 

“Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of a servant”. 

Precious in your sight is our death. 

So we have died of the virus, already, before we were born. 

Snatched from nothingness, ourselves no less than viral angels floating 

               randomly on a collision course with everything else,

Our precarious lives, our tenuous breaths, our next moments and their      

                 disappearance into the nonexistent past,

Nonexistent but for that unexplainable snatching, that lifting up of a cup,

 That gesture of defiance toward the black hole of nothingness,

That cause for an offering of thanksgiving, that mind blowing offering of

                    thanksgiving, that Eucharistic breakthrough that offers everything,

 Angels, viruses, precious deaths.

And thus shall we repay the Lord. 

1 Corinthians 11:23-26

“As often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you show the Lord’s death til he comes”. Except now, in this time of separation, when no meals are shared among friends, no comradely quaffs of wine or beer, no ecstatic invocations of a future Jerusalem, only the flat computer screens, the flat faces of multidimensional spirits, semi angelic projections of Socially-distanced persons, stretched out across the time space continuum like Jesus of Nazareth, stretched out between heaven and earth, stretched out but not stretched thin, not exempted from the possibility of pain, transcendent but not immune. Our access to one another is restricted, rendered remote, but not our vulnerability, not the risk we take when we care about each other, however great the distance between us. That mutual vulnerability is what connects, even when the cup is unreachable, the bread an image on a screen. So the cup has become grail-like, elusive, veiled behind an electronic haze. And we have become questers, knights-errant on a search for that which can only be received as a gift, pilgrims confined to quarters, reaching out toward the cup of salvation with virtual hands, washed many times over, and yet not altogether clean. 

“Health as Membership” by Wendell Berry

Health is Membership by Wendell Berry
Delivered as a speech at a conference, "Spirituality and Healing", at Louisville, Kentucky, on October 17, 1994. Available at: http://home.btconnect.com/tipiglen/berryhealth.html.
From our constant and increasing concerns about health, you can tell how seriously diseased we are. Health, as we may remember from at least some of the days of our youth, is at once wholeness and a kind of unconsciousness. Disease (dis-ease), on the contrary, makes us conscious not only of the state of our health but of the division of our bodies and our world into parts.
The word "health," in fact, comes from the same Indo-European root as "heal," "whole," and "holy" To be healthy is literally to be whole; to heal is to make whole. I don't think mortal healers should be credited with the power to make holy. But I have no doubt that such healers are properly obliged to acknowledge and respect the holiness embodied in all creatures, or that our healing involves the preservation in us of the spirit and the breath of God.
If we were lucky enough as children to be surrounded by grown-ups who loved us, then our sense of wholeness is not just the sense of completeness in ourselves but also is the sense of belonging to others and to our place; it is an unconscious awareness of community, of having in common. It may be that this double sense of singular integrity and of communal belonging is our personal standard of health for as long as we live. Anyhow, we seem to know instinctively that health is not divided.
Of course, growing up and growing older as fallen creatures in a fallen world can only instruct us painfully in division and disintegration. This is the stuff of consciousness and experience. But if our culture works in us as it should, then we do not age merely into disintegration and division, but that very experience begins our education, leading us into knowledge of wholeness and of holiness. I am describing here the story of Job, of Lazarus, of the lame man at the pool of Bethesda, of Milton's Samson, of King Lear. If our culture works in us as it should, our experience is balanced by education; we are led out of our lonely suffering and are made whole.
In the present age of the world, disintegration and division, isolation and suffering seem to have overwhelmed us. The balance between experience and education has been overthrown, we are lost in experience, and so-called education is leading us nowhere. We have diseases aplenty. As if that were not enough, we are suffering an almost universal hypochondria. Half the energy of the medical industry, one suspects, may now be devoted to "examinations" or "tests"-to see if, though apparently well, we may not be latently or insidiously diseased.
If you are going to deal with the issue of health in the modern world, you are going to have to deal with much absurdity. It is not clear, for example, why death should increasingly be looked upon as a curable disease, an abnormality, by a society that increasingly looks upon life as insupportably painful and/or meaningless. Even more startling is the realization that the modern medical industry faithfully imitates
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disease in the way that it isolates us and parcels us out. If, for example, intense and persistent pain causes you to pay attention only to your stomach, then you must leave home, community, and family and go to a sometimes distant clinic or hospital, where you will be cared for by a specialist who will pay attention only to your stomach.
Or consider the announcement by the Associated Press on February 9, 1994, that "the incidence of cancer is up among all ages, and researchers speculated that environmental exposure to cancer-causing substances other than cigarettes may be partly to blame." This bit of news is offered as a surprise, never mind that the environment (so called) has been known to be polluted and toxic for many years. The blame obviously falls on that idiotic term "the environment," which refers to a world that surrounds us but is presumably different from us and distant from us. Our laboratories have proved long ago that cigarette smoke gets inside us, but if "the environment" surrounds us, how does it wind up inside us? So much for division as a working principle of health.
This, plainly, is a view of health that is severely reductive. It is, to begin with, almost fanatically individualistic. The body is seen as a detective or potentially defective machine, singular, solitary, and displaced, without love, solace, or pleasure. Its health excludes unhealthy cigarettes but does not exclude unhealthy food, water, and air. One may presumably be healthy in a disintegrated family or community or in a destroyed or poisoned ecosystem.
So far, I have been implying my beliefs at every turn. Now I had better state them openly.
I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world. summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.
I believe that health is wholeness. For many years I have returned again and again to the work of the English agriculturist SirAlbert Hovvard, who said, in The Soil and Health, that "the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal, and man [is] one great subject."
I am moreover a Luddite, in what I take to be the true and appropriate sense. I am not "against technology" so much as I am for community. When the choice is between the health of a community and technological innovation, I choose the health of the community I would unhesitatingly destroy a machine before I would allow the machine to destroy my community.
I believe that the community-in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures-is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms.
We speak now of "spirituality and healing" as if the only way to render a proper religious respect to the body is somehow to treat it "spiritually." It could be argued just as appropriately (and perhaps less
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dangerously) that the way to respect the body fully is to honor fully its materiality. In saying this, I intend no reduction. I do not doubt the reality of the experience and knowledge we call "spiritual" any more than I doubt the reality of so-called physical experience and knowledge; I recognize the rough utility of these terms. But I strongly doubt the advantage, and even the possibility, of separating these two realities.
What I'm arguing against here is not complexity or mystery but dualism. I would like to purge my own mind and language of such terms as "spiritual," "physical," "metaphysical," and "transcendental''-all of which imply that the Creation is divided into "levels" that can readily be peeled apart and judged by human beings. I believe that the Creation is one continuous fabric comprehending simultaneously what we mean by "spirit" and what we mean by "matter."
Our bodies are involved in the world. Their needs and desires and pleasures are physical. Our bodies hunger and thirst, yearn toward other bodies, grow tired and seek rest, rise up rested, eager to exert themselves. All these desires may be satisfied with honor to the body and its maker, but only if much else besides the individual body is brought into consideration. We have long known that individual desires must not be made the standard of their own satisfaction. We must consider the body's manifold connections to other bodies and to the world. The body, "fearfully and wonderfully made," is ultimately mysterious both in itself and in its dependences. Our bodies live, the Bible says, by the spirit and the breath of God, but it does not say how this is so. We are not going to know about this.
The distinction between the physical and the spiritual is, I believe, false. A much more valid distinction, and one that we need urgently to learn to make, is that between the organic and the mechanical. To argue this-as I am going to do-puts me in the minority, I know, but it does not make me unique. In The Idea Of A Christian Society, T S Eliot wrote, "We may say that religion, as distinguished from modern paganism, implies a life in conformity with nature. It may be observed that the natural life and the supernatural life have a conformity to each other which neither has with the mechanistic life."
Still, l wonder if our persistent wish to deal spiritulally with physical things does not come either from the feeling that physical things are "low" and unworthy or from the fear, especially when speaking of affection, that "physical" will be taken to mean "sexual.''The New York Review of Books of February 3, 1994, for example, carried a review of the correspondence of William and Henry James along with a photograph of the two brothers standing together with William's arm around Henry's shoulders. Apropos of this picture, the reviewer, John Bayley, wrote that "their closeness of affection was undoubted and even took on occasion a quasi-physical form." It is Mr. Bayley's qualifier, "quasi- physical," that sticks in one's mind. What can he have meant by it? Is this prurience masquerading as squeamishness, or vice versa? Does Mr. Bayley feel a need to assure his psychologically sophisticated readers that even though these brothers touched one another familiarly, they were not homosexual lovers?
The phrase involves at least some version of the old dualism of spirit and body or mind and body that has caused us so much suffering and trouble and that raises such troubling questions for anybody who is
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interested in health. If you love your brother and if you and your brother are living creatures, how could your love for him not be physical? Not spiritual or mental only, not "quasi-physical," but physical. How could you not take a simple pleasure in putting your arm around him?
Out of the same dualism comes our confusion about the body's proper involvement in the world. People seriously interested in health will finally have to question our society's long-standing goals of convenience and effortlessness. What is the point of "labor saving" if by making work effortless we make it poor, and if by doing poor work we weaken our bodies and lose conviviality and health?
We are now pretty clearly involved in a crisis of health, one of the wonders of which is its immense profitability both to those who cause it and to those who propose to cure it. That the illness may prove incurable, except by catastrophe, is suggested by our economic dependence on it. Think, for example, of how readily our solutions become problems and our cures pollutants. To cure one disease, we need another. The causes, of course, are numerous and complicated, but all of them, I think, can be traced back to the old idea that our bodies are not very important except when they give us pleasure (usually, now, to somebody's profit) or when they hurt (now, almost invariably, to somebody's profit).
This dualism inevitably reduces physical reality, and it does so by removing its mystery from it, by dividing it absolutely from what dualistic thinkers have understood as spiritual or mental reality.
A reduction that is merely theoretical might be harmless enough, I suppose, but theories find ways of getting into action. The theory of the relative unimportance of physical reality has put itself into action by means of a metaphor by which the body (along with the world itself ) is understood as a machine. According to this metaphor-which is now in constant general use-the human heart, for example, is no longer understood as the center of our emotional life or even as an organ that pumps; it is understood as "a pump," having somewhat the same function as a fuel pump in an automobile.If the body is a machine for living and working, then it must follow that the mind is a machine for thinking. The "progress" here is the reduction of mind to brain and then of brain to computer. This reduction implies and requires the reduction of knowledge to "information." It requires, in fact, the reduction of everything to numbers and mathematical operations.
This metaphor of the machine bears heavily upon the question of what we mean by health and by healing. The problem is that like any metaphor, it is accurate only in some respects. A girl is only in some respects like a red rose; a heart is only in some respects like a pump. This means that a metaphor must be controlled by a sort of humorous intelligence, always mindful of the exact limits within which the comparison is meaningful. When a metaphor begins to control intelligence, as this one of the machine has done for a long time, then we must look for costly distortions and absurdities. Of course, the body in most ways is not at all like a machine. Like all living creatures and unlike a machine, the body is not formally self-contained; its boundaries and out-lines are not so exactly fixed. The body alone is not, properly speaking, a body. Divided from its sources of air, food, drink, clothing, shelter, and companionship, a body is, properly speaking, a cadaver, whereas a machine by itself, shut down or out of fuel, is still a machine. Merely as an organism (leaving aside issues of mind and spirit) the body lives
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and moves and has its being, minute by minute, by an interinvolvement with other bodies and other creatures, living and unliving, that is too complex to diagram or describe. It is, moreover, under the influence of thought and feeling. It does not live by "fuel" alone.
A mind, probably, is even less like a computer than a body is like a machine. As far as I am able to understand it, a mind is not even much like a brain. Insofar as it is usable for thought, for the association of thought with feeling, for the association of thoughts and feelings with words, for the connections between words and things, words and acts, thought and memory, a mind seems to be in constant need of reminding. A mind unreminded would be no mind at all. This phenomenon of reminding shows the extensiveness of mind-how intricately it is involved with sensation, emotion, memory, tradition, communal life, known landscapes, and so on. How you could locate a mind within its full extent, among all its subjects and necessities, I don't know, bur obviously it cannot be located within a brain or a computer.
To see better what a mind is (or is not), we might consider the difference between what we mean by knowledge and what the computer now requires us to mean by "information." Knowledge refers to the ability to do or say the right thing at the right time; we would not speak of somebody who does the wrong thing at the wrong time as "knowledgeable." People who perform well as musicians, athletes, teachers, or farmers are people of knowledge. And such examples tell us much about the nature of knowledge. Knowledge is formal, and it informs speech and action. It is instantaneous; it is present and available when and where it is needed.
"Information," which once meant that which forms or fashions from within, now means merely "data." However organized this data may be, it is not shapely or formal or in the true sense in-forming. It is not present where it is needed; if you have to "access" it, you don't have it. Whereas knowledge moves and forms acts, information is inert. You cannot imagine a debater or a quarterback or a musician performing by "accessing information." A computer chock full of such information is no more admirable than a head or a book chock full of it.
The difference, then, between information and knowledge is something like the difference between a dictionary and somebody's language.
Where the art and science of healing are concerned, the machine metaphor works to enforce a division that falsifies the process of healing because it falsifies the nature of the creature needing to be healed. If the body is a machine, then its diseases can be healed by a sort of mechanical tinkering, without reference to anything outside the body itself. This applies, with obvious differences, to the mind; people are assumed to be individually sane or insane. And so we return to the utter anomaly of a creature that is healthy within itself.
The modem hospital, where most of us receive our strictest lessons in the nature of industrial medicine, undoubtedly does well at surgery and other procedures that permit the body and its parts to be treated as separate things. But when you try to think of it as a place of healing-of reconnecting and making
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whole-then the hospital reveals the disarray of the medical industry's thinking about health.
In healing, the body is restored to itself. It begins to live again by its own powers and instincts, to the extent that it can do so. To the extent that it can do so, it goes free of drugs and mechanical helps. Its appetites return. It relishes food and rest. The patient is restored to family and friends, home and community and work.
This process has a certain naturalness and inevitability, like that by which a child grows up, but industrial medicine seems to grasp it only tentatively and awkwardly. For example, any ordinary person would assume that a place of healing would put a premium upon rest, but hospitals are notoriously difficult to sleep in. They are noisy all night, and the routine interventions go on relentlessly. The body is treated as a machine that does nor need to rest.
You would think also that a place dedicated to healing and health would make much of food. But here is where the disconnections of the industrial system and the displacement of industrial humanity are most radical. Sir Albert Howard saw accurately that the issue of human health is inseparable from the health of the soil, and he saw too that we humans much responsibly occupy our place in the cycle of birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay, which is the health of the world. Aside from our own mortal involvement, food is our fundamental connection to that cycle. But probably most of the complaints you hear about hospitals have to do with the food, which, according to the testimony I have heard, tends to range from unappetizing to sickening. Food is treated as another unpleasant substance to inject. And this is a shame. For in addition to the obvious nutritional link between food and health, food can be a pleasure. People who are sick are often troubled or depressed, and mealtimes offer three opportunities a day when patients could easily be offered something to look forward to. Nothing is more pleasing or heartening than a plate of nourishing, tasty, beautiful food artfully and lovingly prepared.
Anything less is unhealthy, as well as a desecration.Why should rest and food and ecological health not be the basic principles of our art and science of healing? Is it because the basic principles already are technology and drugs? Are we confronting some fundamental incompatibility between mechanical effciency and organic health? I don't know. I only know that sleeping in a hospital is like sleeping in a factory and that the medical industry makes only the most tenuous connection between health and food and no connection between health and the soil. Industrial medicine is as little interested in ecological health as is industrial agriculture.
A further problem, and an equally serious one, is that illness, in addition to being a bodily disaster, is now also an economic disaster. This is so whether or not the patient is insured. It is a disaster for us all, all the time, because we all know that personally or collectively, we cannot continue to pay for cures that continue to get more expensive. The economic disturbance that now inundates the problem of illness may turn out to be the profoundest illness of all. How can we get well if we are worried sick about money?
I wish it were not the fate of this essay to be filled with questions, but questions now seem the
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inescapable end of any line of thought about health and healing. Here are several more:
1. Can our present medical industry produce an adequate definition of health? My own guess is that it cannot do so. Like industrial agriculture, industrial medicine has depended increasingly on specialist methodology, mechanical technology, and chemicals; thus, its point of reference has become more and more its own technical prowess and less and less the health of creatures and habitats. I don't expect this problem to be solved in the universities, which have never addressed, much less solved, the problem of health in agriculture. And I don't expect it to be solved by the government.
2. How can cheapness be included in the criteria of medical experimentation and performance? And why has it not been included before now? I believe that the problem here is again that of the medical industry's fixation on specialization, technology, and chemistry. As a result, the modern "health care system" has become a way of marketing industrial products, exactly like modern agriculture, impoverishing those who pay and enriching those who are paid. It is, in other words, an industry such as industries have always been.
3. Why is it that medical strictures and recommendations so often work in favor of food processors and against food producers? Why, for example, do we so strongly favor the pasteurization of milk to health and cleanliness in milk production? (Gene Logsdon correctly says that the motive here "is monopoly, not consumer's health.")
4. Why do we so strongly prefer a fat-free or gem-free diet to a chemical-free diet? Why does the medicine industry strenuously oppose the use of tobacco, yet complacently accept the massive use of antibiotics and other drugs in meat animals and of poison on food crops? How much longer can it cling to the superstition of bodily health in a polluted world?
5. How can adequate medical and health care, including disease prevention, be included in the structure and economy of a community? How, for example can a community and its doctors be included in the same culture, the same knowledge and the same fate, so that they will live as fellow citizens, sharers in the common wealth, members of one another?
II
It is clear by now that this essay cannot hope to be complete; the problems are too large and my knowledge too small. What I have to offer is an association of thoughts and questions wandering somewhat at random and somewhat lost within the experience of modem diseases and the often bewildering industry that undertakes to cure them. In my ignorance and bewilderment, I am fairly representative of those who go, or go with loved ones, to doctors' offices and hospitals. What I have written so far comes from my various efforts to make as much sense as I can of that experience. But now I had better turn to the experience itself.
On January 3,1994, my brother John had a severe heart attack while he was out by himself on his farm, moving a feed trough. He managed to get to the house and telephone a friend, who sent the emergency rescue squad.
The rescue squad and the emergency room staff at a local hospital certainly saved my brother's life. He was later moved to a hospital in Louisville, where a surgeon performed a double-bypass operation on his
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heart. After three weeks John returned home. He still has a life to live and work to do. He has been restored to himself and to the world.
He and those who love him have a considerable debt to the medical industry, as represented by two hospitals, several doctors and nurses, many drugs and many machines. This is a debt that I cheerfully acknowledge. But I am obliged to say also that my experience of the hospital during John's stay was troubled by much conflict of feeling and a good many unresolved questions, and I know that I am not alone in this.
In the hospital what I will call the world of love meets the world of efficiency-the world, that is, of specialization, machinery, and abstract procedure. Or, rather, I should say that these two worlds come together in the hospital but do not meet. During those weeks when John was in the hospital, it seemed to me that he had come from the world of love and that the family members, neighbors, and friends who at various times were there with him came there to represent that world and to preserve his connection with it. It seemed to me that the hospital was another kind of world altogether.
When I said early in this essay that we live in a world that was created and exists and is redeemable by love, I did not mean to sentimentalize it. For this is also a fallen world. It involves error and disease, ignorance and partiality, sin and death. If this world is a place where we may learn of our involvement in immortal love, as I believe it is, still such learning is only possible here because that love involves us so inescapably in the limits, sufferings, and sorrows of mortality.
Like divine love, earthly love seeks plenitude; it longs for the full membership to be present and to be joined. Unlike divine love, earthly love does not have the power, the knowledge, or the will to achieve what it longs for. The story of human love on this earth is a story by which this love reveals and even validates itself by its failures to be complete and comprehensive and effective enough. When this love enters a hospital, it brings with it a terrifying history of defeat, but it comes nevertheless confident of itself, for its existence and the power of its longing have been proved over and over again even by its defeat. In the face of illness, the threat of death, and death itself, it insists unabashedly on its own presence, understanding by its persistence through defeat that it is superior to whatever happens.
The world of efficiency ignores both loves, earthly and divine, because by definition it must reduce experience to computation, particularity to abstraction, and mystery to a small comprehensibility. Efficiency, in our present sense of the word, allies itself inevitably with machinery, as Neil Postman demonstrates in his useful book, Technopoly. "Machines," he says, "eliminate complexity, doubt, and ambiguity. They work swiftly, they are standardized, and they provide us with numbers that you can see and calculate with." To reason, the advantages are obvious, and probably no reasonable person would wish to reject them out of hand.
And yet love obstinately answers that no loved one is standardized. A body, love insists, is neither a spirit nor a machine; it is not a picture, a diagram, a chart, a graph, an anatomy; it is not an explanation; it is not a law. It is precisely and uniquely what it is. It belongs to the world of love, which is a world of
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living creatures, natural orders and cycles, many small, fragile lights in the dark.
In dealing with problems of agriculture, I had thought much about the difference between creatures and machines. But I had never so clearly understood and felt that difference as when John was in recovery after his heart surgery, when he was attached to many machines and was dependent for breath on a respirator. It was impossible then not to see that the breathing of a machine, like all machine work, is unvarying, an oblivious regularity, whereas the breathing of a creature is ever changing, exquisitely responsive to events both inside and outside the body, to thoughts and emotions. A machine makes breaths as a machine makes buttons, all the same, but every breath of a creature is itself a creature, like no other, inestimably precious.
Logically, in plenitude some things ought to be expendable. Industrial economics has always believed this: abundance justifies waste. This is one of the dominant superstitions of American history-and of the history of colonialism everywhere. Expendability is also an assumption of the world of efficiency, which is why that world deals so compulsively in percentages of efficacy and safety.
But this sort of logic is absolutely alien to the world of love. To the claim that a certain drug or procedure would save 99 percent of all cancer patients or that a certain pollutant would be safe for 99 percent of a population, love, unembarrassed, would respond, "What about the one percent?"
There is nothing rational or perhaps even defensible about this, but it is nonetheless one of the strongest strands of our religious tradition-it is probably the most essential strand-according to which a shepherd, owning a hundred sheep and having lost one, does not say, "I have saved 99 percent of my sheep," but rather, "I have lost one," and he goes and searches for the one. And if the sheep in that parable may seem to be only a metaphor, then go on to the Gospel of Luke, where the principle is flatly set forth again and where the sparrows stand not for human beings but for all creatures: "Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God?" And John Donne had in mind a sort of equation and not a mere metaphor when he wrote, "If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me."
It is reassuring to see ecology moving toward a similar idea of the order of things. If an ecosystem loses one of its native species, we now know that we cannot speak of it as itself minus one species. An ecosystem minus one species is a different ecosystem. Just so, each of us is made by-or, one might better say, made as-a set of unique associations with unique persons, places, and things. The world of love does not admit the principle of the interchangeability of parts.
When John was in intensive care after his surgery, his wife, Carol, was standing by his bed, grieving and afraid. Wanting to reassure her, the nurse said, "Nothing is happening to him that doesn't happen to everybody."
And Carol replied, "I'm not everybody's wife."
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In the world of love, things separated by efficiency and specialization strive to come back together. And yet love must confront death, and accept it, and learn from it. Only in confronting death can earthly love learn its true extent, its immortality. Any definition of health that is not silly must include death. The world of love includes death, suffers it, and triumphs over it. The world of efficiency is defeated by death; at death, all its instruments and procedures stop. The world of love continues, and of this grief is the proof.
In the hospital, love cannot forget death. But like love, death is in the hospital but not of it. Like love, fear and grief feel out of place in the hospital. How could they be included in its efficient procedures and mechanisms? Where a clear, small order is fervently maintained, tear and grief bring the threat of large disorder.
And so these two incompatible worlds might also be designated by the terms "amateur" and "professional"-amateur, in the literal sense of lover, one who participates for love; and professional in the modern sense of one who performs highly specialized or technical procedures for pay. The amateur is excluded from the professional "field."
For the amateur, in the hospital or in almost any other encounter with the medical industry, the overriding experience is that of being excluded from knowledge of being unable, in other words, to make or participate in anything resembling an "informed decision." Of course, whether doctors make informed decisions in the hospital is a matter of debate. For in the hospital even the professionals are involved in experience; experimentation has been left far behind. Experience, as all amateurs know, is not predictable, and in experience there are no replications or "controls"; there is nothing with which to compare the result. Once one decision has been made, we have destroyed the opportunity to know what would have happened if another decision had been made. That is to say that medicine is an exact science until applied; application involves intuition, a sense of probability, "gut feeling, " guesswork, and error.
In medicine, as in many modern disciplines, the amateur is divided from the professional by perhaps unbridgeable differences of knowledge and of language. An "informed decision" is really not even imaginable for most medical patients and their families, who have no competent understanding of either the patients illness or the recommended medical or surgical procedure. Moreover, patients and their families are not likely to know the doctor, the surgeon, or any of the other people on whom the patient's life will depend. In the hospital, amateurs are more than likely to be proceeding entirely upon faith-and this is a peculiar and scary faith, for it must be placed not in a god but in mere people, mere procedures, mere chemicals, and mere machines.
It was only after my brother had been taken into surgery, I think, that the family understood the extremity of this deed of faith. We had decided - or John had decided and we had concurred on the basis of the best advice available. But once he was separated from us, we felt the burden of our ignorance. We had not known what we were doing, and one of our difficulties now was the feeling that we had utterly given him up to what we did not know. John himself spoke out of this sense of
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abandonment and helplessness in the intensive care unit, when he said, "I don't know what they're going to do to me or for me or with me."
As we waited and reports came at long intervals from the operating room, other realizations followed. We realized that under the circumstances, we could not be told the truth. We would not know, ever, the worries and surprises that came to the surgeon during his work. We would not know the critical moments or the fears. lf the surgeon did any part of his work ineptly or made a mistake, we would not know it. We realized, moreover, that if we were told the truth, we would have no way of knowing that the truth was what it was.
We realized that when the emissaries from the operating room assured us that everything was '"normal" or "routine," they were referring to the procedure and not the patient. Even as amateurs
- perhaps because we were amateurs-we knew that what was happening was not normal or routine for John or for us.
That these two worlds are so radically divided does not mean that people cannot cross between them. I do not know how an amateur can cross over into the professional world; that does not seem very probable. But that professional people can cross back into the amateur world, I know from much evidence. During John's stay in the hospital there were many moments in which doctors and nurses - especially nurses! - allowed or caused the professional relationship to become a meeting between two human beings, and these moments were invariably moving.
The most moving, to me, happened in the waiting room during John's surgery. From time to time a nurse from the operating room would come in to tell Carol what was happening. Carol, from politeness or bravery or both, always stood to receive the news, which always left us somewhat encouraged and somewhat doubtful. Carol's difficulty was that she had to suffer the ordeal not only as a wife but as one who had been a trained nurse. She knew, from her own education and experience, in how limited a sense open-heart surgery could be said to be normal or - routine.
Finally, toward the end of our wait, two nurses came in. The operation, they said, had been a success. They explained again what had been done. And then they said that after the completion of the bypasses, the surgeon had found it necessary to insert a "balloon pump" into the aorta to assist the heart. This possibility had never been mentioned, nobody was prepared for it, and Carol was sorely disappointed and upset. The two young women attempted to reassure her, mainly by repeating things they had already said. And then there was a long moment when they just looked at her. It was such a look as parents sometimes give to a sick or suffering child, when they themselves have begun to need the comfort they are trying to give.
And then one of the nurses said, "Do you need a hug?" "Yes," Carol said.
And the nurse gave her a hug.
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Which brings us to a starting place.
Wendell Berry is the author of thirty two books of fiction, poetry. and essays, including Sabbaths; Sex, Economy, Freedom, & Community; andWhat Are People For? He has farmed a hillside in his native Henry County, Kentucky, for thirty years. A former professor of English at the University of Kentucky, he has received numerous awards for his work, including most recentdy the T S. Eliot Award, The Aiken Taylor Award for Poetry, the John Hay Award of the Orion Society, and The Chnstian Century's Award for Excellence in Poetry.
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Sayings

SAYINGS 

Grace Cathedral and Muir Woods are very similar. The same muted silence. Something like the same quality of light. Both contrived, in different degrees, by human intervention. Both contrived by extraordinary leaps of divine imagination. Both containers for whatever “it” is, the magic “stuff” that constitutes the illusive difference between motion and action, energy and spirit, problem and mystery. 

God=most real; most holy; most true. 

I am grateful for having known the blessing of unmitigated joy…which always includes elements of loss, of surrender, of death.” 

I cannot produce fish, but I can produce equipment for the cultivation of myths: boats; rods and reels; stories; knots. 

I am reluctantly persuaded to hitchhike on the drama of other peoples’ heroic achievements. I exit at the next interchange, and go home to take a nap. 

Upon my retirement I will no longer exist. All my words will have been spoken, all my sentences written- I will be empty space, a hollow place in the world, a grotto chapel chiseled from the walls of a ruined cathedral. No pilgrims arrive, no disciples come… 

In reality, the big changes in my life have not come about by my own design, but as the result of chance meetings and graceful emergencies. I struggle to reconcile myself to God’s wild and reckless grace. 

Sometimes it takes something like the impact of a car crash to get my full attention. 

I don’t like it much, but I cannot escape the reality that God seems to be most active and present in my life when I am most uncomfortable. 

By virtue of the limitations of thought and language, anything we say about God is always at least somewhat wrong. Does this mean we have to keep our mouths shut on the subject? Not entirely, but it should increase our humility when doing so. 

From my friend and mentor Father James Jones, I learned that not only is it possible for prisoners to hear the gospel of Jesus Christ as truly good news, but, in reality, prisoners are the only ones who can hear it as such. To hear the gospel, we must first understand in what ways we ourselves are imprisoned. 

To grasp the full significance of a “baptismal ecclesiology” it is necessary to become more intimate and honest with each other and within ourselves, to confront the demons, ghosts, and idols that afflict us from within and without. 

We live in two worlds: one the one hand, we get up in the morning, eat breakfast, and go about our business; on the other, the world has ended, and we are breaking bread with our ancestors and the saints in heaven. 

Even the macho God of Israel has a soft side. 

There are two mega-metaphors for God: 1) the natural world; 2) human community. 

Planet earth is doing to us just what Christ also does: break us down, shatter us, disassemble us- through the events of life, climate change, tectonic shifts geologic or otherwise. 

It is understandable that people would hold back from participation in worship. Worship is like looking over a cliff into an abyss of sorrow, joy, brokenness, and infinite possibility… there is a strong temptation to watch from a safe distance, to dabble in spirituality, like watching Bassmasters on TV instead of wading into a river in the dark. 

Like Jesus, we must join the grief-stricken crowds and seek to restore their lost joy. Only God can bring this about and most of us make changes only when we have to. In other words, when we are broken down, shattered, disassembled. Then we may be ready to become bread. 

Our call: to live gracefully in a world that often seems graceless. 

It is as if Christ wandered into our church on Sunday morning in company with some curious street people, wondering what all the fuss was about. “Is that me they are talking about?” he wonders. He looks around and sees the people ill-equipped to ascend the smoke-shrouded slopes of Mt. Sinai, with the earth’s crust shaking and cracking under their feet, and the wild Law-Giver spitting out commandments like molten pebbles from an outraged volcano…And so Jesus volunteers as a tour-guide, as Sherpa, an expert on volcanos who will take them to the fiery rim where they might safely view the face of God. 

The odd thing about Christianity is the way “absence” becomes a new sort of “presence”, still vulnerably incarnate, still strangely authoritative. 

“Sacred enchantment” involves a child-like capacity for trust, joy, and wonder, as well as a willingness to confront primitive feelings of awe and dread. When there is no healthy community surrounding it, the sacred loses its power to enchant. 

When  it comes to a relationship with God, mediocrity and a compulsive need for entertainment are greater obstacles than suffering, desperation, and outrage. 

  

  

Reflections on the Great O Antiphons (2011)

O Antiphons revisited

Latin phrases often evoke strange, and sometimes bizarre, associations for me. At Christ Church Cranbrook in 2011, as I listened to the choir chant the traditional Advent “O Antiphons”, these are some of the random thoughts that occurred to me, and I wrote down… 

O sapientia. O wisdom. O intelligibility. O logic. O sanity. O mathematical equations. O sentence structure and syntax. O coherence and structure and form. If objects are indeed intelligible, “does not the intelligibility of the object presuppose an intelligent ground?” (Bernard Lonergen)“O O O O that Shakespearian Rag—It’s so elegant So intelligent…” (T.S. Eliot) O sapientia, “quae ex ore altissimi prodisti, and covered the earth like a mist.’ (Ecclesiasticus 24:2) O O O O.

O Adonai. O mighty. O fire of the Burning Bush. O consumption unconsumed. O point dimensionless, at which Being emerges, unexplained, from Nothing, at this moment coaxing atoms into material existence from the vortex of whatever whirls at their center, at this moment spinning us off from the limitless center, spinning us off as atomic dervishes, whirling mightily, whirling on the seamless line where Nothing ends…

O radix Jesse. O root. O radish. O turnip. O beet. O rutabaga, O root vegetables of every kind, buried safely under earth and snow, beyond the need for retaliation or revenge, beyond the need to hurt or destroy in all the holy mountain, feeding us far into the winter, feeding us when all other food has failed, feeding us jam noli tardare – never tardy, rarely served in fashionable restaurants, barely noticed by government inspectors, ever abundant, ever prodigal, ever rooted/radix/radical/ and real…

O clavis David. O key. O combination to the lock. O password. “You open and no one closes; you close, and no one opens”. Sedentum in tenebris et umbra mortis… sedimented in darkness and under the umbrella of death… buried under yards of earth alongside the beets and radishes… buried, but here unearthed by the descent of a mighty silence, its power unlocked by chant, loud organ, and this clavis David…

O oriens- O rising dawn. O morning star. Directional orientation for every nomadic tribe, gravitational force without magnetism, center without circumference, beloved of navigators, goal of every compass, hope of the lost …(disoriented in thick woods, I came across my own boot-prints in the snow, consulted my compass, saw how lost I had become, saw, astounded, how much counterintuitivity would be required to become unlost again. From whence did all these benign themes originate? Hope for the lost…release of prisoners… kindness to strangers… peace among peoples… food for the hungry…water in drought-stricken places… a universal vision of gentleness and mutual peace… how did such notions come to swirl together with such force within the literature of one small middle-eastern country?... How do such far-fetched notions come to resonate so powerfully with us still?

O Rex gentium… O ruler of the unruly and the alien, the unbelievers and the unsaved…O rock and cornerstone…lapisque angularis…

Two Chinamen, behind them a third,
Are carved in lapis lazuli,
Over them flies a long-legged bird,
A symbol of longevity;
The third, doubtless a serving-man,
Carries a musical instrument.

W.B. Yeats, Lapis Lazuli

We are the long-legged bird, lifted by the music for a bird’s eye view, lifted high above the angle of the rock, our lapisque angularis, which is our listening-post, our perch, our launch pad, and, if we ever hope to come to earth again, our landing-zone. 

O Emmanuel… O God-who-is with, with us, with it …with our children in an unknown future, with these singers in a flourishing past, with us witless pilgrims come from outer space, washed up unexpected on what Holy Isle?