“Der Heyser Bulgar”
Traditional
Klezmer Conservatory Band
Saving Face
A Pair of Shoes
Vincent Van Gogh
Susannah Heschel said in an interview in The Christian Century“The Kotzker rebbe . . . Says being Jewish like somebody else is like wearing somebody else’s shoes” (in the 19th century shoes were made for individual feet and would only fit well that individual foot). She is explaining “spiritual plagiarism” or being a Jew like your grandparents. The Rabbis taught that you had to make Judaism your own, it is the result of your own spiritual search.
As a Christian, I don’t think this should be a foreign concept, especially in those Protestant churches that Baptize adults, because being Christian is the result of the individual’s free choice. My Christianity cannot be my parents’ Christianity, their beliefs and the product of their choice for me. I have to make it real in my own life. I like this concept of “spiritual plagiarism” because I know that much of what I believe has its origins in what others’ believe, in how others interpret scripture. Paul says in Romans, “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” (Romans 12:2) It is my mind that must be renewed, not my parents,’ not C. S. Lewis’, not any of those writers that have influenced my thinking. To be clear, their minds, to the best of my knowledge, have been renewed, that is not the point, it is my mind, the mind of each individual that follows Christ, that must be renewed.
But it is also true, that as we grow in our faith, the temptation is always there to find others’ thinking and understanding of scripture and hitch-hike on that. And in so doing grow into someone else’s faith. This is not to say we shouldn’t read what others write, but that we need to use what others have written or taught to add depth to our own beliefs. To use the insights of others to shape and direct our own insights. If all our reading provokes is agreement, then it is important that we know why we are in agreement, to graft those insights into our faith, which is, or should be, grounded in scripture. I am not certain I have ever had an original idea, but I have a smorgasbord of ideas from other kitchens that have contributed to my faith as I understand it and grow it.
T. S. Eliot once said words to the effect, bad poets plagiarize, great poets steal. The difference between theft and plagiarism is that in theft, as Eliot understood it, he put what he stole to his own use, made it his own (he once said most of his best lines were written by someone else). I shouldn’t pass off others’ words as my own but make them my own in the way I employ them in my own thinking. Paul wrote Romans, but in reading Paul, and quoting Paul, in bringing my mind into conformity with Paul, I make what Paul has written my own, they are bricks in the structure of my faith. I make scripture real in my own life.
Still Life with Bible – My Dream
Vincent Van Gogh
But I do have to be careful. As John says, “Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come. (John 16: 15-13) I take this to include guiding me into all truth in my reading of scripture, and of other things.
In the interview Susannah Heschel also said “It is an old Jewish tradition that the Torah is given to us all but each person receives it in a unique way. So each person’s Torah is different. How is the Torah reflected in my life? The answer for me is different from everybody else, the way no two faces are identical.” I think this is true for Christians as well. We receive the Bible, Old and New Testament, uniquely, and our reception of it becomes our spiritual face.
“Look at That Face”
Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newly
Roar of the Greasepaint Smell of the Crowd
Cyril Richard and Sally Smith
Santa Theresa de Jesús
“It is Love That Gives Worth to all Things”
Alonso del Arco
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teresa_of_%C3%81vila#/media/File:SantaTeresa.jpg
But what does a spiritual face look like. Is it characterized solely by personal piety, religious observance, and sincerity of belief? These are important attributes at the individual level. But is this enough? Though the spiritual face may just be another face in the crowd, oughtn’t it to be a face whose presence in the crowd somehow improves the life of the crowd and its world.
Rebecca Mead in her article, “The Gulf Between Aspiration and Accomplishment” writes about the impact of George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch. The novel revolves around a character, Dorothea, who wants to make the world better, especially for those whose treatment at the hands of the world has been unkind, cruel, or brutal. Dorothea is not motivated by anything spiritual, but by a sole desire to do good. Mead writes:
“Dorothea’s inclination is not to withdraw to a cloister for a life of private devotion, however. Today we might recognize her motivations to be not so much religious as social and ethical: She wants to do good in the world, which in her case is provincial England around 1830. Dorothea wishes to reform the lives of the tenant farmers on her uncle’s property not by improving their souls for the hereafter, but by building them new and better cottages for the here and now. Early in the novel Dorothea marries a clergyman, Edward Casaubon, but her attraction to him is not due to any exemplary faith on his part, but rather because she believes—mistakenly, it turns out—that he has a great mind, and that by participating in a minor way in his intellectual project, she might contribute to the greater good of the world.”
At the beginning of this article Mead points out Eliot’s evocation of St. Theresa of Avila (a 16th century Catholic writer and mystic) and compares Dorothea to her. Avila’s influence was profound upon the church and people of her day. The youthful aspirations of the young Theresa are contrasted with those of the young Dorothea. In the course of the novel, we follow Dorothea’s efforts to make the world of her village better, and the lessons the book teaches about those that do make the world better and how they have been received by the world are, I believe, truthful and profound. The book says of Dorothea, “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” Mead says of Dorothea“What is important is not the winning of renowned, but the doing of good, regardless of the notice it may or may not bring to the doer of this good.” Thomas Grey pointed out in his “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”:
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
Known or unknown we share a common end. Some that find their spiritual face, do go on to achieve great notice, but the vast majority go largely unnoticed, even within the congregations to which they belong. Dorothy Day and Mother Theresa are very well known. But the work these individuals began is carried on by many others whose names are relatively or completely unknown.
From Hacksaw Ridge
Mel Gibson
Lionsgate
In the film clip Private Doss has conflicting priorities. He believes it is wrong to kill for any reason and he believes he must participate in World War II to help save his country. He manages to remain true to both priorities. Though he eventually won the Medal of Honor and had a movie made about him, he is probably unknown to many, maybe most, people. But the truly good tend to be self-effacing, they are not motivated by a need to be known, but by a need to make the world a better place and to help those they live around to live better lives, to help those who do not have the resources to meet their own needs, whatever they may be, meet those needs.
David Brooks talks about obituary virtues and resume virtues. Are we motivated by what makes us prosperous or by what will not make us affluent while we live but will be remembered after we die. Some, like Dorothy Day, who lived this way did receive some notice while alive, though I do not believe Dorothy Day or others like her were ever prosperous. But their focus was not on themselves, but on the needs they saw around them. This is not an easy way to live. But it offers a different set of rewards unrelated to material prosperity. One danger of our capitalistic society is that the quest for personal prosperity is always a temptation. It also would have us believe that poverty is the result of individual choices, that society has no responsibility to help those that are badly off; the society is not at fault and whatever fault is to be found is on the part of the individual. And even if it is not the individual’s fault it is not the society’s or the government’s responsibility. Not that all, or even very many capitalists think this way, but the temptation to think this way is ever present.
Christ in the House of His Parents
John Everett Millais
Throughout history we see individuals that live outside the world of their day’s view of how life should be lived. It is often these people that make a society better, that point out the “how” of living life well as opposed to the way we might prefer to live life. The ought versus the desire. Jesus was like that. Old Testament prophets were often these kinds of people. Daniel was essentially a slave in the palace of the king that overthrew his country and enslaved his people. Yet he confronted the king and spoke truth though speaking truth could be costly, potentially deadly.
Margery Kempe was a woman of the Middle Ages I find quite remarkable. On one of her journeys to the Holy Land she got herself “thrown off the bus” so to speak. The group of people she was traveling with found her weeping annoying, so they kicked her out of the group, and she had to travel on alone. This was a time when traveling alone or even as a group of two or three was very dangerous. The roads were watched by bandits of all sorts and worse. Yet she made her way safely back to civilization with the aid of a guide that traveled with her. Though they were only two, they made their journey safely.
When she was commanded by an archbishop to swear she would stop speaking of the Gospel, she said, “Nay, sir, I shall not swear.” She said this to a man who had power to imprison her or worse. If you read her book, you can see easily why many found her annoying. But whatever you think of her as she traveled, she was true to her beliefs and confronted the false beliefs of many. She held up a mirror of sorts.
On the other hand, non-conformity does not always hold up a mirror and can be its own kind of conformity. I grew up in the 1960’s and 70’s when living against the grain was the thing to do. In the end many became non-conformists in ways that conformed with how everyone else non-conformed. Which is how things usually are, we conform with our contemporaries or whoever makes up the crowd with which we travel. We were different from our parents, but we went on to create the society our children were expected to belong. And they, like us, are creating the society that will replace ours. As Emerson wrote, “No man can have society upon his own terms. If he seeks it, he must serve it too.” That is how societies are structured and how we avoid the great loneliness. But it should be the hope of each society that it finds its own Dorothea, its own Theresa of Avila that fixes the brokenness the society does not see or pretends not to see.
Le saint voiturier (The Holy Coachman)
Marc Chagall
Maria Tatar writes about how women who have been marginalized by men used “gossip” to create their own society and their own stories (Tatar also points out that men gossiped too but termed their talk in more socially acceptable language). Where Dorothea and Theresa of Avila tried to improve the larger society into which they were born, Tatar writes about disenfranchised women that in their gossip created their own stories that shaped their society. She writes:
What is gossip’s greatest sin? One possibility is that gossip knits women together to create networks of social interactions beyond patriarchal control and oversight. It can be seen as a counter-discourse that operates against prevailing communal norms, a strategy for collecting talk in the form of compelling stories that can be parsed and analyzed to turn into useful sources of wisdom and knowledge. It becomes a storytelling resource built into a preexisting support system for those limited in their mobility and confined to the domestic sphere. (Maria Tatar, “On the Subversive Power of Gossip”)
The stories that grew out of this gossip became what have been collected by the like of The Brothers Grimm (Children’s and Household Tales) and Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe (East of the Sun West of the Moon). These stories were on the one hand the talk of women dismissed by the men of their day, but on the other hand captured the society and “culture” of the women of their day. Margery Kempe’s talk was dismissed in this way. Tatar goes on to say:
Suddenly there is no need for seclusion and secrecy, two distinctive features of idle chatter and gossip. The story can now be broadcast, told in public without fear of payback. It is also “under control,” in ways that are never the case in real life. Encapsulating a high-stakes conflict, it locates the problem in the long ago and far away of “once upon a time,” turning the protagonists into figures with generic names or descriptors and magnifying the monstrousness of the villains, who are now giants, dragons, stepmothers, and ogres.
We recognize these villains and those, usually children, they prey upon. Fairy tales are easily dismissed as childish and only meant for children.
But J. R. R. Tolkien tells us:
Actually, the association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history. Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the “nursery,” as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the play-room, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused. It is not the choice of the children which decides this. Children as a class—except in a common lack of experience they are not one—neither like fairy-stories more, nor understand them better than adults do; and no more than they like many other things. They are young and growing, and normally have keen appetites, so the fairy-stories as a rule go down well enough. But in fact, only some children, and some adults, have any special taste for them; and when they have it, it is not exclusive, nor even necessarily dominant. It is a taste, too, that would not appear, I think, very early in childhood without artificial stimulus; it is certainly one that does not decrease but increases with age, if it is innate.
The stories themselves are not without importance.
Alasdair MacIntyre points out the importance of fairy tales and stories and of the cultural myths they preserve, “Mythology, in its original sense, is at the heart of things.” (After Virtue) Perhaps in this sense Middlemarch is something of a sophisticated fairy-tale. In some ways the stories we tell grow in sophistication, but their hearts are much the same. We live in a dangerous world, a selfish and greedy world where kindness becomes almost a vice that comes between us and our own prosperity. At the end of the day, we have to decide on the fairy tale we want to live, if we want to live in a Middlemarch world or an Ayn Rand world. Do we want to be more like Dorothea or more like Howard Roark?
‘“On that island stands a church; in that church is a well; in that well swims a duck.”
Kay Nielsen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kay_Nielsen#/media/File:Illustration_by_Kay_Nielsen_9.jpg