(h/t blog.angloromanticism.org - btw, my new band name)
When I first sat with Wendell [Berry] to talk about educating farmers as farmers, he started by turning to the idea of love—in the fullness of the term, not sentimentalized but fully rounded, with the joyful and the difficult joined through membership in a place and with its people.
He then asked a question that I try to answer every day: what works does this love propose?
Start with love, then see what works that love proposes. (H/T: @ayjay)
Annie Dillard: “We’ve been on earth all these years and we still don’t know for certain why birds sing… We have been as usual asking the wrong question… The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?”
A thesis: “When considering faith, it’s helpful to ask, ‘Is this right?’ or ‘Is this good?,’ as a way to discover ‘Is this true?’” (None of this is new; but it’s stuff I like to work out in writing.)
Consider this analogy: When we think about entering into a relationship, say a marriage (but it could be a friendship or even, taking a job at a company), we don’t ask, “Is this step true?” We ask, “Could this step be good? Could this be right?”* And we only discover the answer after we’ve (1) committed to the relationship and (2) lived out that commitment over time. (See Leslie Newbigin’s reading of Michael Polyani for more.)
This knowledge of the goodness or rightness of a relationship through lived experience would typically be seen as subjective knowledge. But, turning now to faith, let’s not discount experience. If a lot of other people, living over the course of centuries and in a range of families, countries, and cultures, also experience that the relationship with God is good and right, doesn’t that suggest the goodness or rightness are reliable, even if they’re known subjectively? (Is that one reason why Christians live their faith in community, in a “cloud of witnesses”?)*
Moreover, even in a one-to-one relationship, such as a marriage, i.e., Megan’s and my marriage, I am pretty confident in knowing that our marriage is good, though it sounds weird(ish) to say, “Our marriage is true.” And like a marriage, our experience of faith probably changes over time (and, one hopes, grows). It’s not static.
Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” so truth is crucial. But, because the modern era tends to subject truth claims to the scientific method (or something like it), I think formulating faith in terms of what’s good and right is an important way we discover what’s true.
By “good” and “right,” I mean not only “good for me”, but also, “fit, apt, appropriate, etc.” for a purpose (which requires knowing the purpose), and also “imbued with an inherent goodness and rightness” that transcends my personal benefit and, even, the aptness for a purpose.
Of course, other faiths can make the same claim, so this isn’t a support for Christianity, per se; it’s just an argument for shared experience being some evidence of a possible truth.
Writing is solving one problem and then the next. It’s like building a house. Once you start, you have to finish… If you hired an architect and a year later you said, “What happened?” And he said, ‘I don’t know, I was blocked.’ You’d say, ‘What?!’
BOSWELL. Sir Alexander Dick tells me, that he remembers having a thousand people in a year to dine at his house ...
JOHNSON. That, Sir, is about three a day.
BOSWELL. How your statement lessens the idea.
JOHNSON. That, Sir, is the good of counting. It brings every thing to a certainty, which before floated in the mind indefinitely.
I’m sure many of you already follow Ted Gioia. But for those who don’t, he’s one of the country’s most perceptive cultural critics, as well as being the world’s preeminent jazz historian. Check him out. It’ll be well worth your time.
“We aim to humanize those who have been objectified.”
– Jessie Kornberg, Director, Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles