christopher cocca

I’ve been thinking that once you decide you believe in reality, really any reality, it’s not such a huge jump to decide to believe in God. If you believe in existence, it doesn’t seem so hard to believe that something caused it. I know that it doesn’t have to be God that caused it, but it ends up being something mysterious we can’t really account for in any case. Chicken, egg, ad infinitum. So it’s either God or not God, but the idea that it’s God doesn’t seem more outlandish to me than the other options, once I’ve decided to believe that I am, in fact, here, that the physical word exists and et cetera.

So if I believe in God, I can probably also believe that I might see my dead loved ones again. I might not, but it doesn’t really seem too outlandish to hope that I might or to even believe that it’s possible, so long as I’m already believing that I exist and the universe with me.

Oh, how far from certainty. How utterly, blessedly, beautifully far.

“But for now we are young
Let us lay in the sun
And count every beautiful thing we can see
Love to be
In the arms of all I’m keeping here with me.”

I try not  to romanticize.  Even so, death shakes me.  More, the prospect that after our sufferings, we might be returned to those ripped from us…that eschatological hope seems like the only measure of justice in the cosmos.

Bart Campolo has suggested that God is not in control of the universe.   If that’s true, the cosmos are unsubdued, death can be random, and God can be good.  I wonder.

Let’s assume, picking up from previous posts, that the God who in the Bible refers to himself as “I AM” is rendered thusly in the grimy mirror of the Scriptures because information about God doesn’t translate exactly from him to us.    Let’s assume, then, that I AM is self-awareness seeking intelligible communication.   If you’ve read any of my Christology, you know that one of the things that continues to strike me about Jesus is the confounding mark his advent leaves on history.  Whoever he was or is, we are left to wrestle with him, just as we would ought to if God really entered history.  

The idea of God becoming self-aware is scandalous for some.  I am, indeed, suggesting that God’s self-communication to us is the result of his Cogito Ergo Sum (more or less).   I am, in fact, suggesting that history begins when this God awkwardly utters “I am!” for the first time.  I said in the last post that if you’re more comfortable saying that the universe (and not just history) began with God’s epiphany, that’s fine, but that’s not really what I mean.  Obviously, a God who becomes self-aware isn’t eternally omniscient in the way people usually mean.  Even so,  I have no problem with a God who is unsure of his own origin.  How such a God would know that he exists and that his perception of reality is objective, I don’t know, but maybe that’s what makes him God.  Special pleading has to happen somewhere.  I’m not sold on this version of the story, but it’s helpful to think about.  It could also be that God is God precisely because he alone does know what objective reality is, and he alone is non-contingent.  I’m not sure how an understanding of allegiance owed him by virtue of his station as Creator differs from strict deontology, though.  

I want to turn the screw another way here.  Let’s assume that I AM exists.  Let’s assume that I AM communicates with us, that the Bible is the in-a-mirror-darkly record of some of that communication.  Let’s assume all of the Bible’s contradictions are the residue of this confounding breaking of I AM into our reality.  If you’re a Christian, assume the same thing about the disharmony of the Gospels and the paradox of God-with-us.

If you found out today that I AM exists, that I AM called Abraham, that he lead the Hebrew children out of Egypt, that he incarnated as Christ, that he died and rose again…if you somehow found out beyond a shadow of a doubt on any epistemological level that all of that was objectively absolutely true, but you also found out that I AM is not the Prime Mover or the Creator the universe, would that make him any less God to you? 

So what if I AM isn’t omniscient?  So what if I AM doesn’t know how it is that HE IS?  So what if “I am!” is a realization? 

I’m not suggesting that there’s some gnostic god above him, some One or some Source or what have you.  I am saying that creation ex nihilo is a problem for any theist or atheist.  We’re here (at least I know I am), and I’m fairly certain we didn’t put ourselves here.  I don’t know how God got here.  I don’t know if he knows.  But even if he’s somehow the offspring of material ontology he didn’t create, that doesn’t make him any less God to me if he is, indeed, these other things.  I’m not uncomfortable wondering if or even believing that he was begotten of the universe and then created us (or didn’t).  That doesn’t resolve the ex nihilo problem (it only further confounds it), but it doesn’t bother me.

There are most subversive possibilities building from this framework.  Perhaps there is a Creator God, and perhaps I AM is his begotten.  Perhaps I AM sought us first through telling us he is (“I am!”) and then through the incarnation.  Perhaps this makes sense of the idea that Christ and I AM are the same.  Or not.  We still have I AM saying and doing things in the Bible that don’t seem very Jesus-y. But then again, it’s a grimy mirror.  And so is our reason.  Where does that leave us?  At the very least, I think it should make us generous and charitable in our theological/philosophical claims, don’t you?  And a little humble?

Something I forgot to mention in the last Postmodern etc post:  

A variation on the Cartesian argument for God (if you believe that’s what Descartes is actually doing) would be to say that because I know that I can’t know the grounding of reality, I can imagine that a being capable of this in fact exists.  Only an omniscient being would be able to know for certain that reality as he/she perceives it is reality as such.  Of course, a very powerful and very knowledgeable being could think he/she is omniscient and be mistaken about this and other things.  ”God” the way we usually mean the word would know that reality is what reality is because 1) God is omniscient on most definitions and/or 2) God made or makes or sustains reality.  Better, God grounds reality.  Better still, only God exists in a non-contingent way.  Perhaps you exist (I know I exist, but I don’t know how or in what true reality), but everything that exists that isn’t God exists only in God’s wake.  Only in relation to God.  

Maybe the word God bothers you.  Substitute whatever you think the ultimate grounding of reality is.  Then figure out where that came from.  Me, I don’t know where God came from or how God is.  Whether you’re a theist or an atheist, this prime mover business really is a problem.  

In the course of preparing this week’s edition of Blog Love (it will be up later today/tonight), I came across a post about an article in Relevant Magazine considering “the ironic generation.”   I can’t give a fair assessment of the piece because I didn’t read the whole thing.  That said, the first part of the second paragraph in the essay by Brett McCracken (and excerpted at LiturgicalCredo) is interesting:

There are reasons for our embrace of irony. We grew up in a world where earnestness failed us. Cold Wars were waged very sincerely, ideologies were bandied about with the best of intentions. Our parents married and divorced in all earnestness, and wide swaths of American homes were devastated by the sort of domestic disharmony that shattered any pretension of white-picket fence perfection.

The excerpt ends  with received language, deconstructing a construct that’s been so deconstructed already that I’m not sure the symbol is worth rehashing.  I didn’t know anyone with picket fences when I grew up in the suburbs in the 80s and 90s, but you get the point.  For me, though, two phrases here hit on something: “Cold Wars were waged very sincerely” and “our parents married and divorced in all earnestness.”

When I was in Div School I wrote a manifesto for my Pastoral Care of Young Adults (that is, 20-and-30-somethings) Class called “Incarnated In Young Adulthood.”   I’m not going to dig it up, but at that point in my devotional life and in my understanding of what made me and my friends the way we were, I looked at the lack of mentoring communities, and, specifically, the lack of some kind of constructive guidance across the generation.  Yes, we had good, caring parents in this cohort, but the overarching pressure I remember is, having deconstructed whatever it was the Boomers thought they were building and rejecting out-of-hand many of things our parents already rejected from the traditions they received, we were at a kind of end.

When the Berlin Wall and Soviet Union fell (I’m collapsing those years), some political philosophers began talking about “the end of history.”  History was defined by ideological struggle (not, as the retreating Marxists claimed, class struggle), and there seemed to be clear victors (the Western ideologies).   In the void, of course, other conflicts bred.  There is no end of history until, you know, it ends.

The end of sincerity strikes me as something different.  The Boomers deconstruct their received traditions, we deconstruct their deconstruction (that is, our received traditions: our parents’ rebellion, political optimism, materialism, the primacy of self) and so on.  And along the way so many mistakes are made by people who mean well or well mean for better outcomes than their systems wrought.  On and on it goes.  At the same time, we imbibe a million points of insincerity in popular media:  there are only so many ways to say I love you that haven’t already been overdone by John Hughes.  Face-to-face communication is recycled movie lines.  Even when we think we mean something, it’s tough to really know.  We are frustrated that there’s nothing new to say.

So some people turn to nihilism (but only in secret:  a good nihilist is anonymous by definition), many more turn to irony, but really, these are turns of the same screw.   The same with bravado.  It’s not entire coincidence that when I’m considering these things in the mid-90s, I’m also reading Beckett and Conrad in English class and listening to Oasis and Beck.  It’s all very postmodern, isn’t it, all very code-hero-safari-existential?  This is why I get cranky when people mean “nihilist” as an insult.  Aren’t all of these things, nihilism, irony, swagger, just different ways of saying we’re only kidding because kidding is all we can do?  Because shit books and romantic comedies beat us to the punches?  Isn’t it all just taking the piss out of pretension with pastiche and effigy?  Taking the piss out of pretension-by-default with pretension-on-purpose?  With winks and nudges?

And so that’s fun for a while.  But then your subversive detached-speak becomes the lingua franca.  Sounding ironic is like unto hipness and easier than ever.  It’s supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.  And so McDonald’s makes new commercials making fun of hipsters and we wink and nudge.

I’m currently reading The Furious Longing of God by Brennan Manning and will be reviewing it here soon.  So far, I’m troubled by its sincerity.  Embarrassed isn’t exactly the word, but I find myself wishing he’d show some restraint.  Put up his guard.  Not tell me so much.  I’m ill-equipped for his confessional bleeds and his conviction that if I take the words of Song of Solomon 7:10, “I am my beloved’s and his desire is for me”, personally, very personally, “the drumbeats of doom in your heart will be replaced with a song in your heart, which could lead to a twinkle in your eye” (pp. 22).  I know he means it, but it sounds so received.  I know I can’t speak like this without feeling insincere myself.

Even so, we did lectio divina a few weeks ago as the main point of our Sunday gathering and I loved it.  I loved the space and the room to breathe it gave us.  And I suppose I loved that I could share this impression or not.  But I can’t escape Manning’s piety or openness and my least favorite measure of spiritual courage, vulnerability.  It’s not that I’m against it, per se, it’s just that I’m against what most people mean when they say they appreciate experiencing the vulnerability of others in worship or in small groups or wherever.  I think there’s a certain piety in keeping some things close, don’t you?  And a certain wisdom?

I don’t know that our generation (let’s say 20-40 year-olds, though McCraken has it starting with people who are currently 15) is incapable of sincerity, but I struggle with finding ways to sound sincere in person and in my writing because of all that’s come already.  Because of all the cliches we all know so well.  Because we know in ways different than our parents that being earnest isn’t enough, that being sure of our convictions doesn’t make them right, that having money doesn’t make us happy, that doing drugs actually kills people.  That being detached and ironic isn’t patent rudeness but also isn’t always funny.  That being clever is lazy.

Maybe I expect spiritual fulfillment to be harder than grace.  Maybe that’s because human relationships, our only model, are so goddamn vexing.  And maybe that’s why I think, in the end, grace is all we can hope for.  That we the vexing and vexed can’t really help how far away we want or need to keep him.  This is a problem for Christians whose God comes kicking and screaming to earth in placenta.  I get that.

When I was at Yale, David Bartlett told our expository preaching class that it was all well and good that we walked around campus with our devotion to irony firmly intact, that we were ironic about the things we were supposed to be there doing, but to remember that there are people whose lives literally depend on the words we bring them.  That when we’re honest, we admit that ours do, too, and if we’d ever let our guard down for even a moment we’d be crushed and destroyed by that need.  He was imploding our irony by saying what it was: defense, a coping system.  Something we used as a buffer, something smoothing the edges of our heady but also primal pursuits and longings.

Our trade in irony betrays our need for something bigger than the human systems, emotions, and words we’ve deemed played out.  For some it’s nihilism and for others irony begets itself.  For some it’s swagger or humility.  The code-hero-safari-existential.  All of these things, maybe.  Does our sense that something’s wrong mean that there’s right to be fought for or found?  My gut says yes. And my gut says there’s a God and God is patient.

Diego’s hair is white and thin-wreathed above his ears, thick and hard around his muzzle and spotty in deep valleys between his temples and his chin. No metaphor does justice to the slow death we all fight for even at the Mission; there’s no sex in the details and we’re not well worn leather or dry mud brick or other things with function. Old age is pain and medicine and penance for our youth; we are wise now but too weak to right the many wrongs we did on purpose. Old age is futile Purgatory and we sin in preparation.

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