The World Is Too Much With Us
This poem by William Wordsworth (Romantic poet, friend of Shelley and Coleridge, brother of Dorothy Wordsworth) has been stuck in my head for several months now. Beginning with the bodily metaphors that describe energy expended in unfruitful pursuits, we can hear the frustration of a poet who cannot find any harmony between the wild, dangerous, and stormy passions of nature (imagine the intimacy between sea and wind!) and the sordid onanism of capitalistic production and acquisition.
In other words, Wordsworth is complaining that we waste energy in "Getting and spending" (ln 2) and are too preoccupied with such dull things to experience Nature (a loaded term for Wordsworth, but I'm not going to bother to unpack it here).
And then he writes, "I'd rather be / a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;" (lns 9-10). Wordsworth is looking to ancient religions jealously and resenting Christianity for inoculating him against the sublime - the terror and wonder in the violence of the elements.
Today I realized that part of the reason that I have been struggling to feel refreshed by church and church-related things lately is that my church is finally and very messily encountering our 21st-century reality. And 21st-century reality is particularly miserable. Anybody who is enjoying this is doing it wrong. What was once innocent, obscure, and abstract became mired down in facts, statistics, and anecdote.
It's kind of like how I sometimes still enjoy the KJV: it's really poetic, and the language is so archaic that it leaves huge swaths of confusion, bringing that sublime of the powerful, the mysterious, and the unknowable. I'm like Wordsworth, wishing for Proteus in the words of Isaiah. And then I got this brilliant new translation of the New Testament, and suddenly things are a lot more concrete. It's much harder to get all sentimentally speculative about whether "light" is used as an adjective or a noun.
By changing its programs (etc.), the church is doing exactly what it was designed to do, and is bending to better reflect our contemporary needs. We believe in continuing revelation, just like the Founding Fathers believed in the necessary elasticity of the Constitution. Nobody alive in the 18th or 19th centuries, secular or religious (much as we wish they had), was meant to have anticipated the civil rights movement, the Internet, or #metoo - only that there needed to be room for change just in case we came up with a solution to a problem we didn't know we had yet.
I think I had assumed that anything about our rites that did not seem to fit my personal ideology obviously held information that I had not yet received. I had never seriously believed that it could have become outdated. Outdated would mean that it was wrong - as in, tainted by the weaknesses of the past. And if it is wrong now, then it was wrong then. How do you continue to believe in a church that gets things wrong!?
I need to point out that this is not how I was thinking. I think very clearly, when I bother. I'm flexible. I embrace human fallibility, and try not to assume that something is wrong because I disagree with it. I think in nuances and details and there are very few things I don't understand even before people (read: my roommate) try to explain them to me. My instincts, a product of years of training with the thinking, are constantly being tuned. I was not thinking of the church in terms of purity. I was feeling. This is a distinction I need to make more often when I have conversations, because smart people (like my roommate) come up with more useful approaches when they realize this about me - that when I say "I think" and "I feel like," they mean two VERY different things.
And so when the Church does what it is supposed to do, and grapples with contemporary issues by navigating in the light of revealed doctrine while simultaneously seeking to interpret divine will into the future, it feels smudged to me. It feels tainted by the sordid mundane of daily living. But here's a thought: maybe it's SUPPOSED to be. What good is pure doctrine if we don't allow it to transform our everyday? And that means the nitty-gritty and the nuts and bolts and the things about us we don't want company to see until we've washed up, individually and collectively.
There IS a harmony between the mundane and the sublime. Jesus's Atonement is the note meant to resolve the discord.
Maybe the fact that I cannot find sanctuary from the weight of the world by running to consecrated ground every Sunday is right. Maybe it is well. Maybe we're supposed to work through this, like learning how to solve a complex mathematical conundrum into which our siblings have become painfully entangled before somebody loses a limb. Maybe we're supposed to be creative.
Even with a PhD in British Literature, I don't feel confident enough to think I can bring my reverent feelings into conversation with Wordsworth's calculated anguish, but I can borrow his words to learn this thing about myself - that I need not mourn, but have cause for great rejoicing, even at the loss of my soul's youth.
In other words, Wordsworth is complaining that we waste energy in "Getting and spending" (ln 2) and are too preoccupied with such dull things to experience Nature (a loaded term for Wordsworth, but I'm not going to bother to unpack it here).
And then he writes, "I'd rather be / a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;" (lns 9-10). Wordsworth is looking to ancient religions jealously and resenting Christianity for inoculating him against the sublime - the terror and wonder in the violence of the elements.
Today I realized that part of the reason that I have been struggling to feel refreshed by church and church-related things lately is that my church is finally and very messily encountering our 21st-century reality. And 21st-century reality is particularly miserable. Anybody who is enjoying this is doing it wrong. What was once innocent, obscure, and abstract became mired down in facts, statistics, and anecdote.
It's kind of like how I sometimes still enjoy the KJV: it's really poetic, and the language is so archaic that it leaves huge swaths of confusion, bringing that sublime of the powerful, the mysterious, and the unknowable. I'm like Wordsworth, wishing for Proteus in the words of Isaiah. And then I got this brilliant new translation of the New Testament, and suddenly things are a lot more concrete. It's much harder to get all sentimentally speculative about whether "light" is used as an adjective or a noun.
By changing its programs (etc.), the church is doing exactly what it was designed to do, and is bending to better reflect our contemporary needs. We believe in continuing revelation, just like the Founding Fathers believed in the necessary elasticity of the Constitution. Nobody alive in the 18th or 19th centuries, secular or religious (much as we wish they had), was meant to have anticipated the civil rights movement, the Internet, or #metoo - only that there needed to be room for change just in case we came up with a solution to a problem we didn't know we had yet.
I think I had assumed that anything about our rites that did not seem to fit my personal ideology obviously held information that I had not yet received. I had never seriously believed that it could have become outdated. Outdated would mean that it was wrong - as in, tainted by the weaknesses of the past. And if it is wrong now, then it was wrong then. How do you continue to believe in a church that gets things wrong!?
I need to point out that this is not how I was thinking. I think very clearly, when I bother. I'm flexible. I embrace human fallibility, and try not to assume that something is wrong because I disagree with it. I think in nuances and details and there are very few things I don't understand even before people (read: my roommate) try to explain them to me. My instincts, a product of years of training with the thinking, are constantly being tuned. I was not thinking of the church in terms of purity. I was feeling. This is a distinction I need to make more often when I have conversations, because smart people (like my roommate) come up with more useful approaches when they realize this about me - that when I say "I think" and "I feel like," they mean two VERY different things.
And so when the Church does what it is supposed to do, and grapples with contemporary issues by navigating in the light of revealed doctrine while simultaneously seeking to interpret divine will into the future, it feels smudged to me. It feels tainted by the sordid mundane of daily living. But here's a thought: maybe it's SUPPOSED to be. What good is pure doctrine if we don't allow it to transform our everyday? And that means the nitty-gritty and the nuts and bolts and the things about us we don't want company to see until we've washed up, individually and collectively.
There IS a harmony between the mundane and the sublime. Jesus's Atonement is the note meant to resolve the discord.
Maybe the fact that I cannot find sanctuary from the weight of the world by running to consecrated ground every Sunday is right. Maybe it is well. Maybe we're supposed to work through this, like learning how to solve a complex mathematical conundrum into which our siblings have become painfully entangled before somebody loses a limb. Maybe we're supposed to be creative.
Even with a PhD in British Literature, I don't feel confident enough to think I can bring my reverent feelings into conversation with Wordsworth's calculated anguish, but I can borrow his words to learn this thing about myself - that I need not mourn, but have cause for great rejoicing, even at the loss of my soul's youth.
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