Hello again, the internet. As you are now well aware, I tend to write blogs when I travel. No doubt some of you will be familiar with Daily Dose of Dan: The Land of Harry Potter and Truffles chronicling my time in the UK, Daily Dose of Dan Goes to the Holy Land, and, most recently, Daily Dose of Dan: Reise Zum Vaterland. I have, in a great exercise of irony, decided to write from a society-imposed exile, known to the vulgar masses as the "Coronacation". What is the scope of this blog? Anything that might cross through my mind, though often loosely with the theme of "the end of the world", "exile", and the like, as these seem to be common themes on this adventure. Thus, I come now to the beginning of this staycation to end all staycations.
The title of this first post of my latest blog is quoted of the great Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, living under the thumb of communist oppression almost a century later, considered this idea childish. He, like Dostoevsky, was an Orthodox Christian, but suffered greatly under the thumb of communist oppression and witnessed some of the greatest evils of which humanity was capable. No doubt shaped by his experiences, he saw beauty as a great intangibility, something beyond human control, which we are forever seeking to control. Always trying to build Edens and destroying them in a berserk fury, to quote another author.
The idea expressed by Dostoevsky may sound vacuous, overused, or even cliche, however when one understands that Dostoevsky saw no distinction between beauty, truth, and the good (a very ancient idea), the quote transcends its isolated, out-of-touch-ness and takes on a much greater significance. St. John records Jesus saying that He is the way, the truth, and the life. Perhaps these two ideas of beauty are like God, intangible and indescribable, as Solzhenitsyn writes, and not far from us, as Dostoevsky believed, lifting us heavenward, "ever winging up and up".
Hans Urs Von Balthazar, the great theologian of the last century, in many ways echoing Dostoevsky's idea, believed in looking to the beautiful first, rather than the true or the good (in opposition to Kant), because he wisely saw the compelling nature of the beautiful. To paraphrase Bishop Robert Barron, the beautiful has a way of disarming us.
Why am I going on talking about how beauty is like God, or about any of this? Because this has been something that has been in my mind for a while now. My move toward an Eastern expression of Christianity has, in many ways, been guided by the great beauty and depth that I have seen and experienced, almost as much as I have been jaded by the often quasi-anti-intellectual, slipshod nature of evangelicalism, which succeeds at drawing big crowds and leading people to that first step, but never seems to fully be able to make the rubber meet the road on anything beyond the realm of justification. Some will say that the high cringe level of evangelicalism today is not representative of either the entirety of Protestantism, or of evangelicalism, and they would be right to say so. Protestantism gave the world Bach, it freed the slaves in the United States, and it even gave us the United States, the greatest country in the world today. It continues to give us the beauty of zealous, passionate faith, and ways to win converts that are far more in line with Von Balthazar's ideas. So where does this leave any of us? It leaves us in the predicament of so many today, of being so good at identifying any number of problems, but hardly able to make any change. So what advice would I, an amateur's amateur who probably shouldn't have as many opinions as he does, give?
1. Stop reinventing the wheel. Don't be afraid of the wisdom of the ancients, and don't always think new is better.
2. Get rid of contemporary Christian music in church. Church is not a concert. It is where we go to commune with God.
3. Be intentional. Call out heresy and condemn it. Bring beauty back: put effort into worship, don't be content with not giving God the best.
4. Don't neglect the intellectual needs, don't look down on intellectual people.
5. Ask good questions, and don't accept shut-downs.
6. Encourage art. Fill the churches with pictures, words, and the like.
7. Get a longer memory! The church is 2,000 years old.
8. (More a reminder for myself) Don't be unhappy if no one cares or wants things to change, and also don't put your own ideas on a pedestal. Don't try to do things yourself, but instead pray for pure motives and for humility as often as you pray for things to change.
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