Relocating To Elfland

“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain”
by Emily Dickinson

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through –

And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum –
Kept beating – beating – till I thought
My mind was going numb –

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space – began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here –

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then –

If, indeed, we all have a kind of appetite for eternity, we have allowed ourselves to be caught up in a society that frustrates our longing at every turn. Half our inventions are advertised to save time – the washing machine, the fast car, the jet flight – but for what? Never were people more harried by time: by watches, by buzzers, by time clocks, by precise schedules, by the beginning of the programme. There is, in fact, some truth in ‘the good old days': no other civilisation of the past was ever so harried by time.

And yet, why not? Time is our natural environment. We live in time as we live in the air we breathe. And we love the air – who has not taken deep breaths of pure, fresh country air, just for the pleasure of it? How strange that we cannot love time. It spoils our loveliest moments. Nothing quite comes up to expectations because of it. We alone: animals, so far as we can see, are unaware of time, untroubled. Time is their natural environment. Why do we sense that it is not ours? . . . If we complain of time and take such joy in the seemingly timeless moment, what does that suggest?

It suggests that we have not always been or will not always be purely temporal creatures. It suggests that we were created for eternity. Not only are we harried by time, we seem unable, despite a thousand generations, even to get used to it. We are always amazed at it – how fast it goes, how slowly it goes, how much of it is gone. Where, we cry, has the time gone? We aren’t adapted to it, not at home in it. If that is so, it may appear as a proof, or at least a powerful suggestion, that eternity exists and is our home.

(Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy, pp. 202–203)

In the Christian circles I’ve been a part of, it’s conventional wisdom that one ought to focus on others more than oneself. Other-focus is a big part of love, and therefore it’s a big part of growing in holiness.

Strange as it may sound, I’ve started to question the validity of this accepted wisdom. To be sure, if we were all more like Jesus, it would be great advice: focus on others. But the fact is that most of us aren’t all that much like Jesus, and apart from the perfect love that shaped His every action, focusing on other people can actually be a bad thing. In fact, I would argue that most of us in our human relations should focus on ourselves a lot more than we do. There’s an I-focus (an I-factor, if you will) without which focusing on others can damage them in horrible ways. Far from being too self-focused, I wonder if we’re not self-focused enough. Let me hurry to explain.

The human heart has an incurable desire to play god over other people; we flatter ourselves (insanely) that things would be much better if people would just do what we want. We don’t think of ourselves as this prideful, but we are. The proof is right there every time two people face off in a conflict. Most of the energy of each party is spent focusing on the other. Each renders all sorts of judgment on what the other has done, thought, felt, and intended; second person pronouns fly like arrows (“you did X”; “you thought Y”; “how could you have intended Z?”). Each person zeroes in on how the other person needs to change, and exerts as much pressure as possible to that end. Neither adopts the posture of a learner with respect to the other. Neither wants to talk about the fact that he or she has taken offense; both are stubbornly focused on how the other person has given offense.

Let’s picture it concretely. (We’ll use marriage, since most of the ugliest fights on earth happen in marriages.) Jack and Jill are man and wife. They’ve been married for ten years, long enough to carry the scars that inevitably come when you’re joined to another sinner till death do you part. They’ve had a fight recently and are trying to talk about it. It’s not going well. Why?

For one thing, Jack doesn’t really listen when Jill talks about her hurts. He’s immediately angry and defensive, because she’s being inaccurate, unfair, and unreasonable. In his head, he sizes up her hurts and judges them, and then (ironically) he feels judged! This messes up his emotional equilibrium and calls forth evasive measures and/or aggressive countermeasures.

Jill pretty much reciprocates when Jack starts talking about his hurts. Soon neither can talk about any hurts without starting a shouting match, so both parties retreat and fume. End of round one.

Cue round two. Jill again starts talking about her hurts, this time with feeling.

Jill has a way of talking about her hurts that drips judgment. She doesn’t really talk about what’s going on in her heart and head; she talks about what Jack has done, thought, felt, and intended. If he tries to explain, she doesn’t want to hear it. She’s not looking for a way to extend grace to him; she’s looking for a way to make him hurt as much as she does; and if he doesn’t hurt, this messes up her emotional equilibrium and calls forth evasive measures and/or aggressive countermeasures. You already know how Jack responds to such measures. End of round two.

The problem in this marriage isn’t the hurts. Hurts are no big deal, actually. They can be quickly resolved if hearts are right. The problem is that Jack and Jill can’t talk constructively about their respective hurts, the reason being . . . they’re not nearly self-focused enough.

If Jack had a better grip on the fact that God is sovereign and Jack isn’t, he would be able to listen to Jill’s hurts knowing that God, not Jill, is his Judge; this would enable him to listen to her without insecurity and reaction (his self-understanding would regulate his responses to her). He would also know that Jill’s Healer is God, not Jack; and freed from the burden of needing to fix Jill, he could simply care for her. He would also realize that, not being God, he really has very little idea what’s going on inside of Jill, and since Jill is the only one who can tell him, he’d do well to shut up and really listen before he tries to respond. In short, if Jack were more self-aware and less delusional, he would be a better listener and a better husband.

Likewise with Jill: if she had a better grip on the sovereignty of God, she would know that she can’t read Jack’s heart, mind, or motives; and she would spend more time explaining what she has thought and felt rather than judging what he has done, thought, felt, and intended. She would be a better communicator and a better wife.

A passage from Edwin Friedman’s Failure of Nerve (pp. 62–63) speaks to all of this:

Members of chronically anxious families will be quick to interrupt one another, if not to jump in and complete one another’s sentences, and they are constantly taking and making things “personal.” Communication is marked more by diagnostic or labeling “you” positions rather than by self-defining “I” statements. Rather than saying, “This is what I believe,” “Here is how I perceive it,” “This is what I will do,” family members stay focused on the other: “You’re just like your mother.” “You’re a control freak.” “You’re insensitive, unfeeling, irrational, missing the point, or just don’t get it.” The family is thus easily “heated up” as feelings are confused with opinions. Those inclined to become hysterical and those inclined to be passive-aggressive will both find their tendencies promoted.

That’s the trouble with us, and it’s exactly how we’re not like Jesus. We don’t stay focused on our own hearts and actions (the only person God has told me to control, after all, is myself); we think we know what’s going on in other people’s hearts, and we really want to (and insanely think we can) control other people’s actions. Jesus wasn’t controlling in the way He related with people, and He was God; He really did know what was going on inside of them! What’s missing in our relational breakdowns is precisely the biblical “I-factor”: a clear understanding of what we are and what we’re not; and a resolute focus on doing our duty of love before God while trusting Him to take care of everything else.

Every parent is in great haste to have his child grow up and mature, to become serious, and often impatient with the carefree, playful world of childish impulse. Children have the remarkable talent for not taking the adult world with the kind of respect which we are so confident it ought to be given. They refuse to appreciate the gravity of our monumental concerns, while we forget that if we were to become more like the child our concerns might not be so monumental. There is a certain refreshing element of profanation in the child’s world of naïveté and mischief, which blows like a gentle breeze through the stuffy pomposity of adulthood. Often with a simple question or a completely honest remark, perhaps with a quizzical smile or a whimsical laugh, a child can call into doubt the sanctimonious façade and sacrosanct presuppositions of an entire civilization. (M. Conrad Hyers, “The Dialectic of the Sacred and the Comic,” in Cross Currents, Winter 1969)

I sometimes feel appalled at the thought of the sum total of human misery all over the world at the present moment: the millions parted, fretting, wasting in unprofitable days – quite apart from torture, pain, death, bereavement, injustice. If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapour, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens! And the products of it all will be mainly evil – historically considered. But the historical version is, of course, not the only one. All things and deeds have a value in themselves, apart from their ’causes’ and ‘effects’. No man can estimate what is really happening at the present sub specie aeternitatis. All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labours with vast power and perpetual success – in vain: preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in. So it is in general, and so it is in our own lives. (J. R. R. Tolkien, letter to Christopher Tolkien, 30 April 1944)

Our experience of things is not a confrontation with something utterly alien, but a way of absorbing, and being absorbed by, the world to which we naturally belong. The mind does not primarily depict, reflect or mirror the world; rather, it assimilates the world as it is assimilated to the world. . . . Thomas [Aquinas] takes for granted this non-subject-centred way of being in the world. We are inclined to begin with the mind, asking how our mental acts relate to the world; he begins on the contrary with the external objects which evoke intellectual activity on our part, and thus bring to fulfilment the capacities with which we are endowed.

We are inclined to assume that the objects of our knowledge remain totally unaffected. To be known, for an object unaware of it, is as if nothing had happened. This surely misses something. On Thomas’s view, articulating as it does the doctrine of creation in terms of the metaphysics of participation, the object, in being known by the subject, is brought more clearly into the light and to that extent its nature and destiny are fulfilled.

It is easy to see how our minds are affected, changed, enriched and so on, by absorbing what comes to view in the world. But for Thomas it makes sense to hold that, even if there were no human minds, things would still be ‘true’ – in relation, that is, to God’s mind (De veritate). He does not look at the world and see it as simply all that is the case, in itself; rather, he sees the world, and things in it, as destined to a certain fulfilment, with appointed ends, modes and opportunities. It is perhaps not too much to say that Thomas sees the way that things are in terms of the way that they ought to be. Certainly, he does not picture knowing as the subject’s projecting value and intelligibility upon raw data. Rather, we exist at all only by participation in being (the doctrine of creation), and, since minds are what we are, we participate, by exercising our intellectual capacities, and of course to a very limited extent, in God’s own knowledge of the world.

(Fergus Kerr, “Overcoming Epistemology,” in After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism, pp. 31–32)

Almost every intellectual claims to have the welfare of humanity, and particularly the welfare of the poor, at heart: but since no mass murder takes place without its perpetrators alleging that they are acting for the good of mankind, philanthropic sentiment can plainly take a multiplicity of forms. (Theodore Dalrymple, “How – and How Not – to Love Mankind,” in Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses, p. 77)

A wonderful passage from Douglas Farrow, working from Irenaeus’ Adversus omnes haereses:

In the light of the ascension of Jesus, the eternal is something to which the temporal may aspire without abandoning its temporality. There is in fact a creaturely form of eternity, consisting in an existence that is fully engaged with God, open to the inexhaustible possibilities generated by communion with God. If the temporal world is not yet so engaged, its very temporality is the consequence of God’s invitation to such engagement; it has, therefore, a proleptic reality lent to it by God himself along the way of that invitation. (Ascension and Ecclesia: On the Significance of the Doctrine of the Ascension for Ecclesiology and Christian Cosmology, pp. 50–51)

[A] distinctive feature of God’s revelation to the patriarchs concerns the objectivity of the gifts which it bestows. We have here the beginning of a factual religion, a religion attaching itself to objective divine interpositions on behalf of man. Not that the inward, subjective aspect is lacking, but only that it is developed in close dependence on the external support. God does not begin with working upon the inward psychical states of the patriarchs, as though they were subjects for reform – an unbiblical attitude which is, unfortunately, characteristic of too much of modern religion. He begins with giving them promises. The keynote is not what Abraham has to do for God, but what God will do for Abraham. Then, in response to this, the subjective frame of mind that changes the inner and outer life is cultivated. (Geerhardus Vos, Biblical Theology, pp. 79–80)

Still more prevalent is the view, by which the essence of the Reformation is placed in the emancipation of the human mind subjectively considered; that is, in the triumphant assertion of the liberty of faith and conscience, as well as of unlimited scientific inquiry. Rightly understood this to be sure has its truth; but as commonly represented, it is a sheer caricature of history. It is made to mean very often, for instance, a full liberation of the subject from every sort of restraint, the overthrow of all authority as such. But of such escape from discipline and rule, the Reformers had no thought. Their object was rather to bind man to the grace of God, and to lead his conscience captive to God’s word. In every view, the act of protesting is not the first and main constituent in the Reformation, but the result only of a positive affirmation going before. This last accordingly is the great point, from which alone its true importance springs. Only in connection with such an original positive life principle, and as flowing from it, can deliverance from the papacy, and the restitution of private judgment to its rights, find any right sense, any religious value. Apart from this connection, they fall over to the province of infidelity, with which the Reformation has nothing to do. (Philip Schaff, The Principle of Protestantism)