A Childish Wonder

Having watched four of my children encounter reality for the first time, I know that to the uninitiated, existence is a strange and magical thing. Even in the operations of one’s own body, there is mystery, for it is not clear at first how consciousness and one’s appendages are meant to cooperate. At some point in the first few months, the wonder of human personality grows to momentous import and the child is awestruck at the hilarious and unpredictable antics of faces, which, through an inscrutable and almost indescribable autocatalytic process, grow in animation in response to the child’s own degree of expression.

The world of nature, too, is full of wonders. Some things are fuzzy, some scratchy, and some smooth, hard and cold and the child spends hours feeling with her hand and mouth and ears and head. Some things fly around the room and some slink along the ground and there is at first no rule which says that the things which slink may not, in a metamorphosis, spring into the air and soar – they sometimes do . To a young child, the exquisite marvel of existence itself is perfect and unmitigated. The sharp edges of reality have not been rubbed smooth. Her sense of wonder is utter and complete and cannot be increased or enhanced. The dog which lies at her feet may sprout wings and fly or the faces smiling down at her may begin to glow and speak with the heavenly and musical language of the archangel and still the child will see these things as the seamless and unexceptional progression of an endlessly magical fabric.

Of course, we grow out of this wide-eyed and infantile wonderment. Over time, we begin to understand, through endless repetition, which types of phenomena are remarkable and which are ordinary. We cannot be surprised by everything forever. The first time we notice the sunrise, it may be unspeakable and mystical, but what of the thousandth?

And a good thing, too, else how would we know real wonders when we saw them? If we were still awestruck by our mother’s voice, we might not appreciate Pavarotti’s.

It is, furthermore, the rolling back of these mysteries which has been the hallmark of natural science. Just as an adult has come to understand which occurrences are commonplace and which extraordinary, the mature culture of the modern west has illuminated whole realms of previously mysterious events and cycles, showing them to operate predictably in compliance with fixed physical laws. We have made such progress in this domination of the extraordinary by the prosaic that it looks as though our last childish vestiges of credulity may soon be dismantled – replaced at last by a hard, mature, and sober realism which understands everything, and is, therefore, shocked by nothing.

Critically, this realistic perspective must do away with the idea of God entirely or at the very least relegate him to the amusing but subjective realm of unicorns, goblins, and heavenward-growing beanstalks. It is understandable that primitive peoples (our ancestors, amazonian tribesmen, and perhaps even children) might transpose the existence of God over matter as if to create a focal point for their wonder and ignorance, but beliefs that are harmless and amusing among children and natives threaten to inhibit a modern adult’s cognitive development.

A Mature Amazement

However, a reexamination of our basis for incredulity reveals that even the most solid of our knowledge about the predictability of the natural world is constructed not from a sterile empiricism, but through a childlike and fertile imagination working in concert with the cultural awareness and rational conventions of a given historical period.

As physicist, philosopher and historian of science Thomas Kuhn points out in The Structure of Scientific Revolution:

Effective research scarcely begins before a scientific community thinks it has acquired firm answers to questions like the following: What are the fundamental entities of which the universe is composed? How do these interact with each other and with the senses? What questions may legitimately be asked about such entities and what techniques employed in seeking solutions? At least in the mature sciences, answers (or full substitutes for answers) to questions like these are firmly embedded in the educational initiation that prepares and licenses the student for professional practice.

Put another way, the elemental mysteries of existence must be accounted for one way or another before the process of scientific inquiry even begins. Usually, these mysteries are accounted for through culturally-embedded assumptions (however valid or invalid) these assumptions thereby limiting the scientist’s evaluation to a mere modicum of available data and limiting his conclusions within a culturally-acceptable range.

And this is merely how inquiry begins. Once it is well underway, the process is even less inerrant and inexorable. Former Harvard professor of geology, biology, and history of science Stephen Jay Gould explains:

Science, since people must do it, is a socially embedded activity. It progresses by hunch, vision, and intuition. Much of its change through time does not record a closer approach to absolute truth, but the alteration of cultural contexts that influence it so strongly. Facts are not pure and unsullied bits of information; culture also influences what we see and how we see it. Theories, moreover, are not inexorable inductions from facts. The most creative theories are often imaginative visions imposed upon facts; the source of imagination is also strongly cultural.

It is in this way, Gould explains later, that rational and objective scientists were incapable of “discovering” that africans were the equals of europeans in intellect until it was culturally permissible to do so.

If, as Gould and Kuhn suggest, the projection of culture on the outcome of scientific inquiry is equally as strong as the projection of scientific findings on culture (if the two are interlaced and often indistinguishable) then science, far from offering a final elucidation of the mystery of humankind’s existence, only adds to the mystery.

Why, one might ask, are we the only creature in the entire known universe who seeks to know the universe or even has a conception of the universe as a universe? The universe is not an empirical fact; your dog cannot smell the universe and you cannot see it. To get to the conception of a universe, one must follow an almost tortuous path of discursive reasoning, and then what has one really gained? Out of thirteen billion light years of space, one would assume that only a microscopic sliver would or even could be interesting to a terrestrial mammal. And yet we find the whole thing fascinating – from edge to theoretical edge and from star to cell to quark – and many of us spend our whole lives dedicated to finding one more method of displaying the shape of the universe through our instruments.

Wonderful indeed.

The Dangers of Frameworks

The investor William Buffett warns us to “beware of geeks bearing formulas” and it is good advice for a keeper of companies, seeing as even the most mechanical of businesses runs by the complex, organic mechanisms of human minds and human relationships. Business is more biological than mathematical and more psychological than either.

Similarly, certain dangers lurk in the very notion of a rational framework which I hope to mitigate though they cannot be destroyed. To begin with, it is important to realize that a framework is a technology, although a metaphysical one and cleverly disguised. Just as language itself is a technological means of communication, knowledge retention, and expression, so a framework is a rational technology to assist us in the apprehension of certain truths.

The danger inherent in a rational framework is the same inherent in any technology: that in reducing actual complex, interpenetrated phenomena to a discreet set of articulations for the sake of comprehensibility, we risk oversimplifying our understanding of the phenomenon itself. It is in this way that we have come to the astounding and comical conviction that intelligence is not only definable, but can even be objectively tested and assigned a discreet number.

However, it is not the technology’s fault, and technology can do a lot of good. As long as we are conscious that it we are looking through a technology’s distortions, it can help us to apprehend the actual truth of the matter. Forget for a moment that what we are seeing is not the entity itself, though, and we are in for trouble. As long as we are aware we are looking through binoculars, they can help us see farther. But if we mistake our extended and yet distorted frame for the real thing, we are likely to stumble over what is right in front of us.

And so, with these caveats and disclaimers publicly posted, here is a framework for thinking about human culture:

An Image-Bearing World

The cosmos began somewhere. Some say it began with God, others that it began with the Big Bang, some postulate that the two may not be incompatible. I am not going to argue here for one, the other or both, but merely point out a particularity with origins.

If something comes from something else, then it stands to reason that the resultant something is merely a subset or reconstitution of the original something. In other words, if the cosmos began with the Big Bang, then everything we experience (human culture included) must be merely a recapitulation of that singular event. If this is not so – if certain elements of reality cannot be traced back – then our theory of origin is too narrow.

Given this, if one assumes the Christian hypothesis that reality began with an act of creation, then it follows that all of reality (human culture included) must be merely a recapitulation of God’s singular personality. In other words, creation bears God’s image.

Of course, we could have just read the first few chapters of Genesis to gather the same thing, but I believe, firstly, that it is useful to see the logic of origins running in lockstep with the scriptural account and, secondly, that we have (often and unaccountably) limited our Christian understanding of image bearing to humans rather than extending it to the natural realm. The reason for this, on the surface, is probably that the scriptures speak specially of the man and the woman being made “in the image of God”, whereas the creation is never spoken of in these terms.

However, I do not believe the special designation of image bearer given to the man and woman excludes the possibility of a general designation for the rest of creation. In the first place, how could it? If creation did not get its substance from God’s image (his likeness and character) then where did it get it? nature, in other words, reflects something, so if not God, then what? One might argue that this is not the same as image bearing, and if by that, one means that the way humans reflect God is unique, then such a position has merit. However, if one means by such a statement that human’s display God’s character while nature does not, then one must explain what or who’s character nature displays. One would also have to explain the many places later in scripture which speak of the natural world reflecting attributes of God’s character.

Rather, the natural world bears the likeness of God in the same vein (although not to the extent) which humanity does. Both humanity and nature bear the imprint of their origins. Both are a recapitulation of God’s character. But man and woman are also special. They not only bear an image, they create an image as well. They are to reshape, rename, and redesign nature after their likeness. They are to coordinate mind and body and combine reason and matter until the whole creation is filled with their creations.

Additionally, just as nature is blessed to multiply and expand, so too is the human race. Adam and Eve were not to be alone for long. The race of their children constituted not only a multiplication of image-bearing faces, but also a multiplication of image-bearing imaginations resulting in new and novel combinations.

The whole arrangement is rather like a kaleidoscope, the input of light and color resulting in a million recombinant designs. And like a kaleidoscope in constant motion, or like the ripples on a calm pond, the image is intended to expand and recapitulate through all eternity. It is as if the creation at the beginning is a portrait to which the growing intricacy of nature and the iterative progress of human culture is forever adding detail and refinements. The physicists tell us that the universe is expanding. If this is true, then it is a fitting picture, for neither a static cosmos nor a static human culture would form a just likeness to God. It is, perhaps, by this expansive motion that a finite world best reflects an infinite being.

Cultural Reflection

This being the case, the first element in our framework is an understanding that human culture (with all its miscellaneous strangeness and magic) is a reflection of God’s image just as a tree is, just as a human baby is.

One might say that human culture is the extrapolation of humanness. Put another way, human culture is the image of God animated. The acting out of image bearing is part of the burden which the bearing entails. Human culture expands the image of God and in the process makes us more human than before.

We can see this more clearly in a couple of examples. In the beginning, God created sound and wood. He also created man and woman and instructed them to cultivate the sound and wood so that it would bear fruit. The result, after much experimentation and false starts, is Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto. One senses as one listens that the composition makes sound more itself. One might also say that the creation and appreciation of such a work makes us more ourselves – more completely human.

Similarly, the mathematics which enable us to postulate an expanding universe are the extrapolation of Adam’s original project of naming the animals. After the animals, we named other things as well, not only naming instances, but naming generalities, such that the name for one animal next to another animal was “two” and both of those animals next to a brook were “three” (adding the abstraction “things” to the lexicon in the process). Extending this cultivation of rationality has led to relativity, black holes, quantum theory, and a new understanding of time. It is easy to see downsides to all of this, but it is even easier to see that were we to roll back all of this fractal expansion from the act of naming, we would be erasing humanness along with its abuses.

The Abuses of Image-Bearing

It is plain to all but the most dim-witted of observers that the progress of human culture has not been without its setbacks. The only real debate, it would seem, revolves around what causes the setbacks and what to do about them.

The modern secular position (if I can attempt an amalgamation of many separate voices) is that our essential problem is one of insufficient knowledge. As far back as Socrates, we’ve had the idea that knowledge and virtue are inseparable if not one and the same thing. The picture the modern world paints is one of science, technology, and the arts progressing in lockstep with morality, happiness, and human fulfillment. The problems of culture, then, are simply because we are new to the task. As we get more practice at the dance, we will step on each other’s toes less frequently. The grave danger, by such logic, is that we may regress to a more primitive level of knowledge through a failure of education or a capitulation to religious sentiment.

I have dealt with the question of human progress in detail elsewhere, so I will not fully restate the case here. Let it suffice to point out two essential difficulties with this perspective:

Firstly, as long as humans compose the jury by which human progress is adjudicated, then we will tend to acquit our contemporary selves while convicting our forbearers. In this way, we are bound to measure progress linearly (from past to future) because we are the ones closest to the future. We may, of course, be right, but all those who could dispute the claim (the citizens of past ages representing our co-defendants) have long since been executed. “Proves our point” we say.

Secondly and more importantly, the school of thought which says cultural problems stem from insufficient knowledge ignores the troubling relationship between increasing external knowledge and decreasing internal knowledge – knowledge of the self. As Nietzsche put it, “as far as ourselves are concerned we are not knowers”. One could add that we are in fact less knowledgeable of ourselves after thousands of years of human inquiry than we have ever been. The reason, as I have noted elsewhere, is that the transcendent stance of rational and artistic objectivity leads us outside ourselves, causing our advancement in human culture to atrophy our own self-knowledge. The basic posture of the modern man and woman standing astride the monuments of human cultural growth is one of self-consciousness and insecurity.

This insecurity is, I believe, better explained by the Christian hypothesis, which says that, far from insufficient knowledge being the problem, it was actually an inappropriate kind of knowledge which caused the original mishap. When humanity reached for the tree, they were reaching for a knowledge which would enable them to be like God, knowing (and judging) good and evil for themselves rather than acknowledging God as the source of their knowledge and being. The fall was in fact an attempt to become gods and recreate the world after our own image. By asserting our independence, humanity was attempting to redirect the mirror of the world so as to bypass God and reflect the self.

In this way, every aspect of human culture (even our so-called progress) can be seen as a form of rebellion – or to use the language of the scriptures: idolatry. Instead of work reflecting the creativity of God in creation, we redirect our labors to reflect our own self-interest. Instead of sexuality reflecting the unity and diversity of the Godhead, we talk of sexual preference and sexual fulfillment – a bipartite act centered on the singularity of the self. Instead of theology reflecting our creator, our theology after the fall reflects the biases and preferences of its human authors. Instead of art recapitulating the creator’s beauty and truth, we work diligently to divest it of both – to display it nakedly to the world and thereby assert our ownership and mastery.

The result of all this is a rotation of idols, and at the swirling center of this pagan orgy is the idol of the self. Each artifact of culture serves fallen humanity as both a little god to whom we bow as well as a little worshipper, bowing to the desires of the self. We bow to the calf and use the calf as a servant to our mirthful self-interest.

It is in this way that the growth in human culture has been paralleled by a growing alienation of the self from its place within that culture. The more we exalt ourselves to a place of godlike transcendence over matter, thought, and human relationships, the more we separate ourselves from the ordinary human enjoyment of such things. Thus the peculiar predicament of the self in the twenty-first century – increasing daily in knowledge, power, and psychological estrangement.

Another way of talking about all of this is simply to speak of a breakdown in morality. Even outside Christian circles it is generally acknowledged that morality centers on the golden rule: on doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, loving one’s neighbor as oneself, or (in short) being unselfish. Christianity adds as a prefix to all this a selfless love of God, but the attitude is the same: morality maintains an open, outward-facing posture while immorality is inward-facing.

The fall, in short, involved an attempt by our forbearers to turn the world upside down from its original purpose so as to serve the selfish ends of a new, very human, deity. The results surround us.

Unsuccessful Rebellion

We have, of course, made a mess of things, but what is perhaps even more amazing than our errors is that we have not made more of them and that the ones we have made have not caused more extensive damage. It’s astounding, in a way, that we can see current and past cultures – rife with cyclical wars, genocide, racism, bigotry, and cruelty – culminating in the construction of a stable of weapons capable of making such cruelty ubiquitous and yet still see truth in the strokes of the artist, beauty in the formulations of the mathematician, and goodness in both as they care for their children. Human culture is both unaccountably wonderful and unaccountably monstrous in equal measures. If culture is progress, then it is a bizarre and heartless sort of progress but if it is mere degeneracy, then it is it is beautiful as it burns.

I believe the root of this paradox can be unearthed by comparing the nature of an image-bearing world with the nature of humanity’s rebellion. If, indeed, it was God who created the world then it was he who stamped it with his character and this stamp would not be so easily erased or redirected. Humanity, by its rebellion, might have turned every stone so that they now revolved around the newly-inaugurated deity of self, but this would merely constitute a sort of vandalism, not a complete reformation. For the man and the woman to have been entirely successful in their coup, they would have had to remake the world from scratch, reflecting only the imprint of a new race of gods. As it was, they had to make do with the materials they had on hand. It must have been irksome until they grew accustomed to such debasement – rather like starving and ill-clad Confederate troops raiding Union supply depots or anti-western militants finding nothing but American flags to serve as blankets.

The rebellion was unsuccessful, cursed from day one with a lack of proper munitions and materiel – what we could scrape together consisting entirely of what we could pilfer from the enemy’s own extensive stores. We have persisted in our self-absorbed cause, but by building with the enemy’s elements and in the enemy’s mediums, we have succeeded only in furthering his original design – scattering, spreading, and expanding the image of God where we intended only our own. It has been infuriating and unavoidable, seeing what we had to work with.

This, then, explains how it is that we often reach the state of external exaltation simultaneous with one of internal despondency, why the smartest and richest and strongest among us are often psychologically the most precarious and vulnerable. The greatness we have built for ourselves refuses to serve us because it is stamped with another’s likeness. The greater we grow and the more voraciously we consume praise from our environment, the more our environment revolts and refuses our pleading demands. We are, as it were, asking cats to act like dogs; they may have been created to serve, but not us.

A Twisted World

All of this leads us to the conclusion that we are living in a twisted world, as if the preceding paragraphs were necessary for such a commonplace. However, understanding that human culture is both good and evil simultaneously is important to our understanding of how to address the part which is evil. Culture is twisted and grotesquely so, but it is not irreparably broken; it can be pried and prodded back into alignment although it will require more than our strength to do so.

This understanding is particularly important to the Christian community, who have often been the first to snuff out the smoldering wicks and bruised reeds of human cultural activities in the name of moral integrity. However, this rigid stance often belies a certain blindness to our own twistedness, as if the effects of the fall had stopped like a spent flood at the doorstep of the church rather than sweeping through every orifice and vestibule.

In addition to glossing over the stains on even the most sanctified of vessels, a stark separation between those elements of culture which the church deems good and those deemed evil belittles the image of God displayed in the whole construct as well as in its parts.

Part of the evil of the fall, in fact, consists in our tendency to separate what God has joined. Just as we attempt (unsuccessfully) to sever elements of creation from their image-bearing function, so also, we are constantly making petty distinction between two conjoined truths and creating a warm, moist, and fertile ecosystem for growing evil in the interstitial spaces. Christians, through the years, have been responsible for many such cavities even as they brandished the bone saw and warned of gangrene. One thinks of the pious southern landowner drawing a fine racial distinction even as he decries with moral outrage the Northern violations of his God-given liberty and threatens secession. Perhaps a careful reevaluation of the prior distinction could have prevented the subsequent rupture.

The task of the Christian within culture, therefore, is one of integration and orientation rather than dissection, repairing torn ligaments between connected truths and aligning contorted joints into their rightful position with the whole being. There may be times when amputation is indeed the appropriate metaphor. It is, after all, better to enter heaven lame. However, while a flicker remains of life and health and the image of the creator, we are to tend and nurse it lest we contribute to the distorting and dismembering effects of rebellion through our own attempts at fealty.

What this looks like in practice is that the Christian is an advocate and sponsor to each part of human culture, but her advocacy and interest elicits her insistence on cultural wholeness. At first, such a description reeks of bias, and certainly any Christian’s particular application of cultural advocacy will itself contain its share of distortions. However, due to the influence of God’s original image stubbornly persisting through many attempts at displacement, the Christian’s particular demands of culture need not feel like a violation or debasement of the activity the Christian is seeking to redeem.

For instance, the Christian position affirms sexuality and likens the human pleasures of sex to the divine pleasure of Jesus himself as he embraces the church whom he has won. Sex, according to the Christian way of thinking, is a transcendent experience, clothing physical sensation and biological function with spiritual significance. However, because of the significance of sexuality, because of its great worth and reflective meaning, one is not to separate sexuality from love. To go further, once the Christian has linked sex with love (a joint our culture certainly sees as preferable if not indispensable) love is then joined with its indispensable corollary: sacrifice. If love, says the Christian, does not involve giving oneself, then it is not love but only lust. It is but a small step from the necessity of selflessness to the necessity of marriage as the lifelong commitment to selfless love. Thus, the Christian would perform a sort of surgery on the bleeding wound human culture has opened between our sexual cravings and the selflessness of true love – pointing out that the former will never be satisfied until the later is cultivated in something very like marriage.

Similarly, the Christian position affirms artistry and craftsmanship of all kinds, but evaluates the worthiness of art by means of the reflections of truth, beauty, and goodness manifest in the created order and accessible even to the uneducated layman. It may well be that certain abstract works are fully understood only be an intellectual elite, but their exclusivity is not, by itself, a mark of quality. Also, the artist who seeks to dissect art to its lowest level, severing art from intentionality, skill and technique (the artist who demonstrates a sadistic mastery of art by stripping it of form and substance) will not by the mere novelty of this reductionism gain the Christian’s approval. Of course, by this standard, much of what is labeled “Christian Art” must be discarded, but such a label is merely a symptom of a more wholesale reductionism of Christianity itself.

The marketplace also has the Christian’s approbation. It is nothing less than the biological image of man writ large, each portion of the market, like an organ, supplying what is lacking in the operations of the whole and receiving its sustenance as a byproduct of such kindness. However, by this same token, a Christian understanding of the marketplace refuses that a person should hide her gifts and wholesome aspiration behind the flimsy screen of self-interest, but be willing to pursue with abandon the particular calling for which she has been equipped – the calling which, if neglected, would leave some crucial facet of God’s image unfinished. Christianity’s view of the workplace is of a garden – where the giving of oneself comes prior to receiving one’s sustenance and neither the purity of the gift nor the sequence of the harvest is to be tampered with.

Whatever one sows, that will he also reap. Christianity (by examining God’s character) merely asserts that the one logically precedes the other and the bounty of the harvest is proportionate to the generosity of the labor. It is rare, for instance, that an entrepreneur interested only in his own gain manages to realize such gain. One must first do some good if one would receive good in return and it is almost impossible to benefit others while thinking only of oneself.

Again, it is bewildering that many churches, forgetting Jesus’ own participation as a carpenter, view the marketplace as a guilty pleasure, enticing believers away from more legitimate occupations.

I could give many other examples – spanning technology, family relations, entertainment, and economics – but these, I hope, are enough for now. I desire only to make the point that Christianity, far from being stubbornly entrenched as human culture’s opponent, should instead, by its very nature, be its greatest apologist. We have grown used the term “apologetics” as it refers to defending the idea of God or of Christianity itself, but it is, I believe, equally applicable in this context. The Christian ought to be the first to defend culture against every attacker (even if these attacks come from other Christians) for the simple reason that God’s image resides in what he has made and part of what he has made is human culture through the (often unwilling) agency of men and women. In defending culture, we defend the creative prerogative of its maker. This is not to say that God himself needs defending; defending culture is more like defending others from the inevitable consequences of getting crossways with the universe.

It just as certainly does not entail a mindless acceptance of every cultural whim or fancy. One may have to come near to blows with both the patient as well as his overly-aggressive physicians (both Christian and secular) if the infected member is to be salvaged. But what it most certainly means is a rugged commitment to seek beauty amid ugliness and and virtue amid brothels. This is not because we believe that either beauty or virtue will save us – there is not enough true virtue in the best of us to fill a thimble – but because all true and good things, however marred and misdirected, lead us to the one who is true and good himself, and part of his goodness, we are promised, is to hear those who ask him for help.

Summary of the Framework

Thus, we have constructed a framework for interpreting culture, and I hope it’s a good one. We have started with the image of God invested into human activity, acknowledged the twisting of this image in idolatrous self-worship, and celebrated our outrageous good luck (some would call it providence) that we have not been entirely successful in our selfishness for the simple reason that we, our materials, and our activities were all made to reflect another. While it is badly scuffed up and graffitied, the image can never be entirely effaced.

The resultant mindset, I have suggested, is one of advocacy, seeking the image of God in every aspect of culture and patiently, even obstinately, working out the kinks and connecting severed concepts until the original beauty is restored. Of course, we are not going to be entirely successful, and the biggest obstacle to our success is the rebellion of our own heart, insisting on making our own selfish divisions in what God has joined and inclining to the saw rather than the scalpel in repairing the divisions made by others.

The End of Knowing

Saying that we understand culture by means of God’s image is as much to say that we do not understand culture fully though we can encounter it as we can a person. For each person is a mystery – inscrutable, unique, unfathomable – and just as the depth of a soul cannot be fully plumbed, neither can the soul’s artistry. And what line could measure the creator of both the soul and its handiwork? Knowing culture, knowing another person, and knowing God, all involve a similar type of knowing. We may know many things about – facts, principles, frameworks – and these things may help us to know, but they do not by themselves constitute knowing. For there is believing-in and trusting-in which must occur to know the smallest particle or the smallest person. We reach out our hand to take hold of another’s, trusting its warmth and believing what is unspoken in her eyes. The hand and eyes of creation’s author offer a similar kind of knowing.

Thus, the end of this rational exertion is not rational but relational. We can know a person by proposition only up until the moment of introduction, past which point knowledge must expand beyond proposition or it serves as impediment rather than interpreter. Exposing the reflection of God’s character in culture is merely an introduction. For relationship to begin, God must extend his hand and we must trust its warmth.

A Gluttony of Things

Just as we anticipate and bemoan our gluttony around the holiday banquet table, but appear incapable of preventing it, we appear also resigned to a low-level nausea stemming from a quite different source between Black Friday and the day after Christmas. It is hard not to feel a slight disgust at the desperate and belittling sales flyers, the endless lines of disheveled shoppers stooped like homeless peasants outside mall doors, and the milling, pushing, tired, flustered throngs filling sack after sack with merchandise – their faces growing more empty as the sacks fill. Over it all, a strain of festive music plays, interrupted periodically by the announcement of yet another sale in yet another store. Of course, some seem to enjoy it, and seem more energized each time their credit balance increases, but in even these glowing faces, one can see the effects of overindulgence – as if one were watching a sorority girl’s elation increase with each shot up until the moment of collapse.

Shopping online is, by and large, the same experience, although instead of feeling overwhelmed by the sensory overload of a hundred choices, we are overwhelmed by the mental overload of ten thousand choices, each with its own pictures, description, and list of reviews. We cannot buy a pair of fuzzy socks in such a context until we have compared it to a dozen other pairs and read about the fuzzy experiences of two or three of their current owners.

We have, of course, grown used to this feeling of mild disgust. We are quick to affirm that “the season” means something else. Different things for different people, but something about family, giving, and perhaps God. But what is one to do? The shopping will not be accomplished without us, and so we hold our noses and plunge in, sometimes even making a joke of it. Of course we are going to wreck our diet, but the cream cheese icing and one-day sales are just too tempting. There is always the new year, strategically placed in the final ruins of our previous resolutions, promising a reparation of our defenses and perhaps a few late-season deals.

Toward a Sharper Image

But gluttony is nothing new. We may be quite sure that the roots of our excess grow deep, and it is not difficult to imagine some medieval adolescent princess (attended by bodyguards and leading an entourage of slaves as porters) meandering through the marketplace picking out spices, trinkets, tapestries, and clothing – her face aglow with the elation verging on collapse.

One could even trace the glow backwards to when the first prince and the first princess went shopping for the first clothing among the trees of the garden. Their newfound understanding had led to a revelation of sorts. They had looked in the mirror, felt naked and knew they needed a change. Their first attempts left something to be desired and little to the imagination, but through gradual improvement in tailoring and materials, they were able through time to cover (or at least obscure) that first embarrassing problem. The image they created for themselves was never quite right, but they would have lots of time to improve it.

In a sense, one could look at the modern shopping mall, catalogue, or online store as merely an extrapolation from this point – ever more elaborate and inventive means of covering the anxiety of the human condition with new clothing and new things which are designed to match the image of ourselves in our minds and hearts with the one we encounter in the mirror each morning and see reflected in the reactions of the people around us.

However, the progression, to say the least, has been nonlinear. It is hard to imagine the medieval princess without also picturing the hundreds of peasant girls stretching out thin, dirty arms to her, dressed in tatters and trying to sell hand-spun linens. But visit today’s marketplace and it is full of princesses with not a peasant in sight. What sort of strange fairy tale are we in?

Consumerism Circa 1800

Consumerism, at one time, lived in rarified air. In the town of Natchez, Mississippi, on the great river, one can find preserved a remnant of the lavish antebellum lifestyle of the south’s planters. In one such residence, built by a wealthy cotton broker in the 1850s, stand two fifteen-foot-tall mirrors, gilded with gold and placed at each end of the home’s expansive parlor, giving the impression of a never-ending grand hall. The mirrors were imported from Europe along with many of the home’s other moldings, ironwork and building materials. The home’s owner had chartered a ship for this effort, seeing as free next day air was unavailable.

But you needn’t have been wealthy to enjoy early-1800’s consumerism. If you lived in a major city, you could find non-perishables for purchase from all over the world, some of them at prices that even the middle class could afford. Of course, at the time the middle class was just emerging, and the U.S. average per capita annual income (even adjusting for inflation) was just $2,000. Furthermore, only 9% of the U.S. population was urban, compared to 80% today.

Taken together, the portion of the US population in 1800 who were either wealthy enough or urban enough to be the princess was probably under 5%.

For the remaining 95% of early American citizens, if something was to be enjoyed, it would have to first be produced. The extent of one’s shopping might be for a few staples (tea, sugar, tobacco), or on occasion one might visit the confectioner and buy a bit of candy. Anything more was too expensive, too distant, and too infrequent to be worth thinking about.

But all of that was about to change.

Railroads and Richard Sears

In 1825, the first locomotive was tested in Hoboken, New Jersey, lighting a slow fuze which would trigger a series of explosions in the length and reach of the nation’s rail network. By 1890, 164,000 miles of track had been laid, enough to cross from New York to L.A. fifty times.

With the railroad, everything changed. Areas which were once inaccessible except by horse and cart could now receive their goods by the carload. In 1888, at the perfect point in history for such an enterprise, a man named Richard Sears sent out his first catalogue peddling jewelry and watches. Within ten years, this modest enterprise was selling paint, photographic goods, and “talking machines” – whatever those were. Suddenly, the humble Midwestern farmer could mail an order for paint from the Sears Roebuck catalogue, and pay for it by shipping his crops off on the train to distant markets. He too could now be the princess.

The intersection of the railroads and Richard Sears was but one development during the industrial revolution. There were a thousand others, and 998 out of the thousand served to either increase the selection of goods for purchase and speed their time to market or increase the purchasing power of the average American consumer. I do not know, but I wonder if it was in this period that the word “consumer” came into wide usage, having long before jettisoned it’s historical meaning of “squanderer”.

The Invisible Hand

Contemporaneous with the Declaration of Independence in 1776, a Scottish philosopher named Adam Smith published a monumental book (both in length and impact) titled The Wealth of Nations. If Smith had not written it, it would surely have been written soon by another, for it was an idea whose time had come. In it, Smith examines the first budding seeds of the industrial revolution to find an “invisible hand” of economic growth prodding the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker to benefit their fellow man. The hand was not, as Smith pointed out, one of altruism, but one of self-interest, each person serving the greater good as a byproduct of his own desire for gain. Multiplied by a million, Smith said, this was how great economies were formed.

Even Darwin’s theory of natural selection based on the survival of the fittest in a self-interested struggle can be traced back to Adam Smith and the invisible hand of economic struggle. Like the making of sausage, the result of economic growth may be delicious, but the process is rather distasteful – merely selfishness in motion.

Whether Smith’s theory was merely the reflection of ideological trends or their catalyst, the industrial revolution operationalized the self-interested tendencies of consumerism, creating a buzzing global industry designed to do nothing more and nothing less than create new images for consumers. The modern marketplace is what happens when self-interest and the assembly line collide.

What is strange at first glance is that our self-image has grown less secure even as its manufacturing methods have improved. It is not immediately clear why both the medieval princess as well as the medieval peasant appear to be more comfortable in their own skins than we are, who have had far more skins to choose from. One would think over time that we should have found the one which was, like baby bear’s porridge, “just right”. The modern shopper sits at the top of a tremendous supply chain consisting of hundreds of industries manned by millions of people concerned with nothing more than creating an image of the shopper which she will like and therefore purchase – thus giving individual producers the resources to become shoppers themselves and improve their own images. But the shopper still feels naked. In fact, more naked than before the whole modern industrial consumerism project began. Why might this be?

The Ghost of Shopping Future

Part of the problem, quite certainly, is the very proliferation of options designed to solve the problem of self image. The modern shopper is daily presented with thousands of alternate possibilities for what kind of person he can be. These possibilities come in the form of clothing (hip, traditional, rugged, retro, athletic), music (punk, country, classical, hip hop, indie) decor (modern, ornate, minimalist, period, rustic) toiletries (basic, indulgent, fastidious, pure, trendy) food (eclectic, organic, fast, comfort, or one of innumerable special diets). This is not even to mention the socio-economic stratification overlaid onto many of these categories to ensure that the wealthy and the poor each have their own brand of eclectic cuisine, indulgent toiletries, etc. What is more, while many shoppers pick associated labels across several merchandize categories for the sake of consistency (rugged clothing, country music, rustic decor, etc.) there are no rules governing such behavior and the modern consumer is often caught in a kind of limbo between competing options trying to figure out which one matches his true self. It is not hard to see how insecurity develops. After a few shifts from one image of the self supported by sundry purchases to another, the shopper realizes that he doesn’t really know who the person really is behind all the purchases. Its at this point, when the shopper sees himself as a ghost picking out clothing to give himself the semblance of corporeality, that acute anxiety sets in. It appears this anxiety can only be relieved by more shopping, and (thanks to Adam Smith and his co-conspirators) he does not have to look far.

Thus, the cycle of identity-building accelerates, along with the pace of purchase. We are not, however, doing much building. Each image of the self is promptly discarded after we realize that it doesn’t fit us as precisely as we hoped. Some people reach a state of equilibrium at some point, conceding the hopelessness of the process. Many never do. The net result of the enterprise is that our shopping is often focused on a very near-term future. We want to cloth ourselves for a few moments, knowing that when the moment passes, we will have to continue our foraging or feel ghostly.

The Ghost of Shopping Past

As I have alluded to, the image-shifting malady of the modern shopper is not an individual and singular one. It is supported by an active industry of smart and creative people who are constantly inventing new ways to appeal to old desires. The reason the producer of goods is largely invisible to the shopper is that the consumer focus of modern industry has abstracted them. If (as is generally conceded) the only role of a producer is to create an object of desire (one which promises the shopper a new and better image of herself), then it is the desire, not the thing itself, which is most important. In fact, if the desire could be created in a vacuum, without the need for the article to have any real substance, then one would have struck upon the perfect business model – the output being profitable trinkets and the input being inconsequential.

In reality, this fabled business model is hard to come by, but many businesses come close to it by assembling from several layers of least-cost suppliers a shabby finished product supported by a generous marketing budget. The ironic thing is that this shoddy workmanship rarely hurts the consumer since he or she moves on to the next item after only one or two uses. It is telling that, with a consumer goods industry many hundred times as large as in days past, it is generally conceded and demonstrably true that the quality of most of the articles we employ in daily use has degraded rather than improved. Modern goods are quite often lacking in both craftsmanship and longevity for the simple reason that neither are demanded. Of course, we still appreciate the appearance of craftsmanship, but such can be more economically supplied in plastic, plaster, and polyester rather than wood, stone, and wool.

In this way, through a torturously attenuated supply chain, the shopper is hopelessly abstracted from any sense of a product’s past or producer. For all we know, the items of our daily use erupted fully-formed onto the shelves of our retailers having no past and no creator. If the shopper is by this incapable of seeing anything in the item except her own flickering image, then the ghostly producer will have accomplished his end.

Both the past and the future of consumer goods look (when seen in this light) pernicious, a series of selfish deceptions, perpetrated on others by industry and on himself by the shape-shifting shopper. However, the original ideological premise behind the rise of the consumer economy provides not only a methodology by which we have come to our current state, but a justification as to why it is really for the best. For when each of us (at every level of the supply chain) follows his own self interest, we are told, the result is greater prosperity and therefore greater happiness. Far from pernicious, our selfish image-making and image-seeking is rather instrumental in the greater good and to be encouraged. The only check we ought to give to our consumption, therefore, is based on our means of payment.

Loving Too Little

It is little wonder, then that many Christians and secularists alike have rejected the rat race (as we have aptly termed it) and sought to disassociate themselves from the consumption economy and its abuses. We must admit that this response, as extreme as it appears, is eminently sane. In a culture of gluttons and alcoholics, those who eat only bread and drink only water are probably healthier.

The Christian, furthermore, has an added rational for asceticism. Are we not told in the scriptures, “Do not love the world or the things in the world”. If John could write those words two thousand years ago, then what would he say today amid a world of cheap and petty nonsense attempting to pass itself off as our true self? Did not Jesus himself say that we ought not to be concerned with what we should eat or drink or wear. Is he who clothes the lilies of the field incapable of providing us with clothing?

However, one finds also in the scriptures the earthy scent of a beautiful and God-breathed creation peopled by God’s image-bearers, employing themselves in shaping wood, weaving cloth, tanning hides, and making music. The scriptures, conspicuously, do not condemn but celebrate these activities. Was not Jesus himself a carpenter? And where, pray tell, could he have sold his wares if not in the world?

What is unambiguous in the scriptures is that, while the creation and what humans fashion out of it is good, it is not God. There was nothing wrong with earrings, but (while they might be shaped into an instrument of greater worship to the true God) they were not to be molded into an idol.

In this we finally begin to see clearly. Our goods (the creations of human hands) have both a past and a future and we are to trace them both out. If one follows the path backwards, one arrives in time to the creator himself, forming man who forms the article in turn. If one follows the path forward to what ought to be the article’s destiny, this too culminates in the image of the creator as each new artifact of man’s culture fills up the cosmos’ remaining voids with the reflection of God’s character.

The central problem with the modern consumer economy (with the shopping mall) is that we have done everything possible to destroy all traces of this historical continuum, leaving the item purposeless and clean – a mirror reflecting our own image and nothing else.

It is doubtless true in the idolatrous sense which John indicates, that we love the things in the world too much. But by the same reasoning, we have been guilty of loving the things in the world too little, separating them from their rightful heritage as sacramental images and diverting them from their rightful future as lamp stands illuminating the character of God. Instead of admiring our goods as constituting part of the broader mystery of creation, we have used them mercilessly – used them up and thrown them out. It is as if we had been offered marriage and settled for a pinup.

Recovering The Past

Tracing backwards through the layers of obfuscation in the industrial supply chain to perceive the image of God in our consumer goods is rather like archeology. One senses that beneath the mountains of worthless dust, there must be some fossil worth digging out, but where to start?

I believe that among the first steps is to explode the myth of affordability which undergirds our perceived right to selfish consumption. As long as we believe that a purchase is our due, we have no need to dig deep enough to find something worth admiring.

We have been trained by two hundred years of economic growth to translate the most exquisitely-crafted of articles into monetary units. The temptation is to believe that because the effort and craftsmanship required to fashion something of quality and beauty (much less something without either) can be measured, that it can, somehow, be purchased. We have grown so used to the idea that it no longer seems strange to us to speak of buying someone’s time and abilities. This commonplace is made yet more ordinary by the producer himself, if we can find him, speaking of his own talents in the same way – as merely monetary units in an economic exchange.

However, simply because something can be measured does not mean the measure defines it. We may reduce the heat of the sun to a measurement in degrees, but that measurement merely adds a decoration to a phenomenon which we fundamentally do not understand and can certainly not produce on our own. To the question “what is heat really?” we have no answer and so we substitute something less for an answer: a temperature reading or a chemical definition. Our measurements and descriptions can peel back a thousand layers of phenomena but still leave unexplained the central inexplicable presence of the phenomenon itself. When a person (or a company of people) offers to create a good for a certain amount of payment, it is easy to gloss over the presence of the person for the price tag. But this ignores the fact that, while a person may not perform her services without payment, her skill, diligence, and materials are fundamentally incalculable. Our measurements cannot place skill in her hands nor diligence in her heart; their acquisition is a mystery which educational science only flutters around. And while we can measure the cost in dollars to extract resources from the earth, how is one to measure the value of their existence in the first place? In the end, we are like the farmer who plants his seeds in the ground, measures the amount of water and fertilizer, and waits. We know what we must do to make it grow, but we do not know where the growth comes from.

Even the things which we buy are a gift, springing out of the earth and from the minds and hands of others without sufficient explanation. We can purchase them only because they exist in the first place, though they are perhaps latent. It is existence itself which is the greatest and most immeasurable of gifts. The best things in life are free, but we have forgotten that life itself is free, and were it not so, we could not hope to pay for it.

And if existence, with all of its accoutrements, is a gift, then we may seek a giver, and this changes fundamentally how we view our shopping. To begin with, if we are purchasing what we cannot (in an ultimate sense) afford, then gratitude and appreciation is the proper response.

In a strange irony, the modern economy, with its consistency of fresh produce and packaged goods, its boring and repetitive exchange of money for pleasure, has robbed us of the very pleasure we presumed our due. For pleasure paid for and taken drives away all thoughts of love – both our own love as well as the possibility of love from another – and the only true pleasure is bound up with love.

It is fortunate, then, that the things we buy are priceless, no matter how much we may have paid for them. We could not have created one molecule of one trivial article, not with a million years and a million dollars.

To come face to face with this fact is to encounter our own dependence, but it is more than that. For one cannot perceive our dependence without then being shocked by the profusion of resources provided for our well being. It is as if for our whole life we thought ourselves to be purchasing the favors of a needy mistress only to find that she owns the whole realm and by her love and constancy has legitimized what we thought to be an illicit relationship, having casually tossed each of our payments aside. We could not have bought her though we tried repeatedly (comically and thanklessly we now realize), but she has made a marriage with us nonetheless and with her love elevated us infinitely beyond our means.

Recovering the Craftsman

In addition to a recognition of our essential poverty and blessedness, an archeology of consumerism ought also to unearth true craftsmanship, practiced by true craftsmen (of both genders I should add, although “craftspeople” is a rather awkward construction). Such people still exist although they have been pressed down and marginalized by an industrial economy content with surface stylishness rather than substantive beauty seeing that the former can be produced much more inexpensively than the later.

Even this purely economical comparison is often misleading. We are all familiar with the notion that a well-made piece of furniture retains its value indefinitely. One may spend as much for an antique of high quality as for a new table or dresser. Thus, over the life of the piece, the price per year of true craftsmanship may be far less less than that of shabby mass production even though initially the cost of the former is a multiple of the latter. It’s not inconceivable, for instance (what with an arid climate and assuming a thoughtful series of owners) although highly improbable, that some few pieces of Jesus’ own handiwork remain in circulation. If it is not so, then it is not due to his cutting corners. The reason we don’t often value this sort of longevity is that is may outlast us and it is almost certain to outlast our current self-image.

Another, and perhaps the more important, reason to seek out the craftsman behind the article is that we are not good at appreciating abstractions. When we see with what skill an item is made and the care taken by its creator, it helps us connect the dots of human creativity with those of divine. In many cases, as with modern electronics, an abstraction may be all we have. We must do the best we can. But we ought not to make the mistake of ignoring the craftsman altogether, ignoring the human act of creation required to bring us our lamp stand. And having mentioned this, we must change the direction of our inquiry, for having bought the lamp stand, one must choose what to do with it.

Recovering the Future

I have mentioned already that the shelf life of our self images (we wear through so many. there is rarely just one even at a single point in time) has grown exceedingly short, supported as it is by an active industry of image manufacture. Asking about an item’s future, in that context, seems ridiculous, almost senseless. Often we have practically used up the thin utility which our psyche derives from a purchase by the time we remove its packaging.

However, since we have taken the time to dig backward to the image of a generous God equipping men and women to create beauty for our use and enjoyment, we must dig forward to find what use and enjoyment we are to make of it. At the outset, we must disallow the use that most quickly springs to mind – that it will make us someone different, someone better. Allow that thought in and the whole pile of self-interested shape-shifting futility washes back with it.

Rather, the use we make of things ought to be the same use that the craftsman should make of his labor – that of sacrament and incarnation. If we are indeed made in the image of the invisible God, then our purpose must be to make him seen, to display his character in our own. Our character, despite the teaching of hundreds of years of western philosophy to the contrary, is not dualistic. We are not merely an independent mind floating disconnected in the medium of a body. We are both, just as Jesus was both, and the actions of the one manifest in the other. By the same token, our existence (both spiritual and physical) is bound up in our environment and culture which itself has both physical and spiritual significance. Thus, the culture and environment we create around us (our occupations and surroundings) themselves constitute part of the image of God which we are to display.

What, we might ask, is the difference? Is it possible to see a distinction between the use of things for our own image vs employing them in reflecting our creator? It is, admittedly, a precarious enterprise to measure a human being’s motives by their actions, but let me venture an example.

It has been my experience that many of the people least capable of showing hospitality owing to the constraints of their home and resources are nevertheless the most hospitable. I am thinking in particular of an absentminded man named Wynn Kenyon whom I studied under in college. I’m not sure if I recall a time in the fifteen years since I met him that a friend, stranger, or foreigner (all three soon morphed into the first) was not occupying one or more of the bedrooms in the Kenyon’s modest home. Dr. Kenyon passed away a couple of years ago, but his wife Ginny still keeps his home open. By contrast, it has also been my experience that many of those most physically capable of hospitality are least likely to practice it, or if they do, practice it in comic disproportionality with their means. It might be mean-spirited to name names, but we can each think of a wealthy acquaintance whose well-furnished home we would be afraid to stay in for fear of disturbing some carefully-crafted element in his fragile self-image. Give the same home and the same furnishings to Dr. Kenyon and it would soon resemble the catastrophic collision between an orphanage, a library, a soup kitchen, and the school of Athens. No one was ever quite sure what Dr. Kenyon’s self image was (he often wore two collared shirts at the same time by mistake), but they saw clearly who he and the environment he built reflected.

Slow, Thoughtful, and Free of Anxiety

If you have read thus far, you may be concerned that this process of tracing backwards and tracing forwards to unearth the image of God in our purchases is rather time-consuming. It may be useful, at times, to stop and smell the roses, but hadn’t we better be getting about our business? We would never get to the end of our shopping list if we took such time to understand and fully utilize our purchases.

That is the point.

While it is certainly true that many of our purchases are for common use and one cannot always spend time in contemplation over every item on one’s grocery list, it is nevertheless this very contemplation, appreciation, and intentionality which distinguishes faithful, healthy shopping from that which is degrading of both our own health and of God’s image. We ought not pass so quickly by even the humble incarnation which a grain of wheat or a cup of wine affords.

It is a necessarily time-consuming enterprise, and the length of our deliberations may preclude many of our intended purchases. But if we appreciate more of the less we have bought, we will not be the poorer. We avoid binging on things not because they are not worth tasting, but because they are. Neither the teetotaler nor the drunk are conscious of the wine’s flavor; it is only the person who tastes carefully and in moderation who is able to taste at all. Far more importantly, we may by this slow and arduous pathway come closer to the image of our creator and become a little less mindful of our own shifting and rebellious self-image. In this, we will shine the brighter, though it will not be our own light we see.

The slowness need not cause anxiety. In reality much of our anxiousness about things is based on our doubts that we will have time and money to buy what we really need. If we recognize them as gifts, then we can assume that we will have time to admire the ones intended for us and assume that what we didn’t have time for we did not really need.

The Words of Grace

In a fascinating book titled The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan traces the natural history of four meals. It is an archeology of dinner. He starts with a meal at McDonalds, follows the industrial food chain all the way to its grimy, mass-produced, and petroleum-fueled source and then works his way through more organic fare to a meal which he serves his guests out of the produce of his own hunting and gathering. The meal is exquisite, not merely because of its contents, but because of its origin – because of the way in which each aspect of the meal grew unmolested from the very earth. The morel mushrooms (impossible to cultivate) grew up nonetheless in shadows and crevasses, the grit and bitterness of soil transmogrified into a savory and rich delicacy. The wine came from local grapes, their sugars distilling through vine and branch into choice fruits. The fruit, in turn, fermenting in a process carefully managed but not entirely understood. Finally, the wild pig roasted for the table represented many elaborate stages of reconstitution. The earth produced the budding oak which would conserve and channel its resources so as to litter the ground with acorns. The pig would eat the acorns and, through an almost miraculous metabolic process, convert the acorn’s nutrients into blood and bone and hair and muscle. The muscle, in turn, Pollan cooked for his guests, turning raw and inedible biological tissues into caramelized and tender mouthfuls – dust to pork roast.

The meal is likewise remarkable for its healthfulness. Rather than loading their palates with synthetic additives which would be expelled from the body as an enemy, Pollan’s guests would be nourished by the wholeness of true food – not isolated nutrients made through scientific ingenuity to taste like food, but food itself with all its richness and complexity.

As Pollan raises his glass to toast the meal and thank the meal’s contributors (his guests had assisted with many parts of it), he is struck with a strange and guttural desire:

I had actually wanted to say something more, to express a wider gratitude for the meal we were about to eat, but I was afraid that to offer words of thanks for the pig and the mushrooms and the forests and the garden would come off sounding corny and, worse, might ruin some appetites. The words I was reaching for, of course, were the words of grace.

For Pollan and his guests, the moment passed and the words were never spoken. It is, after all, not easy to elicit thanksgiving from a modern man. Perhaps the words of grace were, as Pollan says later, unnecessary, the meal constituting grace in itself. At the very least, however, this encounter between a modern intellectual and the immeasurable bounty of the earth is a curious one. His response is surprising because he neither bows down to worship nor dismisses the feeling of thanksgiving as primitive sentiment. It is as if, for a few days, he has stood in the presence of a beauty he cannot describe, a beauty which feeds and nourishes him, which he cannot purchase but only receive.

The feeling is almost one of embarrassment, of knowing the appropriate response in the face of such generosity but knowing too (in the way we moderns know everything) that if he allows the notion of a generous earth, he admits the impossible: that someone has given the earth the gifts it gives to us.

This is where we often leave it: at a vague feeling of undirected thankfulness, in the brief and furtive moments in which we see the gift at all. The words of grace are hard to speak but leaving them unspoken is even harder. It is harder because it hardens us and inures us to further thanksgiving – and by this stroke distances us from the enjoyment of the gift, which is now demoted to a mere purchase (only our due).

We may (like Pollan and many another modern man or woman) be embarrassed by the exchange – the presence of pure and priceless love makes a mockery of all our diligence and effort. But if we are humble, we may by grace be able to say what we are searching for: the words of grace. The words are both thanksgiving and benediction – both an acknowledgement of need and gratitude as well as a blessing on the gift and on the giver. The words of grace bless us as well, for they add to the pleasure of the love the far greater pleasure of the lover.

It is thanksgiving, in the last analysis, which our digging has discovered, or rather evoked. I would like to believe that adding an additional day of thanksgiving to our calendar on December 27th might help to remind us, but I’m afraid the sickness is much too acute for such a remedy. The words of grace, after all, have been spoken to us before. They grew up before us like a young plant, like a root out of dry ground, but we did not esteem them. Perhaps it is because we did not look or having looked, hid our faces. But the word of grace comes not only to those who seek it out through the thanklessness of our culture, but also to those whom the word of grace seeks. We might remember as we strip off our pretenses in order to dive down deep and see the image of God in created things that it was to renew the image of God in us that the Son of Man stripped himself of position and dove down into our history. It was only in this way that he might create for us a future.