It's been a while since I've posted something more thoughtful. And, I'm tired of looking at houses, so here you go.
J1 gave me an early Father's Day gift when she was back visiting in May. She often gives me intriguing books, and this one,
Poets on the Psalms, is a collection of essays on Psalms by a variety of poets. I'm in that brief space between Seminary classes where recreational reading reigns supreme, so after reading this one, I knew I needed to post something about it. All the essays I read were excellent.. who knew that poets could write prose so well? One in particular hit on an idea that resonated with me; I reprint excerpts of it here, with little further comment:
"To be human is to know - within oneself as well as in the relationship of the self to society at large - contradiction, or a conflict of several competing interests. We want what we can't have, or shouldn't have, or have been told we shouldn't want. In short, we have instinct. But what distinguishes humans from animals is an awareness of that instinct and of its possibilities, if left unchecked. Or perhaps another way of seeing it is that humans have, among their many instincts, an instinct to reconcile contradiction. Hence, the creation of laws, morality, religion, and other means of giving some generally agreed-upon boundaries to human behavior.
"If the artist is human, what makes the artist unique among human is a seeming unwillingness to reconcile contradiction. I say 'seeming', because it's less a matter of unwillingness than of inability. Since inability is not correctable (as opposed to unwillingness, which is subject to persuasion, whether in the form of punishment or of pleasure), it's not surprising that artists are the first to be held suspect within society - original artists, I mean. For it is the original artist who - again, because of an inability to do any differently - will always challenge rather than reinforce societal convention. This originality means from the start a unique way of seeing the world and of expressing that vision; and convention is not about uniqueness, but about conformity.
"For the artist, there is less an impulse to reconcile contradiction than to plumb and sound contradiction's depths; and the result (given luck, gift, and vision) can be an art that refreshingly deepens and enlarges the beliefs and sensibilities of the very society it - inevitably, necessarily - also threatens.
[...]
"And perhaps faith, finally, is in the utterance alone. Whether bargaining with, praising, or railing against, the majority of the psalms are utterances directed
toward - which is to say that even to utter is to show a belief in a listener or to show a
desire to believe in such a listener. Many of the psalms speak to or about a God who is said to have hidden or have turned away; nowhere does the psalmist doubt that Gid exists.
"This is human faith, as I see it, one that argues that a belief in God need not mean an unshakable allegiance to and acceptance of all of the
ways of God. Humans are distinguishable from other animals by self-consciousness - by ego. And it is ego that makes humans the only creatures capable of articulating a felt worship of God; it is also ego, however, that makes a robotic allegiance to God impossible. Presumably, God knows this, as he knows his presence could not be fully understood without, occasionally, his seeming absence.
[...]
"The trajectory - psychological, emotional - of the Psalms is that of restiveness itself. It is true that the book as a whole ends with an uncharacteristically sustained note of joyful praise (from Psalm 145 through 150, the last). But crescendo isn't always conclusion; and if we have read the entire book, we cannot help but understand that the only constant here is fluctuation, the ease with which astonishment gives way to joy, joy to fear, fear to despair, and despair again - and temporarily - to joy. This is the restiveness of what it is to be human and perishable. To be flawed. To be alive.
"Maybe an absolutely unqualified, unquestioned belief in deity is like those limits in calculus, the point that a line approaches infinitely without intersection, though theoretically intersection must eventually occur. Call belief the point of intersection, call the ever-approaching line the will to believe. Say the point of intersection is shared by God
and belief - that is, belief in God occurs
at God, and vice versa. And the ever approaching line that we are calling the will to believe? Say another word for that is faith."
----- Carl Phillips, On Restiveness - In Art, In Life
This is one of the best descriptions of the "now-and-not-yet" dynamic of life as a God-fearer of any I've read, though written by someone who from his bio seems like a pretty secular guy. It also expresses the inherent tension in our existence: the finite engaging the infinite; the limited desiring the limitless; the mortal seeking the immortal. Faith attempts to bridge these divides, reconcile the contradictions. As a result true faith (that is, faith true to our human nature) is shot through with a dynamic tension resulting from these irreconcilable differences.
It seems to me that those believers with an artistic temperament, like King David, live out a faith that is most authentically human. And when they write down what's inside their hearts and souls... their desire, their will to believe, while living in a world of contradiction and doubt, pours forth as genuine.
