Questions to ask when you are sick

Not necessarily the obvious ones

[Minifig 113/365] Trip(They also apply to many kinds of difficulties.)

The obvious questions are these:

  1. What’s wrong?
  2. How can it be fixed?
  3. When will it go away so that I can have my life back?

You’d be mad not to ask these questions.

But there’s an extra sheet of questions we can ask, and that perhaps we don’t want to ask. Sometimes we’re forced to ask them, but maybe it’s good to ask them  anyway.

  1. God, where are you in this?
  2. What should I do with my limitedness and my brokenness? Fix it? Or offer it to you in worship?
  3. Do I surrender (not to it, the problem, but to you, my Lover)?
  4. Do I mind not understanding?
  5. Where do we go from here, you and I?

Competence testing for theology scholars

Only let them loose if they’ve proved themselves

Theology scholars like to write ‘Introductions’ to things, and they like to talk about the ‘Problem’ of other things, such as the Problem of Evil or the Problem of God. They do not usually write on anything useful or testable like the Problem of Trapped Wind. Even though, you would think, it would be a good exercise to start on something smaller before reaching out straight for the Transcendent.

How are these people appointed? It turns out that theologians appoint each other. In effect, they mark their own homework. This is convenient for them because words/pontificating/opinions (NB: exactly what I am doing here) comes cheap, whereas facts come expensive and the budgets of theology departments do not generally run to them.

I have a particular problem with Introductions. An Introduction, for example to a book of the Bible, is a long compilation of what earlier theologians have said about that same book, selected according to the prejudices of the current writer. Introductions usually include a discussion of authorship. And Introduction-writers will exercise themselves with things like The Problem Of Isaiah (how many people wrote it); or the Problem of John (that the writer of the book of Revelation, called John in the book itself, is a different person from the author of the Book of John, whose never calls himself John in the book, but implies that he is.) With us so far?

We can cut through this. No theologian should be allowed to opine on the authorship of books of the New Testament without first being tested. This is easily arranged. Give them some books in various genres, written by livibg authors, and get them to theorize who wrote what. If you pass you, you get the job, if you fail, out you go, you charleton, to the World, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth and the need to work for a living.

What to do when you find yourself on a ‘darkling plain’

Don’t panic. Examine the rogue data

In a previous post I looked at Matthew Arnold’s wonderful poem Dover Beach– the best atheist hymn I can currently think of:

the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

And I pointed out that I know of people of whom it is not true. Their pain and loss is suffused with a joy and life that is quite umistakeable to anyone who talks with them.

This is so important. These are rogue data-points that do not fit on Matthew Arnold’s dismal curve. They are also like stars in the universe, holding out the word of life. Anyone who is interested in facts and evidence, and especially atheists, ought to make a point of meeting up with them. They are often conveniently found in churches. If you’re concerned with truth, interrogate the data that doesn’t fit your hypothesis; especially, I might note, if your hypothesis is about life and death and meaning. You might find, if you are a north-facing atheist, as it were, that our human home also has a south side, and the sun is blazing.

Loss, and amazingness

There are also findings

nightfallI watch people getting old and I wonder how they process loss. When people get to their our eighties, it seems to me, if they are lucky enough to have made it that far, they start being dismantled. However proud they once stood, bits start falling off. The networks that have surrounded them unravel. The background noise of the ninth decade is the retreating tide of life:

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

 

I’m quoting of course from Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold and it is (of course) (among other things) a hymn to the courage shown by people who have no faith in God:

the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

My problem with this beautiful poem is that I keep meeting people of whom it is not true.  Some are very elderly, others are younger but being gnawed down by cancer. It is not true for them that the world has ‘neither joy, nor love, nor light.’ And if I can be not true for them, surely it can be not true for me too.

I agree that these people do find themselves ‘on a darkling plain/ Swept with confused alarms of struggle and fight’ but that is not their full story. I am obliged to say they are thriving. They are even life-giving, a ‘green old age’, generous despite affliction. I like to be around them. They do know fear and uncertainty, but they also know peace and rest. Perhaps they have what Jesus meant when he promised ‘abundant life.’ They face dismantlement and death and ask them, ‘is that the worst you can do?’ Then it’s OK.