Diary of a Theologian

Pilgrimage

We have come to know it as, simply, “the Camino”; in the past couple of decades its popularity has skyrocketed. It is a pilgrimage of walking to Santiago de Compostela, the place in northwestern Spain where are kept the earthly remains of Saint James, apostle of our Lord. Today, the most popular route starts just over the border in France then runs roughly 500 miles west. But it is artificial to think of the Camino as one particular route. A pilgrimage starts, in fact, from wherever you are.
    Why? A pilgrimage is a kind of picture of the whole stretch of our life. Our starting place is simply given; it’s wherever we are when we come to consciousness of God and perhaps duty or purpose or a longing for meaning. And the end of our life is God himself. In a pilgrimage, we take a chunk of our life out of our life and make that stretch of time into a picture of our whole life.
    A pilgrimage means something that’s uniquely personal to every pilgrim. One gets a sense of the possibilities of personal meaning in the 2010 film The Way, starring Martin Sheen. This is because of the simple truth: each of us is a distinct person loved by God. On the other hand, a pilgrimage means the same thing for every pilgrim. This is because each of us is a creature made by God, who has placed in every human heart a longing for him that nothing else will fulfill.
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    Dallas has a vast network of trails—old train lines, a number of them, and also parks, and paths that connect parks. We must have at least hundreds of miles of trails. I’m becoming acquainted with some of them, as I prepare for what I hope will be a pilgrimage to Santiago.
    It seems important that I un-learn multitasking. I don’t walk with music or lectures in my ears, and for the most part I don’t walk while talking on the phone. (But sometimes a phone conversation is good: it’s a way of sharing a walk with a friend who is far away.) It seems important, that is to say, for the pilgrim to be attentive to what is at hand.
    One can go through the senses. What do I see? What am I hearing? What do I feel? Are there particular smells here? What’s the taste in my mouth? On the trails, I have seen trees of great variety. Right now some are bare but others have leaves. There are wild grasses with incredibly fine colors; they look like an impressionist painting, even up close I can’t quite focus on particular blades. There are also marks of industry, high lines, tracks, broken concrete. There are fences that block off yards; new construction; trash.
    It’s good and bad, beautiful and ugly. But the pilgrim thinks—maybe I’m not supposed to be judging this. It’s just here—it just is.
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    What Theologians Eat. At the end of a recent walk I was at Pecan Lodge. Brisket commends itself to the theologian: the union of the two natures (cow and barbeque) is perfect, the result being one thing, as we have in Christ who is one person with two natures. (The orthodox will not add sauce. Adding BBQ sauce is like saying the divinity was merely poured on top of Jesus.)

    Out & About. The Good Books & Good Talk seminar will discuss A Canticle for Liebowitz this Sunday, January 26, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at Incarnation, 3966 McKinney Ave., Dallas. Anyone who reads the book is welcome to the conversation.

"B" Is for Beauty

We continue our divine alphabet. After saying he is accessible, we now say God is beautiful, indeed, he is beauty itself. But this does not mean we have seen God in himself and found him good-looking.
    Rather, God is beautiful because he is the source of beauty. We don’t know what it means for God, in himself, to be beautiful. But we do know that God is the source of all beauty in the universe. All beauty comes from God, and that means God must be supremely beautiful—even though we do not know what it means for God to be beautiful!
    (The situation is different if we think only of Jesus: we see him in his human nature and he thus reveals what true human beauty is. But the claim is that God in himself is beautiful, and we do not know what it means for, say, the Father to be beautiful.)
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    If I tell you that I have a bad apple, I have not given you positive information—you won’t know how it is bad. It would be quite a different thing if I told you I had a red apple or an eight-ounce apple or a juicy apple. In any of those cases, you could see in your mind something of what the apple is. But a bad apple, you don’t know what makes it bad. All you know is, the apple isn’t all it should be. The apple falls short of being a good apple.
    A good apple just is an apple. But a bad apple is in some way less than an apple.
    It might be worm-eaten. It might have been on the ground for awhile and have started to rot. It might have been half-eaten by a grandchild then left on the bookshelf for a week. Or it might have been dropped into wet concrete and now be part of the sidewalk. Or it might have been injected with poison.
    Badness gives us no positive information. If something is bad, all we know is that there has been some kind of loss of goodness.
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    Ditto for ugliness. Ugliness is a mark of sin. By contrast, to have a scar on one’s face, for example, is not ugliness. One can bear one’s burdens in such a way that disfigurements become beautiful. Christians know this whenever they picture Jesus whipped, or crucified. Jesus’ bloodied body—indeed, his resurrected body with its scars—is beautiful, because he is himself pure and good. There is no ugliness in him.
    Think of how you might tell someone, “That’s an ugly thing to say.” What you mean is, it’s sinful, it’s cruel or unfair or something similar. Sin is what’s really ugly. And of course, in God there is no sin.
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    We return to beauty. Why are the Rocky Mountains majestic? Because God made them beautiful. Why are the first steps of children awesome? Because God makes them beautiful. In nature, in a child, in music, in art, in a well-crafted constitution—wherever there is beauty, God is the reason it’s there.
    That’s why it is true that God is beauty: he is the source of beauty. Whatever is good or true or beautiful comes from God—and that’s why we say God is good, God is true, God is beautiful. It’s not that we know something about God in himself; rather, God is beauty because all beauty comes from him.
    And that, friends, is why we desire him. “One thing have I asked of the Lord; one thing I seek; . . . To behold the fair beauty of the Lord” (Ps 27).
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    What Theologians Read. At the recommendation of a friend, I have been reading Home: A Short History of an Idea, a 1986 book by Witold Rybczynski. Readable it is, and literally provoking of thought. It helps us see how “privacy” is a new thing, unknown in homes of as recent as four centuries ago, and with privacy, intimacy, even the sense a husband and wife might have of themselves as a couple. This is important—I am pondering still its implications—for methinks the rise of privacy in the home may be related to the way marriage has eclipsed friendship as our principal locus of intimate sharing. The book is fascinating also for its discussion of room specialization, bathing, lighting, cleanliness, furniture, windows, ventilation, and much more. I recommend it as a helpful prologue to numerous questions of theological anthropology (i.e., the “doctrine of man”).
    Out & About. This Sunday, January 19, I am to preach at the contemporary services at Incarnation, 3966 McKinney Ave., Dallas: 9 and 11:15 a.m. and 5 p.m.
    The Good Books & Good Talk seminar will discuss A Canticle for Liebowitz on Sunday, January 26, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at Incarnation. You still have time to enjoy this sci-fi classic and join our conversation.