Category Archives: Theology and Religion

Meditation on Campus

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Inside Higher Ed ran a story today entitled “Meditative Spaces,” about efforts at various colleges and universities to create space for meditation and contemplative prayer. The schools in the article represent a broad range of heritages – private secular, Buddhist, Baptist, Catholic, even a college based on Transcendental Meditation. On one level, I think this can be a promising development, as students, faculty, and administrators recognize the spiritual component to life and attempt to honor our human need for transcendence. The article quotes a recent study from UCLA, which found that most college students were looking for spiritual meaning in their lives:

Indeed, it seems the majority of college students consider themselves to be spiritual in some way. A 2005 study by University of California at Los Angeles researchers found that 80 percent of freshmen have an interest in spirituality – but while they expect guidance from their colleges on spiritual matters, those expectations often aren’t met. In an earlier pilot study of college juniors, the researchers found that nearly two-thirds said their professors don’t encourage discussion of spiritual or religious matters.

The meditation spaces described are as diverse as the schools: prayer rooms, small chapels, outdoor labyrinths. However, the article fails to mention the most important element of meditation. Who or what is the object of meditation?

Psalm 119 is perhaps the central Biblical text regarding meditation. The psalm is organized into 22 sections, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and each line of each section begins with the same letter. Acrostic poems, like Psalm 119, were a Hebrew device for capturing the entirety of God, as if to say that the theme at hand is being covered “from A to Z.” In this case, the theme is God’s word itself.

The second section, Bet, vv. 8 – 16, has always spoken strongly to me:

How can a young man keep his way pure?
By living according to your word.
I seek you with all my heart;
do not let me stray from your commands.
I have hidden your word in my heart,
that I might not sin against you.
Praise be to you, O LORD;
teach me your decrees.
With my lips I recount
all the laws that come from your mouth.
I rejoice in following your statutes
as one rejoices in great riches.
I meditate on your precepts
and consider your ways.
I delight in your decrees;
I will not neglect your word.

The impulse of the colleges above is correct. Human beings are designed to seek transcendence, and meditation is a natural part of how we are wired (some more than others). I pray, however, that students and faculty across our country will discover the proper object for meditation. May the Christians among them be salt and light, so that they will see true spirituality, focused on Christ and God’s revelation.

Letting God Be God

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From my reading today in Os Guinness’ The Call:

No more urgent task faces the church today than the recovery of the authority of faith over the modern world. Those who imagine this can be done solely through strong institutions, more administrative leadership, sharper formulations of orthodoxy, and ever more aggressive political movements will be disappointed. In a world as dynamic, flexible, and individualistic as ours, there can be no return to the authority of faith without a return to the understanding of calling as every follower of Jesus Christ “lets God be God” in practice. (The Call, 69)

The Nature of Knowledge

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The Faculty Ministry Leadeship Team (on which I serve, as part of my role with the Emerging Scholars Network) is reading Douglas Sloan’s book Faith and Knowledge: Mainline Protestantism and Higher Education. I’m keeping a reading journal on my other blog (parts one, two, and three, so far are up). 

One passage, in particular, strikes me as something I’ve been thinking over for some time.  Sloan describes how, after World War II, universities redefined “knowledge” into, basically, the “higher utilianarianism” of scientific, technical, and social research, and the “lower utilitarianism” of “community service and vocational training.”  As a result, there was “very little concern…for an education devoted to the deepening and enrichment of personal and cultural existence.”

Elizabeth and I are just beginning our childrens’ formal education.  Over the last few years, I have wished that my early education included more of the “great books” in the Western tradition.  I have been jealous of the ways that my poetic heroes – Eliot, Auden, Wilbur – were/are able to draw (seemingly) effortlessly from a depth of cultural knowledge that I had to google just to understand.  I’ve been attracted to the classical Christian education movement as a corrective to what I see as gaps in my personal education. 

Just this morning, I was talking with a friend at my other job about the nature of reason.  His work deals quite a bit with debunking scams and seeing through false claims, so he has been attracted to skeptical societies and logical arguments.  Even though he himself is a musician and writer, he seems to lean more to the naturalism favored by so many professional skeptics.  In my experience, hardened skeptics have become so accustomed to fighting false beliefs in UFOs, magic potions, and con artists, that they fail to recognize the truth in philosophy, theology, and religion.  In fact, they often lump the two groups together as mutually “unprovable.”

My Biological Creation?

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QuiverA few days ago, on Jacob Two-Two (that’s right: today’s post draws from the very center of the Western canon), Jacob’s father referred to him as “my biological creation.”

 What a strange way of thinking about a child, especially from a father.  Whenever I have created something with my hands – a poem, say, or a bookshelf – there has been a defined process that I can describe, in which I can clearly point to the actions that I took to reach the final product.  I am working with pre-existing materials (the subjects of the poem, the wood for the bookshelf), but there is “sweat equity” that I contribute. 

In comparison, my contribution to “creating” a child seems trivial.

The Bible depicts children as a gift from God, and that holds true with my experience.  When my wife give birth to our first daughter, I felt like I was experiencing a miracle: a new person came into being.  I could never have done that myself.  I hope that I’m not stretching the exegesis too far by applying this psalm to my two daughters:

1 Unless the LORD builds the house,
       its builders labor in vain.
       Unless the LORD watches over the city,
       the watchmen stand guard in vain.

    2 In vain you rise early
       and stay up late,
       toiling for food to eat—
       for he grants sleep to those he loves.

    3 Sons are a heritage from the LORD,
       children a reward from him.

    4 Like arrows in the hands of a warrior
       are sons born in one’s youth.

    5 Blessed is the man
       whose quiver is full of them.
       They will not be put to shame
       when they contend with their enemies in the gate. (Psalm 127)

Postmodern Toddlers

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One of the assertions of certain postmodernists is that concepts don’t exist until language creates them.  For example, if you didn’t have a word for “love,” then not only would you not be able to recognize, define, or discern love, but love itself would not really exist for you.

Ginger in sinkHeady concept, but it’s something I think about a lot with my almost-2-year-old daughter.  She is at the stage where she is learning new words almost daily, and it’s amazing how she begins to communicate her awareness of the world.  One day she learns the word “apple” (OK, it’s more like “bop-bul), and the next day there are apples everywhere – in books, on wallpaper, on TV.  She sees apples that we completely overlook, because (in my pop child development reasoning) the apple is something that she has a word and concept for, so she picks out the apple instantly.

Now, I believe that apples existed before my daughter discovered the word for them – she ate them all the time without worrying about what to call them – but her experience teaches me about the way that I learn and perceive the world.  As I gain new concepts, I understand the world in new ways.  For example, for years I’ve heard people refer to “Cape Cod” houses.  Just this week, I’m embarrassed to say, I made the connection between the term “Cape Cod” and an actual Cape Cod-style house.  Now I have a new way of thinking about houses.

I have noticed, too, that the literature and film that I consume affects how I view the world.  Elizabeth and I have been watching The Sopranos, and I have noticed that I have to work to control my language more carefully, else I revert to my middle school ways of talking (my 13-year-old mouth = Tony Soprano’s).   When I am constant in my devotions, and reading the Bible daily, carefully and reflectively, the Bible’s concepts of the world – its language for reality – infuse my daily life.

I was blessed to have been given A Guide to Prayer for All God’s People during my introduction as a new InterVarsity staff member. The book provides readings for each week, including weekly readings in the Psalms.  This week, my Psalm has been Psalm 1.  Because of my background in literature and poetry, it often strikes me how powerful the psalmists regard the Word of God to be.  Psalm 1 begins by saying what a righteous man does not do (i.e. allow himself to conform to sinners), then switches to his positive traits:

But his delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law he meditates day and night.
He is like a tree planted by streams of water,
which yields its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither.
Whatever he does prospers.

There is nothing special about the blessed man, except that he loves the law – the words – of God.  The language of God centers him, blesses him, and changes his whole life.
Perhaps these postmodernists are on to something.