Is Spontaneity a Virtue?

Imagine a young woman being pursued by two suitors. The first is staid and predictable. He’s consistent, punctual, and perhaps a bit boring. The second is spontaneous. He tends towards the unexpected and adventurous.

Our young woman considers a life with each of these men. She imagines that the first is a safe choice. He won’t quit his job on a whim to become a skydiving instructor. [Note: this example intends no offense towards the skydiving instructors upon whom our nation depends.] However, the safety he offers isn’t likely to be exciting. The second guy, on the other hand, may be more whimsical than trustworthy. He might be more fun, but will he bail on his vows in a fit of spontaneity?

All else being equal, which guy should she pick? Or, to put it more broadly: is spontaneity a virtue? Is it a characteristic we should value in others and attempt to cultivate in ourselves? Virtue ethics offers some clarity to this question.

The school of thought known as virtue ethics was developed in ancient Greece and has been a subject of renewed interest in recent decades. It recognizes four cardinal virtues which, taken together, represent an ideal of human development. The four virtues – Prudence, Justice, Courage, and Temperance – don’t appear to contain anything having to do with spontaneity. If anything, the virtue of temperance would seem to suggest against it. Temperance is about resisting temptation, after all, and the spontaneous person seems to be giving in to temptation.

But take a closer look at courage. Courage is the ability to overcome fear or difficulty in service of the good. Historically, courage is most closely associated with the warrior who must endure hardship and danger, long marches and fierce opponents, to complete a mission. Courage has two faces. It entails both endurance and attack.

The brave man not only knows how to bear inevitable evil with equanimity; he will also not hesitate to ‘pounce upon’ evil and to bar its way, if this can reasonably be done. – Josef Pieper

Endurance, or fortitude, is the ability to withstand difficulty. The mountaineer trudging up the peak and the shift worker dragging himself out of bed in the morning are both exhibiting courage. They are actively sticking with a difficult thing because it is what needs to be done. Endurance is the persevering, unchanging, even stoic face of courage.

The willingness and ability to attack is an aspect of courage that looks very different from endurance. Unlike endurance, attack presents itself suddenly, in a decisive moment. A courageous man who sees a woman being abused in a parking lot will intervene.

And, pertinent to our question, virtue ethics calls on him to act this way without deliberation. Courage should be second nature. This differs from the modern tendency of thinking that ethical questions pertain to what we do. Virtue ethics is more interested in what kind of people we are.  Through long habituation, courage becomes automatic. As Aristotle said, “we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.”

Paradoxically, courage may cause a person to seem both steady and spontaneous. Life often calls for faithful repetition. It is an act of fortitude to clean the same dishes every day, to exercise regularly, and to consistently report to work on time. However, there are those times when one must become critical of an established routine; when the path of safety and familiarity should be questioned and rejected. There is a time to endure and a time to attack.

Our imaginary young woman would do well to consider which of her suitors is more courageous. Perhaps the first man is predictable because he is timid. Maybe he is simply too afraid to do anything outside of his routine. If so, then life with this man is likely to be not only boring, but shameful. The situation is different, however, if his consistency is a sign of courage. It may be that he has developed the habits of fortitude. The evidence will be in his actions.

As for the second man, is his spontaneity the result of courage or evidence of its absence? Is his apparent whimsy actually a demonstration that he cares more about goodness than convention? Maybe the pursuit of the good life will often appear idiosyncratic.

Then again, what looks like free spiritedness may actually be cowardice. It may be an inability to suffer under discomfort. And so our imaginary young woman will have to ask herself which of these men is more courageous. Which is more likely to meet the challenges of courage, whether of endurance or attack?
 

Clean Eating

Seven years ago, 3 teenage boys took a joyride in a small aluminum boat they’d stolen from an uncle. The boys lived on the Tokelau Islands, a small remote pacific atoll governed by New Zealand. The boys were familiar with the ocean and its dangers, but that familiarity couldn’t restrain their youthful desire for adventure.

In the middle of the night, they pushed off into the open sea, hoping to reach a neighboring island within a few days. Instead, they drifted like a speck in the Pacific Ocean. Before they were rescued, they spent more than fifty days bobbing in salt water with barely any food or water.

One day, malnourished and sick from the sun, the boys watched as a gray gull landed on their boat. Quickly grabbing the bird, they twisted its neck, and plucked its feathers. They pulled off its skin with their teeth before devouring the meat, organs, and the contents of the bird’s stomach. They then crushed and ate the bones, and with growling stomachs wished for more.

****

The eleventh chapter of Leviticus names twenty different birds that should be regarded as unclean, inedible. “The gull” is among them. Distinctions between clean and unclean are applied to the animals of the land and the sea, and of insects. Some can be eaten; others must be avoided.

You must distinguish between the unclean and the clean, between living creatures that may be eaten and those that may not be eaten.

In the Gospels, Jesus dismisses these dietary restrictions. It’s not what goes into your mouth that defiles you, he says, but what comes out of your mouth. Whatever is put in the mouth will eventually be expelled. “But the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these defile them.”

The apostle Peter, having grown up with the dietary restrictions of Leviticus, internalized their logic of disgust. Lizards and catfish represented contamination. Camels and rabbits, through long habituation, were repellent to him. And so it took a vision from heaven to expand his diet.

He saw heaven opened and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners. It contained all kinds of four-footed animals, as well as reptiles and birds. Then a voice told him, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.”

“Surely not, Lord!” Peter replied. “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.”

The voice spoke to him a second time, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”

****

There is a way of relating to food that is only nominally about health. Its chief concern is the aesthetics of purity. It fetishizes the natural, a concept which its adherents can identify intuitively, but cannot quite define. Kale is natural, as are flax seeds. Wheat and corn are not.  

Gwyneth Paltrow, who has published multiple cookbooks, is a priestess of the religion of Clean Eating. She offers spiritual guidance to her followers, covered in a diaphanous layer of pseudoscience.

The bottom line is, our bodies have a hard time with anything processed. That doesn’t only mean kool-aid and goldfish. White flour, white rice and soy milk are all heavily processed as well.

Or again,

We’re human beings and the sun is the sun—how can it be bad for you? I don’t think anything that’s natural can be bad for you.

Clean Eating is driven by a religious impulse to avoid contamination. But, unlike the Levitical proscriptions, the source of defilement here is modernity. It isn’t the pig that’s to be avoided, but the pig’s antibiotics and growth hormones. It’s his sunless stall and the industrial methods of his processing facility that cause impurity.

Clean Eating’s adherents must strive to avoid that which is artificial or manufactured. Through rituals like juice fasts and cleanses, they can atone for the toxins they’ve ingested. In so doing they strive to recover a kind of Edenic innocence. As a recent article explained, “It seems that the further we go with fancy and intricate treatments, the more we’re engaging in a ritual effort to make ourselves pure again.”

But the path of Clean Eating is asymptotal. It desires a state of purity that is always just out of reach. More antioxidants are always needed, more potent probiotics, or a more exotic source of hydration.

Those boys from Tokelau, starving almost to death, confronted an unsavory truth. Our day to day existence depends on sacrifice. The only way to stave off our own death is by killing and ingesting plants and animals. It’s a process that weds us to the world and frustrates our attempts at a diet-based transcendence.

Flash Review: Into the Wild

I first read Into the Wild as a teenager. I was working at a Christian bookstore at the time, selling copies of Left Behind and The Prayer of Jabez in a shopping center off the highway. On breaks I would walk across parking lots and past chain restaurants to the Barnes & Noble to read John Krakauer’s account of Christopher McCandless.

McCandless was a young man with a deep longing for the wilderness and an acute awareness that civilized society could not answer that longing. After graduating college, he gave his money away to charity, cut off ties with his family, changed his name, and walked into the mountains of Alaska.

There was something thrilling about living vicariously through McCandless. My view may have been dominated by parking lots and overpasses, but he was immersed in, “nature in its most staggering grandeur.” What’s more, McCandless took his longing seriously. He refused to be content in anything less than a radical existence.

McCandless was a kind of secular saint of longing. He held nothing back, but gave himself over entirely to the object of his desire. He was also a martyr. His body was found by a hunter just a few months after he entered the Alaskan wilderness.

His story, sad as it was, articulated something that I hadn’t found in the shelves of the Christian bookstore. It spoke of human longing, and of the ways in which those longings make us wild.

Flash Review: The Supper of the Lamb

At times, reading Robert Capon’s The Supper of the Lamb feels like being shown around a quaint cooking shop by its aged proprietor. He strolls with you through the aisles, offering delightful, unsolicited advice on culinary implements:

If you never sharpen your own knives, you will no doubt prefer stainless ones; but if you are the constant whetter of edges you ought to be, only carbon steel blades will keep you happy.

Your guide betrays a surprising familiarity with onions, pointing out that, once they’ve been cut in half, they can’t be fit together again.

The faces which began as two plane surfaces drawn by a straight blade are now mutually convex, and rock against each other.

Such idiosyncratic nuggets of wisdom are worth the price of the book. However, the real value comes as you realize that your host is brilliant as well as funny. His theological and philosophical reflections offer keen insight into the nature of reality.

Things must be met for themselves. To take them only for their meaning is to convert them into gods – to make them too important, and therefore to make them unimportant altogether. Idolatry has two faults. It is not only a slur on the true God; it is also an insult to true things.

What Happened to Lewis and Chesterton?

In his autobiography, G.K. Chesterton, the great 19th century British author, describes a formative early experience. “The very first thing I can ever remember seeing with my own eyes was a young man walking across a bridge. He had a curly moustache and an attitude of confidence verging on swagger.”

The man, we’re told, was carrying a key across a bridge that led to a tall tower. The tower contained a woman, about which he says, “I cannot remember in the least what she looked like; but I will do battle with anyone who denies her superlative good looks.”

This scene was of a toy theater, a kind of diorama that his father had made for him and placed in his nursery. Such a toy might seem unimpressive to an adult, but to the young Chesterton there was nothing more sublime, “…that one scene glows in my memory like a glimpse of some incredible paradise; and, for all I know, I shall still remember it when all other memory is gone out of my mind.”

This early aesthetic experience was a critical moment in Chesterton’s formation. In it, he felt “the fragmentary suggestions of a philosophy I have since found to be the truth.” That philosophy, as he describes in Orthodoxy, was the Christian faith.

Chesterton wasn’t the only British author to have such an experience. In Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis also tells of an aesthetic childhood experience prompted by a diorama. “Once in those very early days my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first beauty I ever knew….As long as I live my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother’s toy garden.”

These men both glimpsed Paradise in miniature. Chivalry and nature, scaled down, called out to them and they never recovered.

As I reflect on these two remarkably similar experiences, I am curious about the significance of childhood wonder. Are we formed in some way through our encounters with longing? Leon Wiesltierjan seems to believe that we are. In his essay, Among the Disrupted, he claims that humanism has an underlying pedagogy. It makes claims about how we learn. Namely, he says that personal cultivation happens “…by means of textual study and aesthetic experience.”

Most of us are anxious for our kids to become literate. We want them to develop a love of reading and to engage with important works of literature. But, if Wiesltierjan is right, people who love reading are still only half formed. Kids need beauty as much as they need truth. And, as Lewis and Chesterton’s stories show, they don’t have to travel far to find it. It could be waiting in a toy theater or in the lid of a biscuit tin.

The Problem With Margaritaville

Currently under construction in Daytona Beach, Florida is a development called Latitude Margaritaville. When it’s finished next year, it will have about 7,000 homes available to buyers 55 or older. This isn’t a new concept; gated communities for seniors have been around for a while. What sets Margaritaville apart is that it is (to quote the press release) “an immersive brand experience.” It’s being designed and built so that fans of Jimmy Buffett (who, I regret to inform you, call themselves “parrotheads”) can live out their days as Buffett intended.

If you’re like me, news of Margaritaville results in conflicted feelings. On the one hand, you wish the future residents of this place no ill will. You don’t believe that they will be doing anything wrong by living there. You hope they’ll enjoy the sun, the shmaltz, and the presumably endless looping of Buffett’s ode to lost salt shakers. Yet, you sense that there’s something creepily dystopian about the whole enterprise.

Buffett’s song, which was recorded in the late 70’s, evoked a certain lifestyle. Indeed, it offered a vision of the good life. It painted the picture of a man who had abandoned the respectability of the American dream to become a beach bum, subsisting on sponge cake and boiled shrimp. He’s an anti-hero who by his authenticity has transcended the tourists whom he views from his front porch.

Undoubtedly, this song has provided a pleasant escape for many people. It has been the occasion for insurance adjusters in Phoenix and dental assistants in Houston to imagine themselves with sand in their toes and drinks in their hands, answering to no one but themselves. And, after a few decades of punching a clock and diverting funds to their 401Ks, they are finally ready to make their dreams a reality.

So it feels a bit mean to state the obvious. The future residents of Margaritaville are not countercultural beach bums who’ve checked out of the rat race. Instead, they are pliant consumers, signing on the dotted line in exactly the manner that Minto Communities LLC (the development company behind Margaritaville) predicted they would.

Of course, such a phenomenon is not unique to parrotheads (it is genuinely painful for me to type that word). Plenty of us express a toothless rebellion through consumption. Businesses like Hard Rock Cafe and Hot Topic have long offered counterculture as a commodity, The Ramones have sold more t-shirts than albums, and the author of this post, who will never attempt an ascent of Half Dome, is currently wearing a The North Face shirt.

The existence of Margaritaville raises a few interesting questions. For instance, what is the meaning of place in such a development? What are the pros and cons of “an immersive branding experience” as compared to a traditional community? But I’ll leave those questions to you and attempt an answer at another. What does Margaritaville tell us about the human experience?

Life can be difficult, even for people who have it relatively easy. As kids, we imagined that adulthood equaled freedom. But upon arrival we learn that there are consequences to eating too much, drinking too much, spending too much, and not exercising enough. We worry about our kids, our jobs, and that knocking sound coming from the car’s engine.

What if our interests and hobbies are, in part, ways of coping with the weight of responsibility? What if record collections, sports fanaticism, and cosplay conferences are valuable chiefly for the existential comfort they provide? Understood in this way, the differences between (for instance) the urban hipster and the resident of Margaritaville are minor. We may not identify with either one of them, but we can sympathize with them both.

The Domestic Trap

I have recently felt sympathy for an adulterous woman. Such feelings are ill advised, I know. Proverbs says that the adulterous woman is bitter as gall and that her house is a highway to the grave. It says to stay away from her. Yet I can’t help being drawn in as I read Melissa Matthewson’s recent essay, On Coupling.

My sympathy is partially due to the quality of Matthewson’s writing. She weaves autobiography, confession, and zoological reflection together in a way that feels at once sober and urgent. Yet her intentions are plain. “I don’t want to follow the rules of marriage, of monogamy.”

She proposes open marriage to her husband, who is uninterested. “He muses over my idea that maybe we aren’t meant for one person. He doesn’t agree. He wants only me.”

Matthewson is careful not to present her husband as the problem. She describes him as loyal, steadfast, hardworking, and accommodating. “I think of my husband’s identity, unwavering in his love, his steady focus on work, on pleasing everyone but himself. I think, He’s selfless. And I’m not.”

Her issue, rather, is that domesticity has become a trap. Married life is a pallid imitation of what she’d hoped it would be. She mourns the loss of passion and “how domesticity might drown your identity.” She expresses apathy towards the mundane realities of housekeeping. “I don’t like doing dishes,” she says. “I’m not interested in how a vacuum works.”

It would be easy to dismiss Matthewson’s complaints as selfish, to condemn her with a ready-made script. For instance, to point out that she made a commitment to her husband, and that her kids need their mom. Or to tell her to stop complaining, act like an adult, and do what’s right.

In fact, I hope she knows someone that she trusts, who is wise, who can say something like that to her. But I doubt it would do much good for me to rail against this stranger. Instead, I’d like to point out something curious.

The woman in this essay is, to use the currently ubiquitous phrase, privileged. She has travelled internationally, earned multiple advanced degrees, and found myriad outlets for her creative energies. Her website says that she is a farmer, a writer, and a dance instructor who runs an organic market. In short, she is not living the life that Betty Friedan warned us about.

Despite this, she is unfulfilled. She suspects that there is something more to being human than her domestic life offers. “Everywhere I go….I judge the nature of married couples, believe they aren’t subversive enough, their lives too ordinary.” She reminds me of the character from Tolstoy’s short story, Family Happiness.

I wanted excitement and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life.

Privilege seems largely to be a term of dismissal. We are assured that anyone to whom that pejorative has been applied can be safely ignored. Yet, the privileged are able to consider the ways in which life, even at its best, is unsatisfactory. Those who lack basics such as food and safety are likely to focus their efforts on satisfying those necessities. Such efforts leave little time for nursing a vague feeling of dissatisfaction.

The French philosopher Rene’ Girard stated the phenomenon in this way, “once their natural needs are satisfied, humans desire intensely, but they don’t know exactly what they desire, for no instinct guides them.” Indeed, Matthewson desires intensely. She articulates that desire well, giving voice to a profound human need. But her solution to that need is tragic insofar as it is damaging to herself and her family and hopeless to satisfy her.

(Here I am making assertions rather than arguments. I am claiming that infidelity damages the person who commits it as well as the person against whom it is committed. Further, I am claiming that it isn’t a sufficient response to longing. I believe such assertions are defensible, though it is not now my task to defend them.)

Perhaps caution would seem like the proper Christian response to longing. Don’t take it too seriously, and maybe it will go away. Such a path may seem prudent, but Augustine took a different approach. In a homily on the first epistle of John, the great African theologian claimed that, “the whole life of a good Christian,” consists of desire. God alone can satisfy our longings, and so he reasoned that those longings ought to be taken seriously.

I am confident that Matthewson’s experiment will fail. Humans are not so simple as to have their longings satisfied by promiscuity. Yet, to say so is no indictment of longing. Rather, it is a call to reject insufficient answers to our longing. “Let us desire therefore, my brethren, for we shall be filled.”

Preacher, Don’t Tweet

I would like to say a word against preachers tweeting. But before I do, I have two things that I need to disclose. 1.) I occasionally preach at Denton Community Church.  2.) I am on Twitter as @bwdaskam. I make no claim as to the quality of the sermons, but my tweets are indisputably of the highest order.

Given my tendency to both tweet and preach, I might seem like a surprising source for this argument. But I’ll ask you to reserve your accusations of hypocrisy for just a moment. It’s a particular kind of tweet that I’m against, and one of which I believe myself to be innocent. Yet I think this argument is worth making, even if I am skewered by it.

Preachers are often the source of ridiculous tweets. On such occasions, rather than instantly publishing their inner thoughts, these pastors would do better to write them in a small notebook and then cast that notebook into a live volcano.

I don’t know much about the author of this tweet. From his profile I glean that he is a pastor and the author of a book. For all I know, he composed this tweet as the result of losing a bet.

There are some preacher tweets that are simply baffling. Just brief, confusing statements that make you wish there was some kind of context to explain them.

It is no longer sufficient?

I wish someone could “explain” those quote marks to me and then rewrite that sentence.

I do know a little bit about the authors of the above tweets. For one thing, they are both significantly smarter than I am. Also, they could come out with a line of asbestos cigarettes marketed toward babies and still be more pious than me. But those positive qualities don’t seem to help them much once they log onto www.twitter.com.

Other preacher tweets are, well, just look…

Forgiveness Man, a little-known super hero with zero fighting skills, has the power of absorbing pain

I want Coach Taylor to yell this at me so that I can be inspired and confused at the same time.

Honestly, I’m just glad that hashtag was outside of the quotation.

It’s easy enough to find a few cringe-worthy tweets from pastors, but there’s a problem here that goes beyond the quality of the composition. It isn’t just bad preacher tweets that deserve opprobrium, I believe. It’s this whole class of newly-minted spiritual maxims that have been released upon the world.

Note that I’m not saying preachers should all delete their accounts. By all means, I hope they’ll tell us jokes, recommend albums, and point us to articles. The problems start when they try to give pastoral guidance via Twitter. Here, in under 140 characters, is my thesis: ‪Preachers who tweet in this way degrade themselves, their audience, and the venerable tradition of short writings.‬

The tweeting preacher is engaged in a sort of shotgun discipleship wherein random bits of advice and insight are sent forth to no one in particular. I think we’ve failed to notice the oddity of this situation. Consider, for instance, the word, “follow.”

Following a preacher on Twitter requires much less commitment than that term normally implies. Sancho Panza put up with many indignities to follow Don Quixote. Yet, the modern Christian can “follow” all of their favorite preachers without the slightest difficulty. Having done so, they get to enjoy an endless stream of pithy insights. In a reversal of the normal order, followers sit in judgement of leaders. They show approval through likes and retweets; disapproval through muting, unfollowing, or simply ignoring.

Meanwhile, the daily exhortations that were once the province of the community have been outsourced to a group of self-styled thought leaders. The resulting unemployment is barely noticed. Instead of breaking bread with a fellow churchman, the follower can subsist on the intravenous drip of advice coming from his or her phone.

Perhaps I seem to be overstating things. After all, it’s true that readily-accessible opinions are as old as the Reformation. The success of that movement depended on the printing press and the pamphlets it could produce. Is Twitter really any different than books, blogs, podcasts, and recorded sermons? Since there’s nothing new under the sun, is Twitter particularly worthy of criticism?

Indeed it is, just as each of those other forms of communication deserve thoughtful critique. One difficulty that Twitter introduces is a lack of context. For instance, when Luther is quoted as saying that, “to go against conscience is neither right nor safe,” we understand that quote in light of a context that is indispensable to understanding its meaning. This isn’t some koan that’s offered to the world apropos nothing.

Of course, Twitter did not invent short writings. The book of Proverbs is a canonical collection of pithy sayings. The first century stoics were fond of aphorisms. Pascal had his pensees, Nicolás Gómez Dávila his scholia, and Nietzsche his aphorismen. And contemporary gnomists such as Nassim Taleb and Sarah Manguso continue to work within the genre.

It would be charitable to imagine that the clamorous din of preacher tweets signals a great renewal of aphoristic writing. Yet, the evidence leaves little room for optimism. As Manguso put it, “The brevity of fragments, scraps, the collective brain lint of the internet, is one thing; the brevity of the best aphorisms, which are complete in themselves, quite another.”

My wish is that preachers who have conceived of a brilliant little apercu would do one of two things. Either share it with some particular individual who is in need of its specific message, or  jot it down in a notebook away from public view. Doing so may not bolster the preacher’s personal brand, but it’s a small step towards greater dignity.

On Inner Brilliance

I have a pet theory that I like to call “The Doctrine of Inner Brilliance.” Despite that ridiculous name, or possibly because of it, I often find myself trying to explain this theory to friends, family members, and unsuspecting passersby. This doctrine concerns the individual and how he or she relates to the rest of society.

According to the doctrine, the individual is a storehouse of great wealth and potential. Each person carries about in his or her bosom an inherent luminescence, an inchoate genius. The wider world, and the people and systems that comprise it, are judged by their ability to recognize and nurture this spark.

Even brighter than the moon, moon, moon

It’s always been inside of you, you, you

And now it’s time to let it through-ough-ough

– Firework, Katy Perry

Perhaps Maslow is partially to blame for this, considering the exalted position he gave to self-actualization. John Locke may also bear some guilt, since he seems to have saddled us with the heavy burden of pursuing our individual happiness (so long as we don’t trample the rights of our neighbor). But no philosopher or theologian is likely to take credit for the doctrine in its popular form. If The Doctrine of Inner Brilliance had a creed, it would go something like this:

  • I am the great protagonist of history.
  • Everyone who lives and who has ever lived and who ever will live are supporting characters and extras in my story.
  • My successes and failures are of utmost significance, the things upon which angels long to look.
  • The world is just and good exactly to the extent that it rewards me.
  • My greatness is intrinsic to my nature. I was born with it. It is not dependent upon displays of talent, ability, and goodness.
  • My inner brilliance deserves to be recognized. Money, fame, and romantic attention are all acceptable forms of recognition.
  • People who encourage me are good. They are on the right side of history.
  • People who criticize me are bad. They are either usurpers or presumptuous in the extreme.
  • Whatever shortcomings I have are adorable foibles and only add to my mystique.
  • Whatever talents I have are profound and whoever beholds them is lucky beyond comprehension.
  • My current position in the world is insufficient. My territory must be increased.

You have probably heard the hymns of this doctrine. You have seen the movies and the TV shows in which our protagonist, simply by being our protagonist, deserves to have every dream come true. One outworking of the doctrine is evident in the live’s of the world’s least happy people.

THE LEAST HAPPY PEOPLE IN THE WORLD

As Arthur Brooks, President of the American Enterprise Institute, explained in a lecture at the 2014 Aspen Ideas Festival, statistically speaking, the least happy people in the world are 45 year old men. What is it about middle age men that are so sad?

“What you find out about the guys who are 45 and they’re having a hard time is basically this; when you’re in your 20s and you’re in your 30s…life and its goals are actually simple. You want to do better, you want to be happier, you want to be more successful, hit the gas on your career. Make more money, get the promotions….”

“And things are great and that seems to work. And then guys hit their mid-40s and they say, whoa, I’m on the wrong road. I mean, this superhighway I’ve been cruising down, I don’t want to be on this highway, I want to be on a road that I chose. I want to be on that little dirt road over there, right? There’s a guy on it, on a motorcycle, okay? No helmet, okay? I want to be that guy. I mean, he’s doing it his way. He chose that little road. I want to be that guy.”

The modern career has a built-in mechanism for the display of inner brilliance. Work hard and you can ascend. (I’m not saying that every person who works hard is doing so to reveal his or her inner brilliance. You, reader, as surely not guilty of this. I’m really talking about other people.)

But, as demonstrated in Mr. Brook’s quote, career success can begin to feel a bit flimsy in middle age. So, is there a better way to understand ourselves as humans? I believe there is. But be warned, things are about to get religious.

CHRISTIAN ANTHROPOLOGY & INNER BRILLIANCE

It is possible to discuss meaningfully the subject of good work (or education for it) only by first clarifying the questions What is man? Where does he come from? What is the purpose of his life? – E.F. Schumacher

The foundational intuition of The Doctrine of Inner Brilliance is that people matter. Not simply “mankind” as a class, but individual men and women. We know that we are significant, even if we can’t tell you why. This is where the doctrine starts, and “by mixing a little truth with it, they had made their lie far stronger.”

Human beings made by God and in His image is the foundation of Christian anthropology. We are a special part of creation. Humans matter, and our significance isn’t a result of our talents or abilities. And because this is true, humans have a dignity that does not depend of their size, net worth, or political value.

The Doctrine of Inner Brilliance and Christian anthropology both agree that humans are important. But while the Christian derives that importance from the fact that he or she bears the image of God, The Doctrine of Inner Brilliance looks to the unique essence of the individual.

Christian thought also differs from The Doctrine of Inner Brilliance in how it treats others. According to the doctrine, life is a struggle to assert my own preeminence. Other people tend to be a hinderance in that struggle insofar as they are also self-centered. In contrast, the ideal of Christian fellowship consists in seeing others as fellow recipients of grace. Rather than struggling against them, we are called to struggle with them. As Bonhoeffer said, “It is only when he is a burden that another person is really a brother and not merely an object to be manipulated.”

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Christian faith and The Doctrine of Inner Brilliance are at odds about the very purpose of life. The latter seeks to bring honor and glory to the self. However noble the means may appear, the end is nothing more than pride. But for the Christian, “the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” We are taught in the Lord’s prayer to seek the glory of God, the Kingdom of God, and the will of God. And so, in a surprising and paradoxical way, we find our true end by abandoning the attempt to glorify ourselves.

Wes Crawford Interview

Last week I had the chance to talk with Wes Crawford about his history in music, his thoughts on worship, and his upcoming album. Unlike your meandering existence, this interview has been edited for clarity and length.

 

How did you initially get into music?

Music was always a part of my life. My mom, starting in 4th grade made me take 3 years of piano lessons. After that I could choose to quit if I wanted to. And I did. I quit as soon as the three years were over.

There was a lady up the street from my house in Arlington who taught me. She had three pianos in her living room, and our piano lessons were purely for fun. They weren’t oriented towards a competition. So in my earliest memories, music wasn’t a means for advancement. It wasn’t about proving myself. It was purely about learning music for the fun of it.

I quit the piano lessons in 7th grade and immediately joined the school band. I had a leg up on the other kids because I could read music and knew a bit of music theory. I choose trumpet because we happened to have a trumpet in the house. In high school I played trumpet in the jazz band, which I loved. I was pretty good at it. I actually made lead in the Texas all-state jazz band my senior year. So it made sense for me to go to UNT and play music.

My natural talent got me pretty far, but I never really had the intense work ethic that a professional musician needs to have. And it was at that point that I started getting involved with Denton Bible Church and working on ministry. So, just as I was starting to run up against my limits in the UNT jazz program, I was more and more interested in ministry.

 

You and I first met you when you were leading worship at Denton Bible Church. As a worship minister, who was influencing you at that time?

Well, I’ve never had any formal training as a worship pastor. I remember asking John Bryson, who was leading Denton Bible’s college ministry at the time, “who are the worship leaders around the country that I should be learning from?” And he admitted that he didn’t know of anything or anyone that I should talk to. As a result, I had to go find people who were doing interesting things.

The Passion movement was gaining steam at the beginning of my career as a worship pastor. And I believe they started with a healthy re emphasis that was centered on God. They were talking about God as “the famous one.” But that movement suffered from a strange self-consciousness in later years.

I was reading John Piper at the same time, who was a huge influence. And I was in reading groups with John Brown where we would go through these classic writings by Christians from previous centuries. I also started listening to Kevin Twit and Indelible Grace, and that was a key point theologically for me. I had learned so much at Denton Bible, and I was beginning to grasp the functional centrality of the gospel – that the death and resurrection of Jesus was the center point of theology. And I began to understand how worship ministry fit into that – how we are formed by the words that we’re singing.

 

Did you plan to have a career as a worship minister?

No, as I started getting into ministry, I always assumed that I would be a Bible teacher. I thought music was just how God brought me to Denton, but that I would get my degree, play music as my hobby, but then move on. But as I’m going through these various states of ministry, I keep getting asked to lead worship. And even though I didn’t have a clearly articulated vision of what music ministry was for, I intuited that there was something important about it. I loved the words of the hymns we were singing, and I knew that they were important.

So I was leading worship for the college ministry at Denton Bible, and around that time I was also asked to lead worship at a church in Sherman. The church had an older congregation, and they felt strongly that there should be a piano. It was ok if I wanted to play my acoustic guitar, but there had to be a piano as well. This introduced an important learning experience for me, because my piano player was an older woman named Pat. Working with Pat, I had to learn – on the fly – how to play out of the hymn book in a way that worked. I had to take my skills and Pat’s skills and put those together in a way that made sense. It was a great education for me.

 

And from Denton you moved to Mexico?

Yes, as a missionary, and I really thought “I’m done with music. Now I’ve grown up. I’m going to start big boy ministry. I’m going to administrate BTCP [a Bible training program for pastors] around the country. I’ll do some teaching and I’m going to sit in with the elders and help them with strategy for the church, and things like that. Maybe I’ll get involved with the band, but music is really in my past.” And when I got down there, the first thing they said to me was, “hey, we need somebody to lead worship.” Ha! And so I led worship. In Spanish. And that wasn’t a frustration, really. It was just different than what I’d expected.

About a year before I arrived the church really didn’t have any musicians. And there was a sweet working-class family in the church who saw that need and determined to meet it. This family lived out in the western suburbs of Monterrey where they had two four wheelers. And when they saw this need in the church, they said, “we’re going to sell our four wheelers and buy instruments and get ourselves in lessons and we’re going to meet this need.” And that’s what they did. Out of that family, I had a drummer, a singer, I had an 11 year old piano player and a bass player. And that was my band, essentially.

So again, this is another scenario where week to week I have to figure out how to put something together that makes sense. And that was a great experience for me to work with people’s strengths, minimize their weaknesses and make something good for the church. That was very formative for me and the way I approach leading a worship band. I’m not trying to imitate some popular worship band. I’m trying to work with the people I have with me that morning.

 

And did you carry that philosophy with you when you moved to Kansas City?

Leading worship at Redeemer in Kansas City was certainly different. We had a lot more musicians, and we had a long list of songs that we played. But, yes, the philosophy was the same. If you’re the kind of worship leader who goes into a Sunday with a target in mind. “I want it to sound like this.” That’s one way to go. But I firmly believe, from my jazz education as well as my theological background, that I should look around each Sunday, and say, “who have I got here. What can we create with this group of people that’s beautiful?” I just want to assemble musical personalities and let those personalities come through.

 

So, tell me about the record. Why did you choose to record these Nathan Partain songs?

I think I have a skill as a curator. We did a lot of songs at Redeemer. Probably too many. Nathan’s songs stood out to me because they go right to the heart of theology. They go to the heart of the gospel and press into it in ways that you just don’t find songs doing very often.

Also, I get the sense that he’s writing from the experience of his community and for a congregation. The songs we’ve done on the record are the ones that gave voice to some specific ways our own congregation was experiencing God’s grace and became favorites for our church.

You know, the enemies of good art and of beauty are more than just laziness. Sentimentality is an enemy. The desire for everything to appear perfect all the time is an enemy. There’s a slickness, or a sheen—trying to recreate the perfection you see on television, or trying to make something that is ready to be mass-marketed—that is sadly becoming the norm in most churches. I say it’s sad because it tends to obscure the humanity involved. At Nathan’s church they have a stated goal of cultivating a culture of art patronage; that is, of not only valuing beauty but also its creation by and for people. Somehow the fact that these songs were written for a specific group of people made them easy for us to relate to as well. And I tried to capture that sense of community on the record.

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You can learn more about Wes’ album by visiting his Kickstarter campaign.