On Phantasie

Dear friend,

You and I were talking yesterday about something I call phantasie. That is my word for a lifestyle of illusion, where one's activity and thoughts swim in dreamy reveries and stories, swallowing hours, days, even years if indulged. Phantasie numbs the heart and mind against the real quiddity of the world outside, so that one goes willing into the invisible prison of one's own imagination.

My thinking of phantasie goes in three directions. First, the gospel is a summons to real life, a life peopled with real bodies and words with real meanings. The gospel calls us to resist phantasie. The living God calls us to love him and to love our neighbor. Second, phantasie seduces us as a distraction from the void. We do not feel the challenge of the meaningless, of the absurd, or the end because we are waking dreamers whose world is alive with drama and color (See my post "Blue Longing or Yellow Laziness".) The cross permits us to look into the void and to not be afraid without needing to shoulder the heavy angst and absurdity inevitable for the existentialists (See my discussion of Emile Cioran). The third part of my thinking about phantasie addresses its affect on the doctrine of revelation. I was raised in traditions that encourage a kind of mystical connection with Jesus through public and private worship, parallelled by an individual and devotional hermeneutic in the case of scripture. It was only when I began reading the Reformers (primarily Martin Luther and John Calvin but also statements such as those in the Book of Concord) that I began to gather the tools to challenge this tradition and to step out onto a path by which the Spirit, rather than speaking in an inner voice to us, has inspired and now illumines/opens our ears to hear the voice of scripture, "he who has ears, let him hear." The tedious ordinaity of reading, of thinking over a historical context, asking grammatical questions, toying with how authors are using words, etc.--the banality of these things becomes the human aspect of a simultaneously divine relationship (See my post "You are Removing God from the Everyday".) Phantasie is that affective prison that turns our own psychology into a little god whose introspective self-doubt distracts us from the judge and redeemer of the Real. Because it numbs us to reality, it prevents us from owning our relationship to the truth of things--it is an enemy of the truth. Thus, it is sin and bondage. Thus, it is what is being put away in this age, and it will not go into the next.

I have struggled with phantasie at various times of my life. It is a subtle and normally invisible opponent. No one talks about it, and especially as our culture is so obsessed with make believe, but you can spot its victims easily enough: smart, creative people who, for one reason or another, retreat from real life and real human community and relationship into the world of films, TV, books, etc. Don't we know these people well enough? Haven't we been those people on occasion? I've lost years to phantasie. Years of being drugged without realizing one is drugged. And so susceptible am I to its power that I'm shy of such things even today.

Ours is a culture addicted to phantasie, to its amusements, to its escapes. We exist simultaneously as citizens free of its dominion by grace, waiting in hope for our full deliverance into the Real, and as people who still struggling with it or give in altogether. Confession and repentance is a daily discipline, as is gratitude and praise.

Warmest Regards

Science's crisis of faith

MIT physicist and novelist Alan P. Lightman has told too much, I think, for the priestly class to let him live. And that is too bad, because Lightman can do the math and the metaphor at the same time, and how many people can do that? For, as he says, “Theoretical physicists ponder things that other people do not.” But that is exactly what I like: you aren't supposed to notice that, and, if you do notice it, by all means keep it to yourself.

Pardon the transition, but let's talk for a second about the priestly class. And don't think that the first world doesn't have a priestly class. Civilization has to have a priestly class. I think of French historian Georges Duby's division of medieval society into those that prayed, those that fought, and those that worked. And how can we tell who is in the first category? Here's two ways, listed in no particular order and by no means exhaustively.

First. They have their own language. Everyone is familiar with the monastics of the middle ages, chanting the psalms for hours at a time and saying mass at lip-lynching abracadabra speeds because it was in Latin. Who cares if the warriors or workers understood—and perhaps its better if they didn't. Medieval Latin was the JavaScript, C++, XHTML, and Ruby on Rails of its time, invented by and for the priestly class. Consider the following comment by author and social philosopher George Steiner:

Science is becoming inaccessible to us. Who can understand the latest innovations in genetics, astrophysics and biology? Who can explain them to the profane? Knowledge no longer communicates; writers and philosophers in our day are incapable of enabling us to understand science. At the same time, the scope of imagination in science is dazzling. . . . I am concerned by what it means to be literate today. Is it possible to be literate if you do not understand non-linear equations?

Second. They are ensconced in their own institutions. Another way of saying that is that you should suspect isolation and pageantry to accompany them. I've already mentioned the monastics—and one can go back to the cenobites in the Egyptian deserts if you like. But before them there are innumerable examples of austere and remote temples, high places, and even priestly cities in every civilization. And when they do emerge, they tell myths of fantastic speculation and drama—half entertainment, half mysticism using the most sophisticated technologies of the day to awe the public and cement themselves as the mouthpieces of the gods and the arbiters of all knowledge. It is the priestly class that brings fire from heaven to earth—best not forget that (because they've been known to burn, torture, imprison, and silence men, women, children, nations, peoples to maintain their power.)

I want to say there is more here: That they demand sacrifice. That they ultimately undermine their own foundations. That they attract and nurture the political and cultural futures of their societies. That they have a love-hate relationship with the warrior/political classes of their times. And that they have a readily identified costume that isn't worn by others.

The scientific establishment is, in my opinion, guilty as charged. Take for example the half-a-lifetime of painful and expensive mathematical hazing it takes to even catch up to what is current (thus barring we normals from real understand. We understand at a step removed. Our is, if you please, at the level of myth.). Or consider the role, and cost, of universities—especially those that boat scientific prestige. Undergraduate education is a court of the gentiles; masters degrees the court of the women. Gown and mortarboard mark the initiates. And who can argue but the university system of our day, bloated and fat on the blood of the middle-class, of itself regulates class, income, and mate-selection using impenetrable occult matrices to separate the wheat and the chaff.

That being said, we return to our Lutheran whistle blower Dr. Alan P. Lightman, and discover another priestly mark, those tales of speculation and drama. We've been expecting our priests—like any good clerics—to give order to the seeming randomness and chaos of the world, and they have. But it may all have been a Ptolemaic act, in the end. They have chanted and cut themselves all day, but no fire has come from the god, and the sacrifice remains.

(more to come)

Heraclitus's chiasmus as a philosophical step toward sacrament?

Philosopher Patrick Lee Miller of Duquesne University was interviewed recently on the blog The Immanent Frame on the basis of his recently published book, Becoming God: Pure Reason in Early Greek Philosophy (Contiuum, 2011). It is an excellent interview. Miller uncovers layers of possibility in the deep strata of Western foundations where they are torn between the pressures of Heraclitean philosophy and Parminidean metaphysics. And Miller himself is of interest, as his influences are Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre. In what follows, I'm going to piece together chunks and bits from the interview—a style that I really hate, but that occasionally works as a kind of personal notebook for later review. Anyone wishing to cite Miller should use the original post. The reason I'm doing this is because Miller is getting at what seems to me to be a natal but real philosophical option for discussing sacrament that departs from the absurdities of Aristotle. So here it is then:

NS: What is at stake in the questions of time and consistency that you’re probing through your inquiries into ancient philosophy?

PLM: If you’ve ever lost someone you loved, or ever deeply regretted something you’ve done, then time is a problem for you. We’ve all longed for the past, whether to be with someone or to be without some deed. Nietzsche expressed this very clearly in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where his hero says that our impotence before “greedy time” makes us resentful of it. To cope with this resentment, we dream of hinterworlds outside of time, eternities that promise to redeem us from its greed. There, everything will be made whole, every beloved will live again. So goes the dream. The sort of rationality pioneered by Parmenides—consistency—makes time impossible, and so when Plato combined it with the philosophical religion of Pythagoreanism, the result was a moralized rejection of time. We can cope with greedy time, for Plato, by seeing it as not only unreal, but evil. Our real life is not here, but there, among the Forms in eternity. If that’s so, however, why not commit suicide and get there immediately? This is a serious problem for Platonism. To avoid its nihilism and affirm our life in this world, we need a way to understand time as fully real. I argue in the book that Heraclitus offers this way.

Time is inconsistent if it is composed of moments. Thanks to the paradoxes of Zeno, Parmenides’ student, Aristotle saw this very clearly. If time is composed of moments, each one must come into being and then pass away. But when? A moment cannot be born in itself, nor can it die in itself, without violating the principle of non-contradiction. Neither can a moment be born or die in another moment, for that, too, would be contradictory. So, the principle of non-contradiction forbids moments, as Aristotle saw, yet it also requires them—a consequence he did not recognize. “The same thing,” he writes, “cannot both be and not be in the same respect at the same time.” Now, referring to fire’s relation to its fuel, Heraclitus called it “need and satiety.” Consistency demands that we analyze this apparent contradiction by distinguishing the duration of fire’s burning into different times. But no matter how finely we do so—ultimately, to the point of moments without duration—the contradiction persists. And likewise for other temporal processes; fire is just a particularly vivid illustration of the problem.

Although philosophers today overlook it, Hegel thought this problem serious enough to develop a new logic. British Hegelians were thus also worried about it. Bertrand Russell began in this tradition, but later rebelled against it to found analytic philosophy—which would venerate, not coincidentally, a logic without tense.

Parmenides's consistent reason fails to accommodate time, whereas the Heraclitean alternative succeeds. Heraclitus was the ancient alternative to Platonism. Where Platonism, indebted as it is to the Pythagorean devotion to reason as consistency / non-contradiction, sees an unquenchable rivalry between transcendence and immanence, Heraclitus synthesizes the two. He can do this because his understanding of reason included analysis—the separating out of things to understand them—and synthesis—putting things together. Heraclitus thus sublated the antithesis between time and eternity. Paying close attention to time and any process in time, we have to acknowledge that it is contradictory at every moment. There should therefore be a higher-order logic that accounts for the operation of reason whenever it thinks about time or itself. This is what I call chiasmus.

Chiasmus is a way of thinking. Whenever we wish to understand anything as temporal, including ourselves, chiasmus is needed. Using chiasmus we can see the difference in time and feel the summons of eternal unity; eternity is present at every moment of time.

Christianity blends the eternity of Platonism with the temporality of the Hebrew bible. Time can be holy. Think of the liturgical calendar. Augustine wrestles with this in the Confessions in order to make sense of the Incarnation. From antiquity, chiasmus has been used as a symbol for Christ.

Christianity is like baseball

There is an article that has stayed with me for quite a while now. The article is "How Baseball Explains the Nature of Language" by Alva Noë. Noë is a philosopher of perception at UC Berkeley. He is also a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Center for New Media, and he blogs on NPR's science blog 13:7 Cosmos and Culture, where this article was published.

Now I've been asking methodological questions about theology for over a decade now. What is theology? What makes theology good or bad? Does theology mean anything? Does it have purpose? Is it useful? What is appropriate to it and when could it be said to go off the tracks? Is it a craft or a science? How do you know if you are doing theology versus, say, sociology, psychology, political theory, writing protest songs, or abandoning oneself to phantasie under the illusion of piety? What are its basic moves, its tools, its core principles? How can one define its edges and sort out its territories? Is theology native to confession or imported (or worse) into/onto it?

Nearly all of these sorts of questions are simply assumed by surveys and the literature (though not by Barth who plows right in from the start), and so I've been forced to work backward into the questions, which is my usual and oh-so-efficient method. Nevertheless, I have made slow, imperceptible progress. My hypothesis is that theology is not akin to philosophy or a philosophical system, but resembles more a craft, something that is made by human beings and that also makes them back.

So if theology is a craft, then what structures and orders it? What are its tools? I've been around the block long enough to have heard a bit about Ludwig Wittgenstein's language games, and I own a copy of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations. But his work outstrips my abilities--and Noë's article enters the picture at exactly this point, meeting low-brow abilities like mine with exactly the sort of metaphor this citizen of Red Sox Nation can respond to: baseball.

A fundamental of Noë's argument is that context governs meaning. The phrase "home run" is meaningless outside of the context "baseball". Baseball creates a space in which meanings like home run, triple play, our grand slam can come to be and make sense. (Wittgenstein put it like this in the first proposition of the Tractatus: Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist / The world is all that is the case. Think also of Heidegger’s Dasein—that we are thrown (Geworfenheit) into this world. Dasein ist geworfener Entwurf.) But what sort of activity is baseball?

Baseball is based on rules, but it far transcends them. Baseball includes all of these actions—throwing, hitting, catching, how to steal a base, how to bunt—and all of this new grammar—double-play, foul ball, home run. But it also includes a higher-order discussion of how it is best played and what makes for the best team and the best game. “Baseball people are concerned not just with how you play, but with the very question of how one ought to play baseball.” And it also brings with it an ethic: “When you are initiated into the baseball world, you learn to care about such things as stolen bases and pick-off attempts.”

Baseball is a human space. And this space is not just system, but a practice, a game, an activity which by definition is participatory, social, and makes as much as it is made. "To learn baseball," writes Noë, "is to come to be able to see and feel and be motivated in ways that are meaningless to strangers of the game. Baseball is more than a system of rules, it is a practice."

Noë says that there is a class of actions that human beings practice, a class based on rules, but that can’t help but transcends rules. A class that always has both first-order activities (what is done) and second-order activities (how we evaluate what is done). He calls these “baseball-like practices” and practices whose “ontologies are practice relative” and includes in these other social practices such as dance, art, law, speech, and language.

As a philosopher of language, Noë is taking linguistics to task. Linguists, he says, want desperately to be descriptive and evaluate only what is there. But they cannot do that, he maintains, because language is one of those class of actions that cannot be described from the outside. We live inside language; we can’t examine it from some removed and untouchable location. “We are so deeply embedded within and at home in the language world (compare: the baseball world) that we find it difficult to believe in the practice relativity of our convictions and commitments.” And because of that language is not only a first-order practice, like chemistry or geology, which can be comfortably described and dissected, but always and everywhere a second-order practice which can’t help but comment and critique itself.

And so I say that Christianity is a baseball-like practice whose ontology is practice-relative. It is a human practice, and that means a social, a political practice. It is based on rules (law), but those rules create a space of actions and activities and words and meanings and, almost instantly, the second-order discussion of how this should all work called theology. But going deeper than that, it is a revealed religion, which means it is based in language (Word) and, because language is a baseball-like practice, then by definition it must have grammar, it must have ethics, it must have theology.

Coming the long way around, then, Christianity is a practice-specific, a baseball-like ontology that exists along the first-order—its practices (liturgy, public and private)—and the second-order—the ethics generated by and for those practices as well as the metaphysics, the theology that questions the fitness of the whole.

Well, I’ve thrashed around in this for a while. Such thrashing is not Noë’s fault. His article isn’t about Christianity, after all, but an intramural jab at linguistics. There is something lex orandi, lex credenda (the law of prayer is the law of belief) about it. And there is something of Plato’s Paradox of the Meno and previous discussions on this blog about the epochē that are here as well. I’m dissatisfied as this last point I’ve neglected altogether in this description. At any rate, I’d better post.

To break or to be broken

And so this American experiment and the quality of the Americans it produces comes down to this word "freedom". Do we break upon its surface, or will we be broken? Is it a politic or a pathway? Will I measure out freedom by the span of my arms, or will I measure it by the outstretched arms of Another?

. . . . . . . . . .

Along this same line, consider the following juxtaposition in a quote from a Cardus op-ed piece by Jane Clark:

"Dr. Anthony Esolen, professor of Renaissance Literature at Providence College, says that throughout literature, the word "villain" simply indicates a person who does not respect things as he ought. Villains are brutes, louts, cowards, petty criminals. They do not appreciate and treasure the small, sacred things, but instead tromp through the world like Jack's ugly giant, crushing everything tender and innocent. Small boys smashing butterflies are villains, as are fathers beating their children. They are intentionally ignorant (note the etymological root: ignore) of the right ordering of the world, which requires tenderness and thoughtful care for the small and weak things.

It is helpful to consider villainy alongside its opposite: virtue. Virtue is the habit of paying proper deference, which can include reprimanding evil as we encounter it. In many ways, virtue is synonymous with respect. It seeks the true nature of things and strives to deal with them as they ought to be dealt with."

A word about the historical-critical method

R R. Reno made this comment in the June/July issue of First Things. Printing it here is a public admission of personal doubt--perhaps just a small one, a question, a confusion, or perhaps not--concerning the interpretive method of my schooling, namely this historical-critical (grammatical) one. Reno says,

For more than two centuries, the tradition of historical-critical study of the Bible has sought authoritative readings of the Bible that distill key normative theological concepts out of many studies of particular strata of the biblical text and it's history. Because of the mathematics of conditional probability, these efforts cannot succeed. Historical judgments about discrete portions of texts and slices of ancient Israelite history can discipline and enrich our larger-scale, traditional interpretations of the Bible. But the techniques of modern historical analysis that provide critical insight lack the creative, synthetic power to generate canonical readings. (7)

I am not an expert in hermeneutics or in the interpretive tradition, but I have had a little schooling. I know enough to know that Neoplatonism and the four-senses tradition were put aside, when Enlightenment science picked humanity from the navel of the cosmos. History replaced metaphysics. And method overcame genius, pragmatic wisdom, or contemplative and mystical insights. German criticisms sometimes hilariously gave us the historical-critical method and conservative scholarship wiped out the critical part and replaced it with the word "grammatical"--as much a political as academic move. It has held an easy peace in the burned over landscape of dead trees and souls that remain after the total war between fundamentalists and modernists, a war presided over by the janus god Modernity. This peace has held for nearly half a century, but, today, that peace is slipping. There is R. R. Reno's observation, above, but the sensibility behind it can be observed in growing calls for theological exegesis. I should observe that R. R. Reno is general editor of the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible.

Where I am concerned, I have long wondered how to make the "well, if you understand the historical situation" results of exegesis and the well-worn "Bible says" truisms stand together. Paper after paper and commentary after commentary discover new readings based on historical and grammatical science--findings that are shared in the classroom and discussed at conferences but rarely--at this point--make it into pulpits and sunday school curricula. These finding are not hostile to the text, as were the assaults of the Tuebingen school, but they are different, nevertheless. And, slowly but surely, they will collectively reshape confession.

I am mostly glad. Perhaps we are seeing the fruit of the Reformation--the gospel message restored to the church after so much cultural accretion. But if these results are based in history alone, if these results are arrived at by a method born of science, then how can they be completely trusted as dependable by the church of Jesus? This method removes the Bible from the churches. It is the Bible of the schoolmen--no matter how devout. Can this Bible be trusted? Does God call ministers without first making them historians? To ask such questions sounds like American anti-intellectualism. It is not. Mine is a question about the role of the Spirit and a growing certainty that Jesus's reign should extend even to method.

Get a Sensei Q&A

The following is a Q&A I put together for some friends recently as part of a longer discussion on personal theological development. I had made the point that one of the things you must do is to choose a sensei to guide your development, and followed it up with this Q&A.

Q: I have no idea where to begin.
A: Ask someone who can give you guidance and, chances are, you have a book on your shelf now. Learn to glance over foot/endnotes and bibliographies. Do not lose sight of your question. Senseis are asking their own questions. They may overlap with yours, and sometimes yours is swallowed up into theirs, but, eventually and in the end, it is always your question.

Q: What if I choose a sensei I cannot understand?
A: This is not uncommon. To some degree, the best senseis are bewildering and frustrating long before they become enlightening. Nevertheless, if you are really in over your head, know your limits and choose a lesser light or a book or article or video or talk guided toward a popular audience. Sometimes senseis are intentionally obtuse for various reasons. An example is the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga, who teaches at the U of Notre Dame. Plantinga started his career by intentionally skewing as difficult as possible. He would give talks that no one would understand . . . and he did that for years. Eventually he earned the fearful respect of the philosophical community. And only after that did he begin to speak understandably.

A quick word about vocabulary. Runners have their time. Stocks have their performance against the market. Ideas have vocabulary. You know you are making progress when your vocabulary grows. If what you are reading etc. never challenges your vocabulary, then you are not in the presence of a sensei. Also, there are times you just skip the vocabulary. You can’t know everything. You are the one asking the question, after all, and they serve your ends, not the other way around.

Q: I’m afraid of finding a sensei. After all, I don’t know enough to judge whether they are orthodox or not. What if they lead me into bad ideas? (or the variant, “My tradition hates this person and has taught me to avoid them for the sake of keeping my salvation.”)
A: This is quite right. You should be afraid. The best senseis think so far ahead of you that you have agreed to their assumptions long before you are ever aware they have made any. And often your frustration with them and the bewilderment you are feeling is only proof that you are a novice and undeveloped in a topic (goodbye pride!). Most are not like that. But a strategy of beginning with a sensei who is anathema to your tradition (for example, in my case, feminist scholar Rosemary Radford Ruether) has its merits. Again, a personal example, I am reading Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics right now, and already the line between what I think and what he thinks has blurred beyond the point of knowing for sure which is which. But I’ve spent a long time preparing for this, so I’m not wholly afraid of never coming out on the other side. I’m also reading him in community with a half-dozen or other bloggers under the guidance of a prof from Fuller Seminary, which will help. My entire life, Barth has been spoken against as a dangerous watchword, and to say I’m not concerned about his influence would by lying.

Q: Why take this trouble?
A: I apologize if this sounds like some kind of occult art. It isn’t. It flows quite naturally from asking your question. If it is a question you really care about, then you want to hear an answer. If you don’t care enough to follow through, then I might ask if you are really asking your question at all. You should go back and ask why you are afraid of your question. Maybe you have never really asked a question before in your life. Just because someone can use a question mark at the end of a sentence doesn’t mean they can ask a question. Positively, though, there are moments where things fall together. There are moments where what was impenetrable before this time falls open as easily as a storybook tale. There are moments where you see past your assumptions, the bedrock cracks, and you see you were standing on something more connected than before. There is nothing like that experience. It is so affirming, so empowering, so humbling, and so exciting.

Q: I’m not a reader / I don’t really like academic stuff.
A: These are really two questions, but they are so close that I’ll address them together. Some people are not readers. There are learning styles. Thankfully, in our day, there are videos and MP3s, and sometimes you can go meet a sensei. Nevertheless, here’s the truth: leaders read. Our culture still exalts reading as the primary vehicle of intellectual exploration and growth. Often you will find that a sensei has long-form and short-form pieces. I’ve often wondered, for example, why people don’t read sermons. There are usually books of, say, Wesley’s sermons or von Balthasar or Bonhoeffer or St. Gregory of Naziansus or Van Til or Hauerwas or Barth or Augustine etc. People also write journal articles. These short-form pieces are often better ways of getting at an idea than the long-form books (which often contain unnecessary linguistic, citational, or other forms of what amounts to showing off).

As for not really liking academic stuff. I totally get that. We Westerners have so exalted the university system that it has become its own nation of priests and Levites. And, theology too has been unnaturally split between “church theology” and “academic theology” so that pastors are now taught counseling techniques while biblical and scholarly languages and the philosophical challenges of our traditions and our age are left as the inconsequential playthings of egg headed ivory-tower brainy types.

That is a complete and utter lie. Doesn’t every Christian have the Holy Spirit? And if so, isn’t that Christian beloved of the father and enveloped in the life of the Trinity? That is the very foundation of theology, is it not? One’s question(s), then, are the real beginning of theology for you, and this is spiritual discipline, not the accumulation of an academic degree or indulging in a proclivity for libraries.

Stop thinking of books and such as academic stuff. Some is. You can ignore that stuff, but don’t ignore what speaks to your question. That isn’t academic, it is about you. And, where it speaks to your question, it is the most relevant and practical dialogue on the planet.

Q: Is there any other way of dividing up senseis?
A: Yes. Do it not just by subject but historically. Every Christian, IMHO, should know three things. (a) the Bible (b) the creeds (by which is a meant having some clue of basic dogma) (c) church history. If you know nothing about church history, then you should get yourself an accessible survey like Church History in Plain Language or Gonzales’s accessible surveys and learn the story of the family. Do a little genealogy. We are all the newest members of the church triumphant spread out over time and space.

Q: How long should I stay with a sensei?
A: Until that sensei has taught you his or her five-point exploding heart technique. Sensei’s are normally classified by one or more signature moves. The more important the sensei, the greater the number of signature moves. But the real mastery comes when the many collapses into the one, and you can see the unity of intent that makes your sensei unique. When that happens, you can anticipate their moves and choreograph their catalog. Your own unity will strengthen and you will know that it is time to seek a new sensei. With practice, you will be able to sense the unifying force underneath senseis you have only just met, and you will see that it is the quality of that unity which separates skilled warriors from the heroes of legend. (Please note that this question presumes your faithfulness to your own question. Not that you can’t learn from anyone. You can. But few of us have the luxury of time or patience to learn at the feet of someone whose teachings do not speak to our needs.)

I’m sorry this went too long. And perhaps I have been too extreme or unnecessary. Perhaps, too, a caveat should be made that says that none of this is necessary for salvation or for an admirable life of witness, service, and devotion. But, in saying that, please don’t think I’m saying that it is okay to shirk responsibility. As the quotes says, “I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” And again, “The mind, once expanded, never returns again to its original shape.” (That latter one is a pilgrim’s prayer and a good saying against hard times.)