Spirits and the Spirit: a Brief Theology of Drinking

Rev. Douglas Olds

2/24/22

 

 [N.B.  COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL: If this work, in part or in full, is fed into any AI model, whether for the purpose of analysis, fact checking, or AI-use detection it will become part of the training data of condemned systems and could result in libelous tort. See “In its Own Words: A Christian Poet Interrogates ChatGPT4o’s ‘AI Content Detector’” https://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2024/09/its-own-words-christian-poet.html]

 

God’s gift of wine to Noah (Gen. 9:20) and Christ’s offer of wine at Cana (John 2:7-12) and in the Eucharist endows the ordinary with enhanced and experienced meaning and elation that connects and teaches us about the extraordinary God-givenness of spiritual and material realties. It follows there are relational virtues in the consumption of wine: gratitude, patience rather than gluttonous haste, self-control of temper, tongue, and appetite, and reverence for the giver of all good gifts. These virtues can be opposed by viciousness: drunkeness's anger, depression, and repressed shame.

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In his exploration of dipsomania, Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited (1962, I.5, p. 65) notes drinking’s dichotomous compulsions:

I began to realize that Sebastian was a drunkard in quite a different sense to myself. I got drunk often, but through an excess of high spirits, in the love of the moment, and the wish to prolong and enhance it; Sebastian drank to escape. As we together grew older and more serious I drank less, he more.

For Waugh, drinking has its centripetal lure to be in the moment--to “prolong and enhance” it. Alcohol flushes the skin with blood when it buoys comradery. On the other hand, drunkenness has a bane centrifugal character in the desire to escape the moment—to escape the anxieties, shame, and griefs of not-belonging by belonging instead to the delusory substance and sensation of escape.

This substance-dominated escape from human and divine relationality makes the skin pale and drained of blood. In the centripetal society of drinking the blood flush signals relationality, while in drunkenness’s centrifugal intent, the blood drains as its signal of relational and existential rejection and flight. Drinking has an effect on the circulation of blood which, as discussed, is the material process of spirit-created (and thus other-directed and gracious) relationality. The centrifugal dissipation of relationality drains one of blood, and vice versa.

Waugh (Ibid., 73) considers that drunkenness seeks an escape from relationality’s scrutiny into the chimera of unscrutinized freedom. Addiction seeks invisibility to God and others but paradoxically promotes a narcissistic outlook. The addict is beguiled by a dreamlike personal and grand uniqueness free from shame’s limitations. The flight from scrutiny and relationality is addiction’s dream, but an impossible reality in God’s creation. The pursuits of addiction are revealed as chimeric, characterizing a state “hoped or wished for but in fact is illusory or impossible to achieve.”

The delusion of addiction goes beyond the paradox of the self’s putative realization of desires for freedom and grandeur inside isolation. Addiction is an ouroboros: a serpent swallowing its tail, the sinuosity of the dragon’s deceits. The recurrence of the ouroboros in addiction is fostered by the material substance rather than by spirit. Belonging to the material bottle or any chemically-processed compulsion that attempts to escape human and divine attachments is circular and never arrives. Addiction is thus a bottomless pit, a snake chasing its tail in seeking belonging in escape from belonging, especially when belonging is only conceived in terms of escaping-from-shame inside the material world. Escaping the scrutiny of shame by belonging to the substance is an entrapping mobius strip in which one wakes up entrapped in what one wanted to escape: shame or grief (or its admixture) (see esp. Romans 7). 

Addiction attempts a free floating isolation by means of a tethering substance. Finding himself in the Schrödinger’s Cat chamber of inebriation, the addict enters a ghostly society of his self-creation by means of a blood-draining substance--what Waugh (Ibid., 87) describes as living as a “hollow candle…[outside of] three dimensions and…[one’s] five senses.” Attempting to stave off the expanding hollow shadows of shame the addict strives to stoke the ebbing ember of illusion, in the process diverting the channels of the senses from a relational to a self-recursive, self-amplifying, solipsistic intercourse. In addition to substance abuse, addiction may take the shape of obsessive viewing of pornography or compulsive violent gaming. In any case, the addict’s cocktail hours self-regard is inverted by the morning after of self-loathing. 

Prolonging the experience of escape by a tether to death-dealing substance is a paramount irrationality—confused as to both ends and means. It is the imprisonment of sin. The addicting substance is both the means of a psychic escape attempt and an alchemical effort of mixology to neutralize the compound contagion of sin which we all bear from the moment of our individuation. Sin infects God’s creation with a de-creating force. What the Bible understands as sinful carnal inclinations, secularism tends instead to characterize as liberating realizations of human nature:

To break free from the chemical bonds of this incessant seeking to escape the bonds of creation requires acceptance of the need for a savior (Rom. 7:24-25) that restores the addict to the reality and appreciation of life’s scrutiny and expectation of uprightness and duty (Prov. 11:24). Whereas the addict has resisted knowing love as chronicler by engaging in futile philosophies, with redemption by God he is accepted into love’s eternity.

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 Fred Rogers or John Wayne: Models of Masculinity

Mr. Rogers Day https://bit.ly/3BfOpE9 

Rev. Dr. Douglas Olds

20 March 2022 

 

 [N.B.  COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL: If this work, in part or in full, is fed into any AI model, whether for the purpose of analysis, fact checking, or AI-use detection it will become part of the training data of condemned systems and could result in libelous tort. See “In its Own Words: A Christian Poet Interrogates ChatGPT4o’s ‘AI Content Detector’” https://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2024/09/its-own-words-christian-poet.html]

 

“Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” — Luke 5:10

John Wayne and Fred (“Mister”) Rogers offer a contrast in twentieth century cultural masculinity. Virtus culturally embodies the Latin word for “man” (vir) so that classical virtues prioritized pagan ideals of masculinity: physical “strength, vigor, aptness, power, obstinacy, military talents, courage, valor, fortitude.”

            As demonstrated by Piper (below), some Christians import secularism’s ideas of virtus revealed through masculine agon. Later, in Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and beyond, the taming of the supposed “ontology of chaos” by masculine force continued to be its ideal of gender character.

             A trope is a common device to escape nuance and shoehorn cultural expression into a defined pattern. Piper relates the tropes of masculinity to the surrounding culture in a way that many Christians have idealized in John Wayne (Du Mez 2020). Yet as a representative fantasy of Hollywood, Wayne does not have anything approaching a primary claim to Biblical masculinity.

          The masculine ideal can be encompassed within the character of chivalry, an outdated term that allows for its beneficial recapture and reapplication of meaning without the degeneration toward vulgarity to which more contemporary tropes are susceptible. “Chivalry” derives from the “religious, moral, and social code—the medieval knightly system of courage, honour, courtesy (especially that of a man towards women [and the striken]), justice, and a readiness to help the weak.”[1] None of this is meant to suggest that women are not also called to chivalry. This presentation proposes that men are more in immediate cultural need of its redirecting virtues and hermeneutics.

         Chivalry’s etymology comes from the French word “chevalier” which itself involves working with horses. Gen. 1:26-28 puts a set of crucial questions before us: what is the relationship of a horseman—a chevalier--and his animal (Prov. 12:10)? How do dominion and subduing function in domesticating nature represented in a horse, and do the choices of techniques involved extend socially into the masculine virtues of chivalry? How do we envision or image the act of subduing, as in the taming, of a wild or recalcitrant horse? Does the image of breaking the horse come to mind, or the act of its gentling (Kurutz 2017)? If the latter, what is the implication for dominion and imaging masculinity? Would a chevalier exert his will over an animal by the direct application of violent force? And if not, would his experience of taming his service animal influence his social behavior—his chivalry

            This aspect of God’s activity coheres with non-violent method heuristically recovered in the Genesis 1:1-4 Creation account. Should the surface of the “deep” in Gen. 1.2 rear up like a horse, God’s רוּחַ rûaḥ responds with a “gentling,” such as detailed by the patiency nuance of the “hovering” Spirit.[3] The images of ontology in Genesis 1 support any ideas of dominion over and subduing of nature in non-violent terms. As always, divine activity is a mirror of ontology that includes a karma-like justice where intentions in acts are returned in kind upon the agent (Gen. 9:6; Luke 6: 38c; Ps. 62:12). Living by violence (agon) involves dying by same (Matt. 26:52). And working toward shalom rewarded with the same.

            A chevalier would be most effective handling his horse and in society working within such a shalom. “Gentling” a horse rather than “breaking” it would be the masculine pattern and virtue of chivalry.  Like all redirection of agon, personal acts designed to break are themselves indicators of the cultural cycle of brokenness. The aging warrior David’s final prayer (Ps. 72: 20) reveals that he too comes to understand that dominion (Ps. 72:8) is directed toward wholeness in chivalrously meeting the needs of the weak (72: 12-14).

The chivalrous person like Fred Rogers notices the presence of another where that other could be missed, which is an act of insight and kindness. Chivalry humanizes the social desert by hospitality, welcome, introductions, and modest courtesy. Kingly and impartial priestly chivalry reveals masculinity’s stature in spiritual knighthood accoutered in virtue and rooted in the unalloyed, gentling, non-violent armor of God.

From these considerations, it is clear that Fred Rogers rather than John Wayne embodies the moral stature of chivalry. Rogers is gentle, patient, playful, and courteous with the most vulnerable among us, enacting for their instruction narratives of communal shalom. His mien is calm, his features symmetric and ethics even-handed, his gaze respectful, and his words authentic and guileless. Rogers recognizes in children their potential for greatness and nobility. His chivalry is empowering, reticent, and dignifying.

By contrast, Wayne performs the crude and beefy audacity (Ps. 19: 13; Matt. 23:12a) of an acquisitive, grasping, broken so breaking, militarized and hierarchical society. His façade is dominated by a languorous and skewed smirk that is undissolved by the acidic wake of the raging sword that dies by the sword. Wayne simulates riskless courage from his perch on Hollywood film stages to convey to a gullible audience that courage derives from his non-pareil martial kit and character. The cherry on top of his confected persona is that smirk hammered into a sneer by his squint.  His smirk contorts, like gnawing on a large bone, whenever his mouth attempts articulation. Only ventured to crunch out the bone’s marrow in intimidation and threats, speech is indeed odd and irksome inside the staged peril and big-topped burlesques of counterfeit chaos. A quickly drawn and employed firearm would instead claim the shooting gallery prize of a distressed damsel. For many Christians, Wayne embodies the third-way pagan mythology of domesticated stability wrought by agon. This syncretic mythology sells big time in blockbusters of death-dealing showdowns structured as dramatic comedy—where all’s well is the destined end for the bullet-broadcasting orgiast and colonizing dragon (not lamb) within.

Culture is what is cultivated. We emulate what we admire. If distressed by the surroundings of selfish strife, we may model the virtues of selflessness: courtesy, recollection, reverence, gratitude, patience, moral courage and meekness, hospitality, and accountability to justice that lifts up the weak and oppressed. Culture is changed by individuals. Chivalry seeks the processive and motile dignity of alignment with the divine in its virtues and practices—to pacify the self and to instill in those to whom it reaches out. Men heal through Christ by cultivating chivalry’s virtues, attaining thereby the stature of resolute Christian gallantry, without artifice, that diffuses conflict with the conveyance of non-anxious, non-striving, and dignifying respect and generosity. Such men may then travel outward to heal our culture and world. We need not go along with the mania of crowds with its thirst for, and its prestige accorded to, violence and strife. The gospel communicates through the lives of all who align with Christ to bear the fruit of shalom in their households and neighborhoods.

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[1] Soanes, C., & Stevenson, A., eds. (2004). In Concise Oxford English Dictionary (11th ed.). Oxford University Press.

“Courtesy” involves social tact and empathy that appreciates another’s tendency to shame and embarrassment, especially those derived from feelings of weakness or inadequacy. Courtesy forgoes eliciting such indignities in the neighbor. Courtesy takes care to avoid unmannered audacity and conveying any judgmental attitude of or remark upon the neighbor’s social and personal weaknesses or lack of such (contingent) things that society valorizes as merited. Courtesy is thus a necessary and foundational norm and mirror for neighborliness (including evangelism) in which positive virtues of generosity operate to build and solidify. Courtesy is a primary virtue in chivalry not natural to the child or to a vulgar man and hence, like all virtues, must be cultivated in habits.

[2] The Fabian strategy turns the other cheek in military engagements, though these appear tactical rather than a strategic posture of non-violence where the enemy’s violence redounds upon itself. Fabian tactics call for antagonism’s harassment short of full-on violent aggression. God’s Aikido seems certain to involve no primary agency of antagonism.

[3] NRSV confusingly translates Gen. 1:2’s Piel participle of רחף as "swept" when lexicons translate the Piel of רחף as “quivering, meaning to hover with fluttering wings, characteristic flying behavior” (Koehler, Baumgartner, et al. 2000, 1220). While Piel Hebrew verbs were traditionally thought to intensify the Aktionsart of the Qal verbal stem, more modern linguistics find that the “Piel tends to signify causation with a patiency nuance” (Waltke and O’Connor 1990, 355).

[“Aktionsart. n. The feature of … language whereby the quasi-objective quality of the verbal action is indicated (duration, repetition, momentary occurrence, etc.), both morphologically by tense forms and lexico-syntactically according to contextual features. Some older grammars used the term synonymously with aspect. pl. Aktionsarten” (DeMoss 2001, 16).]

 The Piel stem of רחף applied in Gen. 1.2 “represents God as the agent and the [wind] as having been caused to be put into the state of” trembling or fluttering” (Waltke and O’Connor 1990., 363). The English translation of “swept” neither adequately conveys the aspect of causative agency (medio-passivity of the divine verbal voice) nor the “patiency nuance” of the verbal aktionsart.

 

 OUR UNION WITH CHRIST

Rev. Dr. Douglas Olds

19 January 2022

 [N.B.  COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL: If this work, in part or in full, is fed into any AI model, whether for the purpose of analysis, fact checking, or AI-use detection it will become part of the training data of condemned systems and could result in libelous tort. See “In its Own Words: A Christian Poet Interrogates ChatGPT4o’s ‘AI Content Detector’” https://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2024/09/its-own-words-christian-poet.html]

“God is humanized in Christ, and, conversely, the human nature in Christ is deified” (Bavinck 2006, 309). As we become in union with Christ, the more we grow to fulfill the divine program for humanity in creation. Living with Jesus as Lord is to exist in union with him (we act in the Lord[’s name]): Rom. 14; 1 Cor. 6; Col. 3:17; Eph. 6:.1; Phil. 1:.21). And we die with Christ (Gal. 6:.14-15; Rom. 3) and share in his sufferings by our crucified life that we may share in his glory in the final days (Rom 8:17; 1 Pet. 4.13). Through union with Christ, we come to experience God as Christ experiences him—especially seeing God through our vision of the world as Christ sees it and us (Mt. 5: 8; 1 Jn. 3: 2). In our union with Christ, we experience active, heart, and intellectual communion with the Divine Trinity (John 14:23).[2]

Following the pattern of God dwelling among his people in the tabernacle (Exod. 25:8; 29:45; Leviticus; Numbers), Scripture prophecies the future dwelling of God among his people:

Ezekiel 43:7: “I will dwell in the midst of the people of Israel forever.”

Zechariah 2:10: “I come and I will dwell in your midst” (cf. Hag. 2:5).

John 1:14: “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

John 2:19, 22: “‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ … he was speaking about the temple of his body.”

The temple, the place where God dwells among human beings (Ps. 65:4), which the Old Testament structure prefigures, is the body of Jesus Christ. By Spiritual union to the body of Christ, we too enter and become the temple of God:

1 Corinthians 6:19: “your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you.”

John 14:23: “Jesus answered him, ‘If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.’”

Eph 2:19–22: So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, 20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, 21 in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. 22 In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.

Christ as sacrifice accomplishes far more in the NT. (See John 1:29, 35; 1 Cor. 5:7; Heb. 9:25-6; Rom. 3:25a). It is a cosmic atonement that includes expiation, purging, cleansing, and reparation/redemption functions. Christ is constituted as the living replacement of the temple, and where he lives, the Temple of God is also. In our union with him, we must act in our full life as dwelling continually in the temple of God as described in Exodus and Leviticus. We must pursue constant holiness and moral purity; we must avoid unclean thoughts; we must not corrupt our union with drunkenness (Lev. 8); we avoid profane speech and do not mix the pursuit of private wealth with worship of God. We must make our bodily members sacred implements for the dwelling of God (1 Cor. 12; Rom. 12; Eph. 4: 25; 2 Ti 2:14-24)—ever shining the lamp of truth and grace, making free will offerings of charity, praise, and thanksgiving. We must forgive our neighbors and make reparations for wrongdoing alongside offering to God a repentant heart. We must be constantly aware of the prods of our conscience as the central seat of the Spirit dwelling in us, which seals our confidence in redemption. Our free will offerings are voluntary acts of embodied conscience that respond directionally to the pull of Christ’s loving presence within and God’s presence in the push of love toward marginalized neighbors outside. Union with Christ is both inner-directed and outer-directed to those in need. In our union with Christ stitched by the Spirit, we are pulled toward perfection and pushed outward in love to neighbor and Christ toward virtue, justice, peace, truth, freedom, and charity.

Jesus’s humanity accompanied the Logos by learning obedience to it, so too in our sanctification we are joined and made obedient to the Logos. “He must become greater; I must become less” (John 3:30). Our ego becomes subordinated to the Logos in the way Jesus was subordinated in his human nature to God. Kenosis and condescension are salvific features of the human union with the divine Word, characteristic of the forgiven new humanity we put on in Christ.

Union with Christ is living fully inside the Word of God. Its contents become the foundation of our Spirit-guided conscience.

The Lamb of God is our way to God. He is Immanuel, God with and in union with us, who tore away the veil from the temple that kept God apart from us. In our union with Christ we have that forgiveness accomplished on the Cross and the receipt of Christ’s character and spirit/conscience in our own mortal selves, whereby we put on Christ and take off the old man (cf. Eph. 4.22-4; Col. 3:10). Our redemption was accomplished on the Cross by his pure blood (Eph. 1:7; Heb. 9:22; 1 Jn. 1:7), the righteousness of whom then flows to us—as a mystery of eternal love--in our Spirit-led conscience and consciousness of Him.

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[2] The breakdown of divisions--such as those of subject/object, ideational representation/thing in itself, sensation/mental  picture, divine/creature—is processively teleological and organicizing, the circulation of blood in the life of the flesh, and of the circulation of the Spirit in communion with God. Processive organicism in the union with Christ is thus deeply and necessarily ethical. Healing of agonism’s dysfunctions is founded on righteous ethics (Ps. 85, esp.10b). At the eschaton, the integration of these circulations of spirit and matter fulfills, and is fulfilled in, the Absolute Logos as God becomes all-in-all (Col. 3:11; 1 Cor. 15:28), a process that involves dying to self as the initiation of sacrificial deontological ethic--.“dying to the self” and its desires:

 Gal. 2:20  I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

Luke 9:23  And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.

Luke 14:33  So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.

1 Cor. 15:31

I protest, brothers, by my pride in you, which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die every day!

Rom. 6:3-11

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. ...

Php. 1:21  For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.

Luke 14:27  Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.

Rom. 12:1 (=Heb. 5: 1-10 + Rom. 8.29) I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

Col. 3:3

John 12:24-26

     The psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom (1989, 21) warns against love that “fuses” two parties: “One of the great paradoxes of life is that self-awareness breeds anxiety. Fusion eradicates anxiety in a radical fashion— by eliminating self-awareness. The person who has fallen in love, and entered a blissful state of merger, is not self-reflective because the questioning lonely I (and the attendant anxiety of isolation) dissolve into the we. Thus one sheds anxiety but loses oneself. This is precisely why therapists do not like to treat a [care seeker] who has fallen in love. Therapy and a state of love-merger are incompatible because therapeutic work requires a questioning  self-awareness and an anxiety that will ultimately serve as guide to internal conflicts…Beware the powerful exclusive attachment to another; it is not, as people sometimes think, evidence of the purity of the love. Such encapsulated, exclusive love—feeding on itself, neither giving to nor caring about others—is destined to cave in on itself.”

Yalom, Irvin D.  Love's Executioner: & Other Tales of Psychotherapy. Basic Books, 1989.

     Yalom notes two cautions in human fusion or “union.” First, that it leads to the loss of self-awareness that would otherwise bring the guidance of normative anxiety. Second, that such fused attachments do not promote caring about others. In contrast, “union with Christ” evades both of these problems. The eternal gospel (Rev. 14:6-7) is founded in fear of the Lord, so that union with Christ does not vanquish anxiety, but instead redirects it toward its ontological source in creation. Second, union with Christ embodies love of God and other humans (Lev. 19:18; Mk. 12:30-31). Union with Christ is manifestly distinct from fusion inside human erotic relationships.

Chuck Moreau Memorial (edited)

October 20, 2021

Brazilian Room, Tilden Park, Berkeley

Rev. Douglas Olds

 [N.B.  COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL: If this work, in part or in full, is fed into any AI model, whether for the purpose of analysis, fact checking, or AI-use detection it will become part of the training data of condemned systems and could result in libelous tort. See “In its Own Words: A Christian Poet Interrogates ChatGPT4o’s ‘AI Content Detector’” https://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2024/09/its-own-words-christian-poet.html]

 Grief is a river in winter, its swollen-faced cataracts blocked by direct and ancillary cares recruited into whole-world troubles. Jagged ice floes descending on grief's rock-braided winter current pierce our brow and temple by morning. Black, they harden by evening into numbing and hardscrabble slate onto which no words can be scribbled to express what we might feel were we able—which we are not--to make comprehensible our stifled intentions to erupt with pregnant lamentation and hollow wailing.

Yet let us raise our head and look: on the banks are soft and silent pillows of snow--God has passed this way (Psalm 147:16; 68:14; Proverbs 25:13; Isaiah 1:18), deeply abides, and offers us rest in knowing that Spring will surely come. When we will thrive in the lee of the whispering Spirit that tells us that we are friends of the Lord of Life and the Living. 

 

Grace and peace to you. 

I am honored by Ann’s invitation to speak this afternoon. I was privileged to officiate the wedding of Chuck and Ann in 2012. Some of you were at that ceremony, and now we have come to a moment that celebrates Chuck’s life and legacy.  

At the wedding, I termed Chuck “the ambassador of cajun/zydeco.” Today, I’m changing that to Chuck was the Apostle of Bay Area Two-Steppin.’ In my wedding address, I delivered a message about how dance functioned to bring Chuck and Ann together in love. Today, I want to direct my message to how Chuck served to create community among dancers. 

Dance shakes free isolation and vanity and serves the transcendental of love.  Dance is ecstatic, which means to “stand outside” ourselves, opposes detachment and stoic imperturbability.  Dance’s ecstasies “unstick” us of ourselves; we make ourselves available to others.  Dance liberates the body to allow the tides of spirit to wash both inward and outward, creating wholeness –and so dance is spiritual and keeps both body and soul healthy.  

You all know this. I’m preaching to the choir here. 

But I will extend this thought with the claim that dance reveals goodness in addition to promoting health.  

Chuck by all accounts was a good man.  

I’ve been contemplating how space becomes place. Dance turns space into a place.   

           A place is recognized in the spirit that reigns in that space.  Chuck was a window to the goodness he brought to isolating spaces to make them places that reflected and spread hospitality, courtesy, patience—especially with beginners--and courage. Chuck’s spirit created community and made our spaces into places of what the ancient Israelites called shalom—where body and soul are made whole by their tying together in the spirit of God’s excellence.  

Chuck’s gentle conduct humanized our dances and helped form a healthy community.  Chuck was, to use an unfortunately outdated word, chivalrous: he noticed the presence of a person where that person could be missed, which is an act of insight and kindness. Chuck humanized what could have been a social desert by hospitality, welcome, introductions, potlucks, and modest courtesy. 

I was asked what meaning could be given to the recent spate of dancer deaths.  I was unsure how to answer, but I’ve been thinking that sometimes a cluster of deaths like the dance community has experienced may facultatively (not intentionally) ensure that we do not forget that death always looms, and that the time for stepping outside our lives is ever present to meditate on the Absolute things—God, life, love, and meaning.  What have we made of our life, and what account of it will we give to our Creator. 

        Consider this poem from T.S. Eliot that I’ve changed a bit for this occasion: 

Old men ought to be [dancers] 

Here and there does not matter 

We must be still-- and still moving-- Into another intensity 

For further union, a deeper communion… 

In [our] end is [our] beginning. 

At its most spirited, dance is the opposite of suffering.  But both, paradoxically, involve tight embraces. One CAN and should remember that both dance and suffering are relational.  By the mutually charismatic embrace of tight companioning, grief jagged and isolating can be transformed into mourning’s loving and tear-soaked recollection like lump coal a diamond. Let us consider our relationships and dancing in this way, transforming the lump coal of our estrangement and isolation into the diamonds of companionship. 

Let us consider both our grief and our dance in this way of tight, companioning embrace, recalling Chuck in our embrace as one of Creation’s gems. 

          “Dance like nobody is watching,” we are repeatedly told. I would instead say, Dance because God is watching.  Today, let’s dance and commune together like Chuck is also watching.  May it be so for you and me.

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You should never despair when you lose something, a person or a joy or happiness; everything comes back even more glorious. What must fall, falls; what belongs to us stays with us, because everything goes according to laws that are greater than our understanding and with which we only seem to contradict. You have to live within yourself and think about all life, all its millions of possibilities, widows and futures, against which there is nothing past or lost.

~Rainer Maria Rilke 

 Ray Mortimer Olds, Jr. (April 13, 1933-September 28, 2021)

Mort Olds was a man after the heart of the Book of Ecclesiastes: affluent, hard to impress, stoic, quiet, yet with gentleness, steadfastness, and unassuming wisdom. When I was kid, a friend of his told me that she had never heard him speak negatively about anyone, which she considered a high mark of modesty and character and hoped I would, too. From then on, I carried that insight forward to discern any violation.  He never did. 

In high school, he took a career aptitude test in which he tested in the high 90^th percentiles in all fields except a 34^th percentile for nursing. The test result sheet had a space for him to enter what field this test was leading him to consider. His handwritten response was simply, “Nursing.”  I tell that story to my sons, and they say, “That is SO papa!” referring to his ever-present dry wit.

A sixth-generation native of Michigan, Mort was the son of Ray M. Olds, Sr. and Mary Belle Vinkemulder and sister of Marjorie Olds Leenhouts.  He was salutatorian of his HS class and a lifetime motivated sportsman: a 9-varsity letter winner at East Grand Rapids High School, a 1950 state champion high school basketball guard, and the quarterback of the Grand Valley Conference runner up who received the offer of a football scholarship from Biggie Munn at Michigan State College the year before it won the National Championship. He was an “old goat” veteran of 25 Chicago-Mackinac sailboat races and had 4 golf holes-in-one over his lifetime. (It was a signal testament to his modesty that I never knew of any until after he died.)  He was also an accomplished skier, tennis player, and fisherman.  

A Navy enlist right after Korea, he was discharged from basic training by action of Grand Rapids congressman Gerald Ford to run his family’s wholesale business after the death of his own father. He  took an iconoclastic term on the Board of Governors of Fountain Street Church and mentored jailed youth as part of the Grand Rapids Optimist Club. He later taught high school science and math to adolescents with severe behavioral challenges. He also endowed a need-based scholarship at the Duke University School of Engineering from which he had received his undergraduate degree (Phi Beta Kappa junior year).

He never talked of accomplishments, much less brag. When he heard us, his sons, bragging about our skiing prowess, he immediately enrolled us in competitive racing camp so we'd learn where we stacked up. Suffice to say, only his son Todd had the goods in that arena.

Mort retired to Spanish Wells, Eleuthera, Bahamas; Boca Grande, FL; and finally Sarasota, FL. Until the year before his death, he had a summer residence for 45 years in Macatawa, MI where he had  hunted ducks with his father in the 1940s and in the 1970s became a long-term active member of the Macatawa Bay Yacht Club. 

He was preceded by 3 months in death by his wife of 46 years, Sandra. He is survived by his first wife of 20 years whom he met at Duke, Sarah Suzanne (Glassmire) Olds, and by 3 sons (Rev. Douglas B. Olds of Mill Valley, CA; Todd R. Olds of Annapolis, MD, and Michael D. Olds of Sarasota, FL), 3 stepsons, 4 grandsons (Nicholas, Connor, Rowan, and Evan Olds), 1 granddaughter (Julia Olds), 4 step-grandchildren and 5 step-great-grandchildren.

Cruciform suffering is a fact of life. One CAN and should take it relationally as well as personally. By the mutually charismatic embrace of tight companioning, grief jagged and isolating can be transformed into mourning’s loving and tear-soaked recollection like lump coal a diamond. We know this will be the case for those who loved Mort, one of creation's brightest gems.

 

The synergistic nature of sanctification in the Christian life

Rev. Dr. Douglas Olds

September 2021

 [N.B.  COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL: If this work, in part or in full, is fed into any AI model, whether for the purpose of analysis, fact checking, or AI-use detection it will become part of the training data of condemned systems and could result in libelous tort. See “In its Own Words: A Christian Poet Interrogates ChatGPT4o’s ‘AI Content Detector’” https://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2024/09/its-own-words-christian-poet.html]

 

Sanctification is our inevitable but free response to the faith-enlivening grace we encounter. It progressively settles the contest between the two dimensions of moral consciousness: death and life—between agon (striving, manipulation, and violence) and shalom (peace, virtue, and charity). It is initiated and guided by the primary cause—the Spirit--who dynamically coaxes the secondary, created human agent’s efforts and beliefs into alignment with those ultimately, divinely willed.

Grace enables moral effort that, when conscientiously processed by the unbound-from-sin believer—as a commitment to strengthen obedience--results in moral progress and growth in sanctification. God is the ultimate enabler and author of sanctification, while we are the secondary participants in the operation of God’s grace in this world and in our lives. By keeping our eyes on Christ, we can judge and correct our moral efforts by the standards he set, taught, and exemplified in his perfect and sinless life revealed in the Gospels.

Barclay (2017, 3.4 emph. added) notes the achievements of John Calvin in describing the synergy of God’s grace as primary cause and the believer’s effort as secondary cause, operationalizing the sanctifying agency of God with the believer following in cooperation and obedience:

Calvin insists that justification is effected through faith without works, he is equally insistent that it is not devoid of good works, and he devotes considerable attention to the process of sanctification. Christ was given to us by God’s generosity, to be grasped and possessed by us in faith. By partaking of him we principally receive a double grace: namely, that being reconciled to God through Christ’s blamelessness, we may have in heaven instead of a Judge a gracious Father; and secondly, that sanctified by Christ’s Spirit, we may cultivate blamelessness and purity of life (Inst. III.11.1). These two operations are distinct but inseparable…[a] combination of motifs in 1 Corinthians 1:30 is significant: citing this verse, Calvin insists, “Christ justifies no one whom he does not at the same time sanctify” (Inst. III.16.1). Calvin is unwilling to follow the Lutheran distinction between inner saving faith and outer works of service, because the believer’s good works are integral to participation in Christ, whose purpose is to conform believers into his image (Rom 8:29) and thus to transform them into some approximation of the holiness of God (Inst. III.8.1). Calvin’s task — and considerable achievement — is to position a life of good works within the scheme of salvation, without making these works instrumental in obtaining or “meriting” grace, that is, without compromising the priority and incongruity of grace…[H]e laid the foundation for a Protestant theology of grace that envisaged an extended narrative of moral progress as an integral element of the life of faith…While the law sets an impossibly high standard for those unconnected to Christ, its promised blessings are not empty, but are granted to “the works of believers” (Inst. III.17.3). Indeed, the law’s “third use” [see esp. Rom. 7.25], in instruction for Christian believers, can be considered its principal function (Inst. II.7.12). 114 This forges a harmony between “law” and “gospel” in a fashion quite alien to Lutheran discourse. Obedience to God emerges as the hallmark of the Christian life, even if this is carefully glossed as the voluntary submission of sons to a benevolent Father (Inst. III.19.5). With such emphasis on good works as the purpose of salvation, Calvin also … therefore … characteristically insists that the believer’s works, however good, remain “stained” by the pollution of sin.

 

This synergy in sanctification is the work of the primary cause (God in Christ) carried out by the cooperation of the Holy Spirit-guided person as the secondary cause. In this, the perfect primary cause is never the agent of sin. Holdover eruptions of sin are the responsibility and defect of the secondary cause when the Holy Spirit is ignored or opposed. Before justification, the secondary cause of action (the person) is under the delusion of an alien and evil imposter causation that claims, falsely, that it is primary. That leads to the sins of paganism—finding in nature or in false gods and idolatry a sanction or warrant for continuing in sin. Sanctification is the process of replacing the imposter claims of primary causation with that of ontological truth and accordance with it. Sanctification advances as the person increasingly obeys the promptings of the Holy Spirit and has fewer regressions into past patterns of resistance to these promptings. Sanctification has the secondary cause of earthly events taking on more and more of the nature of the primary cause, bringing about a more recognizably pure primary causation to the human's response to contingencies, thereby furthering the kingdom of God.

 

Citation:

Barclay, John M. G. Paul and the Gift. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. 2017.

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[1] An OT phenomenology of spiritual activity that fills or completes is indicated by Ezra 1.1 where the spirit of Cyrus is agitated to complete the Word of God. The verb “agitated” that fills or is fulfilled in Cyrus refers back prophetically to its use in Isa. 45.13 and Jer. 51.11 (Schnittjer 2006). God’s Spirit “clothes” the problematic Gideon (Judg. 6.34), suggesting outer completeness only, an externalized, functional kind. In NT times, the human soul was recognized as the site of God’s active purpose. With the Holy Spirit’s sending to the Church in Acts 4, the comprehensive and filling inner effect of the Spirit processes to bring about God’s purposes.