The Light and the Dark: A Sermon on Romans 8: 26-39

[Delivered at St. Bartholomew's Church, NYS, July 30, 2017]



You don’t hear much about C.P. Snow these days. He was a scientist, a civil servant, and a novelist. He wrote a sequence of 11 novels, called Strangers and Brothers, in which he followed an aspiring lawyer and writer from his hungry youth to the brink of a distinguished old age.

Well, you can see why he grabbed my attention as a college student, right? A series of novels that asked the very questions I was struggling with myself—what to make of my life, how to follow ambition without becoming self-serving, what was the good life anyway?-—Snow’s hero Lewis Eliot grappled with them all. In today’s world, where bitter political differences are tearing apart old alliances, and even families, we can look back at Eliot and his friends confronting these same conflicts in the 1930s.

But Lewis Eliot did not wrestle with God. Like Snow himself, he was a cheerful atheist, despite his Church of England upbringing. Still—he knew religious people and several of them play key roles in the novels.

One character was based on his closest friend, a brilliant scholar named Charles Allberry, who translated the one surviving text left behind by the Manichees—the Christian heresy that believed that the whole of creation is a battlefield between the light of spirit and the dark of the flesh. They were the great adversaries of St. Augustine, and, until Allberry’s translation of a group of psalms that survived the persecution of the Manichees, nothing was known of their thought except what their opponents, such as Augustine, wrote about them.

Roy Calvert, the fictional character based on Allberry, and main character in The Light and the Dark, thirsts for God, but struggles with belief. As he tells Eliot:

“Listen, Lewis. I could believe in all the rest. I could believe in the catholic church. I could believe in miracles. I could believe in the inquisition. I could believe in eternal damnation. If only I could believe in God.”

“And yet you can’t.”

“I can’t begin to,” he said, his tone quiet once more. “I can’t get as far as ‘help Thou mine unbelief.’. . . . The nearest I’ve got is this,” he said. “It has happened twice. It’s completely clear—and terrible. Each time it has been on a night when I couldn’t sleep. I’ve had the absolute conviction—it’s much more real than anything one can see or touch—that God and His world exist. And that everyone can enter and find their rest. Except me. I’m infinitely far away for ever. I am alone and infinitesimally small—and I can’t come near.” [1]

The notion that some of us are cast away by God, that some of us are denied God’s love, because of some inherent flaw within us that we can’t identify, let alone cure, the concept that some number of us were born to be damned has haunted Christianity, especially American Christianity, from Jonathan Edwards to the present, as documented by the scholar Peter Theusen.[2]

And today’s Epistle is one of the key sources of that doctrine. In 1910, Bishop Charles Gore, a great scholar, and one of the leading lights of the late 19th and early 20th century Church of England straightforwardly declared that “There is . . . no point on which St. Paul has been more misrepresented than on his teaching about predestination. He teaches plainly that it is God’s plan to have mercy on all,” that it is God’s will that all be saved.[3] And he adds that “it is to do egregious violence to his general teaching to suggest that he entertained the idea of persons with an opposite predestination—to eternal misery.”[4]

So what, then, is St. Paul teaching us in today’s reading?

First, and obviously, that we need not be afraid that our prayers are too weak—that we don’t know how to pray, or what to ask for. The feelings of need stirring in us, the inarticulate emotions that stir us—these are themselves prayers. Or, as St. Augustine wrote in his Confessions, “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”
Prayer isn’t a laundry list, or an online order that we have to get right. It’s an opening of ourselves to God, and effort to speak our hearts to God, but even more, to clear a space for that small, still voice within.

What does he then tell us?

We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.

Let’s stop a minute there. How can that be? All things work together for good sounds awfully Pollyanna-ish to me. But then I read Susan Howatch, who asked the same question when attending a sermon at Guilford Cathedral. The preacher, the Cathedral’s Dean, asked how could you say that to the victim of a tragedy, or about the loss of a beloved friend. And he went on to explain that:

the sentence "All things work together for good to them that love God" was slightly mistranslated, and that the translation should have been: "All things intermingle for good to them that love God." This would mean that the good and bad were intermingling to create a synergy--or, in other words: in the process of intermingling, the good and the bad formed something else. The bad didn't become less bad, and the dark didn't become less dark--one had to acknowledge this, acknowledge the reality of the suffering. But the light emanating from a loving God created a pattern on the darkness, and in that pattern was the meaning, and in the meaning lay the energy which would generate the will to survive.

[5]

All things intermingle for good. The dark never obliterates the light. God is there with us, suffering alongside us, sharing our pain, just as Jesus did in his life.

And then Paul tells us that For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family.

And those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified.

But who are the called, the predestined, the justified?

Us.

But don’t take it from me; here’s Bishop Gore again: “The fact that they love God is the sufficient evidence of their election. Those who love God are also those who are ‘called according to his purpose.’”[6]

But perhaps, we may wonder, do we love God enough? The standard isn’t so high, Bishop Gore explains; all who have felt a movement of God in their heart, who feel the answering “yes” rise within them—these are the people who have been assured by Paul that their “yes” is enough.[5]

It’s not a test of merit or worth; it’s not a test at all. It’s simply opening ourselves up to life, accepting that the good and the bad will intermingle, that growth will hurt, and yet benefit us, that everything ends, and that’s sad, but everything begins, and that’s joyful.

All things intermingle for those who love.

Because to love is to be, and as Plotinus, the neo-platonist who looked on at the early church with curiosity and a little wonder put it, “Nothing that truly is can ever perish.” [6]

The rest is how we respond to that love, and how we let it change us. And as long as we are willing to open our hearts and our minds, to listen for God, to open ourselves to prayer so that the groanings of the Spirit –in other words, the true needs and wishes of our deepest selves—can come out. That’s what it means to be the called, and the predestined.

Nothing that truly is can ever die.

And what of the fictional Roy Calvert or the real Charles Allberry, whose despair was so heart-wrenchingly recorded by his friend in The Light and the Dark?

Look at all the terrible notions that Roy Calvert thinks he must affirm to enter and find the rest of God. The Inquisition. Eternal damnation. A God, in other words, of punishment and cruelty. No wonder he couldn’t find that belief that would enable him to surrender his innate sense of justice and decency!

But do you really think so good a person, who strove to find God, only to be blocked by the cruel idols that have been placed on pedestals and called God, could fall outside of the love of God, the sacrificial love of God as shown to us by Jesus Christ?

I don’t. Here I stand with Paul. Because as he writes:

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers,

nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Yes, here I stand.

Here we stand.

We can do no other.

[1] C.P. Snow, The Light and the Dark , at p. 59 (1948).

[2] Peter J. Theusen, Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine (2009).

[3] Charles Gore, St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans: A Practical Exposition (1910), vol. 2, p. 317.

[4] Id. at p. 319.

[5] Susan Howatch, “The Starbridge Novels and Twentieth Century Anglican Theology,” in Bruce Johnson & Charles A. Huttar, eds., Scandalous Truths: Essays by and About Susan Howatch 231, 235-236 (2005).

[6] W. R. Inge, The Philosophy of Plotinus at 70 (1918).

Written From the Right?

Over at Lawyers, Guns & Money, the eternal debate of "is there any good conservative popular culture" has re-ignited. Stretching to find examples of any, the commenters have posited Yes, Minister and House of Cards (UK original). To be frank, as fans of both, I think neither fits the bill.

In both Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, Nigel Hawthorne's Platonic ideal of the obstructive civil servant, Sir Humphrey Appleby, is a quintessential cynic (see above), while the semi-competent (he fluctuates) is never identified as a member of a political party, although he is clearly leftward of Sir Humphrey. In both series, neither political party nor the Civil Service comes off well. This is not unlike The Thick of It (a spiritual descendant of Yes, Minister), in which both parties are satirized with equal vigor, and everybody is pretty deeply flawed. (Mind you, the store is considerably more gentle in Yes, Minister.) The system is the target, not one side or the other.

House of Cards is conservative, in its origins. But those origins stem from Tory-on-Tory political violence:

Before he began writing, Dobbs was a Conservative party backroom boy, scurrying up the chain of command from speechwriter to special adviser to chief of staff. He was serving as the latter when, on the eve of the 1987 election, he fell out spectacularly with his then boss, the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. He was soon kicked into the political long grass, which was when he found time to write fiction.

“It all started because Maggie Thatcher beat me up and was actually rather cruel to me,” he says, looking softly out onto the Thames from a sunny spot on the Lords Terrace. “I don’t complain about that – politics is rough and tough. But it caused me great unhappiness for a while . . . [Despite] the fact that she could be absolutely horrid to me, I still regard her as being probably the greatest peacetime prime minister in the 20th century.”

It was on the day known as Wobble Thursday, exactly a week before polling day in ‘87. Thatcher was convinced she was losing the election (spoiler: she wasn’t), and “she took out all her pain and anger and frustration on me, when in fact I was perhaps the most innocent person in the room at the time”, says Dobbs with a sweet smile.

Soon after, the bruised former chief of staff found himself on holiday with his wife, sitting on the beach and scrawling two letters onto a piece of paper: “F U” – his soon to be protagonist’s initials, and a none-too-cryptic two fingers up at the page.

Dobbs now denies that the book was a revenge novel--but the picture he paints of his fellow Tories is darker than even most liberals would imagine. Also, to be frank, Dobbs's book ain't a patch on Andrew Davies's adaptations (and in fact Davies has offhandedly junked key components of Dobbs's plotting, rather hilariously transforming not one but two fatal defeats for FU into triumphs, leaving Dobbs in rather an awkward place in writing the sequels), and Davies self-identifies as a liberal.

For what it's worth, though I am emphatically not a conservative, I think there is good conservative popular fiction. It's never the stuff one thinks of, though, no more than is good liberal popular fiction. That's because fiction written to a thesis is almost always tendentious. It suffers from "try too hard" syndrome, whatever the political slant. But R.F. Delderfield's views are gently conservative, and those views inform his work. But he has a broad enough view of the world that non-conservatives can read his writings without feeling attacked. So, for example, To Serve Them All My Days may have a firebrand socialist minder's son as its protagonist, but his integration into a traditional boarding school as its Headmaster is its story arc. "Pow-Wow" never recants his socialist views, but they become less important to him than the well being of the local community of which he is the steward.

Likewise Simon Raven spreads the satire fairly evenly--he has Labour white hats as well as Tories, though the narrator's asides are pretty consistently conservative--sometimes acidly so. Likewise Susan Howatch's theology trends traditionalist in nature, though, like her fictional mystic Jonathan Darrow, I suspect that she is beyond party affiliation. Another favorite of mine, George MacDonald Fraser, was a crusty old Tory long before he was old. So I think it's fair to acknowledge that there is first rate writing from conservatives. I just don't see either House of Cards or Yes, Minister as fitting that category.

However, most of my examples are from a time of greater consensus. And this brings me back to my earlier point: Tendentious novels usually are less well done than those where character (or plot) drive the storyline. Ideological purity is bad for art. I would suggest that much American conservative writing in the last few years has been just that--ideological, and thus mostly bad art. The current conservative movement's sense of being contra mundum is just not good for the muse, unless held in check, any more than is a liberal sense of grievance. In Phineas at Bay, Sir William McScuttle, was a sincere effort to try to depict a 19th Century Social Darwinist, but, because I didn't spend as much time with him, lacked enough roundness to be entirely successful. (I think I did considerably better with Tories Savrola Vavasour and Frank Greystock).

Conservative art tends to not work because it's conservative before it's art.

Suddenly Susan: Some Notes on Howatch

So for this Advent (starting a little early (November 6), ending a little early(December 18)), I'll be leading a book group at St. Barts on the Starbridge Novels of Susan Howatch. The books are old friends; I stumbled on them when Howatch was only partway through with the series, and bought Mystical Paths and Absolute Truths when they came out. They're interesting in several ways, but here's what grabbed me when I first read them: they succeed as moves first and foremost. Howatch's characters, particularly her leads, the conflicted intellectual Charles Ashworth, the mystic Jonathan Darrow, and the low church, ambitious Neville Aysgarth, are three dimensional figures whose struggles with their own flaws and with each other are credible, rooted in deep human insight, illuminated with deep empathy.

You can hear the overview of the novels that I gave at the St. Barts Rector's Forum over the summer here.

As Howatch explained in an interview with David Virtue (!):

Virtue: What makes good Christian fiction?

Howatch: It’s a vexed question. I don’t think of myself as a Christian novelist. I think of myself as a novelist who writes on Christian themes. I think there is a difference. A Christian novelist implies someone who thinks a Christian theme and tailors everything to fit. For me, the people come first and the Christian themes grow out of that. The important thing about Christian fiction is that first of all it should be good fiction; without that, nothing is possible. But because Christianity applies to the whole of life and the novelist’s concern should be the whole of life, if a novel is done well, it inevitably should have Christian themes in it because Christianity is dealing with the great fundamentals of life. Unfortunately many novelists today aren’t interested in broad interests or major themes.. . . I think it is extremely dangerous for any novelist to set out to evangelize, because you end up writing a Christian polemic. A novelist’s first duty is to write a story. A novelist’s second duty is to write a readable story, and without a readable story nothing is possible. You can’t write a polemic for a lost generation. That’s not the way it works. It would be phony. If you get the story right, the Christian themes will emerge from the interaction of the people, and they can be completely understated. In The Wonder Worker you can see the theology of healing, and you can see the business of sin and redemption and forgiveness at work. The themes are all there in the book. Once you start saying I am going to evangelize, that’s actually pride. When I had my religious conversion, one of the most important things was that I was working for years furthering my own self-interest. What I am going to do now, if I continue to write books, I am going to offer them to God to use as he pleases. That sets me free. I offer it to God and say “make of it what you wish”; otherwise you get carried away by pride.

By her standard, of writing good novels with compelling characters, and a storyline that naturally flows from their interactions, Howatch succeeds admirably in the Starbridge novels.

Each of the three clerics at the center of the series is the narrator in one book. The daughter of Aysgarth's best friend continues his story, as Darrow's son tells his father's story and his own. Ashworth then brings the series to a close. Importantly, there are no villains. While Howatch clearly has her favorites among the cast--she's quite fond of Ashworth, respects Darrow, and does not like Aysgarth as much as she does the other two--she gives them all their do, as she does for less central figures making up the work. The overlapping narration, in which the same event is often seen several times, through starkly different viewpoints, enriches the whole.

The theological component of the novels is rich, also, and worth noting, and I'll write about that next.