The man born blind, theodicy and the Waste Land

I’ve been busy with job interviews these last few days and haven’t been able to write, but I suppose there’s plenty of other good reading in the blogosphere to keep everyone busy!

This last Sunday was the Sunday of the Man Born Blind, which of course features the famous story from John 9.1-41, one of my favorites. As with all things Johannine, the narrative is always working on multiple levels and branches out in multiple directions. What struck me in my recent reading of it, though, was the manner in which it relates to the subject of theodicy, which I think caught my attention this time because I’d just written that series on Job.

“Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9.2) The disciples’ question, it seems to me, arises from the same worldview as that of Job’s friends: Since God is good and just, all suffering in the world must be the consequence of sin. Their question is not whether or not sin was involved, but only whose sin it was. The naysayers would later tell the blind man that he was “born in utter sin” (John 9.34). Job’s friends, as you all recall, were convinced that it was Job’s sin that was the cause of his downfall.

I think Jesus’ response says it all: “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be made manifest in him.” (John 9.3) He cut across the narrow options posed by his disciples’ worldview with a new one: “that the works of God might be made manifest in him”. Was this not true of Job’s suffering?

More importantly, doesn’t this anticipate Jesus’ suffering later in the story? He is the innocent Lamb who is rejected, as was the blind man, by his own people not because of his own sin but so that God’s works might be revealed in this world. Isn’t it a strange twist that “the works of God” accomplished by Jesus’ passion has precisely to do with sin—or rather, with the taking away of “the sin of the world” (John 1.29)?

Job, the man born blind, Jesus. Maybe we don’t know as much suffering as we often think we do. I wonder if the many explanations for evil and suffering that originate from the heart of man—whether it’s the Holocaust, 9/11 or the tsunami—are simply the diverse ways in which we repeat Job’s mistake: “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.” (Job 42.3) What are these “works of God” that can and will be revealed in this world thick with suffering? Who can know them fully?

April is finally here, which gives me the opportunity to talk about my favorite poem of all time, T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”. The diversity of voices, the density of allusions, the dry despair of the Waste Land…so painful and so beautiful at the same time!

I tend to like subversive things (probably because it nurtures my post-colonial complex), so it’s no surprise that I like so much the subversion Eliot accomplishes in the opening lines of this poem. Here is Eliot:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

And here, I’m quite sure, are the lines he was subverting, from Prologue of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales:

Whan that Aprille, with hise shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye—
So priketh hem Nature in hir corages…

In Chaucer, April is the month of “shoures soote” and the awakening of Nature—”the tendre croppes” and the song-bound “smale foweles”. In the Waste Land, it is this very stirring-to-life that the narrator resents. As soon becomes evident to the reader, there is much pain in the Waste Land that is better left alone than awakened….

But has the Waste Land been consigned to death “that the works of God might be made manifest” in it and its inhabitants? Who is your man this spring: Chaucer or Eliot?

A dissertation; Confucius and pots; and Jorie Graham

I learned yesterday that Tim Gray’s doctoral dissertation has finally seen the light of publication! I’m not sure exactly when Mohr-Siebeck published it but it appears to have been sometime in 2008. When I left Denver last May Tim was finishing up some last-minute edits to the manuscript. Here it is: The Temple in the Gospel of Mark: A Study in its Narrative Role. (Google Books features selections from this book.) I’ve read the whole thing twice in its dissertation form and can happily vouch for its excellence.

I can honestly say that few people have had more influence on me than Tim. He’s been a teacher, a mentor and above all a friend along the Way who’s lent me his ear, his money, his pick-up truck and countless books on Scripture and theology. Everywhere in my Bible there are notes and markings from my classes with him, whether on the Pentateuch or the Prophets, on Paul or Markan eschatology. I’ve jokingly told him a few times that I can always hear his voice inside my head whenever I open up my Bible. (I still do.) I don’t think many people have the privilege of being formed and mentored by a great teacher and I’m thankful that I’m one of the few. The playground of biblical studies is more like a mine field most of the time, and my faith not only survived but was strengthened because of Tim. Congratulations, Dr. Gray!

While I’m on the subject of teachers, here is one of my favorite sayings from that old Chinese sage:

The Master said: “A gentleman is not a pot.” (Analects 2.12 [Leys])

Quite cryptic, yes? Leys explains in his note on this:

a pot: one might also translate “a utensil” or “a tool”—the idea is the same: the capacity of a gentleman is not limited as is that of a container; his abilities are not circumscribed to one narrow and specific function, like a tool which is designed for only one particular purpose. The universal aim of Confucian humanism should have particular relevance for us today, as our modern universities seem increasingly concerned with the mere training of “specialized brutes”.

The civil service which was to run China with great efficiency for two thousand years embodied the Confucian ideal: officials were selected through an examination system that essentially tested their knowledge of the Classics and their literary talent. With such an intellectual equipment, a local prefect was expected to dispatch single-handedly all the affairs of a large territory with a vast population, performing simultaneously the functions of administrator, judge, engineer, economist, police officer, agronomist, architect, military commander, etc. (not to mention that, in his leisure time, he was also supposed to be a competent calligrapher, poet, writer, painter, musician, and aesthete).

I grew up thinking that the Confucian ideal was the nerd. Not so, not so.

To close off with a little literary refinement for today, a poem featuring minnows by one of my favorite poets, the Pullitzer-crowned Jorie Graham.

The writer as reader

A writer is, first and last, a reader. Who do you write for? Gertrude Stein was asked, and famously replied, “Myself and strangers.” That self, the reader-self who is allied with strangers, may be a writer’s better half, more detached, more trustworthy, than the writing self who swaggers through a lifetime of prose. It is difficult—and diminishing—to separate the self who writes from the one who reads. Both acts belong to the communion of the word, which is a writer’s life.

Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory

Flannery O’Connor on Crutches

When I contract my debilitating illness, I hope to have this kind of humor.

I have decided that I must be a pretty pathetic sight with these crutches. I was in Atlanta the other day in Davison’s. An old lady got on the elevator behind me and as soon as I turned around she fixed me with a moist gleaming eye and said in a loud voice, “Bless you, darling!” I felt exactly like the Misfit and I gave her a weakly lethal look, whereupon greatly encouraged, she grabbed my arm and whispered (very loud) in my ear. “Remember what they said to John at the gate, darling!” It was not my floor but I got off and I suppose the old lady was astounded at how quick I could get away on crutches. I have a one-legged friend and I asked her what they said to John at the gate. She said she reckoned they said, “The lame shall enter first.” This may be because the lame will be able to knock everybody else aside with their crutches.

Letter to “A.”, November 10, 1955

Flannery O’Connor on Truth and Emotional Satisfaction

But I can never agree with you that the Incarnation, or any truth, has to satisfy emotionally to be right (and I would not agree that for the natural man the Incarnation does not satisfy emotionally). It does not satisfy emotionally for the person brought up under many forms of false intellectual discipline such as 19th century mechanism, for instance. Leaving the Incarnation aside, the very notion of God’s existence is not emotionally satisfactory anymore for great numbers of people, which does not mean that God ceases to exist. M. Sartre finds God emotionally unsatisfactory in the extreme, as do most of my friends of less stature than he. The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, and of the saints, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing and downright repulsive.

…There is a question whether faith can or is supposed to be emotionally satisfying. I must say that the thought of everyone lolling about in an emotionally satisfying faith is repugnant to me. I believe that we are ultimately directed Godward but that this journey is often impeded by emotion. I don’t think you are a jellyfish. But I suspect you of being a Romantic.

Letter to “A.”, September 6, 1955