A Year of Morning Thanks
Pilgrimage
Speaking of Faith, a weekly radio broadcast on National Public Radio created by American Public Media, has featured discussions the last two weeks on America's peculiar marriage of religion and politics. Two weeks ago, Krista Tippett featured Amy Sullivan, a Time magazine correspondent, an evangelical Christian and political liberal. This week Ms. Tippett spoke to Ron Dreher, who writes for the Dallas Morning News, a Christian political conservative not always at home with the Christian right.
The political atmosphere is so heavily charged right now that I'm sure many would disagree, but I found the two programs extraordinarily helpful in a ton of ways.
Just one. Dreher says that the difference between Christians on the right and Christians on the left is that the former tend to honor what one believes, while the latter honor how one comes to believe what one believes. To liberals, the quest is all; to conservative, the precept is all. Interesting and, I think, helpful.
Here's the way I look backward. The watershed events in my life concern my children growing up. We just spent a sweet chunk of the weekend in Oklahoma, where my son is a grad student; we came back thrilled. He's doing well, and the young lady he's been seeing for a year, we think is a gem. Our daughter lives here, very happily and very busily, with her husband and two great kids. We've got it pretty good.
That's not the point. The watershed events in my life happened when it became perfectly clear to me that we can't and don't clone ourselves, that our kids have their own lives, that just because they're ours doesn't mean they make decisions or choose to behave or determine what they believe in a fashion that replicates their parents' ways, just as I didn't. My children--and they're doing well--have taught me the greatest lesson I've ever learned: that I'm not so blasted smart. Maybe that's why I'm not as interested in precept as I am in the pilgrimage.
Sometimes I see parents of young children in church, and I remember what it was like for me, standing there in a pew, kids beside me as I tell myself that this whole parenthood thing was a piece of cake. Then my kids got minds of their own, just like I once did. Life got more complex than it seemed when they were my responsibility. I became far less sure of my positions on just about everything. How I got to where I stood was of far greater interest to me than simply where I stood.
If Ron Dreher is right--and I think he is--then listening to him this weekend has helped me to understand why I am where I am. And, as Aristotle says--and Calvin remembers--"the whole humility of man consists in the knowledge of himself."
So this morning, I'm thankful for a radio program I heard yesterday on the way back from a great weekend visit to our son, a program that helped me better understand myself. Oh, yeah--and a wonderful weekend.
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3 comments:
Jim:
Good observations. This also reminds me of how quickly we place before ourselves a false dichotomy with its false choices. Was not Israel's defining event, the Exodus, which we as contemporary children of Abraham re-enact daily, an amazing story of pilgrimage and precept insolubly linked? Of a God who both led them through the particularities of their personal narratives and issued his decrees written in stone from the mountain? Neither Red Christian or Blue Christian tells the full story on this one, thank God.
Dan
Really boxes me in. The left love the journey and the right love the precept. The prejudicial psychology in that view says that the conservative is stuck in the past and the other has freed him or herself from those constraints and allow themselves to move forward, improve etc. etc. One side is portrayed positively, the other negatively. One group ignores the part of life that doesn't square with the belief, and in fact the prudish conservatives have ignored life for so long that we can't see the rubber for the road. And the other more perfect liberal side is always aware, always changing, always soaking in all the knowledge and wisdom that shapes belief. That's the message. Its justification to isolate, segregate and discriminate against one group and justify one's own point of view. It's another form of class warfare. I'd really freak out the math if they understood how much I love and disdain but always acknowledge the journey.
How would he explain why I am so interested in the journey? At the same time, I do have absolutes, paradigms and presuppositions and although my paradigms change, my presuppositions change very little. So does that make me an independent? Am I the moderate candidates ardently chase?
Nope.
An interesting idea, “To liberals, the quest is all; to conservative, the precept is all”. But what of the prize, the destination, or the goal?
Is the journey really worth taking if there is no destination? Who runs a race and does not try to win it? 1 Corinthians 9:24
If the “precepts” are the undisputable truths of God, and the “quest” is the journey to understand or possess those truths. Then it goes to reason that both are equally important and necessary. Stay the course, win the race.
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