And an entire life here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRNOLKMpkJ0&t=36s
I had never heard of Lilias Trotter but I admire her so much. Born 100 years before me, and artist and a serious Christian. I watched it on Prime.
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THanks for the link. I need to look into her work, a bio and the movie!
[EDIT]Just found a bio:
A Passion For The Impossible: The Life Of Lilias Trotter by Miriam Huffman Rockness
[Another edit] @MarkD the movie is in Kanopy, which many libraries provide
And yet another edit:
A brief article about Trotter https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/20/arts/design/a-renewed-spotlight-on-two-women-artists.html?unlocked_article_code=1.408.N-Yx.NjuqOZlhA9L3&smid=url-share.
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From Many Beautiful Things (about the life of Lillias Trotter, whom MarkD mentions above):
I am now ready to be offered.
Measure thy life by loss, not by gain.
Not by the wine drunk, but by the wine poured forth.
For love’s strength standeth in love’s sacrifice.
And he who suffers most has most to give.
For her this wasn’t a romatic ideal, it was the summary of her own life. Hers was the Christian life in quiet, obscure action that brought her no fame or glory but deep satisfaction in the beauty and people who surrounded her and the mutual love she found among strangers she went to serve.
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The fuller excerpt from the book When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi occurs between pp182-185 and I had to transcribe it so I could look back on it. So enjoy:
.. Surely enlightened reason offered a more coherent cosmos. Surely Occam’s razor cut the faithful free from blind faith. There is no proof of God; therefore, it is unreasonable to believe in God.
Although I had been raised in a devout Christian family, where prayer and Scripture readings were a nightly ritual, I, like most scientific types, came to believe in the possibility, an ultimately scientific worldview that would grant a complete metaphysics, minus outmoded concepts like souls, God, and bearded white men in robes. I spent a good chunk of my twenties trying to build a frame for such an endeavor. The problem, however, eventually became evident: to make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning - to consider a world that is self-evidently not the world we live in. That’s not to say to believe in meaning, you must believe in God. It is to say, though, that if you believe that science provides no basis for God, then you almost obligated to conclude that science provides no basis for meaning and, therefore, life itself doesn’t have any. In other words, existential claims have no weight; all knowledge is scientific knowledge.
Yet the paradox is that scientific methodology is a product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about mater and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. Science may provide may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.
Between these core passions and scientific theory, there will always be a gap. No system of thought can contain the fullness of human experience. The realm of metaphysics remains the province of revelation (this, not atheism, is what Occam argued, after all). And atheism can be justified can be justified only on these grounds. The prototypical atheist, then is Graham Greene’s commandant from The Power and the Glory, whose atheism comes from a revelation of the absence of GOd. The only real atheism must be grounded in a world a world-making vision. The favorite quote of many an atheist , from the Nobel Prize winning French biologist Jaques Monod, belies this revelatory aspect: “The ancient covenantt is in pieces; man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance”.
Yet I returned to the central values of Christianity - sacrifice, redemption, forgiveness - because I found them so compelling . There is a tension in the Bible between justice and mercy, between the OT and the NT. And the New Testament says you can never be good enough: goodness is the thing, and you can never live up to it. The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.
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That is not a reasonable statement. There is no proof of many things, but that does not make it unreasonable to believe in them. The claim does not follow from the premise.
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There he is only pointing out the foolishness of the thinking. It becomes clearer.
Nice excerpt! I push back on the concluding sentence, though - I think that mercy is the fulfillment of justice and justice the fulfillment of mercy. Both of them in their penultimate senses are flip sides of the same coin one might say.
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From someone whom I might refer to as the queen of hospitality - in that she always makes her household a home for other wayfarers - including my own family. Anyway, yesterday she dispensed this observation as I was reading something out loud about Paul. I’ll paraphrase from memory here…
It seems to me that Paul often taught very context-sensitive stuff, while from Christ we’re getting more of the timeless pearls - you know, the universal stuff that transcends local context, or it should be applied in all generations anyway.
Not that Paul didn’t also yield many timeless truths himself - shoot, he’s written most of the New Testament. Or that Jesus wasn’t also attentive to the specific context around him. She acknowledges all that. But still - was a pithy observation I think.
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A Strange Relativity: Altered Time for Surgeon-Turned-Patient Paul Kalanithi, MD
Wikipedia: Paul Sudhir Arul Kalanithi (April 1, 1977 – March 9, 2015) was an American neurosurgeon and writer. His book When Breath Becomes Air is a memoir about his life and illness with stage IV metastatic lung cancer. It was posthumously published by Random House in January 2016.[1] It was on The New York Times Non-Fiction Best Seller list for multiple weeks.
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What is your idea of justice?
That’s going to make a great deal of difference in what you mean.
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I wish Jesus had laid down some unequivical timeless truths about women, that clarified the contextual nature of Paul’s statements.
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Funny you should mention that - since that was one of the specific topics she mentioned. It’s been brought up that if one reads the ends of Paul’s letters - his long lists of “coworkers” which often included women of no small prominence - that even his couple of verses that so many want to take as new universalized rules banning women from any leadership roles (especially over any men) need to be read in the wider lights of Paul’s actual practice. He had ample opportunity to be scolding women for “exercising their leadership”, and not only does he not do that - he commends them! So even Paul must ultimately be taken as a disappointment to those who want their cultural preferences universalized into new gendered rule sets for all time. And it gets even worse with Jesus - who unlike Paul, doesn’t even have so much as a single recorded verse in any of the gospels that diminishes women as being somehow less fit receptacles for the Holy Spirit to use (with the possible exception of the Syrophoenician woman - who is an outsider in a number of ways besides just her gender. But even with her, Jesus comes round.) Jesus’ (and Paul’s) timeless truths are both things that are applied to all - fruits of the spirit, reaching out to all, heedless of whether slave or free, Jew or Gentile, male or female. At least I’m not remembering any place (excepting the discussion about divorce) where Jesus says “Okay men - listen up, because this instruction is for you.” Maybe such distinction might have been inferred by them in their culture, since males did have obligations of things the culture assigned to them. But Jesus doesn’t seem interested in limiting his outreach or imperatives along those lines.
That all people have their needs met, and that all receive the same grace that any of us would want for ourselves. That those who have wronged others (or benefitted from wrong done to others) joyfully make restitution - and take an active interest in continued Shalom for all - each widening the circle of his/her care as widely beyond themselves, their immediate family & friends as they are enabled to do so. Kingdom of God stuff. No worldly government or system gets us all the way there; but the way we arrange our systems (those of us who are given any say about it) can certainly make that work with or against such justice. I don’t really believe there are (or ever have been) such things as “Christian” nations, but I do believe there are nations that have Christians in them working on Christ’s behalf for the poor and the immigrant and against war at every level they can.
It’s easier to define injustice than it is justice. We have so many more examples of the former to look at. It’s like pornography. You know it when you see it.
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It’s an enormous point of conflict for women as wider western culture recognizes the injustice of patriarchal systems, while many quarters of the church - mine - are trying to promote and enforce them with ever greater vigor.
This sounds more like grace to me.
While both the OT and NT talk about justice, it is more as fairness before the law. Equal access to the law, fair enforcement of the law, and punishment and/or penalties for law breakers.
Such a thing does not, cannot exist. It is an oxymoron, a trick of words.
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It seems to me that justice and mercy, though not opposites, each set limits on the other. Mercy without limit is impractical, justice as lawfulness can make one hard hearted. Any set of rules can only approximate justice. Real justice must abide the judgement of the heart.
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Except in the sense of “a country in which the citizenry largely espouse Christian values” I agree. When national resources are devoted to pursuing national policies which someone infers as Biblically required, I think that is a harm both to the country and to the faith.
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Generally, the latter is what is meant. This gives ua the worst that religion can offer.
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So how come I love, hate and have meaning? I know that science provides no basis for God, it certainly does for meaning.
No it’s not, in the bottomless pit of yearning. Most reasonable. Just don’t go looking for a fossil.
If you’re offering yourself as an exception then you must be an atheist who only accepts the meanings which science can provide. But those meanings science give us are entirely about stuff, not feelings or values. Science sets those aside at the start in order to see how far we can take the empirical endeavor.
No exception me, but in the context of yearning, as I said, the reasonable meanings are accessible to psychology.