Dickinson penned this in the context of the Second Great Awakening, but her sentiment is suited for today, too. Unwavering confidence in rigid ideologies pushes forward with popular conviction and very little patience for regular, honest reflection or rethinking. And if you don't get it, if you just don't see it that way, and you're not on board, you can't believe, can't claim the same all-encompassing hopes, can't write the others off so easily, or you just don't *know* the way they do, you feel a little off and pretty out of it and somehow guilty and stubborn and like you're the jerk ruining it for everyone else. Meh.
Bad ones, unite! There are worse things than pondering and pausing, mourning and doubting, reevaluating. (Things like certitude, war, snakes, city driving, and Facebook, for instance.)
Okay, back to work.
I have never read that comment by Dickinson. How well it captures several different perspectives.
ReplyDeleteIt occurs to me that the Dickinson quote could be read with a sense of liberation, haunting, or sorrow for her sorrow, if that's not a bit too redundant.
ReplyDeleteAlso, taking this post together with the previous, I'm prompted to wonder: is it certitude per se that you find troubling, or the sanctimony that so easily accompanies it? (Or would you say that the latter is a sine qua non for the former?) And if it is certitude, is it all certitude, or only that which differs from your own -- if indeed you are certain of anything? (I'm trying to avoid both assumption and condescension here: troubling task, that!)
And last, just to throw in an annoying question to accompany the reasonable ones (smile): with reference to the answers above, why?
It also occurs to me to suspect that many of the troubles you've described with the RPCNA and other folk who are (potentially over)confident in their assertions stem from their perfectionist's reliance on self and a forgetfulness of their sinner's need for God's grace. It is also possible that I am projecting my own sins in this area onto the others of whom you speak.
ReplyDeleteJesus is truth, and He speaks in love. We aren't and often don't. And this is worth mourning and repenting of.
Hi, Drew! Thanks for reading and for the thoughtful comments. I think you're right about the different ways in which the Dickinson quote can be read, or at least that there's a complicated combination of feelings/senses going on there.
ReplyDeleteRe: your questions about my unease with certitude ... it's spiritual/religious certitude that leaves me particularly befuddled. To claim to know/have total confidence in what the afterlife will generally look like, for instance, strikes me as an unwarranted kind of certainty, as does certitude about the resurrection of Jesus.
This kind of certitude (and the dangers I think it presents) has captured my interest the last few years, but there are other kinds, certainly;-), including the things I feel most "sure" of. I recently finished a book called The Tribes of America by Paul Cowan, and for some reason it's gotten me thinking a lot about how we know what we know--about what is right, about other people, etc. It's just articles on different events and communities--e.g., Harlan County, poor Jews in New York, busing in Boston, textbook controversies, the Mississippi delta following the civil rights movement--but his journalism is a very vulnerable kind. He discusses how interviewing this or that person really impacted his view of a given topic, making it more difficult, usually, to come to judgments. Anyway, this is a jumble but I highly recommend that book both for the content (just to learn more about some key communities and events around the 1970s) and for the integrity and reevaluation and humility Cowan exhibits in exploring his subjects.
Gotta run, but re: the whole forgetting-all-is-grace/need for God's grace thing--I certainly think that sins/mistakes/lack of love (whatever you want to call it)have been key, both in my own life and in others' both within and outside the church. But I hope it's clear that "the troubles [I've] described" are more theological/philosophical than interpersonal. I didn't leave because I was angry; I left because I am not honestly convinced of central evangelical tenets.
Rushing here--thanks for the dialogue, and for your friendship. Hope you and Sarah et al are well!
I realize
Thank you for the response, Evie. Sarah and I and our daughter are living in the DC area and are keeping ourselves busy. She has a blog of her own, and I think from time to time about starting one -- and then life moves in again!
ReplyDeleteI didn't mean to suggest you departed from Christ because you were angry; I was genuinely curious. And I think your answer was excellent in satisfying my curiosity. As an aside, I wonder if there's really anyone who actually renounces faith because they're angry. I think that most of those who SEEM to renounce it because they're angry have actually, like you, ceased to believe in what they (thought that they) once believed -- or never in fact believed at all. The anger is just a way (one of many that are available) to liberate them into taking the public step they were too hesitant to take before. I'm not sure what it was that gave you that freedom (if it was indeed one thing; you probably wrote about this in a previous post somewhere), but I now know for sure that it wasn't anger and resentment -- which makes me feel at once better and totally not better! :)
Giving up faith is hard, I would imagine (I can't exactly say from personal experience, since I've never actually gone beyond garden-variety puzzlement and doubt.), and doubly so when your father is a blue-blooded pastor in the RP Church and you've been selected as one of the church's "rising stars." Perhaps it is less hard to have made the decision than to make it; I don't know.
But one thing I do know (with conviction, in every sense of that word) is this: when you wrote in your blog post last November that "if hell exists, everything else--every endeavor, every good meal, every smile, every breath, every breakthrough, every book, every new life--is rendered utterly meaningless," you were EXACTLY right --- as long as Yahweh is NOT who the Bible says He is. This is the point of Ecclesiastes (which I think I remember noting to you at the time; a good book, well worth reading several times in quick succession).
Also, thank you too for the dialogue. I pray that God isn't done with you yet. For your sake as much as for His.