After spending the weekend with my grandfather repairing a roof, I've begun wondering whether humor doesn't transfer biologically. Both he and I agree on the importance of stating the obvious. That is, on stating the obvious obviously, as if it weren't obvious. For example, "be careful you don't slip, else you'll end up falling" or "I wonder if i take my time nailing these, whether it'll take longer." The first was mine, the second his.
The majority of the time, the subtlety of the joke goes unnoticed, or worse, gets taken seriously. But Popop and I were having a grand ol' time blathering off meaningless and tautologous sentences."
Later, the whole subtlety of the thing got me thinking. As a word, subtlety reminds me of two things. The first is that it is absolutely impossible to spell correctly on the first try. I can never get the 'L's and 'T's straight. The second, and only slightly less important, is that the majority of religious activity seems to occur as if shrouded by some unobservable force.
It is becoming more and more apparent to me that our former categories are presently in a sort of metamorphic state. We are now conflating, if I may borrow and misuse O'Conner's terms, Mystery and Manners. "My Cosmos" and "the cosmos" are turning into the same thing--a phenomenological possibility unattainable till this century.
The globalized American Christian, or at lest this globalized American Christian, is beginning to feel the intense struggle between the Mystery of homo religiosus and the Manners of, say, my shoddy excuse for being an Anglican. I am beginning to feel, in other words, the psychological strains created by the incessant juxtaposition of my particular world and the whole world. There are too many congruities between the impulses that drive Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists etc...(even secularists) to be ignored. Why, for example, do we all desire a "better," and hope to find it by transcending our present condition? Why does religious man distinguish between Sacred and Profane things? What is all this rigmarole concerning the imitation of the gods? The re-creation of the Creation through art or ritual? Why are so many different people, in so many different places, sacrificing so many different things to attain salvation? I'm not suggesting some kind of blind universalism, I'm declaring obvious trends among the vast majority of humans.
There are deep-seeded phenomenological phenomenon which subtly dictate the course of a religious enterprise. The difficulty is that the enterprises are remarkably similar, suggesting a remarkably similar phenomenology. And when the Mystery that is India is not so mysterious when you have three Indian friends, what becomes of your Manners? If my Manners reflect my phenomenology, and the Manners of the Indian reflect his phenomenology, aren't they, aren't you, both part Western and part Indian? Doesn't our identity get screwed up? Isn't a Southern hospitality which collides with Jamaican or German Manners no longer hospitality at its Southern best?
What on earth happens when you smash one worldview into a world? What happens, in short, when my religion meets comparative religion? Psychological dissonance? Recalcitrance? Integration?
It is almost as if the world has come full circle, and the war of the gods has started anew. Yahweh must now fight Allah instead of Baal; He must show us his wonders as standing in contraposition to the platitudes of Taoism. In a way, our generation (and especially our children's) will resonate with the O.T. Jews, a people who struggled to have faith in one God among many. The future, I'm afraid, will not consists in fighting against the mere onslaught of atheism. Christianity must learn to persist while fighting, in a sense never possible till now, the entire world.
2 comments:
Kevin, stimulating and grandiloquent, as always. It's interesting that your "crisis" derives from the contiguities between the religions of the world; you rightly note a variety of them. My struggle has been quite the opposite...I labor under the ceaseless critical accusation that generalizations about humanity or religion bear the distinctive mark of my own religious and cultural vantage (i.e., can I write and think anything which is not irremediably white, middle-class, and Protestant-based?). I think back to a book I once read about religion in Nepal ("Retheorizing Religion in Nepal" by Grieve) whose basic onus was to demonstrate how discussion of Nepalese religion bore the cast of its western and Protestant (i.e., "orthodoxy"- and book-centered, flat, cerebral, anti-supernatural) observers. He tried to come up with a funky-fresh alternative. In other words, I wouldn't trust a course at UPenn to accurately mediate the astonishing particularity of religions over the world, for the obvious reason that to take a course on comparative religion requires certain impressionistic "frames" within which to compare each against another -- which you have recited.
Your last paragraph is very right, though. "Fighting" is an interesting way to describe Christianity's relationship to other world religions -- collocated closely, in your post, with the OT's (violent and controversial) way of posing the problem. There may be other strains within the Bible which could contribute towards a "theology of religions." Our Christian brothers and sisters in Asia probably have a huge leg up on this whole issue, simply because intense pluralism has characterized their situation right from the outset, whereas we in the West are still struggling to get over the fallout from our first, internecine competition of religious paradigms (the Reformation), let alone dealing with the ascendant reality of inter-religious diversity. That's my impression, anyway; I had a course on Asian Christianity here recently, and it strengthened my resolve to keep track of Christian thinking over there.
Well, there's been plenty written about the subject of Christianity and world religions. I have not read but I would like to read George Sumner's book, mostly because I like and trust the general cast of those thinkers up at Wycliffe.
Collin, I'm both surprised and delighted that you picked up on the subtlety of my O.T. reference. At prima facie value, warfare seems a natural corollary in the struggle to continue Judaism amidst such a variety of religions. The same, i suspect, might be said of the crusades. On a somewhat different but related note, i also predict, with however inchoate an intuition, that our modernist-apologetic-defense strategy will no longer succeed like it has in the past. One cannot fight the world from within his own walls, as it were.
And i am sympathetic with your struggles, though, obviously not to the same degree. I've always had a crush on blind universalism, over-simplifications, and generalizations. Of course, they do not accurately describe the intricacies of any religion or human. Where i think they succeed is in offering categories and models with which to manipulate the given data set. It's why i take Eliade to be so perceptive. His models undoubtedly collapses at certain points, with certain people. But though he supplies --as you say--"frames" which limit and often misinterpret the data, i think sometimes the "frames" better help describe the data. The most obvious to me, at present, is his (e.g.) distinction between the Sacred and the Profane. As phenomenological categories, they are painfully perceptive.
It may simply dwindle down to a matter of intellectual taste. We both agree on the need for good scholarship--a thing i trust you'll be more apt to provide than myself.
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