Twice in an hour I've come across words that have serious consequences for human happiness. One is nihilism. It's a bleak word, and not to be confused with skepticism, cynicism, or even atheism. One of the most remarkable little books published 50 years ago was by Helmut Thielicke, a theological prophet of a past generation, and it was entitled, Nihilism. Thielicke confronted the ethical and spiritual vacuum of post war Europe by contradicting the latent nihilism of a world coming to terms with the Holocaust, the Bomb, post war austerity and gradual transition to prosperity. Nihilism isn't simply an ideological stance based on rejection of value, meaning and significance. It is a world-view with its own ethic, its peculiar convictions, its practical consequences in how we live, regard others and look on the future with curtailed hope.
Robert Cording is a poet working out of Holy Cross University, and Jason Goroncy has posted one of Cording's poems on Mozart's starling. It is a beautiful poem, a wonderfully imaginative celebration of life in ordinary, and taking joy in simple things. There is no surprise that Cording in ways very different from Thielicke, challenges the latent but sometimes blatant nihilism that runs through our culture. He does so in poetry, by the creative use of words, writing an alternative story of the world and its consequence, hinting strongly but gently of those spiritual intimations that whisper and murmur loud enough to be heard by those soul-sick enough to listen. Here's his own description of what he is about - and how we need more of what he is doing, taken from his own self-description on the website of the Journal Image, found here.
"I am teaching and directing a creative writing concentration that is part of the English Major at Holy Cross, as well as working on my fifth volume of poems. My current work strives to reincorporate religious language and content in a way that interests and wins over a skeptical modern audience. My work is rooted in the belief that words can invoke what the critic George Steiner calls "real Presences," and that these presences bring us back again and again to the fundamental question of being: that there is something, rather than nothing. The poems I'm writing lately try to criticize and call into question what we have rarely questioned—our own unexamined nihilism."
Writing over 40 years ago, Thomas Merton
often reflected on the experience of alienation, another form of human diminishment so familiar to the modern
western spirit. In our own age of self-obsessed concern for the self (and yes that is a deliberate solipsism), Merton's words come as yet another shrewd, compassionate and passionate plea for a much less artificial, posturing, exaggerated presentation of the image of the self we want others to see. Here he is, reflecting on the confusion of personas culture forces us to adopt, as it changes and fluxes, shape-shifts and dissolves only to re-form in new configurations, expressions and expectations.
"The result is the painful sometimes paranoid sense of being always under observation, under judgment, for not fulfilling some role or other we have forgotten we were supposed to fulfill."
"The peculiar pain of alienation in its ordinary sense...is that nobody really has to look at us or judge us or despise us or hate us. Whether or not they do us this service, we are already there ahead of them. We are doing it for them. WE TRAIN OURSELVES OBEDIENTLY TO HATE OURSELVES SO MUCH THAT OUR ENEMIES NO LONGER HAVE TO. To live in constant awareness of this bind is a kind of living death."
Thomas Merton, Echoing Silence, Thomas Merton on the Vocation of Writing, (ed), Robert Inchaustri, (Boston, New seeds, 2007), 72-3
I'm not sure who has replaced Thomas Merton as the spiritual director of secular society, and as a prophet who often saw clearly what everyone else only vaguely guessed at. He lived the paradox of worldly contemplative, gregarious hermit, immersed at one and the same time in silence and solitude, and in the world of human affairs, and his heart was open to that world with an openness to risk on behalf of others that was truly Christ-like. Not personal physical danger, but the spiritual ambiguity of being a worldly monk, a vocation to detachment from the world combined with a vocation to attachment to that same world, living out a genuine love for the world that seeks to replicate the outgoing, self-giving love of God. Because whatever else contemplative prayer was for Merton, it was to love the world with the heart of God.
Nihilism and alienation. Two words loaded with spiritual toxins, diseases that affect the whole inner person - intellect, heart, conscience, will. While the church seeks new ways of doing mission, maybe it also needs to find new ways of bringing the good news of Jesus to bear on a culture in which nihilism and alienation remain favoured default positions. Whatever else the New Testament contradicts, subverts, challenges, confronts, it entirely and comprehensively negates these two enemies of human wholeness, healing and blessing. The church of Jesus Christ needs more Thomas Mertons, Robert Cordings, more of those upstarts who call in question the spiritual status quo of a culture desperately searching for whatever will fill its self-created emptiness, nature isn't the only force that abhors a vacuum - so does the divine love that seeks to fill all in all.
One of your best posts yet Jim. Wonderful.
Posted by: Jason Goroncy | May 03, 2010 at 07:58 AM
Many thanks for the Thomas Merton.
Reminds me of the thing about self-deprecation: I’ve tried it and I’m not much good at it.
You will notice that it’s a different kettle of ferrets from knowing God’s forgiveness. It’s about other people.
I have lots of encouraging stuff to fight this with – otherwise I would have keeled over long ago. I don’t hate myself but I feel weary of this world and its ways. You can’t stop people talking. I should like to have a touch of Aspergers but then that would mean I would be unable to empathise with others. I’m always on the lookout for giving and receiving a cup of cold water…but I’m not much good at it. It’s often easier to offer help outside of the orbit of the people who know you.
Blessings
Posted by: Martin Cooke | February 19, 2011 at 11:33 AM