Gospel)—mysterious, never loud; at the beauty and humility—secret, never showy; at the goodness, never extolling itself. ‘Come to me . . . .and I will give you peace.’—How can this be reconciled with a never ending, thunderous, ‘we declare, we demand . . . .’ [While] standing on Second Ave. changing a tire in the garage, I contemplated people on the street who were going home from work with shopping bags; and earlier, a mother, with two little boys, all three in poor but so obviously festive clothes, all three lit up by the setting sun. Why do I like it so much? I, the most unsentimental and indifferent man, I want to cry. Why do I know with such certitude that I am in contact with the “ultimate,” that which gives total joy and faith, the rock against which all (my little) problems crash?30
One longs for such “unsentimental” gifts amidst our own church’s squabbles.
October 27, 2004
I have been teaching a Sunday School class recently on “Sabbath as a Way of Knowing God”. In preparing for that course, I ran across these words from Karl Barth, which I would share with you:
As we all know the minister’s Sunday involves both a program and work, yet does this mean that he has to bemoan it? Is not the minister the ideal case of the man who works joyfully on the holy day and in this very way keeps it holy? If it were toilsome and dull for ministers to do their Sunday work, how could they expect the congregation and the world to find it refreshing? More generally, we may ask whether even during the week theology is a labor operosus, a burden and anxiety, something which has to be done for professional reasons but which we should be happy to lay aside with a clear conscience. If theology as such is not a joy to the theologian, if in his [or her!] theological work, he [or she] is not genuinely free from care, what is it? Can he [or she] then abandon it on Sunday and devote himself [or herself] to all sorts of tomfoolery? Why should he [or she] not be free for theology? Fundamentally, cannot the heaviest theological working day be for him [or her] the best day of rest?31
Which is why one’s time at seminary ought to be, despite the immense amount of travel, work, and weariness involved, the most joyful time of all.
November 2, 2005
This morning at staff meeting, I read this quote from Simone Weil which I would like to share with you. She writes:
Will power, the kind that, if need be, makes us set our teeth and endure suffering, is the principal weapon of the apprentice engaged in manual work. But, contrary to the usual belief, it has practically no place in study. The intelligence can only be led by desire. For there to be desire, there must be pleasure and joy in the work. The intelligence only grows and bears fruit in joy. The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking, there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship will not even have a trade. It is the part played by joy in our studies that makes of them a preparation for the spiritual life, for desire directed toward God is the only power capable of raising the soul. Or rather, it is God alone who comes down and possesses the soul, but desire alone draws God down . . . 32
“The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running.” So may we run (and breathe and study) with such joy.
February 8, 2006
In his introduction to Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir, Hope Against Hope, Clarence Brown writes of Mandelstam’s husband, Osip, that he was not only one of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century, but also a poet who, despite years spent in exile ending in death in one of Stalin’s gulags, sought to account for the joy he espied at the heart of life. In the introduction, Brown refers to a fragment of one of Mandelstam’s early essays in which he writes of this inexpungeable joy, concluding finally that Mandelstam found this joy in Christianity. “In an early essay on Pushkin and Scriabin, of which only fragments remain, Mandelstam was evidently trying to find the source of this joy within the terms of Christianity. Christian art, is joyous because it is free, and its art is free because of the fact of Christ’s having died to redeem the world. One need not die in art nor save the world in it, those matters having been, so to speak, attended to. What is left? The blissful responsibility to enjoy the world . . . .”33
I am not sure that a Reformed theologian could have said it better. This last week in theology class we read about what it means that “Jesus takes away our sins.” The loss we often bewail of being exposed as a sinner who seeks in fact to be God is actually a great liberation, says Karl Barth. It is a nuisance, and at bottom an “intolerable nuisance” always to be pretending to be divine. And it is very hard work. To discover that this matter has been taken out of our hands, that we are not in fact judges of ourselves or others, is liberation. “A great anxiety is lifted, the greatest of all. I can turn to other more important and more happy and more fruitful activities. I have a space and freedom for them in view of what has happened in Jesus Christ.”34
Space and freedom to “enjoy the world.” Maybe the poet Mandelstam’s joy derived from the freedom he discovered in not having to undertake the hard work of saving himself.
June 21, 2006
In one of his essays, W. H. Auden comments on the difference between classical comedy (as found, say, in the plays of Plautus and Terence) and comedy in a culture that has been influenced by the Christian faith (e.g., Shakespeare). In classical comedy, the comic figures are all lower class fools, slaves, and rascals. (If you have seen, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, you will know exactly what Auden has in mind.) The comedy comes from watching these knaves connive and fool the noble classes, deceiving them with underhanded tricks. But in the end, these rascals are found out and shown to get what they deserve. Christian comedy, on the other hand, exposes all classes and conditions of folk, especially the heroic and virtuous, to the unsettling gift of grace. And at the end of the play, no one gets what he or she deserves, though all are revealed to be recipients of grace. At the end of a classical comedy, Auden notes, the audience is laughing while those on stage are weeping. In Christian comedy, he adds, both the audience and the actors are laughing together.35
That is how forgiveness works its healing way, and gives in the end, not what we deserve but the deep, deep joy of something better, the gift of God’s grace.
October 18, 2006
More on Schmemann and joy:
To love—one’s self and others—with God’s love: How needful this is in our time when love is almost completely misunderstood. How profitable it would be to think more carefully and more deeply about the radical peculiarity of God’s love. It seems to me sometimes that the first peculiarity is cruelty. It means—mutatis mutandis—the absence of the sentimentality with which the world and Christianity have usually identified that love. In God’s love, there is no promise of earthly happiness, no concern about it. Rather, that love is totally submitted to the promise and the concern about the Kingdom of God, that is, the absolute happiness for which God has created man, to which He is calling man. Thus the first essential conflict between God’s love and the fallen human love. ‘Cut off your hand,’ ‘pluck out your eye,’ ‘leave your wife and children,’ ‘follow the narrow way,’—all of it so obviously irreconcilable with happiness in life . . .
What has Christianity lost so that the world, nurtured by Christianity, has recoiled from it and started to pass judgment over the Christian faith? Christianity has lost joy—not natural joy, not joy-optimism, not joy from earthly happiness, but
