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[whateverist]

As someone who does not identify as a Christian I have nonetheless acquired some insight into what that might be like from the novels I’ve read. In fact, just as for acquiring emotional intelligence, I think literature has taken me further than any expository writing I’ve encountered, though some of that is also quite good. So I envision this as a place to share passages that give more than definitional insight into what a sense of the sacred as experienced within a religious worldview might be like. In most of what I’ve read it is the Christian perspective that I’ve encountered as in this first snippet from Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry. The circumstances make it more understandable to me how someone (back then) might come to believe. Interesting too that you almost can’t talk about belief without also mentioning doubt.

To place this excerpt it may help to know that Jayber is orphaned young, goes to live with an aunt and uncle who are happy to get him as all three of their children died young. But before long they both die too and he is shipped off to an orphanage which is run by Christians. He loves to read but forms no bonds with other ‘students’ or anyone else. At one point he comes to think he has received the call to go into ministry. So eventually he is packed off to Pidgeonville college with tuition and board paid but then he begins to have doubts.

I took to studying the ones of my teachers who were also preachers and also the preachers who came to speak in chapel and at various exercises. In most of them I saw the old division of body and soul that I had seen at The Good Shepherd [orphanage]. The same rift ran through everything at Pigeonville College; the only difference was that I was able to see it more clearly, and to wonder at it. Everything bad was laid on the body, and everything good was credited to the soul. It scared me a little when I realized that I saw it the other way around. If the soul and body really were divided, then it seemed to me that all the worst sins - hatred and anger and self-righteousness and even greed and lust - came from the soul. But these preachers I’m talking about all thought that the soul could do no wrong, but always had its face washed and its pants on was in agony over having to associate with the flesh and the world. And yet these same people believed in the resurrection of the body.

Although I was shaken, maybe I could have clamped my mouth shut and gone ahead. But about then I began to get into different trouble and more serious. You might call it doctrinal trouble.

The trouble started because I began to doubt the main rock of the faith, which was that the Bible was true in every word. “I reckon there ain’t a scratch of a pen in it but what is true,” Uncle Othy used to say, but he spoke as of a distant wonder, and was not much concerned. The pious men of The Good Shepherd and Pigeonville were concerned. They had staked their immortal souls on the infallible truth of every pen scratch from “In the beginning” to “Amen.” But I had read all of it by then and I could see that it changed. And if it changed, how could all of it be true?

From chapter six, pp 49-50


This next part struck me as interesting for the way it talks about prayer which was on my mind from the new thread Stoppelmann recently started.

Before that time I may have had my doubts about public prayers, but i had listened to them complacently enough, even when they were for the football team. I had prayed my own private prayers complacently enough, asking for things I wanted I was not going to get, no matter how much I prayed for them. (Though I hadn’t got around to thinking about it, I already knew that I had been glad to have some things I had got that I had never thought to want, let alone pray for.)

But now I was unsure what it would be proper to pray for, or how to pray for it. After you have said “thy will be done,” what more can be said? And where do you find the strength to pray thy will be done” after you see what it means?

…Does prayer change God’s mind? If God’s mind can be changed by the wants and wishes of us mere humans, as if deferring to our better judgment, what is the point of praying to Him at all?

Does God want us to cross the abyss between Him and us? If we can’t - and it looked to me like we can’t - will He help us? Or does he want us to fall into that abyss? Are there some things He wants us to learn that we can’t learn except by falling into the abyss?
…
By then I wasn’t just asking questions; I was being changed by them. I was being changed by my prayers, which dwindled down nearer and nearer to silence, which weren’t confrontations with God but with the difficulty - in my mind, or in the human lot - of knowing what or how to pray. Lying awake at night, I could feel myself being changed - into what, I had no idea. It was worse than wondering if I had received the call. I wasn’t just a student or a going-to-be preacher anymore. I was a lost traveler wandering in the woods, needing to be on my way somewhere but not knowing where.

from Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry, pp51-2

[Stoppelmann]

As someone who does not identify as a Christian I have nonetheless acquired some insight into what that might be like from the novels I’ve read. In fact, just as for acquiring emotional intelligence, I think literature has taken me further than any expository writing I’ve encountered, though some of that is also quite good. So I envision this as a place to share passages that give more than definitional insight into what a sense of the sacred as experienced within a religious worldview might be like. In most of what I’ve read it is the Christian perspective that I’ve encountered as in this first snippet from Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry. The circumstances make it more understandable to me how someone (back then) might come to believe. Interesting too that you almost can’t talk about belief without also mentioning doubt.

To place this excerpt it may help to know that Jayber is orphaned young, goes to live with an aunt and uncle who are happy to get him as all three of their children died young. But before long they both die too and he is shipped off to an orphanage which is run by Christians. He loves to read but forms no bonds with other ‘students’ or anyone else. At one point he comes to think he has received the call to go into ministry. So eventually he is packed off to Pidgeonville college with tuition and board paid but then he begins to have doubts.

I took to studying the ones of my teachers who were also preachers and also the preachers who came to speak in chapel and at various exercises. In most of them I saw the old division of body and soul that I had seen at The Good Shepherd [orphanage]. The same rift ran through everything at Pigeonville College; the only difference was that I was able to see it more clearly, and to wonder at it. Everything bad was laid on the body, and everything good was credited to the soul. It scared me a little when I realized that I saw it the other way around. If the soul and body really were divided, then it seemed to me that all the worst sins - hatred and anger and self-righteousness and even greed and lust - came from the soul. But these preachers I’m talking about all thought that the soul could do no wrong, but always had its face washed and its pants on was in agony over having to associate with the flesh and the world. And yet these same people believed in the resurrection of the body.

Although I was shaken, maybe I could have clamped my mouth shut and gone ahead. But about then I began to get into different trouble and more serious. You might call it doctrinal trouble.

The trouble started because I began to doubt the main rock of the faith, which was that the Bible was true in every word. “I reckon there ain’t a scratch of a pen in it but what is true,” Uncle Othy used to say, but he spoke as of a distant wonder, and was not much concerned. The pious men of The Good Shepherd and Pigeonville were concerned. They had staked their immortal souls on the infallible truth of every pen scratch from “In the beginning” to “Amen.” But I had read all of it by then and I could see that it changed. And if it changed, how could all of it be true?

From chapter six, pp 49-50

I think that many, many people have become disillusioned with the institutionalized aspects of religion, but like Jayber maintain a deep sense of spirituality and a connection to the divine. The relationship with nature and the land becomes a source of spiritual solace and reflection for many people who become estranged from the church, because they return to a more existential spiritual experience. It is, as Wendell Berry says, that people “stake their immortal souls” on an understanding of existence, which becomes too “heady” and essentially projects internal stirrings on the body, on women, on others, on anything but their own unquiet thoughts.

This next part struck me as interesting for the way it talks about prayer which was on my mind from the new thread Stoppelmann recently started.

Before that time I may have had my doubts about public prayers, but i had listened to them complacently enough, even when they were for the football team. I had prayed my own private prayers complacently enough, asking for things I wanted I was not going to get, no matter how much I prayed for them. (Though I hadn’t got around to thinking about it, I already knew that I had been glad to have some things I had got that I had never thought to want, let alone pray for.)

But now I was unsure what it would be proper to pray for, or how to pray for it. After you have said “thy will be done,” what more can be said? And where do you find the strength to pray thy will be done” after you see what it means?

…Does prayer change God’s mind? If God’s mind can be changed by the wants and wishes of us mere humans, as if deferring to our better judgment, what is the point of praying to Him at all?

Does God want us to cross the abyss between Him and us? If we can’t - and it looked to me like we can’t - will He help us? Or does he want us to fall into that abyss? Are there some things He wants us to learn that we can’t learn except by falling into the abyss?
…
By then I wasn’t just asking questions; I was being changed by them. I was being changed by my prayers, which dwindled down nearer and nearer to silence, which weren’t confrontations with God but with the difficulty - in my mind, or in the human lot - of knowing what or how to pray. Lying awake at night, I could feel myself being changed - into what, I had no idea. It was worse than wondering if I had received the call. I wasn’t just a student or a going-to-be preacher anymore. I was a lost traveler wandering in the woods, needing to be on my way somewhere but not knowing where.

from Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry, pp51-2

This aspect of prayer, of God as a vending machine, is what turned me off as well. I was attending a prayer week once in a small chapel where I had spoken, and heard people pray for things, and I thought, “What are we doing here?” My short devotional had been about wonder being the origin of faith, how awe is an initial expression of faith, and how we had lost this in our daily lives. I realised how I too started asking what I was required to pray, what was accepted, and the fact that we were doing it publicly seemed to change our perspective.

I found too that my prayer “dwindled down nearer and nearer to silence” and that I needed to discover what they use to call “vacare Deo,” a silence in which we invite the divine to reveal what we need to know, and if I spoke, it was to ask for guidance in aligning myself to God’s reality. Being a nurse on a ward with dying patients, caring for their basic needs, told me that our interaction was a kind of prayer. My relationship with nature, with the sea and the land, the mountains and hills, the birds and animals, even with the insects in the earth, became increasingly a source of spiritual awareness, and of awe and wonder.

Thank you for this, I must read more of Wendell Berry.