Seminary Lecture - Confusion Will Be My Epitaph
Personal and Communal Disorientation in an Age of Cultural Fragmentation
By Rev'd. Steve Clarke
Grace Memorial Episcopal Church
October 28, 2009
Introduction
Some, if not all, of us here, are old enough to remember the 1969 album released by King Crimson, In the Court of the Crimson King. Its opening track was a provocative and prophetic attempt to predict the experience of modern society in the next millennium. It was simply entitled 21st Century Schizoid Man.
Cat's foot iron claw
Neuro-surgeons scream for more
At paranoia's poison door.
Twenty first century schizoid man.
Blood rack barbed wire
Politicians' funeral pyre
Innocents raped with napalm fire
Twenty-first century schizoid man.
Death seed blind man's greed
Poets' starving children bleed
Nothing he's got he really needs
Twenty-first century schizoid man.
Andrew Fletcher, an 18th century Scottish moral philosopher, once wrote, Give me the making of the songs of a nation and I care not who writes its laws. Songs, as with other forms of popular art, are a major access point to the mind-set of a culture. They play a dual role, that of insight and influence, for they shape moods and reveal convictions. So, in the light of Fletcher’s maxim it is worth pausing a moment to reflect on these lyrics, and those of the album’s 3rd track, Confusion Will Be My Epitaph.
The wall on which the prophets wrote
Is cracking at the seams.
Upon the instruments if death
The sunlight brightly gleams.
When every man is torn apart
With nightmares and with dreams,
Will no one lay the laurel wreath
As silence drowns the screams.
Between the iron gates of fate,
The seeds of time were sown,
And watered by the deeds of those
Who know and who are known;
Knowledge is a deadly friend
When no one sets the rules.
The fate of all mankind I see
Is in the hands of fools.
Confusion will be my epitaph.
As I crawl a cracked and broken path
If we make it we can all sit back and laugh.
But I fear tomorrow I'll be crying,
Yes I fear tomorrow I'll be dying.
For King Crimson, life’s epitaph is summed up in one word – confusion. The predictions are compelling as the imagination is left to wander through scenes of senseless violence, needless hate, and heartless cruelty, behind which lies an unshakeable barrenness of soul amidst the uncertainty of a future anchored in futility. The profile of the 21st century schizoid man? Nothing he’s got he really needs.
In case you think this is too bleak a picture I offer an account from renowned US sociologist, Robert Bellah, in his book The Good Society. Bellah tells of a student speaker at the 1990 Harvard University graduation ceremony who said,
I believe that there is one idea, one sentiment, which we have all acquired at some point in our Harvard careers, and that ladies and gentlemen is in a word, confusion … They tell us that it is heresy to suggest the superiority of some value, fantasy to believe in moral argument, slavery to submit to a judgment sounder than your own. The freedom of our day is the freedom to devote ourselves to any values we please, on the mere condition that we do not believe them to be true.
The Harvard student’s sober evaluation of her educational experience, echoes the sentiment of the earlier lyrics,
Knowledge is a deadly friend
When no one sets the rules
The fate of all mankind I see
Is in the hands of fools
As a pastor, educator, and academic I want to recognise the degree to which we often hide behind neat philosophical and theological arguments, heavily footnoted for effect, rather than face the hurts, confusion, passions, and loves of the society in which we live. The unmasked vulnerability, the heartfelt anguish, the soaring aspirations of youth too quickly leave us. Yet, as teachers, we encounter these things every day, in the lives of the students who sit before us and walk along side us.
Hearing the Voice of Youth
If we listen to the voice of youth we increasingly hear stories of disorientation, which in turn are echoed by the agencies and institutions that are responsible for providing services to them. Professor Robyn Hartley, in her delivery of the 1998 Smyth Memorial Lecture, given at Australia’s Victoria University of Technology conference on ‘Collaboration in Today’s Youth, Education and Community Climate’ stated that
"The experiences of young people, the spaces they inhabit in the social world, and indeed the way in which youth itself is defined, have all undergone enormous change. At the heart of these changes, the predictability and stability that characterised, certainly not all, but many key aspects of young people’s lives in the past has irrevocably changed."
The challenge for us at this point is enormous, if not daunting. As Hartley concludes, "schools (and, I would add, churches) are increasingly being expected to contribute to solutions for a whole range of social ills, including youth unemployment, homelessness, youth suicide, substance abuse, mental health problems and youth alienation, and at the same time … operate as efficient business units."
Before I address these challenges for us I want to reflect a moment, against this backdrop of social and cultural fragmentation, on the perspectives and experiences of this current generation, particularly in relationship to their sense of disorientation.
Understanding the Perspectives and Experiences of this Generation
To understand this generation we must understand a shift that has occurred over the last 40 years or so, in which we have gone from the so-called Age of Enlightenment to what social historian Michael Ventura calls the Age of Endarkenment, an age marked by a profound distrust of institutions and ideologies. As Gen X commentator Jonathan Feedland says, "We used to anchor ourselves in the belief that today was better than yesterday and that tomorrow would be better than today. We believed in progress, that modern was always best. No longer. These are postmodern times in which we have lost faith in ourselves."
Essentially, the difference between modernism and postmodernism lies in their respective assumptions about the acquisition of knowledge and the nature of truth. Modernism saw knowledge as certain, attainable, objective, and good. The ‘knower’ stood apart from the world, in splendid Cartesian detachment, an objective third-party observer, unbiased in his or her opinions, processing information via rational faculties, aided by the analytical tools of the empirical sciences, sceptical about anything that could not be weighed, measured, quantified, and controlled. The enlightenment thinker was incurably optimistic, believing ultimately in the inevitable progress of humanity, both intellectually, socially and morally. Marked by a radical individualism, modernity promised what it could never deliver, self-fulfilment via self-development. This was its truth.
Postmodernism does not share modernism’s convictions about either the rationality or objectivity of truth. It disavows the notion of the ‘knower’ as detached and objective. It emphasises the emotive and the intuitive, while advocating a relativism where meaning is derived from the perspective and situation of the person. Truth is defined subjectively by the individual and attested to by the community that he or she is a part of at that time.
Postmodern people are not convinced that knowledge is necessarily or inherently good. The optimism of modernity and its dream of self-fulfilment is displaced by an often nihilistic cynicism, albeit punctuated by ad hoc moments of fun and distraction. Postmoderns, above all, spurn modernity’s myths of progress. They reject all ‘isms’ and ideological attempts to create a better future. In Peter Berger’s words, this new period is ‘life in chaos’ where the vacuum left by modernity’s demise is filled by a rush of often contradictory beliefs and irrational behaviour, with only one clear objective – survival with a maximum of fun!
The film Trainspotting is a powerful depiction of the postmodern outlook and experience (I apologise in advance for the language used here, but it is important that we feel the rawness of the film's message). The title is a reference to that strange British habit of hurrying around railway stations and collecting train engine numbers; an absurd exercise which apparently gives life some meaning. It is a metaphor of life for four young Glasgow heroin addicts, whose ultimately pointless and destructive habit gives some meaning to their lives. Why take drugs? is the film’s question. Answer: because it makes you feel alive for a moment. In typically postmodern fashion Trainspotting suggests it is better to choose risk and excitement, to "just do it"! According to one of the characters it is better to die young than to "choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows … to choose rotting away at the end of it all, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats that you’ve spawned to replace yourselves."
As irrational and repulsive as such a conclusion may seem, it is a chilling reminder of what happens when disorientation leads to despair for a generation confronted with a fragmented world. It is the strangest of apparitions – Nihilism with a smile!
Aboriginal activist and academic, Dr Eva Cox, in her 1995 Boyer Lectures, spoke of the diminution of "social capital" in Australia. By this she refers to those expressions of social connectedness which create and sustain goodwill and social cohesion among people of divergent backgrounds and interests. She attributes this diminution of social capital, at least in part, to the displacement of a right sense of history (particularly the history of social movements and ideas) by the ideology of economic rationalism. According to Cox, one of the primary myths of the past that we pass on to this generation is that life is defined in essentially economic terms, and the consequent goal of life is the creation and acquisition of wealth. This leads us to "conceptualising citizens as being competing individuals, rather than socially connected human beings." This, according to Cox, is perpetuated by both the public and private sectors promoting policies and practices which "seem to ignore or undervalue many of the issues, which puts quality of life, the social system and human needs well behind wealth-creation."
Her point is not merely speculative or academic. Today’s youth are receiving such distorted messages that they are often thrown, consciously or subconsciously, into disorientation and confusion. For example, there is no longer a clear connection between educational outcomes and economic security. The Government’s policy of extending education has become a means of masking diminishing access to employment for young people. When they do find work, many now face the prospect of low-paying, low-tech, dead-end ‘MacJobs.’ After decades of rising expectations they face the reality of being worse off financially than their parents.
Well, enough of this gloomy analysis. What can be done to reverse these trends and remedy their effects? Research shows there are a number of primary characteristics that this generation are looking for in those who form their social context, whether they are family, educators, social service providers, community acquaintances or close friends. I want to explore three of them. They are authenticity, community, and a shift away from dogmatism. I will apply these here to the missional context, but they are obviously more widely applicable.
Authenticity ‘Don’t give me six easy steps to success. I know life’s not easy.’ This generation is looking for a context where transparency about personal struggles and doubts is permissible. They relate more to the story of someone’s honest struggle than a contrived story of success. They want to journey through your story, in the hope that something will emerge to mediate their own. I cannot help but ask if this need for authenticity does not involve a return to innocence, or child-likeness. Perhaps we have rushed ahead too quickly and have cheated this generation out of some of the grandest lessons life has to teach. One of the great capacities of childhood is the engendering and enjoyment of wonder. It is enthrallment with the sheer mystery and exhilaration of life itself. Religion that reduces this to mere banality, which robs the enquirer of the joy of discovery, because it leaves nothing sacred, is not spirituality but indoctrination. This is true not only in the science lab, but also in church. It is the essence of human nobility which spirituality (and all of life’s pursuits) should preserve, but it is this essence which we destroy by rendering it commonplace. It is the intuition of the child that must be left intact, otherwise we will render this generation like Michael Morley who "went to the theatre with the author of a successful play. He insisted on explaining everything. He told me what to watch, the details of direction, the errors of the property man, the foibles of the star. He anticipated all my surprises and ruined the evening. Never again! And mark you, the greatest author of all made no such mistake." Authenticity involves an invoking of the transcendent values of life in all of their forms. The mechanistic, reductionist materialism of modernity has left a legacy of meaninglessness that this generation longs to see countered. It has left them a cultural legacy of virtue in distress and vice in triumph.
Community "I’m homesick for the home I’ve never had" sings Grunge band Soul Asylum on their album Homesick. Many of the young people I work with come from dysfunctional, broken families, in which failure or defeat is commonplace. Their primary need is not information but formation. As Prof. Simon Marginson has noted in his book Markets in Education, one of the great heresies of our day is that of individual competitiveness, wherein the natural state of relationships between people are the relationships of the economy, in which people live only for themselves, not for each other or the common good. According to these edicts we ought to compete with each other so as to profit individually, even at the expense of the other. Those who help are seen as weak or gullible. It is a world divided into winners and losers. Winners deserve what they get, losers likewise. If you fail, it’s you’re fault. This kind of competitive individualism engenders selfishness that in turn destroys any sense of relationship and community. It is this kind of inner hyper-individualism that has left this generation existentially disoriented, drifting without any sense of place, belonging or responsibility to a larger purpose. In addition, this generation also face formidable external challenges. They find themselves in a pervasive social, economic and political environment with its own peculiar ethos. Rodney Clapp has described it as a mass, technological expression of liberal, free-market capitalism. It is a mass in that it is built and operates on a large, highly centralised, bureaucratised basis. This includes communications media (TV, radio, telephones, computers etc.), transportation, energy generation, and waste disposal systems. In the so-called developed world we collect and disseminate news and entertainment via mass media. We rely on mass transportation systems such as cars, buses, trains, and airlines, both nationally and internationally. Our homes are fueled by gas and electricity companies who make mass provision for millions of users. Our rubbish is collected, our sewage eliminated, and our industrial waste diverted, en masse, by corporations and municipalities. Most, if not all these systems exceed the reach of local government agencies, hence the exponential growth of centralised, bureaucracies, both public and private. It is technologically sophisticated in both its complexity and global intensity. Entire societies are now almost entirely dependent on technology for communication, transportation, energy generation, and waste disposal. Electrical failures of a relatively minor nature can disrupt an entire city block, an airport, or a sewage works, thus affecting thousands of people and endangering the profitability of many businesses. Technology necessarily supports the mass described above. It also necessitates the concentration of technique and machinery in most other areas of life: the professionalisation and mechanisation of medicine; the marketing and management of religion; the shift from cottage industry to corporate conglomerates, to name a few. Like the emphasis on mass the emphasis on technology gravitates away from the local and communal toward the centralised and impersonal. It displaces particular communities with the abstract ‘global’ community. It is liberal in that philosophically it is guided by a classical libertarian vision, with its attendant focus, not on community, but on the autonomous individual, and is interpreted politically as the maximisation of self-interest. Liberalism, in the end, assumes that there is not, and cannot be, a common substantive good. ‘Good’ in the end is a private matter held together by a frail public consensus regarding collective self-interest. It is not surprising to realise that the necessary economic system to sustain this socio-political arrangement is free-market capitalism. Capitalism is intended to regulate the activities of self-interested, liberal individuals by forcing them to compete in a free-market. However, the advanced, late 20th century manifestations of capitalism shows this ideal to be a fiction. Markets are themselves now massive, technologised and centralised bureaucracies with their own peculiar power. They are not politically and socially neutral ‘safety zones’ which serve to defend those who cannot participate or compete within them. The great, final characteristic of this mass, technological expression of liberal, free-market capitalism is its sheer pervasiveness. We are always bumping up against it, if not being run over by it, through one or more of its manifestations. Not only does it dictate how we consume its goods, but also how we conduct our relationships. Centralisation and technology may be a blessing when it comes to flushing our toilets, but the same tendency has all but eroded community life, if we think of community as persons commonly inhabiting one place, sharing common interests and goods, dependent on a local culture and economy. Hence the death of the corner store selling local produce and its displacement by supermarket chains importing food from thousands of miles and many countries away. We are so professionalised, specialised, capitalised and bureaucratised that we ‘moderns’ simply ‘cannot register the wisdom inherent in communal cultures.’ As John Rawlston Saul concludes, we now have ‘individuality and choice in all the areas that don’t matter; conformity and passivity in all the areas that do.’ No wonder many of us, with our sense and actual experience of authentic community being replaced by a helpless enmeshment in mass, impersonal ‘public’ life; with our most urgent hopes privatised and commodified, find ourselves waking up in the middle of the night dreadfully wondering about the hollowness of our lives. ‘Ironically,’ as Robert Inchausti observes, ‘it is this very longing for a more profound existence that makes us prey to salesmen and commercial visionaries who sell us dreams without inspiring us to the disciplines necessary for authentic, meaningful existence.’ So, we specialise in such important issues as weight loss without exercise, fat-free desserts, or the ‘2 minute devotion for busy saints’. We are made into the worst kind of consumers: ‘systematically miseducated, under-estimated, financially pampered, and morally exploited ... by a world socio-economic order that runs according to its own impersonal rules and agenda.’ The worldview embodied in the mass, technological expression of liberal, free-market capitalism, above all else, militates against real community building. Respect for place, communal stability and enduring identity disappears into the vortex which drains away such values as familiarity, commitment, a sense of the past, doctrine, tradition, substantive relationships, and interdependence, to name a few. We must counter this challenge by insisting that we are inescapably communal beings. We really can’t create ourselves, regardless of views to the contrary. We depend on others to be born, to survive, to be known, and to be remembered. We live and have our being in relationships, no matter how dysfunctional they may become. Basic problems, such as the institutional separation of role and relationship, must be resisted and reversed. Radical commitments to friendship for the sake of community building only require a definite ‘no’ to the pursuit of self-interest. It is through the sharing of relationships that we learn to love and be loved, and through which we may embrace the loveless. Simply put, strengthening community involves simply recognising, acknowledging, and building on what already exists. The problem is, we have been trained institutionally to deny or ignore the fact that we are a community before anything else. Allow me a brief word about language at this point. Language has an indispensable role in defining our relationships. It reflects the way in which we relate, as well as defining the dominant practices among us. The recovery of communal language may help check and challenge our atomistic individualism. Communal language, with its relational insistence, reminds us of the other, placing us in relationship with, rather than apart from, the other. Interpreting everyday life in communal language will enliven imaginations and open up formerly unheard of options for this generation. Community can be rebuilt by honouring and taking the small steps. Further possibilities and ways of acting will emerge as we reform our language and imagination. For instance, the language of managerial control and commodification legitimates the dominance of the market. We must take small, personal yet communal, steps in denying the anti-communal direction of privatisation and its attendant individualism. Having an open table, feeding homeless people, welcoming refugees into your world, all are small steps of inestimable significance in the economy of grace. In short, we must care. As John McKnight writes, ‘Care cannot be produced, provided, managed, organised, administered, or commodified. Care is the only thing a system cannot produce. Every institutional effort to replace or replicate the real thing has failed.’ People who belong to such communities want to belong - they cannot conceive of life outside of it. Active participation for all, rather than clienthood, becomes the hallmark. A caring, consensual community creates interdependence where people of all capacities and fallibilities are incorporated, creativity is multiplied rather than channelled, and care replaces professionalised service. A great heresy of Western culture is its insistence on our dependence on its centralised services and products. We are reliant on the advertisers to tell us what we need and where to find it. They do not seek our informed consent but rather our compliance to their distorted images. We must begin by confessing and renouncing our complicity in a system that depersonalises and commodifies, degrades and often does violence, that it might feed on the discontent and greed of disoriented human beings. By the radical practice of caring we are actually striking out against the powers that would deny community, dishonour human dignity, and destroy wholeness.
A Shift Away From Dogmatism For most of this generation, experience has replaced dogma. In responding to this shift, I am not advocating a capitulation to what Alain Finkelkraut describes as, ‘the nihilistic relativism of postmodernism where a pair of boots is as good as Shakespeare’ but I am wanting to say that the spiritual formation this generation involves not only telling them what they need to know, but also helping them with how to know. Ministry styles should be more narrative than didactic, more relational than rationalising, more dialogical than pedantic. Rather than merely providing answers, we should be helping people frame meaningful questions and equipping them with the critical and moral skills to analyse and answer them. For example, let’s refer back to Eva Cox’s earlier critique of the dogma of economic rationalism ‘which puts quality of life, the social system and human needs behind wealth creation.’ She is describing a world where the value of the human being is measured by productivity, so that social relationships revolve around our ability to consume and compete in the free-market. The household is deconstructed by production while the market determines which values survive. For example, the village, the commonwealth, the family, protection of the vulnerable, the aged etc. may all be values we cherish theoretically, but if they defy the market then we will probably ignore them. Economic rationalism means compete or die, regardless. So, we lift constraints on capital while labour cannot move readily. Hence, communities are destroyed and neighbourhoods crumble. There are now few market-places where there is a relationship between producer and consumer. We now have place-less markets where everything is mediated through the image, not through relationships of accountability. This has lead to the privatisation and commodification of things such as public services, the commons, and the environment. What used to belong to all is being privatised as commodities to be marketed, hence the diminution of public infrastructure. Politics are privatised and degenerate into a personality cult where there is often little consideration for the public good. Ironically, there is the privatisation of poverty as well.
There is a Magic Deeper Still
I have addressed you thus far primarily as an educator and social critic. As I close this lecture I want to address you from my standpoint as a Christian minister, whose faith informs all I see of the world. I invite your attention as we consider three images that bring together the threads of my address, and offer what I believe to be an answer to the disorientation of this generation and the way back to a coherent society that truly values all its members.
In 1633 Rembrandt portrayed the crucifixion of Jesus and twice included himself in the painting. First we see him at the foot of the Cross, gazing up, as if sharing responsibility for the deed. Second we see him, hand outstretched, clutching what appears to be a Cross, looking straight into our faces, as if to invite us to enter the scene, to accept our place in this drama. We see also the puzzled figure with overly large hands in the lower left. He accentuates Rembrandt’s imagery, encapsulating the questions, invitation, mystery, and sublimity of this extraordinary moment. The three figures raising the Cross – pushing, pulling, carrying the burden of this awful deed. And central to the image is Christ Himself. Bathed in light, He is suspended between heaven and earth. His near naked form leaves no doubt that He is truly human – one of us. Yet his gaze heavenward tells us that that He looks into the Face of the Divine - He sees what we cannot. You can ‘hear’ the words of entreaty – ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’.
It is a painting full of rich imagery, full of human experience and emotion, and divine promise and hope. It is intimately personal and yet embracing of all who would enter it’s scene.
In the 1960’s Andy Warhol painted Campbell’s Soup cans. In all he created a set of 32, one for each variety Campbell’s produced. Warhol’s biographer, David Bourdon, says the inspiration came from seeing empty soup cans on his desk and the desire to show modern life as being without any ‘substantial personality or individual expression’. As Warhol simply explained ‘a group of painters have come to the common conclusion that the most banal and even vulgar trappings of modern civilization can, when transposed to canvas, become Art.’ He understood the modern era as one of ‘commercialisation and indiscriminate sameness’. By repeating mechanical derivatives of a packaged commercial product Warhol was mocking any pretension to discrimination or perception.
Noticeably absent from Warhol is the person, whether human or divine. For him, we are merely consumers, without substantial personality or individual expression, mere captives to the banal and derivative. The can is the object of meaning, itself an absurdity. In stark contrast, for Rembrandt, our identity is tied to the crucifixion of this Man on a Cross; He is the object of veneration and wonder. Both images raise questions of human significance and divine purpose.
Rembrandt’s and Warhol’s works of art serve as powerful symbols in terms of their respective visions of reality. Every society has its symbols, its icons, which tell of its search for meaning. Once a crucified God was our vision; now we stare at Campbell’s Soup cans. Once we were gathered around the crucified Jesus, but now we are merely consumers.
You Are What You Worship
There is something terribly hollow about modern life. As John Alexander reminds us, ‘The tragedy of modernity is that we have nothing worthy of worship; the absurdity of modernity is that we go ahead and worship anyway.’ You see, the issue of what we worship is inextricably linked to our understanding of who we are ourselves.
The absence of the human from Warhol is ultimately due to the absence of the Divine. The biblical insistence is that, in Christ, human beings find clues to meaningful identity. Without meaningful identity we devolve into mere consumers. In such a world, therefore, all things are ultimately absurd.
The presence of the human in Rembrandt is due to the presence of the Divine. It is in the crucified Christ we find clues to what our humanity entails. His presence among us speaks of our inalienable value and worth. Our presence at His death speaks of our disorientation and culpability. We are hollow because we are alienated. Rembrandt’s painting is full of these rich images.
What about Warhol and soup cans? They, like us, are faced with emptiness. In Warhol’s world the emptiness is trivialised. In Rembrandt’s it is confronted.
As we begin the 21st century, we are again confronted with the question of the meaning of the crucified and risen Christ. In moving from the one-dimensional banality of Warhol to the multi-dimensional spirituality of Rembrandt we have to ask, ‘What do we worship, and why?’As a Christian I worship Christ, crucified, and risen from the dead. Why? This is the crucial question in these postmodern times. We have passed from Warhol’s ’60s image of empty consumerism; but to what? A commonly cited depiction of the post-modern condition is found in Edvard Munch’s painting, The Scream. It shows an agonised, tormented figure on a lonely bridge, holding its head in a desperate attempt to shut out the raging violence which surrounds it. The figure is asexual, the swirling background unidentifiable. The only clarity is in the agony of the person - the Scream!
There is a confronting potency to this image when considered from a Christian perspective. At the heart of the Gospel is the assurance that God has heard humanity’s scream. It is an agonising cry of human despair, borne out of disorientation and the alienation that follows. God has come among us; He has confronted the raging violence of our moral and spiritual confusion; He has embraced in protective love all those who have fallen victim to sinfulness and alienation. As Rembrandt so powerfully depicted, the Cross tells us to stop lying to ourselves and face our vulnerability. We crucified Him. Yet He bore our alienation willingly.
It is in this mystery that we come to know the power of the Risen Christ. The vacuum of postmodernism yearns not merely for proof of the Resurrection. Rather it yearns for the meaning of the Resurrection. The victory of Jesus over death and alienation promises the silencing of the Scream. It puts the soup cans back where they belong, on our supermarket shelves. But to comprehend all this we must stand with Rembrandt at the Cross, gaze in wonder at Jesus’ love, and own our share in His death.
In his extraordinary novel, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis captures the drama of the death and resurrection of Christ in a penetrating allegory. The Lion, Aslan (the Christ figure), triumphant over death, greets the children (whose deception by the Witch has lead to Aslan’s demise on the Stone Table), and explains,
It means that although the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge only goes back to the dawn of Time. If she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and death itself would start working backwards.
Lewis’ point is both simple and profound. There is a deeper magic. Seen through the eyes of Him who conquered death, life is not a scream, nor is it an empty, impersonal existence. It is taken up in adoration and wonder, in the worship of the One whose life was not only given for us, but is now shared with us, so that ‘death itself would start working backwards’.
I close with these words from former Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple;
Worship is the submission of all our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by His holiness, nourishment of mind by His truth, purifying of imagination by His beauty, opening of the heart to His love, and submission of will to His purpose. All this, gathered up in adoration, is the greatest of human expressions of which we are capable.
Here then, is the key to the unity of all human experience and its relationships. Life is lived as a gift, as an act of worship. Philosophy from Socrates to Aristotle, from Aristotle to Plato, from Plato to the present has sought for the one, unifying theme of life, and has ended in confusion. Is it knowledge? Is it pleasure? Is it power? No! it is in Temple’s statement, it is in the submission of all of our nature to God.
Conscience quickened by His holiness
Nourishment of mind by His truth
Purifying of imagination by His beauty
Opening of heart to His love
Submission of will to His purpose
ALL THIS GATHERED UP IN ADORATION IS THE GREATEST OF HUMAN EXPRESSION
It is life in Jesus Christ that fuses all else together. The alternative is series of disconnected events and experiences that build no over-all purpose.
There is a magic deeper still!
Note:
This lecture was prepared, not as a formal paper, but as a public discourse. Hence there are no footnotes or exhaustive references to all sources. Various authors and artists are acknowledged throughout, but all sources are not detailed. I particularly want to acknowledge the influence of Rodney Clapp, whose work ‘Peculiar People’ is the source of much of the content on pp.5-7 ‘Community’. Readers may contact me for details of sources and further readings .
I wish to thank Grace Memorial Episcopal Church and the Grace Institute for inviting my wife Fiona, and me, to share in a week of ministry with them in late Oct/early Nov 2009. This lecture was part of that week, along with a great concert on El Día de los Muertos (All Soul’s Day) – Blessings and Blues. Grace was our home when we lived in Portland, and has now become part of the rich fabric of our lives. Special thanks to Fr Stephen and Mother Esme for their friendship and love.
Rev’d Steve Clarke BTh MA(Hons) ThM(Hons) GradDipEd
Lecturer, School of Theology
Flinders University, South Australia
Ministry Development Officer
Anglican Diocese of Willochra
Australia
+61 8 8849 2022
