Adiaphora

The closer a book comes to being a genuine work of art, a true creation fully alive with a life of its own, the less likely it is that the author had a full control and a clear understanding of what he wrote. D.H. Lawrence, who was an exceptionally perceptive critic, summed this up in a statement which I have already quoted many times but which one should never tire of invoking: “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.”

Cal Newport, a professor of computer science at Georgetown and author of the book How to Win at College, has interviewed hundreds of students about their college experience. Based those interviews and observation of his own students, Newport believes that those who chose majors simply to please their parents are more likely to give up or burn out. ‘It’s just harder to weather the hard times if you don’t have the intrinsic motivation,’ he said. You might not expect college freshmen to understand that careers don’t proceed in straight lines, but surely their parents ought to. In the real world, most physics majors don’t become physicists, most psychology majors don’t become psychologists, and most English majors don’t become writers or teachers. You’ll find a surprising number of philosophy majors at hedge funds and lots of political-science majors at law firms. I was an American studies major. Among chief executives of the largest corporations, there are roughly as many engineers and liberal arts majors, in total, as there are undergraduate majors in business, accounting and economics combined. Indeed, one study found that only 27 percent of people have jobs that are substantially related to their college majors — a reality that applies even to the STEM fields. 'Choosing a major is not choosing a career,’ says Jeff Selingo, author of There Is Life After College.

[How should we] respond to the charge of arbitrariness, commonly made in the direction of spiritual exegesis[?] The accusation usually ignores the remarkable similarities in the exegesis of premodern theologians…. This is something we would hardly expect if allegorizing were mostly an arbitrary exercise. Indeed, I am convinced that most Christian use of allegory is anything but arbitrary. It is typically christologically grounded, and theological considerations… determine the appropriateness of its use. As a result, there tends to be a great deal more similarity in exegetical outcome among advocates of spiritual interpretation than among those who restrict themselves to literal or historical exegetical methods. Once a common theological starting point no longer enters into the exegetical practice, exegesis inevitably becomes dependent on the insights of individual historians. And experience teaches that these insights tend to vary more than the interpretations of those who consciously stand in line with the christological exegesis of the great tradition of the church.

And I realized then that the answer to “why write? Why talk? Why read? Why publish?” is that we are not primarily writing and reading and publishing to “fix” the City of Man. I mean, maybe things will in the future “swing our way,” and maybe our words will have had something to do with the restoration of social conservatism in America. But maybe not. But the thing is, that was never—it never should have been—our major vision for writing anyway.  Why write, in the first place? The answer is the same answer you’ve got to give to “Why garden?” “Why have babies?” “Why build a house?” The answer is, because we are called to, we are called to be makers, because we are made in the image of a creator, and this is part of what it means to be fruitful, to have dominion, to be humanity, restored in Christ, as God intended us to be. It is by being the best humans we can be, the best makers we can be, that we will do the best for the culture at large. If we’re writers, then we write because it’s our part of the human task to do this, to write essays and publish them, the way we might bottle peaches, or crochet granny squares, or install insulation. When we are in Christ, and being in Him, offer him our work, it lasts into eternity; I think it ends up as part of what we’ll be able to get from the libraries and bookshops in the New Jerusalem. It’s not about “turning America around;” it’s about living in the Kingdom now, being ambassadors from another city, being a light in a dark world. Living the cultural life of eternity, starting now.

A psalm drives away demons, summons the help of angels, furnishes arms against nightly terrors, and gives respite from daily toil; to little children it is safety, to men in their prime an adornment, to the old a solace, to women their most fitting ornament. It peoples solitudes, it brings agreement to market places. To novices it is a beginning; to those who are advancing, an increase; to those who are concluding, a confirmation. A psalm is the voice of the Church. It gladdens feast days, it creates grief which is in accord with God’s will, for a psalm brings a tear even from a heart of stone.

In the midst of those these seemingly uneventful days, prior to my mother’s death, I found myself thinking about and praying over the impermanence of life, the way in which, despite our best efforts, we cannot hold on to the things we love, to the people we love: how we hold our lives like water cupped in our hands that ever so slowly leaks through our fingers. Our days slip past us, each one marked by some degree of loss. We experience this most sharply when we lose to death someone we love. We experience it perhaps less sharply, but no less really, as we drift away from friends over time, or lose the enthusiasm we once felt for our work or for a cause we cared about, or even for our faith. Of course, there are gains in life as well as losses, but we experience a kind of loss even in life’s gains. As I prayed about the coming death of my mother I recalled my last conversation with her, in which she was recalled when I was a toddler and she would come into my room every morning and I would be standing in my crib, so excited to see her. While I have no doubt that she loved the man I became, it was also clear that she missed that little toddler and his unambiguous love and enthusiasm. I thought too about my own children and their transition from childhood to young adulthood, and how even in the process of becoming the increasingly accomplished, interesting, complex people that they are there is the loss of innocent childlike wonder and simplicity. Even the great gains of life are not unmarked by loss. The advent of the child who walks on her own marks the end of the child whom you carried in your arms. The emergence of the child who can read for himself marks the end of the child to whom you read The Very Hungry Caterpillar over and over and over and over. As tired as our arms may grow, and as tedious as the adventures of that caterpillar may be, we still miss the feel of that child against our chest, the time spent together discovering the wonder of language and image. We want to hold on to those moments of grace. but they pass away and even memory fades. Is this simply the fate of us human beings, who live within the unceasing stream of time? Will the water of life inevitably trickle through our fingers? Does every tick of the clock mark the winding down of life? Is it the case, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, that “all is in an enormous dark/Drowned,” that “vastness blurs and time beats level”? Or can we find, in the midst of the ceaseless flow of time, a still point, a place of eternity in which every moment that flies past us is held safe and kept close, a point that gathers in all that time takes from us, a point in which we can find that lost loved one, that friendship that faded out over the years, that childlike innocence that was exchanged for adulthood? On this Easter morning, St. Paul exhorts us, “Think of what is above, not of what is on earth.” In the midst of this life that at every moment is being pulled by time from our grasp, Paul tells us to open our hands, to let go of the things we love in this life. But he tells us this not because this life is unimportant, not because the things we love are not worthy of our love, but because the only way we can keep them is by releasing them into the eternity of love that is God, the eternity of love that explodes into our world in the resurrection of Jesus. This is what Easter hope is all about. The empty tomb of Christ is the doorway into the still point of eternity in which all time is gathered and redeemed.

In the public school system, children are socialized horizontally, and temporarily, into conformity with their immediate peers. Home educators seek to socialize their children vertically, toward responsibility, service, and adulthood, with an eye on eternity.