What’s a Metaphor, or Politics As Unusual Part IV

Published at May 8, 2008 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment

I want to take you on a poetic tour of my thoughts this last month, to explain my growing conviction that politics desperately needs poets and prophets to avoid collapsing on itself. I will start with the Adrienne Rich quote and move from there:

“What’s pushing the grammar and syntax, the sounds, the images—is it the constriction of literalism, fundamentalism, professionalism—a stunted language? Or is it the great muscle of metaphor, drawing strength from resemblance in difference? The great muscle of the unconstricted throat? I’d like to suggest this: If there’s a line to be drawn, it’s not so much between secularism and belief as between  those for whom language has metaphoric density and those for whom it is merely formulaic–to be used for repression, manipulation, empty certitudes to ensure obedience. And such a line can also be drawn between ideologically obedient hack verse and an engaged poetics that endures the weight of the unknown, the untracked, the unrealized, along with its urgencies for and against.”

Here, in four gorgeous sentences, Rich captures a running problem and subdues its flailing limbs in turn. She understands, first, that most kinds of political engagement fosters—in its commitment to circumstance rather than language—the very problems it is trying to ameliorate. By privileging the specific problem or the system over the principle for arguing against it, Politics falls into a constricted language of dogma or efficiency and—even if it succeeds in solving something—does not create people who can solve for the same problems in the future. The language will be used repressively, manipulatively, coercively; even if it is used in the name of a good cause, it will fail the good cause by denying people the right to decide for themselves that it is good. Besides that, Rich suggests, the language of Political engagement is a language once-removed. The real language is a language moved by human urgency that, in its respect for that urgency, bears it amidst ambiguity, argument, and the circumstances that pull in every direction. The real language of poetry and religion sees the world as sacred. When that sacredness is violated, poets and prophets come ready to fight, not with punches, but with urgent words that fundamentally respect both the individual and the everybody—language that is radically committed to the one and the many at the same time, language that is tutored by that precise and radical commitment to both, language that will speak its urgency while realizing the thousand million perspectives that bring different urgencies to the reading. Poems and poets, prophecies and prophets all recognize urgency as our best response to the violation of the sacred. But, as Rich says, it must not abdicate its ambiguity and radical commitment to the flat, political language of political utility. It must attend to all difference to find the similarities capable of converting people to each other.

And this is not all. Rich is also saying that the whole revolution—the protection of the sacred—depends on good readers, people who are radically committed and feeling enough to keep a sense of urgency without collapsing their world.

The great risk taken by religion and poetry—the risk that politics is unwilling to take—is to speak in a language that can only be heard by the people who are sensitive enough to be affected by it. A prophet, for instance, cannot see the utility of demoting his language to achieve a certain goal (say, to get someone to stop smoking or to be peaceful and kind) because the sacredness created by the language is the goal itself. The goal, to put it in such crass terms, is to create a sacred world that would compel its inhabitants to evaluate everything in their lives in terms of that sacredness, not to achieve a piecemeal victory here or there. The consequence of this commitment to sacredness is vulnerability; it is the willingness to speak in a language that can be dismissed and mocked by everyone who has not voluntarily become meek, awe-struck and grateful enough to be moved by the sacred. It is a decision made knowingly, and what it knows is this: that its presence will only be appreciated by those who are sensitive enough to feel its loss. (Indeed, all of religion and poetry operate in this way. For instance, it is decidedly untrue to say that people without the gospel are necessarily unhappy—or that people who drink are not good or people who kill must be full of guilt. The fact is that our happiness and guilt is determined by our sensitivity. If we are not compelled by an initial feeling of sacredness, our decision to do or not do something is moot; if we are not moved by a holy desire, our doing something will bring us nothing but circumstantial perks and our not doing will bring us no more sorrow than lacing our shoes. Both are dead without sacredness; doing and not doing will amount to the same nothing.)

Prophets choose to speak in a way that could only reach the people who had decided to be tender, to care and exist at an acute enough level that words could change their worlds. Poets do this, too, and that is why we need so desperately to grow the world of people who care about poetry. The smallness of that group is not a preference, it is a sickness. It is a sign of what we value and what words can speak to us: flat, constricted words that see speaking as a formula. We need the words that can change hearts and then our hearts can expand our constricted throats. Religion and poetry have the power to speak with unrestricted throats, to speak humanly about human things, to find sacredness amidst real difference and to call people to that great sacredness in a way that politics can’t.

Rich also quotes Muriel Rukeyser, who says that poetry can be “an exchange of energy, which, in changing consciousness, can effect change in existing conditions.” Most people would laugh at this. Poetry change the world? Ha! But there is one thing about poetry: it works for itself. You can’t work for a poet, you can only be a poet, and that is no accident. Once a person works for someone else, she has power but also a constricted throat. A poet must work for himself in order to say all the brave words that he could not say working for someone else, all the words that would be forced to take a back seat to any particular agenda. Because of this, poetry is free to say the words that cannot be said elsewhere, to dwell in the holiness and never move beyond it. But it isn’t just poets who are poets. After all, I do not mean ‘poet’ in the sense of a vocation but, rather, as a way of seeing the world. To be a poet is to be a seer, and to be a seer is to practice politics as a human activity tied to the sacred experiences that motivated it. Where Politics fails, politics succeeds wildly—capable of saying the things that Politics forfeits in its move toward systems and power. The politics of individuals can, by speaking an effulgent poetry, talk about humans in the language of the humane, and this—not votes, not laws, not sixty in the Senate—is the first and ultimately only thing that can change our hearts enough to change our world.

Prophesy and poetry, religion and rhetoric: all have great power because all speak to the individual in urgency and sacredness, hoping not for his compromises and circumstances but for his conversion, his transformation into a new way of seeing. And, since religion is predicated on radical equality, it speaks to the individual without dividing him from an obligation to all creatures; it consecrates the individual’s actions by directing them toward the whole creation. It does not break down at the edge of families or nations or ideologies, but bursts through them with the swiftness of a person intent on blessing the whole world.

I believe in the politics of the individual body, the most basic body politic. And I believe in the larger body politic only if it is composed of a thousand brave political bodies—or, in other words, people who have chosen to speak with unconstricted throats—to see speaking as the fundamental act. I believe in the ideas that make people free to work and live for themselves, not in the selfish sense but in the most effulgent sense—to act in their own name in the name of others. I believe, finally, that all this is a religious or poetic way of seeing the world: one that gains urgency out of a sense of sacredness but does not flatten words to push circumstances over the point itself.

What’s a Metaphor, or Politics As Unusual Part III

Published at April 30, 2008 in Uncategorized. 6 Comments

I wrote the above under contention one: that some of our political language is learned, that it can be reformed. Journalists do not have to write criminally constricted essays or prop up a thousand bad assumptions. They could—and some of them do—begin to see their job as that of the responsible interpreter rather than the reporter, a job that demands the journalist to engage with his story: to offer context, history and ethical analysis so that readers can have enough information and indignation to respond to the events that need them.

But I also spoke of people in my office—informed, indignant people—who believe that politics is the solution to these problems. These people aren’t bad readers in the literal sense; they have read volumes, they see patterns in political history and they are committed to change. They represent something less immediately infuriating than constricted prose but ultimately more dangerous: unquestioning faith in a system—politics—that is (in my opinion) fundamentally constricted in its scope and moral power. These people are good readers inside the system but cannot read outside it—have no idea, even, that there are words outside their system that their system cannot say.

I hear these people answer their phones; I hear them explain why the Democrats this and the Republicans that and our candidate will this, that, and the other. (Be careful: I am not saying that I have become disillusioned with my job or the candidate I work for. I am saying, rather, that I am leery of politics as a form of secular salvation because I believe, most of the time, that we are using the wrong words to have the wrong conversations.) I see that politics, as a system, can flatten itself in an instant and become propaganda: taking beliefs that are based in common desires and problems and choosing one interpretation over another, arguing one side so tenaciously that all other sides become mysterious and completely Other, trying so hard to convince others of the supremacy of one opinion that the opinion loses all fallibility and subtlety whatsoever.

I spent time in my last post talking about people who call in about immigration. I could have picked any topic. The point is that every time I have tried to talk to these people in the language of politics I have been convinced that top-down politics is not enough: that it is not subtle enough, not historical enough, not personal enough, and certainly not ready enough to have conversations about its own methods and shortcomings. I have realized that Politics as a system, which I will forever distinguish from politics as a human activity (hereafter, big P and little p politics respectively), cannot speak in the language of human experience. Politics takes experiences and reduces them to things that can be quantified and made into policy. I have also realized that Politics, by virtue of having to win, convince, and speak to thousands of bad readers via bureaucracy, will constrict until it speaks in a stunted language of “professionalism”, “literalism” or “fundamentalism” that cannot possibly capture its own point. Top-down politics, in its frenzied attempts to galvanize people and get votes, will start speaking in the language of propaganda. By propaganda, I mean that it will speak with a practical urgency (the urgency of passing this or that bill) that ironically forgets the human urgency that it is addressing (poverty, inequality, hate, genocide). It will become so fixated on practical urgency that it will forget ambiguity and the unknown in every situation. It will speak the language of formula instead of the language of metaphor, and it will find only differences and create only chump change. It will be reduced to the myopia of incremental policy change, and it will forget the sacred and the unsayable and the humane in favor of cold law. In the end (which is obvious when looking at the Democratic Party) Politics will forget its principles (principles that are inherently pre-Political) and talk itself into a contradiction. In the name of slow policy change, it will defy its own platforms and, in the name of someday achieving its platforms, it will try to suppress the political—those who are still talking about the underlying principles—from using the language of equality and ethics to frustrate the slow march of policy. In other words, the ultimate expression of Politics is that the people can get what they want as long as they agree to not speak about it as an ethical issue. Slavery can be abolished, peace can be declared, and the environment can be saved as long as this is done in the language of utility and never in the language of fairness and worth.

It is precisely these people who believe that politics is complete and who deride poets and prophets and other word-users as impractical or entirely superfluous dreamers. These people are bad readers, not because they don’t read but because they believe that words are the servants of systems and not the other way around. They are not capable of seeing the ways in which the system collapses in on and fails itself, and they are not capable of looking for the words outside the system—words that the system cannot say. They do not read with the love of a narrator, looking for inconsistencies, subtleties, things beyond expression. They read and speak to coerce and convince, to get people to take on more step down a tunnel.
Since arriving in DC, I have been haunted by a quote from Adrienne Rich’s small book, Poetry and Commitment. I first had this book pressed into my hands by Elizabeth Pinborough, and then later by Chris Nielsen, both people who should know. They both wanted me to read it because they know my thoughts and they felt like it could be one answer to my very crucial question: how do you use words (or any art) to engage and confront injustice without falling into propaganda? Or, more precisely, what is the role of the poet in a world of pain and suffering? On a more subtle level, the question is whether there is something about reading the world poetically (or, I will add, prophetically) that allows us to do things that politicians cannot—that allows us, quite literally, to realize our small-p political visions?
My answer is yes, and I will explain it below. For now, I will say that I am convinced that poetry and religion are capable of affecting revolutions that politics cannot. I believe they are capable of this precisely because they do not revolt or reform but restore—restore people to their goodness, words to their power, and emotions to the sacred. I want to be very clear: I recognize emphatically that religion and poetry are equally if not more prone to propaganda as politics. I am not deluding myself into thinking of religion and poetry as pure forms of thought that people practice purely. Religion particularly is one of the most abused, flattened, and ill-treated concepts imaginable, and it is obvious that millions of people misuse it. When I use the words ‘religion’ and ‘poetry’ then, I am using those words to signify a possible way of seeing the world. I am using those words for the possibilities they contain, not the realities they frequently produce.

What’s a Meta-Phor? Or, Politics as Unusual: Part II

Published at April 24, 2008 in Uncategorized. 10 Comments

Here’s to an insanely long continuation of the metaphor blog, in to-be-continued sections. Just had to get it out my head, you know…

About a month ago, I wrote a blog post about how the gospel needs good readers. I was making the argument that good reading—of scriptures, of people, and of the world—is vital to living, rather than collapsing, the gospel. I accidentally used the word “intellect” (and its formidable derivative, “intellectualism”) to stand in for the concept of good reading. Many people skewered me for that, claiming that I shouldn’t sic my mental hobbies on others and that being a Mormon did not require the intellect—that I was arrogant to suggest it.

Either I misrepresented myself or, ironically, I was misread. I think it was a bit of both. Whatever it was, I have been thinking of this post every day for the past month, this time in a new light. I have been thinking of it in the light of politics and good reading. (Before anyone misinterprets the phrase, I will say that “good reading” cannot be reduced to literacy skills; by it, I mean the ability to see the world feelingly, to be attentive and to accept ambiguity, to notice and to see connections between things.) I should have been thinking about this because I field calls all day long from people whose bad reading has caused them to interpret the world in woefully contradictory ways, and to do great harm with their thinking. When we are in the middle of an economic crisis, for instance, and people can think of nothing more than to throw $500 at every human they see—when they say nothing of how we got into this problem in the first place, or examine our misbegotten premises or our sacred ‘right’ to consume more goods—I am living the direct consequence of politicians who use too few and too poor words. 

But it is, as I said in my last post, not just a problem of individuals but a problem with the limits of language in politics. It isn’t just that I sit all day and field calls from bad readers—people who haven’t read enough, or observed carefully, or imagined themselves in different situations—but also that I spend all day with people who believe that politics alone is the solution to the problem.

Once again, my disagreement occurs at two levels.

1.       On the first level, I believe that our constricted political language can be reformed. It isn’t inherent, in other words; it is learned. I am confronted with this kind of learned constricted language—this kind of cramped reading and speaking—every time I pick up a Time or a Newsweek.  For instance: I read Time’s account of the protests against Musharraf several months ago and felt nauseated. Here was one of America’s lead journalists, waxing on about Musharraf without saying a single thing of importance. Instead of questioning the assumptions of power politics and accurately portraying the motives of the protesting lawyers, the writer reported the news like a tired, small-town waitress rattling off specials and ended with banal prescriptions for U.S. foreign policy: In order to maintain its power, the US should accept Musharraf as a strong-man ruler and get everything they could out of him.

 

      No matter that people were dying in the streets. No matter that Pakistan was exploding. No matter that we were at war in the supposed name of democracy while foiling another country’s fight to preserve it. No matter that economic interest had become a completely legitimate reason for allowing immense suffering and injustice. No matter that there were a thousand stories underneath the official one—a thousand lawyers who could say exactly why they were on the streets and exactly what was being taken from them—who could not get an audience. No matter that there were a thousand longer stories that outstretched the news moment—important information about U.S. interventions into foreign countries, information about its mercurial allegiances to democracies and dictatorships, information about the ways in which leaders have undermined their own judicial systems and for what reasons and with what consequence, information that could have contextualized the story and allowed a reader to make an educated judgment. No matter that the whole account was crying out for ethical analysis, for a journalist’s informed and rigorous interpretation.

 

No matter, precisely because we see news-reporting and politics as siblings and overlook their family defects. No matter, because we now see it as biased or superfluous to do anything but report in the most deficient sense: to say merely what happened without saying why or what for, disregarding history and common themes. No matter, because politics and news-reporting are designed to perpetuate the myths that keep our news from morally affecting us: the myth of realpolitik, the myth of America’s “original sinlessness,” the myth that we do things for a million reasons but that the rest of the world does things for no real reason at all. No matter, because the official story is the only one we consider news-worthy, while the real stories of the real people involved—people who could speak candidly and with heart—are noise. No matter, because the entire point of being a mainstream journalist seems merely to shuffle around old ideas on an industry-approved checkerboard. No matter, because we’ve decided that whatever basic logic holds in personal interactions—understanding why someone did something, how we might be at fault, what the right thing is to do—is irrelevant in politics or political writing, with the consequence that the basic emotions motivating Iraqi insurgents or Pakistani lawyers become shrouded in artificial mystery. No matter that these basic emotions are the real news, the things that could get us to understand each other’s motives and resolve our differences; no matter that the real bias in news is to so woefully under-report reality that people doing exactly what we would do in their situations become mysterious and absurd to us. No matter that all of this leads to the most frightening consequence of all: propaganda—a world of news that is forever proving its own interpretations, a world of news without history or empathy, a world that flattens every world but its rhetorically inflated one, a world that can never be wrong, a world whose supposed wrongness only confirms the miscalculations or wrongness of others, a world in which bad reading and constricted interpretation are rewarded as objectivity, a world in which words have no power but to manipulate others into fortifying the borders of that world, a a world in which all words are formulas and real stories are reduced to allegories with over-obvious symbols and a misbegotten moral. A world in which stories are so flat and calculated that they have no moral power. In other words, a world in which metaphor has been reduced to propaganda, a world in which the differences between us no longer remind us that we are the same—the fundamental task of the metaphor.

 

And is it any wonder, given words like this, that people call my office to decry the immigrant, so uninformed about the history of corporate power and globalization that they blame the wrong people, so seduced by bordered ideas that they believe in the idea of a border, so convinced of their own history-less American-ness that they assume nativity, and so ravaged by so-called news that the honestly believe that they would not, if their children were starving, cross any border and take any job to get them food? So convinced by amnesiac, constricted, bland propaganda that they can no longer measure the differences between themselves and the immigrant in similarities?

 

People tell me that words are just words, and that they don’t really matter. Action is what matters, and politics is action. The above is my first counter-argument, my avowal that words have power to create the reality that action labors under. And my argument is, by extension, that it is imperative to get those words right so that our actions aren’t misdirected.

To be continued….

What’s a Meta-Phor? Or, Politics as Unusual

Published at April 12, 2008 in Uncategorized. 12 Comments

By now, most of you know that I have moved to Washington, DC to work as the office manager on Ralph Nader’s presidential campaign. Now that we’ve gotten that mouthful of bureaucratery out of the way, I can use it as an excuse for not writing for so long. It is a hardship: I have never had more thoughts but also never less time. But today the thoughts are screaming and they must fly out.

I am tempted to explain everything I have felt since I moved out here, and then I am tempted to go into great detail about my job and what I do there and exactly what I think of those things I do. I am forcing myself not to do that, however. I will say, merely, that since I have been out here I have been thinking hourly about the poverty of politics—what it can but mostly what it cannot do. I have been thinking about religion as the real and poetry as restoration. I hope I can explain.

Three things:

1.      I ride the bus to work. I bring books to read. One is Mills’ On Liberty, which we can talk about tomorrow. The second is Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, which we’ll need to talk about right now. Maybe you haven’t read Klein. And maybe—if you are prone to despairing on buses—you shouldn’t. It is a complicated book, but it spends most of its pages chronicling the tandem relationship between free market fundamentalism and torture—between economic and physical trauma. That’s the thesis, but not my point. My point is the artist the Argentine junta locked in a coffin for so long that he forgot about color. My point is the man dropped from a government plane with his belly cut: desaparecido. My point is the writing on the walls of a torture chamber discovered in the corner of a glitzy mall in Buenos Aires: words like ‘help,’ or perhaps a name, compelled to scrawl itself to no one.  My point is that I have spent the last fourteen mornings reading about people being brutalized in the name of a certain political and economic ideology. I have, in other words, spent my mornings learning how real human beings suffer in the name of something imagined, how humans—somewhere-somethings—suffer in the name of ideas—nowhere-somethings.

2.      When I get off the bus, I am at work. This is where I answer phones all day, from people who find the campaign number and call. They call to tell me they are poor and don’t know when they’ll eat again. They call to tell me they are losing a mountain or a stream that no one can bring back, yes-ma’am-amen-Jesus. They call to say ‘Iran’ out loud, to send me Rumi quotes. They call because they are voiceless. They call to say words like ‘help,’ compelled to scrawl their names to someone.

3.      But some people do not call for this reason. About thirty-five people call about immigration. They start out nice enough: “What is your policy?” I talk about NAFTA and corporate welfare; I repeat the phrase ‘root of the problem’ until it is ash in my mouth. But they are not satisfied. They are labor leftists who see the world through the backward telescope of wages. They are for solidarity bound on all sides by the idea of a nation. Immigrants aren’t from that nation, and so it follows that no solidarity is left for them. They tell me: “Tell your man to send them all back. Tell them to send those job-robbers packing.” I sit in my chair, nearly crying. I want to stand up, un-chaired, and say all the words I have, to break through the language of wages in a fury of sprinting. To be a human. But as surely as I sit in my chair, the protocol demon sits on my shoulder, telling me I work for someone else, telling me I am not free to use words, telling me to say ‘NAFTA’ and ‘root of the problem’ until there is no blood left in the room. And then no one is satisfied: the leftist hangs up and I sit, rebuking myself in my chair. But last Tuesday? I couldn’t please the demon. Somewhere after the third NAFTA, I lost it. “Because they are human beings.” I said, this time beginning to sprint. “Because your nation is fake and your wages are even faker and your proposed wall is the realest consequence of believing in all that fake!” All that fake, I should have said, over real flesh. But I didn’t, and it was just as well, because the man had some words for me—words about insolence and never voting for Nader again.

I have learned that a nation, simply defined, is a collection of tragedies that cannot be told in the language they happened in—in a language that is above and beyond the nation itself. A nation is the cork in the narrowing neck of language, a backward telescope with the lens stopped up. I have learned that true politics cannot speak in the language of government without silencing tragedy and joy. I have learned that true politics must speak a language both smaller and bigger than the nation to keep the nation from being bigger than its people. And since the only thing that is truly bigger than the nation is the human, I have learned that true politics must be radically humane. This is because humans, unlike nations, can speak in the voice that things happen in. Unlike politicians (and even less like people who answer phones for politicians), humans are radically free to set the limits of the language, and this language, if spoken fervently, can reframe the acceptable territory of institutional politics. The ongoing confrontation between humans and the limits of politics is radical in the truest sense: it forever acknowledges and challenges the limits of the political language, and it does so full-throated, in the language of a sacred happening.

Soon, I will take a two-month leave from my political job to do two months of intensive writing in the bluffs of Utah and Santa Fe. The bosses know this, and they have to let me go because I told them about it from the beginning. But they are confused: “Why do creative writing when the action is here?” Because for them, the action is here and words are just words, dull things for convincing people. I tell them I have to go because I promised, but that isn’t the truth. The truth is that I must go. The truth, at least my portion of it, is that words are the strongest things in the world. No, stronger than that: The truth is that words create worlds, that they are great fictions that become realer than the fictitious systems that threaten them.  Words are covenants that humans make with the real; politics is a contract that governments make with ideas.  Politics cannot speak; politics can only repeat. It is a fundamentally constricted language. Quite literally economic, it is as small as its public can afford and as systematic as a formula. Even if it would rather not, it speaks in the accent of money.

The truth is that politics desperately needs our best speaking so that it can do its best doing. Some people will deride the speaking, wanting to skip straight to what they call the action. Anything that is not practical is, for them, a superfluous hobby. But no one knows better than the pragmatist the prison-house of wordless doing—the house that is as small as the doing and can go no further. The practical politician must sit in chairs and listen while someone reduces immigration to economics, and the most he can do is talk about NAFTA. He will be forced to speak about the problem at whatever level the real-throated have demanded; he is a slave to their ceiling and the boundary of their words. He will be forced, even against his will, to talk about the problems in terms of systems rather than individual humans—in terms of logic rather than in terms of sacred worth. Ironically, he will become as bounded by his boundaries (national, ideological, rhetorical) as the immigrant; he will suffer the boundaries that bind him to bind people who are bound for something better; in so doing, he too will be bound.

It is not that the politician is bad. It is precisely that he is only as good as his people. These people, speaking freely, can give each new topic the subtlety, carefulness, and sacredness it deserves. The politician, as part of a system, is free only to practice politics as usual—the politics of formulas, common denominators, averages. It isn’t evil that gives rise to politics as usual. Politics, as a system, can only speak of the usual—what can be mapped, charted, ensured. Radical politics—the politics of individuals speaking bravely—is precisely the opposite. In its very nature it is politics as unusual, not just because it questions Politics but because it can see human beings as sacred individuals who are themselves unusual. This is powerful, since the unusual is the language of both tragedy and joy, and ethics is the language of unusual response. To Greek it up a little: Big P Politics is classically limited so that little p politics can be romantically unlimited—so that little p politicians can use the noble fiction of words as a faith against the fictions that threaten the natural hope of words. 

Clearly I am not finished yet. I said I wanted to talk about religion and poetry as political saviors (quite literally, forces that save us not in but from our politics). I have not done that, nor have I really connected the last part of this essay with the parts about torture at the beginning. That will happen in part two, which is a more direct collection of ideas on the shortcoming s of politics.

My Ninety-Five Theses, or Everyone Needs a Door in Wittenberg

Published at March 25, 2008 in Uncategorized. 16 Comments

In 1546, Martin Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses on the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg. Now it’s 2008, but theses—posted or unposted—are still a good thing to have. In my conversations about my religion, I have encountered certain platitudes several times. After hearing some of them for the last bearable time, I decided to write a couple of my own theses against ideas that threaten what I see as my religion.

Here is the first, posted (doorless) in way Luther could only have dreamed about.

Church is for the Simple:

By now, many who read my blog are familiar with my opinions on a host of religious topics, particularly the sanctity of conscience and the intellect. If you are like me, you have also probably heard the inevitable comebacks: that the Church is for the weak and simple and that intellectualizing endangers it. Most likely someone has countered your requests for an intellectually robust gospel (de-baggage the word, please) with the classic image of a penniless, illiterate widow in the slums of Manila. The conclusion is obvious: the gospel is for her. And how could we ask this poor, penniless woman for a sharp-toothed mind? How could we ask her to cut through conceptual meat when she doesn’t have meat to eat? She is barely surviving! She needs the milk of the gospel, and she needs it fast.

Maybe so. Maybe this woman’s life is so tragic and perverse that she needs to simply know that God lives and loves her. Before that, even, she needs a full stomach and something in her wallet. I believe these things. I believe them because I believe that bearers of good news should recognize the bearing capacity of their listeners; we do and should tailor the gospel message (and any other message) to the immediate needs and limitations of our audience.

But the way that people invoke the widow counter-argument frightens me because it privileges one narrative over another; it reduces the bearing capacity of one type of member to cater to the bearing capacity of another type. In essence, I believe that the way we invoke the ‘new members/penniless widow’ argument reveals more than we wish about how we value and conceive of our religion.Presumably, when we make the widow argument, we are emphasizing that each member of the Church is different and deserves unique treatment. We are also suggesting that there is a category of members—i.e. poorer, new, or less educated members—who require a different gospel message than other categories of members. Both these arguments suggest that the gospel works for everyone and that the different approaches to it will eventually merge into the same religious experience.

I disagree with both the assumptions and the likelihood of the expected outcome. I will start by explaining the latter opinion and end by explaining the former.

When we say that different kinds of religious strains will merge into a common experience, we are basically suggesting that—one fine day—a new convert will finish her glass of gospel milk and suddenly reach for the meat. Years of milk drinking, in other words, will have prepared her to stomach the heavy stuff. It also suggests that mature or experienced Church members will never eat their meat without their milk—that they will supplement their hard thinking and philosophical digestion with the basic principles of love and repentance. Sounds good in theory. The reality, however, is that we emphasize the milk so much that we effectively prohibit any movement toward the meat. To misuse an old standby, we create a milk ceiling between one level of the gospel and another—an opaque barrier that keeps us housed in horizontal rooms. Repeatedly invoking the penniless widow, we have given her no place to go when she overcomes her adjectives. We have made the gospel into a point rather than a vector with speed and direction, a dot to balance on in tiptoe rather than a moving line that takes us toward God.

The problem is that we have sacralized our limitations and made those limitations into a gospel, the good news of it being that we never have to struggle with big ideas. By doing so, we have not only insulted huge swaths of people—suggesting, condescendingly, that their poverty makes their minds impossible things—we have invented a gospel that will fail its basic principles. We have invented a gospel that is artificially self-limiting, a gospel that has come to prize self-limitation as one of its core virtues.

The obvious criticism is that this hurts the members who want more from the gospel, who are trying to live it to its fullest intellectual, ethical and theological extent. This is true; asserting an over-simplistic gospel not only decimates the argument that the gospel is for everyone (since it really caters to one type of convert); it also actively discourages thoughtful inquiry by making the thoughtful member’s virtues into vices. And so it is that it suddenly becomes proud to want more from the gospel, elitist to ask good questions, faithless to criticize, and extreme to interpret radical precepts radically. Compensating for the decline of these maligned virtues is a host of manufactured virtues geared toward survival and normalcy. And thus, bad reading becomes faith, convention becomes obedience, and preemptive certitude is humility

That provincialism hurts the non-provincial is, like I said, the obvious criticism. But this criticism itself is too narrow. To criticize naivety by invoking the rights of the sophisticated not only builds a false hierarchy of religious classism, it also assumes that intellectualism is a hobby like any other. It suggests, in others words, that some Church members like soccer, jigsaw puzzles and petty truths while other members prefer crossword puzzles, golf and thinking. The great success of any religious crusade against intellectualism is to make intellectualism into a hobby or a consequence of wealth. This crusade is especially ironic, since it is most frequently waged by people whose middle class interests require them to antagonize intellectuals to defend their hobbies and wealth. The success of this crusade is very important to vested interests, for it only after the crusade succeeds that the vested can argue away the intellectuals. Only after intellectualism is turned into an elitist hobby can people lecture intellectuals against imposing their thinking on others, as if the intellectual were asking that every new member play croquet or win at Scrabble. When thinking is seen as a hobby, a thinking gospel will seem a dangerous pastime.

But because thinking is not a hobby—because real religious life requires a tremendous amount of thought and thoughtfulness—the milk ceiling hurts more than thinkers: it hurts the whole Church and religion itself. To pretend that religion is simply a lifestyle or a regimen—to say that the signs of conversion would be a white shirt or an edited movie or the simple absence of alcohol—is to grossly misunderstand the agony, conflict and trepidation of a real religious quest. Religion as a regime won’t save anyone, and only thoughtfulness can save religion from regimen. The heart is important, yes, but the heart without the mind is a dangerous thing.

You might disagree, say: the heart is the instrument of religion! I will not argue using facile invectives against irrationality. I will say, instead, that the heart is often only as big as the ideas that house it, and it can easily keep the wrong things alive. The heart can do profound work, it’s true—it can grow straight out of a rotten ideology—but it is more often confined by the interpretive frameworks that tell it when and where and how to do its job. In the Church, we often speak as if charity were the same as love or long-suffering when it is routinely separated from those words in scriptural lists. Charity does not mean having thoughts as wide as love; charity means expanding our thoughts until they require everything from our hearts. Love is not the antidote to regimen. Only charity, seeking for truth in all places, can avoid the dangers of a preferential heart. Seeking real truth, rather than seeking allegiance, requires the mind and a most brutal consciousness.

Our missionary program tells us more about what kind of religion we value than almost any of our other institutions. And it is clear that the missionary program overwhelmingly prefers regime over mind. If the discussions are coins in the most valuable currency we have to exchange, then we are suffering from the worst kind of inflation; we can buy almost nothing with our ideas. We have decided, arbitrarily, to trade mainly in platitudes and behavior change. Dealing in sales, we produce converts that look like market products: remarkable similar, unambiguous icons of a certain belief set. There is no room in this process for the unfinished—for what cannot readily appear—and so we constrict our discussions to regimens and exclude the kind charity that overflows regimens and bounds. It is in this way that we can tell the Manila widow that we need her abstinence but not her mind, presumably because we include abstinence in what we call the core of the gospel while relegating intelligence to a waiting room. But there is a question here that is begging to get out: why is thinking not included in the core of our religion? Why is it less important than a regimen marker? Why is it something that can wait, as if it is a final embellishment or a curtsy rather than the point itself?

I believe that religion needs our minds: all of all of our minds. Without this, the religion becomes a lifestyle rather than a probing question, and charity falls to allegiance. The meat–never a side dish in the first place–will be perpetually deferred to make way for a new milk religion that, by deferring meat, becomes as small as the cup holding it. My next post will contine this theme, getting more specific about the consequences of deferring the mind. In the meantime, I will end this, the first of several Lutheran theses.

Deception, or Shakespeare Takes the Discussions, Act I

Published at March 11, 2008 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment

This post is also availabe at By Common Consent, where I am a guest blogger for two weeks. 

Prologue

In my last few blogs, I have been arguing for conscience as a birthright. But, as my friend George reminded me, “a defense of conscience must also answer the problem of deception”–more specifically, self-deception. He is right. Having created a post title that sounds like a cross between a Jane Austen novel and a Mormon tabloid, I will ply Shakespeare to reckon between perspicacity and perspective. An essay, in five acts.

Act I

Two weeks ago, I saw Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Pioneer Theatre Company. The next night, I went again. It was not just the puckish (literally) fairies and delightfully dim-witted tradesman that required my second patronage; it was that the play was not finished with me, and I could tell. There was something nagging in it, some mirthful, mouthing truth that walks behind the comedies, making faces at predicament. I have noticed the same nag in Much Ado About Nothing, and felt the grim version while reading the tragedies. What was it? I went back to find out.

If you don’t know the story of Midsummer Night’s Dream, you should read it. In the meantime, I’ll help you out: it’s about fairies hexing fairies and courtiers and queens falling for donkeys and everyone getting supremely deluded about who they actually love and what is actually real, while the unseen fairy Puck flies about, confusing everything and then trying to right it all again. The whole mess ends with a play-within-a-play, in which provincial tradesman perform a ‘great drama’ for amused courtiers. The tradesman’s play is, of course, the ultimate in buffoonery—people who think they are wise spewing clichés and otherwise overdoing things—and includes the arch-dupe Bottom, who refers to his stint as a donkey (another of Puck’s hexes) as a great vision that he can’t seem to match with words. The play is watched by patrons of the court, including several couples recently recovered from Puck’s love-hexes (which had caused them to fall in and out of love with each other several times). The patrons spend the tradesman’s play in mocking, delighted at the stupidity of the so-called actors and chortling over their attempts to ‘create’ reality in the form of an illusion: the illusory-real, a play.

The play ends with fairy Puck’s synopsis, which is fitting. After all, the whole comedy has consisted of people mocking people who appear to know less than they do, all the while being meta-mocked by the reality-fairies and the more-knowing of the play and audience. According to Shakespeare, then, the greatest buffoonery is not to be a tradesman, but to be a mocker. The greatest buffoonery is to believe that one has escaped the limitations of perspective and is operating according to reality. Thus, the disdainful courtiers are more stupid than the tradesman precisely because they think they are smarter. As an audience to buffoonery, they have forgotten that they are buffoons to the audience watching them.

Upon second viewing, I started to understand: the Old Bard was trying to teach me something about self-deception. And while Shakespeare isn’t exactly taking the discussions, his comedy should certainly start some, especially amongst religious people. And so, a story: about learning how to be Mormon from a man who never was.

Deception, or Shakespeare Takes the Discussions, Act II

Published at March 11, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

I said I would be talking about the relationship between conscience and self-deception, which is really a discussion about criticism and deception, since people with sharp consciences feel compelled to criticize in the name of truth. This is particularly true in religion—for our purposes, Mormonism—in which the subject of truth is paramount and people must criticize in order to preserve it. These critics are often hounded. They are told: lay off, be positive, drown critique in kindness. This poor kind of guidance led me to write posts on the importance of conscience, since it is clear that these directives ignore the very real task of judgment and belittle agency in favor of allegiance. But many advocates of conscience are similarly amiss. This crowd often equates integrity with questioning and conscience with critique, as if those things were secure and enough by themselves. They are right in the motives for critique, but they are often wrong in their method—more particularly, because of their confidence in their method.

Midsummer’s play-within-a-play takes both crowds to task, showing the exposure to deception in both. Interestingly, Shakespeare does not seem to suggest that the courtiers shouldn’t criticize the play; indeed, it seems they should. The tradesman’s play is an insult on every front: over-obvious, simplistic, and devoid of subtlety. The tradesmen, afraid that their audience will not understand their metaphors (that a man, for instance, will be dressed as a wall) or be disturbed by the frightening parts (a man dressed up as a lion) decide to write a prologue for every metaphor, ensuring that the audience will not miss any of the lessons they are designed to communicate.Any Mormon who has attended church, Institute, or General Conference will find the tradesmen’s pedagogy too familiar: a criminal lack of subtlety, an abundant fear of ambiguity, a penchant for overwrought metaphors, and a generally low estimation of the audience’s capacity for discretion. In these instances, the play’s illusion is not real enough to outdo reality; by poorly mimicking life, it has nothing beyond it to offer. It is not moral: the illusion does not expand what we consider to be ‘real.’ Shakespeare’s courtiers sense the same things, and so they critique the play and call it poor.If plays teach us anything, then, it is this: that obviousness is immoral. By trying to name everything, the tradesmen have defied the morality of fiction and also crossed the formidable Alan Badiou, who warns us that “Evil is the will to name at any price . . . the desire for Everything-to-be-said.” The desire of fiction, on the other hand, is to highlight “the unnamable,” which Badiou claims “frees the destructive capacity in all truth.” For a Mormon, these seem to be strange definitions of evil; after all, evil is stealing or lying or doing drugs! But it is precisely Mormons who most need this definition. We are a people whose sinfully easy notions of evil have motivated the crime of provincialism. Oddly, in desiring to name everything, our moral speeches and talks have propelled rather than prevented the destructive capacity of truth.

Shakespeare surely recognized this, and seems to defend his courtiers in their critique; after all, the play really is bad! And thank goodness for his permission, since criticism is both a responsibility and a right. But Shakespeare is obviously criticizing the courtiers just as much as, if not more than, the tradesmen. At least the tradesmen are sincere—bumbling, yes, but also earnest. Perhaps their uneducated earnestness is dangerous, but Shakespeare seems to consider it less dangerous than the courtier’s hypocrisy. After all, almost everyone watching the play has just finished acting like fools in the name of love; Puck’s spells had changed their reality, and their resulting limited perspective made them mad mis-interpreters, fawners, idiots. They should have learned something from love—perhaps their ability to be deceived?—but they didn’t. We are left appropriately wondering what kind of love they are in. Probably not much, if they can’t admit their own hypocrisy.

And so: If audiences teach us anything, it is that we are always part of one and always being watched by one. Criticizing the one we are watching is fine if we accept being criticized by the one watching us. If the tradesmen’s sin was naming at any price, the courtiers have their own version: they will to criticize at any price and the desire for Everything-to-be-scanned. Everything, that is, except themselves. And so the courtiers, too, commit a crime against the morality of fiction. They forget that they are characters rather than narrators, and that their perspective is always being out-perspectived somewhere else by someone else. Their attempts to narrate from the limits of their perspective constricts their criticism and makes it suspect. They avoid simplistic and overwrought truth, but they also suppress the unnamable until it no longer names them. They cannot be convicted—not by others, and certainly not by themselves—and so they have lost their moral power to judge. Even Bottom, the tradesmen’s swaggering anti-savant, knows two things the courtiers don’t. First, he knows he is an actor and he tries (albeit too hard!) to convince people he is something he is not. Second, he knows he can’t name everything: he tried to explain his experience as a donkey and failed. The courtiers, on the other hand, don’t even know they’re something they think they aren’t, and they cannot even remember their visions (delusions) long enough to think twice about the supremacy of their opinions. The courtiers have no memory and no sense of audience: they do not remember making the mistakes they criticize and they do not feel exposed to a wider perspective. In other words, they are deceived. They are unreliable critics.

Deception, or Shakespeare Takes the Discussions, Act III

Published at March 11, 2008 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment

King Theseus comes closest to articulating the predicament when he tells his new wife (with shining condescension) that “The lunatic, the lover and the poet/ Are of imagination all compact.” These three perspectives are similar because they all see more than mere reason can; the first two are similar because they are capable of great deception and great insight. The poet, however, is a chronicler of deception: aware enough of his own to see others’. Poetry is the desired state of imagination because it is a fiction that makes the world more real; it is true enough to life that it becomes greater than it, out-perspectiving life in its awareness of perspective. But, interestingly, poetry is not the means to poetic perspective. Love is. And that is why Shakespeare has so much to teach us about Mormonism (or any religion) and that is why both religion and poetry, in their proper state, have so much to teach us about self-deception.

Good religion teaches us to be madmen and lovers, and then to write good poetry. It is impossible to do the latter before you have been the former. That is a secret. But, as Shakespeare and Mormonism both show us, love and lunacy have dangerous bellies. Both can persuade one to ignore facts, to be selfish, jealous, to speak one’s own insular language. Both are deeply capable of idiotic or egotistic self-deception—an impassioned refusal not just to be criticized, but to acknowledge that there are even critics or reasons for critique. The lunatic can create a universe of one; the lover, of two.

We can see love’s deception all over in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Helena loves Demetrius despite the fact that he abandoned and despises her. Demetrius loves Hermia more each time she snubs him, and Hermia loves Lysander because he dotes on her. Lysander, for his part, loves Hermia because . . . because . . . because? And then, just as suddenly and with as little logic, Puck mis-hexes them and Lysander hates Hermia to love Helena and Demetrius follows suit, Hermia hates Helena and Helena hates them all for (she thinks) playing a trick on her. The new love-spell isn’t that much more confusing than the original state of affairs—both seem motivated by delusion and selfishness, and both lack reasons at the bottom.

It is for these same reasons that Mormon critics often critique Mormonism. Compelled by God-love, Mormonism can dismiss both fact and detractor to persist in certain unreasonable perspectives. Like a lover, it can love an idea for very little reason and, simplifying it through worship, can cause great harm. It often communicates in an insular language of defense (provided it knows that there is an audience to defend against at all). These are real and important reasons to critique Mormonism and—like Shakespeare’s courtiers—we should. We should critique anything that harms truth and infantilizes people.

Too often, however, critics recognize the danger of love and lunacy and reject it, replacing the danger with a rationality just as deluded. They recognize the danger of love, yes, but they also forget its power to see more than what appears, and so they hunker down in an impoverished rationality that—far from transcending the limitations of perspective—simply ignores it. In place of love and lunacy, critics venerate ethics. Truth, in turn, becomes a way to ensure ethics—a factual accounting that keeps us from doing harm. But these kinds of critics are just as deceived as lovers, perhaps even more so. They have replaced the view from somewhere with a view from nowhere and traded devotion for ‘objectivity.’ They do not understand that they are, or have been, or will someday be implicated in the very swooning they reject, and that they are constantly implicated anyway by having a perspective. Because they rarely acknowledge their hypocrisy and perspective, they reject poetry in favor of law. They have judgment, yes, but it is punitive and blind, unable to acknowledge self, hypocrisy, and circumstance.

So love has its dangers, but both Shakespeare and religion champion the danger. It isn’t that either is oblivious to love’s shortcomings; both plainly see love’s failings, the abuse it causes, and the likelihood that people will abuse it. And yet both Shakespeare and religion seem to suggest it is our only way out—the way out that leads perpetually back in.

Deception, or Shakespeare Takes the Discussions, Act IV

Published at March 11, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

But how does love help us to avoid deception? Specifically, how is religion’s commandment of love the physic for a quarantined perspective? Surely it isn’t just a flowers-and-bunny’s setup; there must be something in the nature of love that confronts the problem of knowledge.

It is interesting to note that Shakespeare respects fiction’s moral ambiguity and leaves things nice and complicated. Though he might be advocating for love as deception’s anecdote, his play’s curtain falls on still-deceived lovers—the same lovers who criticize the tradesmen’s play. These lovers—Helena and Demetrius, Hermia and Lysander—still suffer from love’s delusions but don’t even see themselves as deluded. This doesn’t mean, however, that we should discard love. In fact, a careful viewing of the play (say, for the second time in two nights?) should show us precisely what kind of love to discard. I said earlier that the courtiers loved each other, and were thereby deluded. It is more correct to say, however, the courtiers loved themselves first and were therefore deluded again in romance. Similarly, in the paragraph about religion, I said that God-love led to dangers; I think it is more true that self-love used God to commit a sin against knowledge. Shakespeare’s lovers are deluded before Puck ever hexes them; they are deluded because their love for each other is really a runaway love of self. After Puck hexes them, their love get criss-crossed, and its purposeless seems absurd; it is easy to compare it to irrational faith and God-worship: groundless, reasonless, and persisting despite all reasons to the contrary. In truth, though, it is no more absurd then self-love masquerading as romance (falling-into-self confused for falling-in-love) or hypocrisy posing as worship.

In the end, everyone gets the dreamboat and they all float away on happily-ever-after. But the predicament is unsolved and the lovers—as made obvious when they mock the tradesmen’s play—are still deceived hypocrites. What the lovers never accomplish is a religious kind of love, which is precisely the kind of love that cures self-deception. And religious love does not only cure the deception of romance, but also of criticism.

Loving religiously requires loving a third party as much or much more than one loves oneself, to see God as an audience who knows more and to see ourselves as actors pursuing an illusion to become, oddly, more authentic. It is surprising how much this love resembles the lessons of theatre and fiction:

First, any religious person must reckon with the problem of illusion and metaphor; one must ask what is real and if one has been convinced enough by words to learn a new perspective. Have the words been true and subtle enough that they outdo the perspective of immediacy? Is the fiction of scripture both impassioned and restrained enough to offer the truth without naming the unnamable? Is the illusion real enough to make one true? If the answer is yes, one agrees to love. If it isn’t, one must determine how to supplement love with criticism and criticism with love.

Second, a religious person is always acutely aware of audience. Prayer, for instance, is nothing less than a monologue to the invisible, a plea to be narrated by a poet who knows more perspectives than one’s own. To pray is, quite metaphorically, to break down the famed fourth wall and admit once and perpetually that knowing is always part of a more-knowing, a God-audience with great perspective. To speak a monologue, in prayer or in play, is to realize that there is something out there to speak to—something that needs our explanation. That is religion and theatre’s great starting place.

Third, a religious person recognizes that there is someone—some God, some fairy, some magic—behind the rationality and knowledge she supposes to have earned. When Demetrius falls for Helena, for instance, he probably believes he is deciding to do so for good reason. He probably even believes he is rational. He isn’t; his experiences are simply flush with his knowledge. The audience knows his rationality is actually Puck’s mischief. But the real lesson, and the one known by the devout, is that truth and reality are functions of mood, and that mood—while possible to regulate—is not possible to choose. Mood is a room with small truths inside it, walls and hallways to other rooms.

But more than anything, religious love cures deception by requiring us to love God more than we love ourselves and others, or more precisely, to love ourselves and others by loving God. I said love would cure deception, but I don’t mean it will get rid of it. Love cures us of deception by making us notice it, by insisting that it will never go away. The commandment to love God, then (or, theatrically, to love our audience), is a clue to solving the problem of knowledge. It is trying to tell us that we will never escape perspective. Consequently, it is trying to teach us that conscience will never be enough. Conscience is only reliable when its sense of duty matches actual obligations. If conscience relies only on itself, we might think that we are true (that our sense of duty matches with our real obligations) when we are actually solipsistic—when our experiences are merely flush with what we count as real. The commandment to love is the great commandment of non-alignment: it requires us to love something that isn’t ourselves so that we cannot be deceived by the solipsism of conscience.

 We must love a God that is different enough than we are—who loves people we don’t love, who asks for things we cannot give, who stays when we wish he’d go—in order to reckon with perspective. In the process (and in the attendant process of loving other people) we learn our power to deceive ourselves. We learn that our perspective must be constantly amended by the perspective of others, and that our consciences must be the result of that loving confusion.

Deception, or Shakespeare Takes the Discussions, Act V

Published at March 11, 2008 in Uncategorized. 6 Comments

We also learn one more crucial lesson from love. This lesson is one that Shakespeare lets us learn from Helena and God lets us learn from worship. And it is this: throughout the play, Helena loves Demetrius. She starts by loving him for specific reasons, but when he abandons her and loves someone else, she persists. At first, this persistence seems childish and undignified. And it is; it really partly is. But there is something strange about Helena. Even after Puck hexes two desirable men (Lysander and Demetrius) into loving her—even after she believes everyone is mocking her and her friends abandon her—she still chooses Demetrius. She still loves him. Now, we could make a thousand arguments about why this is: perhaps she has no self-esteem, or is certainly irrational, or that her worship has made Demetrius into a false god. And in the beginning, Shakespeare does seem to be making fun of Helena’s childish professions (protestations) of love. But we also know that Helena used to love Demetrius and he used to love her back. And so, while her actions seem laughable or irrational to us they are rational to her—they proceed from a memory of a great trust and an ensuing and confusing separation. Indeed, the whole play is full of couples who break promises and otherwise hurt each other, but who nevertheless forgive the breaches in their desire to love again. Perhaps this is simply unschooled desperation and fawning; after all, they should all at least consider whether they can trust each other when former trust seemed altered on a whim. But I also think Helena is something more than a caricature. Specifically, I think she has a lot to teach us about devotion and deception.

I would hope that we love God for a reason; to love him for no reason would be absurd and arbitrary. But once we start to love God, we also begin to love him for no specific reason at all. We are, in a word, devoted to him. This devotion is dangerous and must be checked constantly in its natural overreach. But this devotion is also profound; it sees more than circumstance can see. If it is done right, it is lunacy and love and poetry combined. Therefore, when God appears to abandon us or love someone more, the strong poets turn lunatic in their love: Aware of deception and aware of perspective, the poet will assume that there is more to the abandonment than can show up in fact and, as lunatic, will persist in her love while insisting on God’s.

For loveless critics, the world is as it appears. A broken promise a broken God, and preference is mutiny. Bound by ethics and law, critics must criticize God and reject him, certain of their perspective and more certain of their resentment. To be honest, I understand these critics; often I am one. But I also believe that devotion knows something that mere criticism can’t: that the most dangerous thing is to doubt that we have been loved. If we know we have been, we must insist on it. Questioning is not, then, mere questioning, or criticizing mere criticizing. It is the question: Why don’t you love me when I love you? It is that question again and again. Criticism is not a question or a comment; it is the desperate hope for an answer. That is what both Helena and religion can teach us.

Ultimately, they both teach us that—since truth is in relationships—love must be its method. As Helena knows, the question is not whether something or someone is true but whether someone or something makes us true; it is not the question of whether or not God exists but whether he teaches us how to; it is not the question of right or wrong—of ethics—but of righting wrongs: compassion.

I am not saying that we should dismiss our reservations to love a God we do not trust. I am also not saying that we should excuse God for things we think are wrong simply because someone somewhere told us to love him. We must be true to our perspective. That is conscience, criticism. But we must also be true to the limitations of our perspective. That is love, lunacy. And a mad love is far, far more risky than anything else. As we have seen, it is capable of great deception: of self-love playing at real love, of romance, of irrationality and excuse, of simplistic worship. It is a wonder that God trusts us with the emotion at all! But love is also capable of seeing more than is there, for it requires us to love others more than ourselves and to answer the limits of perspective by inhabiting the perspective of others.  If truth is in relationships, then the knowledge of it is best found through compassion—through the togethering of perspectives in love. It is no coincidence, then, that Jesus became most true at the moment that he entered into a relationship with everyone—when, through the atonement, he inhabited a million million perspectives. It was this act that finally made him a true object for our worship, or, in other words, an object that could make us true. It was also the moment that qualified Jesus to judge us. All of this happened because Jesus loved and expected love freely and–to borrow an idea from earlier–transcended hypocrisy by literally allowing himself to be convicted. This combination–refusing to restrain his love while giving people the power to abuse it–made him a God and a judge. If we can do the reverse–if we can stop abusing our duty to love and accept the love God offers us–we will transcend self-deception. A redemptive chiasmus.

So here we are, at the end of a long idea, with the realization that self-deception is hardly a problem at all, at least not one to be gotten rid of. It is, instead, a testament to the relationship of love and judgment. Love and judgment cannot be separated: love requires judgment and judgment requires love. Anytime someone separates our duty to love from our duty to judge wisely, we should defend our consciences. But any time we are asked to judge without love, we should defend devotion. Maybe, in the end, we will stop being the wrong kind of hypocrites and becomes the original kind: actors who know they are acting, who become real through this knowledge, who know they must speak feelingly to a wise audience. Then we, with the courtiers, could say the wisest thing: “Methinks I see things with a parted eye/ When everything seems double.”