Lamentations 1:15b

Encountering verses like this reminds me how anemic is our common understanding of God and the Bible. When was the last time you heard a sermon about Lamentations in general, much less Lamentations 1:15b? I don’t say this as someone who has got if figured out; I think the only reason I read Lamentations was an old bulletin in my Bible that made me open to it. But look at those words. Read them again. Imagine a crushed virgin and the God who crushed her. Is that the God we worship?

I once asked my professor Gregg Ten Elshof what to do with the doctrine of hell, something I struggle to understand. He replied, “Ask God prove it good to you, and if he doesn’t, to give you faith to accept it.” So that’s what I do, all too infrequently.

To learn more about how to think about hell: wikipedia on hell. Needless to say, while I find C.S. Lewis’ famous words on hell attractive, (the bit about it being locked from the inside) I’m not convinced they found their way into the Bible.

To end, here is a poster I made for a recent event. Our presenters did a fantastic job. Glory be to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

I made the sign below to help promote the event. I got the idea from a Chip Kidd book cover; he’s about as close as you could get to being a rock star graphic designer. The signs were a huge hit, we even got a few requests from people who wanted a copy. My favorite was from professor Bruce Wilshire of Rutgers University’s philosophy department. He recently gave a lecture at Biola critiquing analytic philosophy that I unfortunately had to miss. My roommate Ben told me someone asked for some “practical advice” for a budding philosopher. I guess Wilshire looked at him and replied “Practical advice? I’ll give you some practical advice; go to the Mojave Desert and look at the stars…”

One time I was flying back to LA from God’s Land and found myself sitting next to a chatty high school English teacher. I usually get pretty giddy whenever I meet anyone who likes to read; you can imagine my excitement at discovering this guy had studied philosophy at USC. He was very nice, but unfortunately a little too “I-try-to-avoid- real-thought-about-religion-and-its-oppression-but-did-I-mention-I’m-spiritual?” Despite this, when I asked about Willard he started glowing. He told me story after story about how kind and wise and peaceful Dallas had been: one of the best men he had ever met.

Christianity Today recently had an article on the “Divine Conspirator” (read it here) in which they spoke about the tremendous impact he’s had on how people think about the Christian life. Among my favorite Willard-isms: “People of late have seemed to reduce the whole of our faith to the agreement with a certain theory of the atonement.”

One of the most revolutionary notions for me was initiated by something Ten Elshof said, in obvious agreement with the spirit of his mentor. It involves a genuine and extravagant good-will toward others, even to the point of wishing their benefit over your own. It’s appalling how often the goods I set myself on securing are necessarily unsharable. To want to be the best (notice it’s never just “good”) means in some real way I hope my neighbor will lose to me. I am very attracted to the opinion that success, even “Christian success,” is fairly trivial; you get the impression Willard would almost prefer someone else to have said these wonderful things and been made an icon. Influence is important and can be very good, but I hope I never forget the words of my dad: “We have to pray that our success won’t outpace our soul’s growth.”

So my friend Leif is awesome. Not only did he give me a free ticket to go see Paul Simon with him, but he put up with me taking pictures out the window while I was driving in downtown LA. What a guy. He even has this really tiny kitten at his house that almost justifies all those calenders you see with pictures of eight kittens stuffed in a mailbox. Who says guys from Oregon aren’t sensitive.

Paul Simon turns out to be about as tall as a mic stand, and still able to put on a good show. My favorite song was the The Boxer; I was pretty bummed he didn’t play Sounds of Silence. Leif told me Art was usually the one to sing that. Leif has all these stories about getting into afterparties and finding backstage passes, but this night wasn’t one of such exploits.

“The Man Who Was Thursday, The Man Who Was Sunday, and The Man Who Was, And Is, and is to Come”

The Man Who Was Thursday is irritating its well-fed author right now, wherever he is. What peeves Chesterton, probably, is what makes most intellectuals chartreuse with envy, his almost effortless achievement of that holy grail of scholarship: a book that is understood by everyone to be brilliant, but not actually understood by anyone. Thursday is a mystery thriller, a meditation on the problem of evil, and an exquisite picture in words. It is also really hard to understand. Perhaps we should not expect so much. Chesterton wrote the book and prefacing poem in 1908 to childhood friend and fellow mystery author Edmund Clerihew Bentley, and one can imagine close friends sharing obscurities. (For at least some eye into London at the time and the many names that surface, The Annotated Thursday by Martin Gardner is helpful.) Specific references, however, don’t seem to be the tricky bit for most readers—the whole thing is. Most of the puzzlement surrounds how to interpret the inscrutable character Sunday, particularly in the book’s final chapter. This Gordian knot of a man (or is he a god, or is it a force…) dominates the imagination, preventing even a careful interpreter from making much sense of the beginning of the book, not to mention the first six days of the week.

Chesterton noted similar fumbling when a few critics praised his Sunday, whom they thought a portrayal of the Christian God: “I have sometimes had occasion to murmur meekly that those who endure the heavy labor of reading a book might possibly endure that of reading the title page.” The full title is The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare. To those readers who are presently quite satisfied to know its full title but still lack acquaintance with the book itself, I urge on you heavy labor—there are few stories more pleasing to read.

Thursday is some of Chesterton’s best fiction, and surely his most iconic. The book’s first sentence signals the end of an epoch: “The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset.” Saffron Park is the book’s name for Bedford Park, the bohemian West London suburb where Chesterton met his wife Frances. Chesterton loved the neighborhood, but in many ways it stood as a bastion of what he wrote against. The occasion described at the beginning of the book is characteristic of the place: an anarchistic captivating the crowd with poems praising chaos as a red sky suggests impending Armageddon. The dying day is not the only thing red; Rosamond, a girl perhaps very much like the one Gilbert met and married in similar circumstances, is adorned in braids of red hair. Chesterton once said of the color, “Red is the most joyful and dreadful thing in the physical universe; it is the fiercest note, it is the highest light, it is the place where the walls of this world of ours wear thinnest and something beyond burns through.”

Under this scarlet banner, not far from this girl, purpose, goodness, and tidiness battle chaos and disarray. Gabriel Syme, a lilac-scented, self-proclaimed “poet of order,” confronts the anarchist, one Gregory Lucian. Syme scoffs at Gregory’s pessimism and chuckles when he threatens of revolution. Syme doesn’t know that Gregory is about to be elected to the Supreme Council of Anarchy, a body of seven members, each named after one day of the week. Gregory smuggles Syme into the anarchists’ den, but not before both men promise to hide their secret allegiances. Syme quickly turns on Gregory at the election and galvanizes the anarchists with a fiery speech; they elect him to be Thursday on the Supreme Council instead of Gregory.

Syme steadily discovers, with who-dun-it hilarity, that that like him, all of the other days of the week are undercover policemen. Each was commissioned by the same nebulous figure, a man they never see who sent them into the world with the promise of martyrdom: “I am condemning you to death. Good day.” Syme often believes himself to be entirely alone fighting a struggle that is as impossible as it is isolating. Once, when four of the detectives are hounded by what they think to be the entire world of anarchists, peasants, and policemen, Syme asks his companion:

You are quite hopeless, then?” Mr. Ratcliffe kept a stony silence; then at last he said quietly—“No; oddly enough I am not quite hopeless. There is one insane little hope that I cannot get out of my mind. The power of this whole planet is against us, yet I cannot help wondering whether this one silly little hope is hopeless yet.” “In what or whom is your hope?” asked Syme with curiosity. “In a man I never saw,” said the other, looking at the leaden sea.

That man never comes to save them, but the whole world is also not actually out to kill them.

Eventually the entire Supreme Anarchist Council chases their lord of chaos, Sunday. Their quest to protect the world seems a silly game to him; he bounces like a rubber ball, throws them ridiculous messages and escapes on an elephant. Their pursuit prompts discussion, but they cannot help but compare him to some feature of the natural world: the earth at spring, shapeless protoplasm, the sun at noonday. Syme summarizes their observations: “I also find that I think of Sunday as I think of the whole world.” After the hopeless chase, a servant of Sunday’s escorts each to a separate carriage for transport to his master’s house. The trip marks a sharp contrast, an apparent journey to the afterlife. As they travel to his home, Biblical imagery echoes of a prepared place, a great feast, and a day of reckoning.

Upon arrival the servant informs the men, “My master has only just come home.” This suggests Sunday can be understood as a god of the natural order, of the earth as we encounter it. He was always present in the world with the detectives, but only as an adversary. Now each weary traveler is given refreshments and clothed in a glorious robe corresponding to his day of creation. Syme is fitted in a peacock blue gown emblazoned with a golden sun and flaming stars. As the men assemble, they observe a ball with dancers dressed in various costumes: an elephant, a ship, a hornbill, an apple tree. Their thrones arc around a center seat, empty, until Sunday slips in to share the scene of the masquerade. Eventually, after hours of life and romance, all creation drifts into Sunday’s house, leaving the seven days dimly lit by fire coals and then finally, slowly, strong stars.

Sunday breaks the long silence “dreamily”. He praises their perseverance in “epic on epic” and their fidelity to his instructions given out of the darkness. One of the detectives replies harshly “Who and what are you?” Sunday, without moving, replies “I am the peace of God.” The men are confused, wondering about the madness he put them through, his trickery, and their tremendous suffering. Syme, affable, just requests a reason. Sunday does not reply, but greets a final witness, Gregory Lucian. Clad like a black anarchist flag, Gregory cries out:

…I curse you for being safe! You sit in your chairs of stone, and have never come down from them. You are the seven angels of heaven, and you have no troubles. Oh, I could forgive you everything, you that rule mankind, if I could feel for once that you have suffered for one hour a real agony such as I.

Syme springs up indigent; he has suffered, and he has lived the glorious agony that is one good man fighting against the whole universe. He finally understands why he has been crushed and thrown down to hell, that he might answer Satan’s blasphemous lie. Suddenly however, in dread, Syme turns to Sunday, seated on the center throne of stone: “Have you ever suffered?” Sunday does not reply. His face grows “larger than the colossal mask of Memnon, which had made [Syme] cry as a child.” It fills the sky, blocking all light until the moment before it destroys Syme’s brain. He hears a distant voice: “Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?”

We do not know who asks this question. The book ends with Syme and Gregory suddenly conscious, walking in Saffron Park at dawn. Syme’s vision is over; he feels like “he is in possession of some impossible good news, which made every other thing a triviality, but an adorable triviality.” The sky is a timid rose, and under it he sees Rosamond cutting lilac before breakfast.

Syme is so buoyant, I think, because he has a reason to be. Sunday never gave him one, but Sunday is the god of a nightmare. When describing how Syme awoke, Chesterton says it “was something much more psychologically strange if there was indeed anything unreal, in the earthly sense, about the things he had gone through.” What Syme went through was, in some sense, very earthly. Sunday is a nightmare, a twisting of reality, because he has no purposes higher than the chaos he embodied on earth, and nature’s brute facts are horrific apart from systematic achievement of the divine’s good glory. The poet Albert Goldbarth once wrote, “Let the earth stir her dead.” This is all the earth can do. The problem of evil is one of reasons—Does God have a purpose for all the suffering that occurs on earth, or is it senseless, wasted?

One must not think that if God does have a reason, which he undoubtedly does, we would have any knowledge of it. Chesterton is keen on this point in his “Introduction to Job”. To him, Job is given an answer by God, an auto-theodicy, that is extremely unsatisfying by conventional standards, but fitting: “He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told.” One might think God is mute on Job’s condition, apparently apathetic of anything but the marvelous wonders of his creation. What is so easy to forget however, is what volumes are spoken by a God who cares enough to say he won’t tell. In her essay “Aquinas on the Sufferings of Job”, Eleonore Stump points this out:

What does Job say? “I had heard of you before with the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.” [Job 42:5] Whatever else we need to say about the complicated relations between God and Job, and that is no doubt a great deal, it is clear that with his views of happiness Aquinas would certainly attribute deep, sweet consolation to anyone who could truly claim to be seeing God.

Two Chesterton biographies incorrectly assert that Syme sees the back of Sunday when he is commissioned in the dark room. The text is clear: “It was not the ordinary darkness, in which forms can be faintly traced; it was like going suddenly stone-blind.”
The visitation to Job is still not an explanation of God’s ways. There is no vision into the purposes of permitted wickedness and chaos; our wisdom wanders fruitlessly in the depths. Annie Dillard, in her meditation on the problem of evil, writes:

Many times in Christian churches I have heard the pastor say to God, “All your actions show us your wisdom and love.” Each time, I reach in vain for the courage to rise and shout, “That’s a lie!”—just to put things on a solid footing.

There is little we can explain, and even less we can understand. Biologists believe that for every person on the globe there are a thousand pounds of termites. 2,000 people a day commit suicide. But evil, pain, and suffering are not the deepest mystery. The same year The Man Who Was Thursday was published, Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy:

Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king…In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss; and I apologize in advance if any of my phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent touching a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt.

The death of Christ is proof to the doubter, the poet of order or anarchy, that anguish is not unique to humanity. Sunday has no answer for Gregory or Syme because he did not renew creation through the Word; he did not descend into hell and defeat death. His antics lack justification because they serve no higher purpose. While it resists comprehension, the real creator’s sacrifice affords the believer hope of the future redemption of a world still wild. We, like Syme, have no logic, but we have a loving logician. In him we see a new Job, a real sufferer of no fault. This is the Christian God, the God Thursday wakes to, the God who brings restoration and order through the man who was, and is, and is to come.

Anyways, the next morning comes and I’m reading the news and eating breakfast. Suddenly I reach for more milk and knock my cereal bowl onto my laptop. Death by Mini-Spooners. I frantically flip it upside down and try to dry it off, but not before my space-bar, apple key, option, brackets, enter, and yes, you guessed it, my backspace key are all obliterated. SonowIllhavetotypelikethis.