The Discipline of Joy

This is a response to Chapter four in John Ortberg's book "The Life you have Always Wanted". He does not say that Christian's should be happy and smiley all the time. That is bad theology but he does suggest we should practice joy but then does not tell us what joy is.

I am going to suggest that what he means be joy is those practices that lead to celebration and I therefore think that a two fold approach is needed

Stage one is a practice which is very close to Buddhist mindfulness, the only difference being that it tends to seek out pleasant experiences rather than just taking any experience. That is when something good happens you take the time to actually experience it, enjoy it, savour it, appreciate it, there is not a good verb in English. John suggests spending a whole day doing this each week. That I would not think possible in modern life, too many commitments but it is possible to have the occasional spoil yourself day and/or to try and have five minutes when you just let yourself savour what you are experience. It might be the warm blankets over you as you lie down to go to sleep. Just feel their weight and the warmth reflecting back from your body. What I find really good for doing this is to write poems. Most of mine start with me just trying to capture some experience in words. I have to experience it first before I can find the words.

Stage two is complimentary and that is to practice gratitude. No I do not mean the idea of thanking God for the cut knee. I mean when you come aware of something as given, whether from God or from another human being, just acknowledging that. It takes all of two seconds to do. Somebody opens a door for you and you say "thanks", a person serves you in a shop and you say "thanks" even a driver lets you into a flow of traffic and you wave your hand. It makes you aware of how many things you receive each day. Then there are things that are not due to any other human but are not under your control either: it not raining on a wet day when you leave your brolly at home, the flavour of blackberries picked while out walking, having the health you have or a good family and friends even a nuch needed parking space. To acknowledge that much of life is given and as a Christian I see it as given by God so it is natural to thank him.

The thing is that together the two work together to provide a motor out of which celebration naturally happens. A life savouring the generosity of God, can there really be a better basis for joy.

That is not to say nasty things don't happen they do and it is totally right to be cross when they do but a discipline like this helps so that nasty things don't overwhelm us. It provides hope in times when hope otherwise seems far away. Sometimes all we can do is savour the pain and offer that to God but God takes even that.

After Virtue and the Elephant in the Room

I am reading Alisdair McIntyre's After Virtue for my PhD. I have no idea what its connection is with Congregational Studies but as quite a few papers cite it, I am reading it to find out. I am not at all sure that I will agree with the conclusion and if I do I will argue that it has come about in a very different way. This is because he is using a tradition I was brought up in as his starting off point and I disagree with his reading. In fact in my view his reading is far too kind what happened.

Lets start at a point where I can agree, that is with the Nicomachean Ethics and the idea that ethics is made up of a threefold scheme of "man as he happens to be" is discordant with his true nature with discordant ethics and needs to be instructed to realises what man could be. Thus there is natural state, ethical training and ends ([i]telos[/i]).

He goes on to posit that during the enlightenment what happened is with the idea of science that it could only deal with means not ends and turning ethics into a science (legitimate form of knowledge) then the telos was got rid of. That is there was no end to which ethics were directed.

To discredit this I only have to state the end and the very argument that he makes turns around. The ideal of instruction was to become the "purely rational man". In other words there is a telos, but it appears to be a telos that at first glance fits our own world. In actual fact it is one of the most potent myths to inhabit the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty first centuries. I can trace it back that far.

Firstly when I did my early theological trainng or that first beyond the home to be exact, I did it in St Andrews, where David Hume is still a celebrated former member of the academy. However it was theology not philosophy I am talking about which is still Presbyterian. We were introduced to Kierkegaard but also to Schleiermacher. There you start to get the idea of the aethete, who has mastered rationally various arts, who becomes the new man.

Turn wider to a Sociologist Emile Durkhiem and read how he builds a picture of religion as starting off in superstition, through monotheist Judaism, Christianity and laterly Protestant Christianity man is slow able to gain a purer and purer religion until it becomes so pure there is no need for God, and the enlightened man is an atheist.

Darwinian evolution has been interpreted in this way then you get eugenics. No that is not accidental, I said my criticism of what happened was harder. The idea of a super-race that is purely rational and so on also haunts this form of ethics.

So to me the threefold scheme is not broken, but the telos is changed and in changing it becomes a monster that eventually leads to the holocaust. It is humanity faced with an ethics based on the "superman" myth driven to its natural conclusion that is repelled by what it has created.

To me, indeed to my theology teachers at University the ethics triad is not broken by the Enlightenment (perhaps that is one of the reasons my father does not believe in the Enlightenment) but rather it is broken by the carnage of the early twentieth century when it is obvious that even if man has developed rationally he has not developed ethically and no amount of rational training secures better moral outcomes.

Nor are we clear of it. The militant atheist are often so busy promulgating this myth at least indirectly. The idea all religion is about control and that a rational person must dispense with it and that the purely rational must triumph is yet this in another guise.