Rod, thank you!! I am one of those men suffering in a marriage, but I always pray to God to help me bear the Cross of it to keep an intact family. I have been willing to sacrifice my happiness because I have believed my children, two in high school and two in college, would benefit from a family unit going to Church and staying unified. Some days it gets very lonely and was I praying so hard today for the Lord to help me and comfort me. This is proof He was listening!!
I really struggle with loneliness too, and in my case anger at God as well, for not giving me this thing I desperately want that almost everyone around me seems to effortlessly have. It’s a lot of work on a daily basis not to give in to a furious bitterness.
The only thing that really helps is, like you said, trying to trust that it’s for my sanctification. It also helps to hear other people struggling with it though so thank you.
What’s wild is that I know perfectly well it’s an illusion, having a disastrous marriage in my past that looked wonderful to everyone outside of it. It’s a *very* powerful illusion, though.
Romans 8:28. Koine Greek scholars say that in the original letter to the Romans, that verse says, "For we know that God works all things together for good..."
I'm not a determinist, but at the same time, the Christian can know that God is always in control.
I don't believe that God micromanges us so that we are mere puppets. I don't think you believe that either. As I have said many times God can, and will, bring good out of evil, but never by means of violating the freedom he has bequeathed us. I hesitate over words like "control" but maybe because the word has problematic connotations in my understanding
I don't believe that God deliberately inflicts suffering on us, as part of God's plan. I believe that sometimes people acting according to God's plan will encounter suffering at the hands of our fellow humans -- because humans are imperfect, sometimes cruel, sometimes clumsy, and we all have free will. Suffering is something we do to ourselves and each other. Sometimes going through what we do to each other is necessary to stick to God's plan. But its not a gift God gives to us.
I have studied our Civil War for over 60 years. After some decades, always a fierce unionist, I began to realize that whatever good came out of the war was the result of God leading us around by the nose, using our own passions and prejudices to bring some good out of the conflict that most of those actively participating did not seek, or did not desire, or did not think possible. Abraham Lincoln understood that -- it stands out in what Justice Brennan called its "profound theological content." We could have made it easier on ourselves. We as a nation could have opted for John Quincy Adams's constitutional amendment making slavery non-hereditary after a certain date in the 1840s. We could have barred expansion of slavery beyond the Appalachians. Virginia could have accepted gradual emancipation as the best solution in the wake of Gabriel's Rebellion. We had many chances. The longer we waited, the higher the price, but God did not inflict the suffering on anyone. Its also true that slavery was not originally America's sin -- that's like blaming a baby for being born addicted to crack. England was the dominant power in the slave trade 1764-1808. We didn't handle it very well though.
Agreed, I think: my view is that God can bring good out of evil, but that the evil itself is never a part of His plan. (If God actually *premised* His plan on evil, then that would say something pretty hideous and possibly disqualifying about His own nature.) Evil is superfluous to Him, and it's only from our human standpoint that it seems meaningful; He Hmself never had any need or use for it.
I think our souls could not be formed absent suffering, and though God may not will any specific suffering, part of His plan is that we suffer. Some people suffer far more than any human being should be asked to do, and no, I do not know why God permits this.
Sometimes suffering is brought on through illness and disaster, things we don’t bring upon each other. I don’t believe God inflicts us with these things, but He does allow them to happen for reasons that are deeply mysterious.
We often do bring illness upon each other, and bring disaster by neglect. For instance, smallpox emerged among pastoral peoples once domestication of cattle become a significant source of food. Cholera was spread via shipping and migration, as well as poor sanitary practices. There are areas of Oregon likely to be hit at some point by a significant tsunami that have elementary schools built below the likely high water line.
We can be **called** to take part in situations where suffering is not avoidable, and this suffering is NOT resolved in this life. It's the way of the Cross.
"Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, because theirs is the kingdom from heaven ... Rejoice and be glad! Because your reward is great in heaven."
Thank you for this. The idea that God does not necessarily want us to be happy, that our temporal happiness is not a measure of anything, really, is so foreign to most people, they cannot begin to wrap their heads around it. But it is fundamental. The world is full of suffering, and in the West much of it is self inflicted. We live destructive lives, ignore God’s ( and even nature’s ) rules, and create misery for ourselves and others but somehow believe that happiness however it is defined 2024 is God’s will for us. If we don’t believe in God, we think it is the will of the universe, for we deserve nothing less.
I can’t find the passage now, but I seem to recall that, in one of Heinrich Böll’s stories, a German officer told his men, in order to help them bear up in the nightmare of the Russian front, “We are not here to be happy: we are here to suffer and to remember.”
The Greeks believed that nothing of value can be achieved without suffering and striving - hence the famous choral refrain in the “Agamemnon”: “pathein mathein” - “we must suffer to be wise”. Hence too the god representing glory, Zeus, was married to the antagonistic Hera: you could only get to Zeus through Hera. And the greatest of the Greek heroes suffered the most at Hera’s hands - Herakles, the “glory of Hera”.
Oh man, you have no idea. I told my friend tonight over dinner, "People say to me they don't know how I write so much. I want to tell them it's for the same reason that a man struggling in the ocean flails his hands and arms to try to keep his head above water."
I was thinking about you yesterday, Rod, on a long hike. Thinking about all these fellow Rod-readers complimenting on your output and wondering if the volume comes from trying to outrun the pain of your divorce. I know I have done (still do!) the same during the darker periods of my life. Maybe time for an extended break at a monastery. I’m looking to do the same in the coming months.
Though you’ve gone through much pain, you also have many blessings. First, the gift of your faith, then the gift of all your friends and avid readers, finally the gift of …. writing.
Even that latter is a great blessing. Not simply that you’ve a talent for writing, but a passion for it.
All this pain from your long drawn out divorce—I will guess the daily burden of it would be heavier, the world would look bleaker, if it weren’t for this need to write.
I may be wrong, but I think you’d still be prolific even if you weren’t suffering the pain. So some of the writing may feel like flailing, but much of it is *you*, your need to get things into words.
Stay tough, be patient. You’re doing much, very much, to keep people from heading off onto dangerous paths. We’ve so many seductive wrong paths open to us in these sick 2020s. You’re needed.
I do worry about the malady that Paul Kingsnorth describes in *Savage Gods*, though: at what point do our words become a neurotic attempt to substitute a representation for the Real?
Regarding our prolific friend Rod, I myself wouldn’t worry about it. Two reasons. First, he is a Christian, and is doing good with his words in an authentic Christian sense. I was serious when I evoked dangerous paths. They are various, and they are both ideologically seductive, and plausible. Plenty are treading them already. Rod is adept at seeing the seduction and revealing it as such. I wish he was more widely read. Second, as it’s in his bones to write, it’s not odd or ill that he spends hours a day at it.
As for “At what point do our words become a neurotic attempt to substitute a representation for the Real?” I’d say this trouble pretty much begins at the point when we begin to learn language. In short, we’re all ensnared in it, *always already*. To know we’re thus ensnared, to grasp some of what that means, is one of the important lessons. It’s part of what the Apostle means with our having to make do with seeing “through a glass darkly.”
BTW, good to see you. You haven’t been battering these boxes in recent days. About a week or so, I think.
There are a lot of things, yes? Rod's given us the idea that he writes "so he can know what he thinks". Then he has also spoken of writing regularly "because I feel a loyalty to those people". He has spoken of the miserable time he had in Philadelphia when he could not publish his writings. He has said that for a time he wrote so much because he was in an unhappy home. - What a double-edged sword. He can and should flail now rather than sink, but it is not God's ultimate will that he remain near sinking. Who knows what kind of writing, in quantity and in quality, may come when the waters receed. God doesn't mind a hard worker. Balance - and only God and Rod know for sure. Yes, his writing is a blessing to the world. May be well and continue to bless.
Rod doesn't mind this place being a kind of sounding board and attempted advisory, I think. I don't think we are wrong theorize about the amount of work he does, and motivations. Shall he ever be still before the Lord for more than a weekend, or a Christmas or a Good Friday? We don't know and can't know. He should write, he should do other activity, he should rest - we can't say for sure how much of each. Reflective suggestions can be good, he can discern about them.
We will trust God to give Rod wisdom about the amount and timing of writing, and Rod to seek and receive that wisdom.
Agreed. Many writers write to know what they think. And Rod has the blessing of readers who follow his thoughts, readers who benefit from those thoughts.
There were a few months earlier this year when he kept getting sick, and I sensed his drive to write was perhaps wearing him out, that he should take a couple days break at least. But he seems to have gotten his health back.
Yeah, I'm not worried about Rod per se; just more about the general snares of language.
I know somewhere that Roland Barthes says that a man who can write is never truly mad, since final madness is the absence of all meaning. So, the words can serve a luminous brige across the abyss. And as Leonard Cohen says, "There's a blaze of light in every word." But I guess the dark alternative would be for them to become savage gods that demand the sacrifice of life and the Real. That seems to be the basic ambivalence that's inherent to language, which I think we've talked about before.
And thanks!—it's been a few weeks. I've been up to some things. And I've secured a book contract for a manuscript of mine that's now on track to be published in January, so I'll let you know about that when the time comes, in the event that you'd be interested.
Hey Sethu, give me some philosophy here. So, "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God". Yes, I know, the Logos, Word, sometimes Reason. Also "God spoke and there was light". Isn't there something about words? - - You know I believe in Christian meditation where the mind is cleared of all but the words of a prayer phrase, not following any thoughts, idle thoughts or otherwise - it is so healthy for the soul, spirit and brain just to be in The Presence. But I think perhaps you are getting at something beyond that. Are you? I have trouble distinguishing The Real from The Word (Logos) but you seem to make a distinction here.
I believe in words *provisionally*, because one has no choice. I think they can easily become savage gods on two conditions: first, if one doesn’t know their provisional nature (here you have the naive victims of ideology); second, if one knows and chooses to use them as tools to blind and manipulate (here you have the ideologist demagogues).
But the problem is, we all of us, daily, engage in different degrees of both. That’s the basic condition. At our best, we’re questioning our own assertions as we make them.
Glad to hear you’ll have a book out! Let me know about it, or parts of it, as you please.
I looked again at the beginning of John, - In the beginning was the Word...the Word was God...all things were made by Him...In Him was life and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.
So that is just what you said about Words and Light. In the Word is light, which is life, and which is creating. . And then Light, which in science is both energy and waves, is the way we know things, this light of creation was love and the way God created through Christ.
And the physics we talked about last week. Quantum enganglement. A hologaphic Universe. We are not God, but God's light is what what binds all things together, indwelling all things, not identical with all things, immanent not merely transcendant, Orthodox Christianity. Not something my mind will every grasp, but very beautiful.
“… no one outside a marriage really knows what is going on inside it.”
In my experience no one inside the marriage really knows what’s going on either!
In all aspects of life, here we see only through a glass, darkly.
"21 Likes!" already. We all know.
Rod, thank you!! I am one of those men suffering in a marriage, but I always pray to God to help me bear the Cross of it to keep an intact family. I have been willing to sacrifice my happiness because I have believed my children, two in high school and two in college, would benefit from a family unit going to Church and staying unified. Some days it gets very lonely and was I praying so hard today for the Lord to help me and comfort me. This is proof He was listening!!
I really struggle with loneliness too, and in my case anger at God as well, for not giving me this thing I desperately want that almost everyone around me seems to effortlessly have. It’s a lot of work on a daily basis not to give in to a furious bitterness.
The only thing that really helps is, like you said, trying to trust that it’s for my sanctification. It also helps to hear other people struggling with it though so thank you.
"this thing I desperately want that almost everyone around me seems to effortlessly have."
That is an illusion for most of us.
What’s wild is that I know perfectly well it’s an illusion, having a disastrous marriage in my past that looked wonderful to everyone outside of it. It’s a *very* powerful illusion, though.
Oh, it is, it is.
As I grieve the death of my husband 18 months ago, your article has given me a new way to look at my loneliness. Thank you.
Beautiful. Now required reading.
Been through it too, Rod. Peace and blessings to you.
I've been giving you the business, lately, Rod. So I wanted to be sure, here, to simply say:
Thank you.
God does not will evil, but I believe that God can bring good out of evil- if we cooperate with him.
Romans 8:28. Koine Greek scholars say that in the original letter to the Romans, that verse says, "For we know that God works all things together for good..."
I'm not a determinist, but at the same time, the Christian can know that God is always in control.
I don't believe that God micromanges us so that we are mere puppets. I don't think you believe that either. As I have said many times God can, and will, bring good out of evil, but never by means of violating the freedom he has bequeathed us. I hesitate over words like "control" but maybe because the word has problematic connotations in my understanding
Trusting in His mercy and His providence.
There are not just miracles of light, there are also dark miracles:
https://squaretwo.org/Sq2ArticleCasslerDarkMiracles.html
Thank you, Rod. This was timely.
Rod - Rest assured you are not the only one excited for 22 October. There is a long line!
WOW!!!!
I don't believe that God deliberately inflicts suffering on us, as part of God's plan. I believe that sometimes people acting according to God's plan will encounter suffering at the hands of our fellow humans -- because humans are imperfect, sometimes cruel, sometimes clumsy, and we all have free will. Suffering is something we do to ourselves and each other. Sometimes going through what we do to each other is necessary to stick to God's plan. But its not a gift God gives to us.
I have studied our Civil War for over 60 years. After some decades, always a fierce unionist, I began to realize that whatever good came out of the war was the result of God leading us around by the nose, using our own passions and prejudices to bring some good out of the conflict that most of those actively participating did not seek, or did not desire, or did not think possible. Abraham Lincoln understood that -- it stands out in what Justice Brennan called its "profound theological content." We could have made it easier on ourselves. We as a nation could have opted for John Quincy Adams's constitutional amendment making slavery non-hereditary after a certain date in the 1840s. We could have barred expansion of slavery beyond the Appalachians. Virginia could have accepted gradual emancipation as the best solution in the wake of Gabriel's Rebellion. We had many chances. The longer we waited, the higher the price, but God did not inflict the suffering on anyone. Its also true that slavery was not originally America's sin -- that's like blaming a baby for being born addicted to crack. England was the dominant power in the slave trade 1764-1808. We didn't handle it very well though.
Agreed, I think: my view is that God can bring good out of evil, but that the evil itself is never a part of His plan. (If God actually *premised* His plan on evil, then that would say something pretty hideous and possibly disqualifying about His own nature.) Evil is superfluous to Him, and it's only from our human standpoint that it seems meaningful; He Hmself never had any need or use for it.
I think our souls could not be formed absent suffering, and though God may not will any specific suffering, part of His plan is that we suffer. Some people suffer far more than any human being should be asked to do, and no, I do not know why God permits this.
Sometimes suffering is brought on through illness and disaster, things we don’t bring upon each other. I don’t believe God inflicts us with these things, but He does allow them to happen for reasons that are deeply mysterious.
We often do bring illness upon each other, and bring disaster by neglect. For instance, smallpox emerged among pastoral peoples once domestication of cattle become a significant source of food. Cholera was spread via shipping and migration, as well as poor sanitary practices. There are areas of Oregon likely to be hit at some point by a significant tsunami that have elementary schools built below the likely high water line.
We can be **called** to take part in situations where suffering is not avoidable, and this suffering is NOT resolved in this life. It's the way of the Cross.
"Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, because theirs is the kingdom from heaven ... Rejoice and be glad! Because your reward is great in heaven."
But God does not inflict persecution. Its not that God says "persecution would be good for you, here, have a good dose."
Thank you for this. The idea that God does not necessarily want us to be happy, that our temporal happiness is not a measure of anything, really, is so foreign to most people, they cannot begin to wrap their heads around it. But it is fundamental. The world is full of suffering, and in the West much of it is self inflicted. We live destructive lives, ignore God’s ( and even nature’s ) rules, and create misery for ourselves and others but somehow believe that happiness however it is defined 2024 is God’s will for us. If we don’t believe in God, we think it is the will of the universe, for we deserve nothing less.
I can’t find the passage now, but I seem to recall that, in one of Heinrich Böll’s stories, a German officer told his men, in order to help them bear up in the nightmare of the Russian front, “We are not here to be happy: we are here to suffer and to remember.”
The Greeks believed that nothing of value can be achieved without suffering and striving - hence the famous choral refrain in the “Agamemnon”: “pathein mathein” - “we must suffer to be wise”. Hence too the god representing glory, Zeus, was married to the antagonistic Hera: you could only get to Zeus through Hera. And the greatest of the Greek heroes suffered the most at Hera’s hands - Herakles, the “glory of Hera”.
Two in one day; that indicates to me enormous intellectual energy, stress and restlessness.
Have a good night's sleep and try to enjoy the weekend.
Oh man, you have no idea. I told my friend tonight over dinner, "People say to me they don't know how I write so much. I want to tell them it's for the same reason that a man struggling in the ocean flails his hands and arms to try to keep his head above water."
This comment will forever color your writing for me. It reveals a world of pain.
I was thinking about you yesterday, Rod, on a long hike. Thinking about all these fellow Rod-readers complimenting on your output and wondering if the volume comes from trying to outrun the pain of your divorce. I know I have done (still do!) the same during the darker periods of my life. Maybe time for an extended break at a monastery. I’m looking to do the same in the coming months.
Though you’ve gone through much pain, you also have many blessings. First, the gift of your faith, then the gift of all your friends and avid readers, finally the gift of …. writing.
Even that latter is a great blessing. Not simply that you’ve a talent for writing, but a passion for it.
All this pain from your long drawn out divorce—I will guess the daily burden of it would be heavier, the world would look bleaker, if it weren’t for this need to write.
I may be wrong, but I think you’d still be prolific even if you weren’t suffering the pain. So some of the writing may feel like flailing, but much of it is *you*, your need to get things into words.
Stay tough, be patient. You’re doing much, very much, to keep people from heading off onto dangerous paths. We’ve so many seductive wrong paths open to us in these sick 2020s. You’re needed.
I do worry about the malady that Paul Kingsnorth describes in *Savage Gods*, though: at what point do our words become a neurotic attempt to substitute a representation for the Real?
I see two points here.
Regarding our prolific friend Rod, I myself wouldn’t worry about it. Two reasons. First, he is a Christian, and is doing good with his words in an authentic Christian sense. I was serious when I evoked dangerous paths. They are various, and they are both ideologically seductive, and plausible. Plenty are treading them already. Rod is adept at seeing the seduction and revealing it as such. I wish he was more widely read. Second, as it’s in his bones to write, it’s not odd or ill that he spends hours a day at it.
As for “At what point do our words become a neurotic attempt to substitute a representation for the Real?” I’d say this trouble pretty much begins at the point when we begin to learn language. In short, we’re all ensnared in it, *always already*. To know we’re thus ensnared, to grasp some of what that means, is one of the important lessons. It’s part of what the Apostle means with our having to make do with seeing “through a glass darkly.”
BTW, good to see you. You haven’t been battering these boxes in recent days. About a week or so, I think.
There are a lot of things, yes? Rod's given us the idea that he writes "so he can know what he thinks". Then he has also spoken of writing regularly "because I feel a loyalty to those people". He has spoken of the miserable time he had in Philadelphia when he could not publish his writings. He has said that for a time he wrote so much because he was in an unhappy home. - What a double-edged sword. He can and should flail now rather than sink, but it is not God's ultimate will that he remain near sinking. Who knows what kind of writing, in quantity and in quality, may come when the waters receed. God doesn't mind a hard worker. Balance - and only God and Rod know for sure. Yes, his writing is a blessing to the world. May be well and continue to bless.
Rod doesn't mind this place being a kind of sounding board and attempted advisory, I think. I don't think we are wrong theorize about the amount of work he does, and motivations. Shall he ever be still before the Lord for more than a weekend, or a Christmas or a Good Friday? We don't know and can't know. He should write, he should do other activity, he should rest - we can't say for sure how much of each. Reflective suggestions can be good, he can discern about them.
We will trust God to give Rod wisdom about the amount and timing of writing, and Rod to seek and receive that wisdom.
Agreed. Many writers write to know what they think. And Rod has the blessing of readers who follow his thoughts, readers who benefit from those thoughts.
There were a few months earlier this year when he kept getting sick, and I sensed his drive to write was perhaps wearing him out, that he should take a couple days break at least. But he seems to have gotten his health back.
Yeah, I'm not worried about Rod per se; just more about the general snares of language.
I know somewhere that Roland Barthes says that a man who can write is never truly mad, since final madness is the absence of all meaning. So, the words can serve a luminous brige across the abyss. And as Leonard Cohen says, "There's a blaze of light in every word." But I guess the dark alternative would be for them to become savage gods that demand the sacrifice of life and the Real. That seems to be the basic ambivalence that's inherent to language, which I think we've talked about before.
And thanks!—it's been a few weeks. I've been up to some things. And I've secured a book contract for a manuscript of mine that's now on track to be published in January, so I'll let you know about that when the time comes, in the event that you'd be interested.
Hey Sethu, give me some philosophy here. So, "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God". Yes, I know, the Logos, Word, sometimes Reason. Also "God spoke and there was light". Isn't there something about words? - - You know I believe in Christian meditation where the mind is cleared of all but the words of a prayer phrase, not following any thoughts, idle thoughts or otherwise - it is so healthy for the soul, spirit and brain just to be in The Presence. But I think perhaps you are getting at something beyond that. Are you? I have trouble distinguishing The Real from The Word (Logos) but you seem to make a distinction here.
I believe in words *provisionally*, because one has no choice. I think they can easily become savage gods on two conditions: first, if one doesn’t know their provisional nature (here you have the naive victims of ideology); second, if one knows and chooses to use them as tools to blind and manipulate (here you have the ideologist demagogues).
But the problem is, we all of us, daily, engage in different degrees of both. That’s the basic condition. At our best, we’re questioning our own assertions as we make them.
Glad to hear you’ll have a book out! Let me know about it, or parts of it, as you please.
I looked again at the beginning of John, - In the beginning was the Word...the Word was God...all things were made by Him...In Him was life and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.
So that is just what you said about Words and Light. In the Word is light, which is life, and which is creating. . And then Light, which in science is both energy and waves, is the way we know things, this light of creation was love and the way God created through Christ.
And the physics we talked about last week. Quantum enganglement. A hologaphic Universe. We are not God, but God's light is what what binds all things together, indwelling all things, not identical with all things, immanent not merely transcendant, Orthodox Christianity. Not something my mind will every grasp, but very beautiful.
Please don't stop. You are a light in the darkness.
It's amazing, nonetheless, and it's a gift.