The Suffering of Love

There is something uniquely eternal about love. After all: "and now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love" (1 Cor 13:13), and "God is love" (1 Jn 4:8). Love, unlike faith and hope, is uniquely conceivable without a temporal dimension. Love cares for what has come to be--what is--and not for the formless possibility of what might be in the future. This is why love is tortured by time, which continually threatens the objects in which it rests. Only love can, and must, suffer, while faith and hope do not.

Human agency is the agency of love, the operation of this most divine longing. Yet the opportunities for the action of love are too often inaccessible to us. The more aware we are of the world, the more love is awakened within us and the more incompetent we find ourselves to be in uniting with the loveliness within objects. There is literally not enough time for our love. We have not the skills needed to enact it. When we seem to have succeeded in some small measure, it is at the painful cost of neglecting some other loveliness. The byproduct of love in the midst of temporality is always grief and regret.

To be temporal is to suffer, not because time is evil but because there is something timeless at the core of our being: "he has placed eternity in their hearts" (Ecc 3:11). This is why the physical ailments we term "suffering" are so insufferable: because they eat away at the already-too-little time and energy we have for love. And perhaps this explains the most suffocating forms of depression: an oppressive sense of dread as our fallen and finite capacities encounter a world of infinite loveliness. Whether diagnosable or not, species of these sufferings are the inevitable price of a life that is lived in a temporal world that is "charged with the grandeur of God". 

The ultimate realization of temporal suffering is the final loss of agency in death, for there the possibility of love is at an end. Death thus makes the task of love infinitely more urgent, but at the same time it renders love's meaning questionable in the extreme."The afterlife," conceived simplistically as an indefinite continuation of this form of temporal existence, would only exacerbate this problem. Love would never find its home. Its sense of loss would mount infinitely with the coming into being and passing away of the objects (and moments) of love. In light of this perplexing antinomy, we must conclude that death itself is some form of mercy, precisely because it is the necessary presupposition of the possibility of some other, better, form of love's existence. 

"Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit" (Jn 12:24). The scriptures speak of death neither as love's total cessation, nor as an intrusive but ultimately temporary obstacle in love's infinite march forward. No, death is somehow the doorway to love's home. One dies in order to live in a new mode, one in which all of love's objects, one's own and those of others, are present to one all at once with their true depth of loveliness, its Source, now apparent. No longer must one object and its loveliness give way to another in a cruel zero-sum game; now all serve as factors in a multiplication whose product is innumerable. This is the hope of resurrection, and this is why love must take up its cross and suffer. 

Led Zeppelin IV: a theological meditation

A recent comment raised the question of the best albums of all time – which got me thinking about Led Zeppelin IV, certainly one of the greatest and most enduring albums ever recorded. It is still one of my own favourite albums – but I came to it by a rather unusual route.

In the church circles where I grew up, rock and roll was regarded with considerable suspicion. Some time in the early 90s (I was a teenager at the time), I remember a youth pastor preaching against the evils of rock music: he informed us that Led Zeppelin’s song “Stairway to Heaven” contained hidden subliminal messages (about drugs, Satan, sex, etc.), which can be discerned not only when the song is played backwards, but also when a person hears the song under the influence of marijuana.

Intrigued and hopeful, me and my Christian friends hurried off to put this theory to the test: and so we sat down together, with the album in one hand and a bag of weed in the other, eager to experience those alluring occult messages.

It was in this way that the strange world of Led Zeppelin IV began to open itself to me. The album conjured up a world of forests and magic and spirits, of gods and fertility rites and the dark secret powers of the earth. There was, as Erik Davis puts it in his recent book on Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV (Continuum 2005), a kind of “wayward tantric magic” in their music (p. 53). We were invited to enter into the mysteries of primitive ritual, to “dance in the dark of night, sing to the morning light.” The songs invited us to re-imagine a long forgotten world, to turn away from the dominance of Christian-Western rationality towards the sensual pagan magic of another time and place: “Tired eyes in the sunrise, waiting for the eastern glow.”

The songs promised a deep synthesis of the erotic and the religious, a convergence of drugs and mysticism, the awakening of a strange but authentic “reason” which transcends the stifling limits of modernity, so dominated by technology and utility. As the magnificent song “Stairway to Heaven” puts it:

        And it’s whispered that soon
        If we all call the tune
        Then the piper will lead us to reason
        And a new day will dawn
        For those who stand long
        And the forests will echo with laughter.

Here, it is the pagan god Pan (that horned and horny deity who was one of the main classical sources behind Christian representations of the devil) who leads us out from the darkness of modernity into the soft eerie light of a new age. This return of pagan magic and sensuality promises to restore a primal balance to our disturbed and fragmented world: “the magic runes are writ in gold, to bring the balance back.”

Throughout the album, this recovery of primal balance focuses especially on the theme of the rediscovery of Goddess-devotion. “There walks a Lady we all know, who shines a light and wants to show.” Or in the words of the later song “Down by the Seaside”: “show your love for Lady Nature, and she will come back again.” Erik Davis observes that Led Zeppelin IV wrestles with the desire to both serve and master the sacred feminine; the album’s answer to this dilemma “is clear and pagan: one honors the Goddess by bringing the balance back, the lost harmony of human labor and the great good earth” (Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV, pp. 103-4).

For those of us reared on the Bible and the imaginative resources of Christian tradition, the album’s pagan-sexual-telluric world seemed exciting and alluringly exotic. Our youth pastor was surely right to feel uneasy about a song like “Stairway to Heaven” – after all, this song was nothing less than a breathtakingly beautiful challenge to the entire imaginative world of Christian faith. (I take it that this is the case in spite of the fact that Led Zeppelin’s lyrics were deeply influenced by the Christian writer J. R. R. Tolkien: where Tolkien used mythology to re-imagine the world Christianly, Led Zeppelin used Tolkien to re-imagine the world paganly.)

If Led Zeppelin IV posed a challenge to Christian imagination, then it might seem that the album won the contest. The kind of mythology represented in the album has penetrated deeply into our popular culture. Walk into any bookstore and you’ll find entire shelves devoted to these themes: nostalgia for a state of primal innocence; the recovery of a deep primordial harmony between humans and the earth; reverence for the sacred feminine; romantic idealisation of the country over the city; the quest to awaken a dormant inner self; and suspicion of those institutions in which “Western rationality” is embodied and transmitted.

Significantly, you’ll find all these themes not only in The Da Vinci Code or New Age self-help manuals. Efforts in contemporary theology and liturgical renewal are often guided by precisely the same values and commitments. Just think of those well-meaning liturgical experiments in which God is invoked as the Great Mother; in which Christ is identified as the enlightening influence of Sophia; in which the prayers and hymns celebrate (even while mourning the loss of) our primordial rootedness in the earth; in which practices of eastern meditation are uncritically synthesised with traditional liturgical practices. Or just think of those contemporary theologies in which Christian teaching is calmly absorbed under the larger rubric of “spirituality” – as though doctrines of grace and Christ and salvation can be translated without remainder into discourse about individual fulfilment or the inner life of the soul.

In short, the vision of Led Zeppelin IV has been realised not only in contemporary pop culture, but in a good deal of contemporary church culture too. But where Led Zeppelin promised a renewed world and a deeper, richer human experience in the world, the most striking thing about contemporary popular spirituality (and likewise much contemporary Christian spirituality) is its extraordinary superficiality, its willingness to settle for banalities and trite pre-packaged experiences in lieu of any deep reflection on the world or on the place of humans within it. Spirituality is a commodity: something to be purchased, consumed and subsequently discarded by the privileged classes (whose social position gives them the leisure to cultivate the requisite spiritual anxiety).

From today’s vantage point, then, we might say that the most (unintendedly) prescient lines in Led Zeppelin IV were not from “The Battle of Evermore” or “Stairway to Heaven,” but from the autobiographical song “Going to California”:

        Made up my mind to make a new start
        Going to California with an aching in my heart.

For all its sweeping grandeur and “forceful telluric energies” (Erik Davis, p. 54), the spiritual vision of Led Zeppelin leads ultimately here: not back to the forests, but to – California! The mysteries of earth, of magic, of sensual Lady Nature, of gods who play their music in the woods – all this finds its historical realisation in the Hollywood spiritual therapist, with her easy slogans, her bright smiling face on glitzy book covers, her wealthy and rapaciously unhappy clientele.

Led Zeppelin IV is still one of my favourite albums, and I listen to it very often. I enjoy as much as anyone the album’s profoundly imagined world, its absorbing nostalgia, its alluring occult invitation: “the piper’s calling you to join him.” I understand this to be a serious invitation – and thus as an invitation to be rejected.

Those churches who hope today to find sources of renewal and enrichment in a quasi-pagan earth mysticism would do well to ponder the question whether there can be any easy synthesis between these two imagined worlds; whether there is not a more radical gulf between Christianity and the culture of therapeutic spirituality; whether the “stairway to heaven” is not ultimately a descent into the banality and claustrophobic boredom of the inner self.

Ten propositions on spirituality

by Kim Fabricius

1. “Spirituality” is a word suffering from runaway inflation. Let’s try to stabilise the currency. Historical amnesia, false dichotomies, and fashionable therapies bedevil the subject.

2. Philip Sheldrake observes that the noun spiritualitas “only became established in reference to ‘the spiritual life’ in 17th century France – and not always in a positive sense,” principally due to its clerical associations (in the Middles Ages the clergy were “the spirituality”). “It then disappeared from theological circles until the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century when it again appeared in French in reference to the ‘spiritual life’…. [B]ut it was only by the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s that it began to dominate and replace older terms such as ascetical theology or mystical theology.” Then in the 1970s the term took off, and now, set to the key of the so-called New Age, spirituality has become the mood-muzak of postmodernity.

3. I’ve got nothing against psychology as such – to the contrary, I minored in the subject at university – but on spirituality circuits that revolve around the gurus Myers-Briggs and James Fowler I often sense an approach to spirituality that lacks both a proper Christian concept of the spirit and an orthodox understanding of faith as not just fides qua but fides quae creditur. At the very least it takes a semantic sleight of hand to reduce the “soul” to the “self” to the “personality,” and to equate human potential and growth with sanctification, let alone to assume that in exploring ourselves we are exploring God the Holy Trinity. By the way, for the life of me I do not understand how Christians can prefer Jung to Freud as a theological resource (though it’s probably due to our preference for naivety to suspicion).

4. Theology without spirituality is empty, spirituality without theology is blind. When theology is “thin,” it is often because it is not steeped in prayer; when spirituality is “lite,” it is usually because it is theologically vacuous. Only in the West, and only during the 12th century, when the theological enterprise moved from the monasteries to the new universities, did Christian thinking begin to become an activity distinct from askesis, while contemplation, in turn, tended to become separate from both eucharist and ethics. Since the High Middle Ages, Roman Catholics and then Protestants (Puritan, Anglican, and radical Reformed) have been working in different ways to stitch together what should be a seamless garment of the affective, the intellectual, and the active – to reunite the speculative theologian and the practical saint.

5. Spirituality is theology with attitude, theology with soul – but not a soul without a body. A truly Christian spirituality will be incarnational – but it will not idolise health. And it will be cruciform – but it will not glorify pain. Fasting has been called praying with your body, but feasting should be praying with your body too. Biblically speaking, the opposite of πνευμα is not σωμα but σαρξ. Nor, needless to say, are the “sins of the flesh” essentially sensual (cf. Galatians 5:19ff.). Notwithstanding insidious Neo-Platonic, even Gnostic influence, a couple’s bedroom as well as the monk’s cell can be a place where heaven and earth get it on (the Song of Songs’ X-rated eroticism is often lost through censored translation). In fact, the material as such is (forgive the pun) a spiritual matter.

6. Spirituality has been called theology on its knees, but it is also theology on its feet, in labora as well as ora. “Bread for myself is a physical matter,” said Nocolas Berdyaev, “but bread for my neighbour is a spiritual matter.” Any authentic Christian spirituality will have shalom – peace-and-justice – at its heart. Hans Urs von Balthasar said that “Whoever does not come to know the face of God in contemplation will not recognise it in action, even when it reveals itself to him in the face of the oppressed” – but is not the reverse equally and emphatically true (Matthew 25:40, 45)? Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “Only those who cry out for the Jews may sing Gregorian chant.” It is no coincidence that liberation theologies are deeply committed to combining experience, reflection, action, and prayer/worship/eucharist.

7. So what is “spirituality”? Perhaps spirituality is one of those things that is easier to show than to say. If so, Rowan Williams, who sees thought itself as a practice of askesis, is the finest contemporary guide I know to what spirituality might look like, not least in his own personal and theological life (and he has written acutely on Augustine and extensively on the Desert Fathers, the Carmelite tradition, and iconic prayer). Williams suggests that we understand spirituality in terms of “each believer making his or her own that engagement with the questioning at the heart of faith.” But spirituality is “far more than a science of interpreting exceptional private experiences; it must … touch every area of human experience, the public and the social, the painful, negative, even pathological byways of the mind, the moral and relational world. And the goal of a Christian life becomes not enlightenment but wholeness – an acceptance of this complicated and muddled bundle of experiences as a possible theatre for God’s creative work.”

8. In an important sense, then, “spirituality” is almost synonymous with discipleship, with starting from exactly where you are and taking the next step in following Jesus wherever he leads. Hence a good deal of holiness has to do with discernment, with attendre (Simone Weil). As John Webster says at the end of his little gem Holiness (2003): “A crucial aspect of holiness is an increase in concentration: the focusing of mind, will and affections on the holy God and his ways with us.” Spirituality, then, as watchfulness, being alert to the present moment, disabused of illusion and fantasy and seeing what is really there – the toil to be truthful, the struggle against self-deceit, the purification of desire. Unlike many of the Pelagian nostrums on offer, Christian spirituality takes sin seriously.

9. Authentic spirituality is an exilic practice, for nomads on a journey: “Exile, the home I have with God; God, the home I have in exile” (Marc Ellis). Peace and perfection are redefined in terms of strain and growth, what Gregory of Nyssa called epektasis (from Philippians 3:13). To Augustine’s famous image of the cor inquietum, add Gregory’s image of the vertigo one feels at a cliff-top, with the abyss below and the beckoning yet ever-receding peaks beyond. Divine darkness and human incomprehension become themes that will be explored in the night theology of St John of the Cross and the theologia crucis of Martin Luther. Frances Young writes: “It is this whole complex context which demands that we move beyond the easy spirituality of well-being, comfort and happiness to rediscover the wilderness way that lies at the heart of the Bible.” In place of the New Age bandwagon, the desert caravan.

10. “It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream…. This sense of liberation from an illusory difference [between monks and ordinary people] was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed aloud.” Thus Thomas Merton, a pioneer in explorations of ecumenical, inter-faith, and ecological spiritualities, who yet knew that there is no view from nowhere, no traditionless practice, no unmediated interiority, no silence unhaunted by speech (and no separation between spirituality and institutional religion, yet another trendy dichotomy that crumbles under scrutiny). In the end, if spirituality is about “me” at all, it is about my dispossession and transformation into a proper human being, my becoming a living hermeneutic of the Great Commandment, loving the Other and the other. As a saying attributed to the Desert Father known as John the Dwarf has it:

“You don’t build a house by starting with the roof and working down. You start with the foundation.”
They said, “What does that mean?”
He said, “The foundation is our neighbour whom we must win. The neighbour is where we start. Every commandment of Christ depends on this.”