steady
ryan my name. worship my resolve. carolyn my gift. coffee my job. Jesus my master. taiwan my island. samson my cat. helming a tall ship my wish. arlington heights my stay. music my craft. kingdom come my desire. running my habit. pleasant lands my lot.

Earlier this month I witnessed a level of racial unity that was downright staggering. It happened along Roosevelt Road, far away from Wheaton, IL, whose college is now embroiled in a relatively hopeful conversation about race. It was at Holy Family Catholic Church in Chicago. I was there for art historical research, and upon arrival, I braced myself for the sad spectacle of a onetime thriving religious community now inhabited by a handful of elderly worshippers whispering the rosary. What I witnessed, instead, was ethnic harmony nearly amounting to theistic proof. The traditional Catholic Mass (from which, of course, I abstained) was infused with sublime African-American “rhythm and praise” singing from a mixed-race choir that, because of disciplined, expert leadership, nearly moved me to tears. The passing of the peace, in a packed congregation of various ethnicities (in relatively even numbers), lasted for fifteen minutes. The sermon, delivered by a white priest, included a moving biography of the African American Chicago sculptor Marion Perkins, whose abstractly black Christ presides over the Art Institute’s American galleries. This experience was a reminder that supposedly “white” liturgical worship and “black” spontaneous worship is a characterization which is itself arguably racist. These styles can and should blend into one another, support one another, as they do at Holy Family.

He spoke continually about the hurricane of which the psalmists had sung and the prophets had preached. He spoke about God himself becoming king. And he went about doing things that, he said, demonstrated what that meant and would mean. He took upon himself (this is one of the most secure starting points for historical investigation of Jesus) the role of a prophet, in other words, of a man sent from God to reaffirm God’s intention of overthrowing the might of pagan empire, but also to warn Israel that its present way of going about things was dangerously ill-conceived and leading to disaster. And with that, the sea is lashed into a frenzy; the wind makes the waves dance like wild things; and Jesus himself strides out into the middle of it all, into the very eye of the storm, announcing that the time is fulfilled, that God’s kingdom is now at hand. He commands his hearers to give up their other dreams and to trust his instead. This, at its simplest, is what Jesus was all about.

[We can] correct woolliness of view as to what Christian commitment involves, by stressing the need for constant meditation on the four gospels, over and above the rest of our Bible reading: for gospel study enables us both to keep our Lord in clear view and to hold before our minds the relational frame of discipleship to him. The doctrines on which our discipleship rests are clearest in the epistles, but the nature of discipleship itself is most vividly portrayed in the gospels. Some Christians seem to prefer the epistles as if this were a mark of growing up spiritually; but really this attitude is a very bad sign, suggesting that we are more interested in theological notions than in fellowship with the Lord Jesus in person. We should think, rather, of the theology of the epistles as preparing us to understand better the disciple relationship with Christ that is set forth in the gospels, and we should never let ourselves forget that the four gospels are, as has often and rightly been said, the most wonderful books on earth.

The tree of life my soul hath seen,
Laden with fruit and always green:
The trees of nature fruitless be
Compared with Christ the apple tree.

His beauty doth all things excel:
By faith I know, but ne’er can tell
The glory which I now can see
In Jesus Christ the apple tree.

For happiness I long have sought,
And pleasure dearly I have bought:
I missed of all; but now I see;
‘Tis found in Christ the apple tree.

I’m weary with my former toil,
Here I will sit and rest awhile:
Under the shadow I will be,
Of Jesus Christ the apple tree.

This fruit doth make my soul to thrive,
It keeps my dying faith alive;
Which makes my soul in haste to be
With Jesus Christ the apple tree.

Part of the weakness of current theological warfare is that it is premised on stable, lifelong belief – each side congealed into its rival (but weirdly symmetrical) creeds. Likewise, in contemporary politics, the worst crime you can apparently commit is to change your mind. Yet people’s beliefs are often not stable, and are fluctuating. We are all flip-floppers. Our “ideas” may be rather as Woolf imagined consciousness, a flicker of different and self-annulling impressions and convictions. What if you were a strong Christian believer, and you woke one night, terrified by the sudden awareness that God does not exist? Hours pass in this unillusioned crisis, and then blessed sleep finally returns. The next day, you wake up and the awful doubt – a thing of the night – has mysteriously disappeared. You continue to “believe in God”. But what does such belief now mean? If it has not been annulled by the doubt of the night, does it now contain the memory of its inversion, as a room might trap a bad smell? An essay or work of polemic finds it hard to describe the texture of such fluctuation, whereas the novelist understands that to tell a story is to novelise an idea, to dramatise it. There is no need to make a tidy solution of belief; to the novelist, a messy error might be much more interesting. The Brothers Karamazov offers a famous example from the 19th century – a novel in which the author, a fiercely Christian believer, argued against his own beliefs so powerfully that many readers are swayed by Ivan Karamazov’s atheism (as Dostoevsky feared might happen).

The crucial difference between the Catholic and common uses of the word “mystery” lies here. When the term is applied to divine realities, the mystery involved is by definition without end. This is not to say (as nominalists, in contrast to Aquinas, seemed to want to say) that the things of God are permanently or radically incomprehensible and ineffable, but that they are endlessly comprehensible and expressible. Not darkness, but too much light is what we encounter here. That irritating conversation stopper, “it’s a mystery,” doesn’t mean that we have nothing further to say but that we can’t say enough about the matter in hand. The mysteries of faith are so far-reaching in their meaning and so breathtaking in their beauty that they possess a limitless—that is to say, literally an unending and inexhaustible—power to attract and transform the minds and hearts, the individual and communal lives, in which they are pondered, digested, and, ultimately, loved and adored.

This concentration upon God is strenuous, but everything else has ceased to be so!

It is human nature to overestimate what we can achieve in a season and underestimate what we can achieve in a decade.