Life Makes Sense

“Each of us has adopted one or more models for living, even though we didn’t do it consciously. We learned a certain perspective by living in certain contexts and listening to certain voices. Those might have been the voices of fearful parents or of calculating peers. Those might have been the voices of grudging tradition or euphoric dreams.”

―Walter Brueggemann, “The Bible Makes Sense”, 1977

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Dear Alex,

A small thin orange book with bland cover and tattered edges, your gift meant for my giving it away on my birthday, makes no sense. Its lines are simple but searching, clusters of upheavals from the norm. How could a voice in old print, published in the 70’s shortly after my birth, speak to me like a comrade estranged from me until now when more than half of my birthdays in battle have burned up?

 

Days and births a century ago have been warring against the Spanish 1918 Flu much like the way we are sparring COVID-19. Over the wick of time, we are seeing more parallels than contrasts between the two pandemics. Both have been misunderstood, mysterious. The Spanish Flu is a misnomer, its origin most likely not Spain. COVID has been tagged with a racial slur, super-spreading like the Flu without borders and bombs to mark more graves than world wars.

This weekend my local region has set new record highs in daily COVID cases, our hospitals burning up in febrile pace to keep up with very sick patients. An even redder hotter mid-summer we are baked in, inoculated with strains of exhaustion from inactivity and gluttony, our Olympian thirst naming goblins as gods and God as drunkard. The flame feels familiar, death closer, hope torched.

The voice from your old thin book burns up my assumptions again:

“The human community consists of people getting what they earn and deserve. Those who earn little and therefore deserve little do not figure; in fact, for practical purposes they do not even exist. Obviously, such a view favors those who succeed and are competent. It tends to be the case that those who have get more, and those who don’t have get less or nothing.

(...)

As a result, this [modern-industrial-scientific] view puts a premium on what is knowledge, manageable, and predictable. Clearly it does not appreciate graciousness, for everything is earned. It is not open to mystery, for everything must be explained. It has no space for transcendence because everything must be managed.”

For much of my life, I’ve been striving to manage and explain the pandemics of my shortfalls with labeling and antidote. The impulse to earn a name, the pulsing of envy for perfection - these are syndromes more contagious than a marvel bug. Thank you, my friend, for this little book of magnificent truths, a balm for bunions and birthdays.

Yours, Kate

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Dear Kate,

I am glad you are enjoying the book.  I hope you will continue to enjoy it even if you find, very quickly after the passages you quoted above, it takes you to strange terrains where no immediate connection (so it seems) can be readily established (so you feel) to bridge you across to the promised land.

It's meant to be a wilderness; you are meant to be blessed in it.  That's God's story for us, backdropped by "grudging tradition or euphoric dreams" then as now, idols and tyrants trying to kill us for good.  Yes, it is a life-and-death kind of summer reading for you, piña colada optional (and most likely not on offer).

How things seem and how you feel--how can you trust in anything else other than the immediate connections made readily available by your perception and feeling to make sense of this world and flourish in it?

It makes me think of another book that is required reading for the modern Man, "The Coddling of the American Mind" (2018) by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, in which the authors speak about three untruths that are well-intentionally but also unintentionally conveyed to young people and cripple them in ways more than one:

• The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
• The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.
• The Untruth of Us vs. Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

Look around you, not only the generation after us is a living testament of what such untruths can do to a person, we adults, human beings seasoned by seasons of cautious hopes and clear defeats, are also finding convenience in this new language to explain away life:

• We are fragile and someone owes us better protection from danger, greater effort to right past wrongs done to us, ever more focused attention to how we feel now.
• We know how we feel, and no good word can be spoken into the world between our ears, a world that is getting ever darker and more hopeless, unless...
• We can fight against Darkness, people who make it impossible for us to live a good life, enemies to our flourishing.

The Bible makes sense, so Brueggemann claims.  Because life makes sense.  Or to state it apophatically, we can sense that life has been made senseless by the self-destructive devices of Man.

So here you are reading a book that has never been out-of-print since 1977, bridging across to another 40 years later, each speaking from different vantages to address your here-and-now with a Good Word.  Are you listening?

Yours, Alex

PS. There are masters.  And then there are grandmasters.  Walter Brueggemann is both and neither.  He is a singular Giant in a league of his own.  You might think "The Bible Makes Sense," with its corny cover (the old version you have anyway) and cornier title, must be some sort of Gospel tract made 150 pages long (one of his shortest books).

How should I describe it to you?

If you are to ask Mozart to write you a piece of elevator music, you know what he's going to do, right?  He will do exactly that, to elevate you to high heaven, humming to the tune of a childhood memory he half-remembers.

So is "The Bible Makes Sense," an "introduction" to the Biblical story, a "how-to" book to get you started.

Here's a Giant guiding you, taking small steps for your sake, humming and (as Brueggemann often does when preaching) dancing, gleefully oblivious to the ridicule the book's title invites, and you, your response, your responsibility is to listen attentively, read every word slowly, stop after every paragraph and meditate on what you've just read.  Because...

Every. Word. Counts.