In the face of death, we dance...

Let me try to flesh out today some of my thoughts behind yesterday's post re: the report of soaring suicide rates in the US.  On one of her visits to the United States in the 1980s, Mother Teresa observed that the most destructive disease in America was not HIV/AIDS or cancer, but loneliness.  "Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty."  From where I sit, it would understate the truth to say that our sense of isolation and addiction to utilitarian thinking has only deepened in the 30 years since her testimony.  We  are a "bottom line" people obsessively inured to being in control.  We have no moral center nor any communion with reverence and awe. 

In a word, we have cultivated selfishness to such a degree that it has become our national past time.  And our imaginations have atrophied to the point that we can no longer grasp an alternative.  Marilynne Robinson puts it like this:

American culture has entered a period in which atavism looks to us for all the world like progress. The stripping away of humane constraints to liberate great "natural" forces, such as capital flow or the (soi-distant) free market, has acquired such heady momentum that no one even pauses to wonder whether such forces are indeed particularly "natural." The use of the word implies a tendentious distinction. Billions of dollars can vanish into the ether under the fingers of a bad young man with a dark stare, yet economics is to be regarded as if it were lawful and ineluctable as gravity.  If the arcane, rootless, disruptive phenomenon we call global economies is natural, then surely anything else is, too. ("Darwinism" in The Death of Adam, p. 28)

Once upon a time, our collective conscience was challenged by the notion that we, humanity both individually and together, were both created in the image of God and fell from grace.  This counter-cultural vision inspired acts of justice and compassion - to say nothing of great works of art and beauty - and at the same time grasped that human good was not "natural."  That is to say, our vision of God's truth once helped us encourage, practice and teach ethical and moral behavior that was humble.  "All of us have sinned and fallen short of the grace of God" as the apostle Paul put it.

Now that religion has disqualified itself from popular practice, however, this humble wisdom has been cast into the dustbin of history.  Douglas John Hall writes that contemporary people in North America have given up on religion both because part of the tribe has substituted harsh "moral counsel for the gospel" while the rest of us have "neglected the pain of personal life in favor or attention to the public square." (Waiting for Gospel)  This spiritual bifurcation throughout the Body of Christ has calcified into two competing camps that neither mistrust one another and fail to offer everyday people a taste of God's healing alternative.

Despite the very real challenges that must be confronted in the struggle for a more just society, however, the Christian vocation to speak to the great, subtle, recurrent and permanent problems of personal life requires an even deeper commitment - one that is intellectually more rigorous and spiritually more sympathetic.  While for most of us there are indeed joys and laughter and moments of great happiness, human life is also filled with sorrow and pain at every stage, from childhood through to old age and death. the excruciating struggle for survival, which is both physical and spiritual, is often carried on by ordinary people quiet silently, for, especially in our rhetorically upbeat society, there is a strong pressure on individuals to seem content and in charge even when they are decidedly not so.  It is said that one in four are clinically depressed. Great social problems such as poverty, crime, drug addiction, suicide and the like, may and must certainly be studied... but behind each of these immense social problems there are individual men, women and children whose lives cannot be studied objectively or addressed by remedial legislation...

With the dual loss of both a sense of reverence and a humble awareness of

human sin, we are left with ourselves and our idols.  For a few hundred years science and the market place have become our gods.  "But science cannot serve in the place of religion because it cannot generate an ethics or a morality. It cant give us no reason to prefer a child to a dog, or to choose honorable poverty over fraudulent wealth. It can give us no grounds for preferring what is excellent to what is sensationalistic. And this is more or less where we are now." (Robinson, ibid, p. 71)

This morning, after sleeping late after a wild and very weird set of jazz last night, I sipped tea and read the NY Times. The headline stated that a new poll documents that while most Americans are in agreement on the major social issues of our day, there is an unwillingness to create a politics of consensus to fix anything. (see http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/02/us/politics/poll-finds-strong-support-for-tightened-gun-laws-and-path-to-citizenship.html?_r=0) We know what hurts, but are unwilling and unable to share.  After 40 years of intense partisan politics - and increasing loneliness - Americans still prefer selfishness and fear to cooperation and compromise.  This is insanity for, as they say in AA, "if you always do as you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got."

A people nourished in the wisdom that we are created in the image of God - and schooled in a healthy and humble sense of human sin - would not tolerate this tragic absurdity.  But we do... and more and more of us are taking our own lives.  And so in the face of this ugly reality... some of us choose to dance. Or make music.  Or create artworks of beauty and depth and challenge.  Why?  In a penetrating yet faithful essay in For the Beauty of the Church, Andy Crouch puts it like this:

We who are privileged enough to live in North America live in a world that is forgetting both pain and play. Our popular culture offers us endless diverting amusements that fall flat and well short of real celebration. Our so-called serious culture offers us endlessly difficult dead ends.  So who will be the people who can play gracefully, unusefully in our world?  Who will be the people who turn unafraid toward the pain? Who will be the people who believe in beauty without being afraid of brokenness?  Who will be the people who champion that which is not useful?  Ours (has become) the age of the economist and the evolutionary biologist, each of whom have gotten very busy explaining why everything we thought was particularly human is actually just useful...

But once you have lost the idea that the world is a gift, that culture can be taken, blessed, broken and shared, all any of it is... is useful... and eventually all you can make of our humanity is that it is just useful... without a reason to believe in the unuseful, who will be left to champion those people who are not useful?  People who cannot be substituted for one another, who are stubbornly and particularly themselves, in bodies capable of immense beauty and immense brokenness, capable of the most graceful play and the most terrible pain.  Who will value them in those bodies?  If not the church, then who? (pp.41-42)

We dance - and make music and art and theatre and so much more - to both keep our souls alive and share a glimmer of light with those who know only the present darkness.  St. Paul wrote:  I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.  In his contemporary reworking of this text, Peterson puts it like this: 
 
So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

I recall Elie Weisel speaking of a mother who danced after the unspeakable

deaths of her children.  Born of a mysticism that is nourished from the heart of God, this dance was both an act of protest in the face of horror and an act of commitment to a beauty greater than human sin.  For Yom Kippur 1997, he wrote this Prayer for the Day of Awe that was published in the NY Times.

Master of the Universe, let us make up. It is time. How long can we go on being angry?

More than 50 years have passed since the nightmare was lifted. Many things, good and less good, have since happened to those who survived it. They learned to build on ruins. Family life was re-created. Children were born, friendships struck. They learned to have faith in their surroundings, even in their fellow men and women. Gratitude has replaced bitterness in their hearts. No one is as capable of thankfulness as they are. Thankful to anyone willing to hear their tales and become their ally in the battle against apathy and forgetfulness. For them every moment is grace.

Oh, they do not forgive the killers and their accomplices, nor should they. Nor should you, Master of the Universe. But they no longer look at every passer-by with suspicion. Nor do they see a dagger in every hand.

Does this mean that the wounds in their soul have healed? They will never heal. As long as a spark of the flames of Auschwitz and Treblinka glows in their memory, so long will my joy be incomplete.

More and more, an alternative to the path of darkness looks like dance to me...