So, I was thinking about this today in relationship to theology. In the discipline of theology, there is a lot to know. There is a reason why the old universities saved theology for last. That's what it requires. Theologians have to be historians, literature professors, quasi-scientists, philosophers, psychologists, ethicists, Biblical scholars, linguists, economists, political scientists, researchers, teachers, writers (and sometimes public speakers), and keep up with their fellow theologians all at the same time. Theology needs it all, and there is never enough. It is necessary to dive down many times and to stay down as long as possible. In theology, the Baptists finally get their wish and the submerged must be saturated through-and-through. It is necessary--along with the comorbid guilt and frustration. Nevertheless, there is a time to put it aside. That is what I am feeling.
What I want to do is follow those chefs back into the ingredients. I want to pluck a blueberry from a bush or pull a carrot from my own earth. And I have been noodling around with Christopher Alexander's pattern language ideas, his and others, because I think this is the way to do this. That is the way to pull the ingredients up out of the crazy kitchen of tradition and argument and give each one my deepest attention. I want to get to know them, be schooled by them, let them pull me into the conversation they are having, into the tradition, and not the other way round. I do not want to use them; I want to spend time with them, to love them. It is part of the working out of the transition from the practice of theology as a profession in the academy to the practice of theology as craft. It is part of ad fontes.
For a while, I have been struggling to understand how to build a pattern language. I've not been sure exactly what constitutes a pattern. Is a pattern the solution to a problem or is a pattern a theme or idea? Are the themes and ideas that make up a discipline in reality solutions to problems that come up in the practice of that discipline (in which case they trace how that discipline is practiced)? I have not been sure. And this hesitancy around what is and is not a pattern has slowed me down. But I am starting to overcome the either/or and say the ideas of a discipline are also its solutions to underlying problems. Patterns are like tomatoes, curry, and garlic, and they are solutions to necessary problems (Acts 10:13).
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Epilogue: It occurs to me this evening that I still act as beholden to the academy when there is no reason to be. I do not need its permission. There is no need to beg a tenure committee. There is no need to hock my wares, desperate in a frayed suit at the yearly AAR paid for by money scraped from months of the family food budget. There is a discipline to well-formed scholarship that should be obeyed. Discipline is important, yes. So, giving a respectful nod, I feel free now to follow my muse (cf. Purgatorio I.1-84).
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"Emmanuel Mounier describes the notion of environment poetically. The environment is not everything that surrounds us. It is only that which may become our experience and possesses the power of incarnation.“Precisely that winding road transforming proximity into incarnation turns the whole human environment, from bodily fluids and blood to the starry heavens above our heads, into the living body of our life. Anything that has not been experienced this way has not yet become a human environment.”
"So things, stars, people must become my body in order to exist for me.
The same holds for poetry."
~ Anna Kamienska from In that Great River: A Notebook
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