May 2013 – Page 42

The Theology Of Stephen Colbert

With graduation season upon us, David Zahl revisits Stephen Colbert’s 2011 commencement address at Northwestern University. An excerpt:

After I graduated from here, I moved down to Chicago and did improv. Now there are very few rules about improvisation, but one of the things I was taught early on is that you are not the most important person in the scene. Everybody else is. And if they are the most important people in the scene, you will naturally pay attention to them and serve them. But the good news is you’re in the scene too. So hopefully to them you’re the most important person, and they will serve you. No one is leading, you’re all following the follower, serving the servant. You cannot win improv.

And life is an improvisation. You have no idea what’s going to happen next and you are mostly just making things up as you go along. And like improv, you cannot win your life. Even when it might look like you’re winning…

In my experience, you will truly serve only what you love, because, as the prophet says, service is love made visible. If you love friends, you will serve your friends. If you love community, you will serve your community. If you love money, you will serve money. And if you love only yourself, you will serve only yourself, and you will have only yourself.

Zahl comments:

There is a sense in which all of us want what Colbert is describing: more acts of love and service in the world–more people doing what they love both for its own sake and the sake of their fellow citizens. You might say that we all want to be happy, and we are happy to the extent to which we have lost sight of the winning/losing spectrum–which also happens to be the extent to which we’ve lost sight of ourselves (or at least that part of us which is so helplessly caught up in justifying itself). The problem invariably comes when you talk about the How. How are people inspired to do good?

Does it happen through admonition and instruction? Or does it happen when those things are removed and/or allayed? Colbert seems to be in agreement on this issue with the man who executed his New Testament namesake. After all, when it comes to success, both inherited and achieved, the apostle Paul was clearly a “winner”. Yet in light of his conversion, Paul came to view those point tallies–indeed, the entire game itself–as a profound dead-end. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that he also spoke so beautifully about the fruit of the Spirit, that is, of the organic nature of life lived in the shadow of the cross–which is simply life lived from a place of gratitude rather than fear.

A Poem For Sunday

“2047 Grace Street” by Christian Wiman:

But the world is more often refuge
than evidence, comfort and covert
for the flinching will, rather than the sharp
particulate instants through which God’s being burns
into ours. I say God and mean more
than the bright abyss that opens in that word.
I say world and mean less
than the abstract oblivion of atoms
out of which every intact thing finally goes.
I do not know how to come closer to God
except by standing where a world is ending
for one man. It is still dark,
and for an hour I have listened
to the breathing of the woman I love beyond
my ability to love. Praise to the pain
scalding us toward each other, the grief
beyond which, please God, she will live
and thrive. And praise to the light that is not
yet, the dawn in which one bird believes,
crying not as if there had been no night
but as if there were no night in which it had not been.

The Not Self-Assured Believer

Morgan Meis ponders the similarities between Kierkegaard and the New Atheists:

Søren Kierkegaard was not an atheist. He was a Christian. All of his writings are either directly or indirectly about Christianity. He’s thus a natural opponent to Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris. Except for one thing. Kierkegaard detested Christianity as he found it. He considered the vast majority of Christians to be hypocrites. Kierkegaard took a look at the Christianity practiced in his time and proclaimed it complacent and self-satisfied. Christianity, thought Kierkegaard, was mostly an excuse for being lazy and dumb.

How they differ:

Real religion, thought Kierkegaard, is doubt-wracked. Real faith, Kierkegaard wanted us to know, is profoundly involved in working out the deepest paradoxes of being alive. That’s why Kierkegaard once said, “The self-assured believer is a greater sinner in the eyes of God than the troubled disbeliever.”

That’s a strange thought for most Christians. What did Kierkegaard mean? He meant that if you are self-assured in your belief then you have neutered faith to make it intellectually palatable. Faith requires belief in things that are insane from the perspective of reason. It doesn’t make sense that God became man on earth. No amount of thinking about it is going to make it logical. It is a strange and shocking and downright crazy notion. If you are going to believe it (and live your life accordingly), you are going to have to find resources within yourself that transcend reason.

Recent Dish on Kierkegaard here.

A Pilgrimmage On The Page

Angelo Alaimo O’Donnell leads her students through the work of four American Catholic writers:

One of the joys of teaching is sharing powerful, life-changing books with my students. Each spring semester, I ritually invite the men and women in my American Catholic Studies Seminar to accompany me on this literary pilgrimage. From January to April, we read Seven Storey Mountain, The Long Loneliness, Wise Blood and Love in the Ruins. Together we trace the steps of young Merton as he becomes an accidental pilgrim in Rome, haunting her churches and devouring her art; we sit with Day in the dark of prison and walk beside her through the gritty streets of the Lower East Side; we follow O’Connor from rural Georgia to the literary metropolis of New York, and follow her back to Georgia when illness condemns her to a life of exile; we accompany Percy as he discovers his vocation to be not doctor of the body but physician of the soul, trading his Columbia M.D. for the considerably less prestigious role of Catholic novelist. We conclude the course by reading Paul Elie’s literary biography of the Fabulous Four, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, the narrative of “a journey in which art, life, and religious faith converge.”

The students learn from Elie that the lives of these four contemporaries were interwoven yet never physically intersected. Instead, their moments of connection occurred through acts of imagination. They were all engaged in the same project—the pursuit of meaning in a chaotic and fallen world, and the search for God in a world that denies his existence. Each carried out this search by means of the word, writing the stories of their own lives, both directly, in the form of essays and memoirs, and indirectly, in the form of fiction and poetry.

Kenneth R. Morefield compares Robert Rossellini’s Rome, Open City, which came out shortly after the end of WWII, to contemporary films. He praises Rossellini for framing “his characters’ struggles within a long historical perspective”:

[T]he sweeping historical perspective of Rossellini’s films highlights rather than diminishes their moral questions. They force us to look beyond the scope of one life or one generation. And in so doing, they invite an analysis that is broader than what most current movie narratives provide.

You can find a striking contrast to Rome, Open City in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, which compresses over a decade of action into a single narrative. By doing so, it reduces the breadth of its moral questions (such as the use of torture) from the broadly philosophical or moral (“is it right?”) to the narratively pragmatic (“did it work?”). Ben Affleck’s Argo uses history as merely a backdrop, with the roots of the Iranian revolution covered in a two minute prologue and the coming years of war between Iran and Iraq elided as champagne is served on the plane, accompanied by retrospective pats on the back. But the inability to consider moral questions that stem beyond “the mission” is not unique to Argo – just most pronounced in it.

To Hug Is Human

Responding to Kate Notopoulos’s rant against hugging, Maria Bustillos comes to the gesture’s defense:

The larger solitude to which each of us is ineluctably fated—Wallace’s “skull-sized kingdom“—can sometimes come to feel very like a prison. The difficulty of escape at such times is very, very great; there’s such a vast distance between one soul and another. It’s not guaranteed that a hug will always pierce that veil of solitude, but then again, for some, sometimes, it might.

A hug, then, may even be a reminder that there is more to us than whatever bullshit societal transaction or business nonsense or idiotic role-playing is being forced on us in any given moment. A hug may in fact be a (literally) palpable indicator that we are not alone in the universe. For there is one other at least, right now in this moment, real, warm, breathing like oneself, willing, like oneself, alive, like oneself. Against all the world’s cold calculations, a heart to beat, so improbably, against one’s own.

The Unknown Frankenstein

Reviewing The Annotated Frankenstein, Michael Saler reveals the deeper meaning of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s famous creation:

Wolfson and Levao show that the first edition of Frankenstein of 1818 was packaged as a philosophic novel. Published anonymously, and dedicated to William Godwin, it features more references to the Prometheus legend and Paradise Lost than to such Gothic tropes as perverse sexuality and spectral hauntings. The monster may be stitched together from human and animal parts, yet he is more memorable for being an autodidact who pleads for affection: “his humanity is the most surprising, most disturbing, and ultimately most moving aspect of his character”. When he is viciously rejected, the monster engages in a murderous rampage – but Shelley blames this on his egotistic creator and an uncaring society that refuses to empathize with a suffering fellow “creature”.

As the editors note, Shelley’s contemporaries would have associated the monster’s terror with the Terror of the French Revolution. Conservatives likened the Revolution to a monster created by Enlightenment rationalism, whereas radicals perceived it as a justified response to a monstrous ancien régime. The novel raised questions about social justice and reciprocal obligations in a modern, secular age, in the process also condemning slavery. In addition, Shelley criticized gender relations, just as her mother had done in A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). Frankenstein’s creation of life was not simply an act of scientific hubris, but an exposé of patriarchy. By arrogating the creation of life solely to himself, Frankenstein’s deed of giving birth results in the death of everyone he loved, culminating in his own mortal struggle with his creation in the sterile frigidity of the Arctic.

(Image: the frontispiece to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, via Wikimedia Commons)

No Writer Is An Island

Tarn Wilson found an unexpected benefit from being in an MFA program:

When I started my program, I hoped only that the structure would help me make writing a priority and I’d pick up a few advanced skills. I’d underestimated the power of mentors. I should have guessed: in my work with at-risk teens, I’d researched what fosters resilience in those from disadvantaged backgrounds. The number one predictor of future success? Mentors. The number one way to increase the percentage of underrepresented minorities in top career fields? Mentors. Yes, my MFA mentors were skilled writers generous with their wisdom, but even more, they showed me, in their various creative ways, how to build a writing life—especially in a culture that rewards very few writers financially and that offers constant, bombarding distraction. They modeled how to make a living, prioritize writing, navigate the demands of family and friends, and manage emotions around success and failure.

The critics don’t argue against mentors, but suggest writers should find them organically. Think Hemingway gathered with the expatriates in Gertrude Stein’s Paris salons. But not all of us know where to find a mentor, and even if we did, we’re too polite or shy to impose on their precious time. Critics argue that MFA programs are classist, but I also believe it’s classist to demand writers find their own support. Now that I teach privileged teenagers, I recognize how much easier it is for those raised in well-off families to find mentors. They have spent their lives cultivating an appealing, graceful assurance. They know how to network, have access to people who know people, and have the confidence to ask for what they want. The rest of us need an MFA program.

Life’s A Bitch And Then You Laugh

From a review of Marc Maron’s Attempting Normal:

The comedian knows well… that “real life” can be a real challenge: “If you are alive and awake, sadness is a fluctuating constant.” As Maron explained during a keynote address at a comedy festival in Montreal… humor is one of our greatest analgesics. Growing up, he felt that comics “were the only ones that could make it seem okay. They seemed to cut through bullshit and disarm fears and horror.” At certain key moments, Attempting Normal does so as well. For comics like Maron and his colleague Louis C.K., stand-up is not simply about making people laugh. It is about making people laugh by exposing one’s innermost vulnerability.

Maron’s greatest comedic successes, including his podcast and his self-titled IFC TV show, have come from speaking honestly and emotionally about his life. As C.K. put it in his epic two-part interview on WTF, a portion of which is included in this memoir: “I’ve always [thought] that your progress [came from] taking away more and more layers of your defenses away;” and “I started watching you humiliate yourself more on stage, which is a good thing.” This book reveals that more than ever, Maron’s defenses seem to be down. Despite his tendency for abrasiveness, Attempting Normal is filled with softie remarks like: “I felt my heart open in relief”; “there are beautiful things in the world if you look”; “sometimes you just can’t fight being in love.”

Month: May 2013