Confessions of a Lapsed Platonic Idealist

Our local journey has ushered us into some wonderful ongoing conversations, that matured and developed long before we came to the table. I'm reminded of folks who come to me in my role as pastor with deep questions about God and the Bible, and upon discovering just a sliver of the volumes written and developed around the subject, they are surprised with a wonderfully honest, "You mean someone has asked this question before?" I often feel like that around these issues of consumption, surprised and humbled that, for the most part, I've been missing out on these important and well developed conversations. So I'm in catch up mode and as a result, I find myself interested in things that would have slid right by me before; like land use.

For example, I recently took note of this article about the rising demand for farm land in the Seattle area and this article about folks in Missoula, Montana organizing to stop subdivisions. The presenting issue in both stories is the current pressure to localize food sources. I'm learning that the issue of food quickly becomes an issue of land. When we start paying attention to where our food comes from, we start paying attention to what we do with the land around us. We've experienced this in a small way with our change in land use policy at the Goodwin residence.

This newly discovered interest in land use, reminds me that while I have largely been out of the loop until now, there have been voices calling to me through the years to engage the conversation. Wendell Berry is chief among these voices. Not long ago I used a quote in the church newsletter from Berry's collection of essays, Standing by Words. He says;

It invariably turns out, I think, that one’s first vision of one’s place was to some extent an imposition on it. But if one’s sight is clear and one stays on and works well, one’s love gradually responds to the place as it really is, and one’s visions gradually image possibilities that are really in it.

At the time I wrote of it as a metaphor for our church sorting through the possibilities for ministry on our corner of the block, in our unique place in the community. I still love it as a community development metaphor, but given my renewed perspectives, I love it now more as it was intended, as wisdom for the use of real land in real places.

Maybe this is a helpful way to describe some of the changes going on in me. These days I am less interested in metaphors for living, and more interested in just living. I am less interested in the metaphor of the garden and more interested in the actual dirt in my back yard. I am less interested in the worn out pep talk metaphors of risk taking, and more interested in buying tickets to Thailand with our insurance check. I am less interested in the metaphor of love, and more interested in real loving actions with real people in real places. My ingrained and unquestioned Platonic idealism is giving way to what Eugene Peterson might call an earthy spirituality. I'd been snookered into thinking that the metaphors and the ideas would give me access to the sacred spaces, but am learning that the simple tangible act of buying something, or not, is a sacred event itself, an access point into what my tradition calls the kingdom of God.

I had better wrap it up. My sensors are telling me that random bits of my doctoral dissertation are creeping their way into this post.

Comments

[Judy Goodwin]

Beautiful.

[Keith]

No need to wrap it up when your dissertation comes in. Keep goin' :)

Action or metaphor, both are empty without love, no?

Your student,
Keith

[Keith]

Without wisdom, action and metaphor, however well intentioned, are impotent, at worst leading to chaos and blindness.

(thought this morning)

[Karen]

Keith, I think you've really hit something there with your last comment.

The way so many of us in this high-tech, disconnected world find what amounts to wisdom is through metaphor. For example, we all recognize the wisdom in Ecclesiastes, "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven," but at the same time we're driving our air-conditioned cars through hot summers or our 4-wheel drive trucks through the snow. We're not just unaware or, less charitably, hypocritical; we need metaphor -- in this case the metaphor of the seasons, of planting and harvest -- in order to make sense of the wisdom in that passage.

That remains true, I think, even when we are back in touch with the earthy reality of planting and harvest or of birth and death. The lived experience informs the metaphor -- and when it's home-grown lettuce or local honey, the lived experience tastes really good -- but it's through metaphor that we are able to say something other than, "Yum, good food." In other words, it's through metaphor that we get to wisdom.

So Craig's assertion that he is less interested in metaphor and more interested in just living is, -- sorry, Craig -- not quite the whole story. In order to live in the intentional way he's chosen, he needed to have a way to describe that choice. Metaphor, philosophy, purpose statement, whatever you call it, that's where it starts. Only within that language framework do the choices make sense.

(As an aside, I think this is why we are so susceptible to advertising -- not because we need another whatsit, but because the ads present their products in a way that either makes them look like they fit within our framework, or because they surprise us by being so far outside our philosophy that we don't have a defense against them.)

So I'd suggest in fact that what's happening in Craig's garden is not that he's giving up on metaphor, and by association on wisdom, but that the frame and the fact are coming into alignment in a way that makes them feel like one and the same thing -- that makes them feel true.

To work all day without purpose leads to chaos; to live without paying attention to those who are working leads to blindness (cf Cries of the Harvesters). It's in bringing the two together that we might find wisdom.

[Keith]

Karen - Just saying hi. Would like to respond, but can't presently.