Getting Lost in Our Infinite God

 

Astronaut Dr. David Bowman in 2001:  A Space Odyssey

Control is fun.  Starting at a young age, every one of us wants more of it over more aspects of our lives.  We begin to pick out our own clothes, decide what we want to eat, and, with our first tricycle, discover the thrill of plotting the course of our own journey.  The pangs of anxiety that come with increased control as we fret over more significant decisions like whether to ask someone out on a date or which university to choose are quickly quelled by the sheer fun of the myriad smaller acts of control that decorate our lives.  It's fun to customize our laptops with stickers and curate our own music lists online.  Sooner or later, however, we discover that the pressures of control are no longer outweighed by the joys, and the best that many hope for is to keep the pressures and joys in balance.  We play the stress of controlling our finances off against the pleasure of choosing where to go on vacation.  Yet there is something far better and far more freeing, but it requires a bit of imagination and getting lost.

The Imagination of God

God created human beings in His own image.  Jesus is the Imago Dei, the image of God in its fullness.  Part of what it means for us to be made in the image of this image-making God is that we, too, are gifted with great imaginations.  We think things up out of nothing and bring them into reality.  From Michelangelo's David to the internal combustion engine to Mozart's Requiem to the James Webb Space Telescope, we really are quite imaginative creatures, and it will take all the imagination we have to approach a certain truth about God.  He is infinite.

Aristotle says that there must be something that causes other things to move that is not itself moved by anything else, the unmoved mover (ἔστι τι ὃ οὐ κινούμενον κινεῖ, Metaphysics 12.1072a).  Think of it this way.  You are grilling hot dogs around a nice campfire, but what caused there to be fire in that particular fire pit?  You struck match and put it under a log.  But where did the log come from?  It came from the tree that had stood nearby.  Where did the tree come from?  It came from a seed.  How did the seed get there?  A bird dropped it.  Where did the bird get it, and for that matter, where did the bird come from?  You see where this is going.  At some point the whole thing gets ridiculous and you have to think, "There has to be a stopping point somewhere," and that stopping point is what Aristotle called the unmoved mover.  Picking up from Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas says this unmoved mover is God.  (Therefore it is necessary to come to some first mover that is moved by no other, and this everyone understands to be God.  Ergo necesse est devenire ad aliquod primum movens, quod a nullo movetur, et hoc omnes intelligunt Deum.  Summa Theologiae 1, Q2, A3)

Now kick back and just let your mind go.  What could it possibly be like, what could it possibly mean for something to exist that has no cause?  Let your mind drift.  Use a piece of art or perhaps something like the famous stargate scene in the classic film 2001:  A Space Odyssey.

"God is the fullness of Being and of every perfection, without origin and without end. All creatures receive all that they are and have from him; but he alone is his very being, and he is of himself everything that he is" (CCC 213).  On the surface, that really doesn't make sense, but the liberating thing is that it doesn't have to.  As you begin to stretch your imagine to conceive of the inconceivable, an infinite being without beginning or end, you get lost in that notion.  You realize that you can't get your head around such a thing, much less control it, and in that moment you take your first taste of freedom.

Realizing Fatherhood

As the infomercials used to say, but wait!  There's more!  Despite having no beginning and no end, God is also personal, which is to say, He is a person.  No, He is not human, but what it means to be a human person comes from the personhood of God, and if that still sounds a bit too abstract, God is our Father.  What follows is something I journaled recently after pondering the identity of God.

When God speaks to Moses from the burning bush and says, "I am the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob," and then reveals his name as YHWH, "I Am," He is truly inviting us into an infinitely larger reality, identity, and relationship than the mud-hut-dwelling, dirt-scratching experience of life and family that we have known with our blood relatives.  What would life be like if we look up from our meagre existence and truly saw our Father and knew we were His?

You may think my description of earthly, familial relationships is harsh and inaccurate, but consider that the largest mansion and the smallest mobile home are essentially the same thing.  They are both boxes made of stuff from the earth in which people sleep and eat.  And just as we must scratch the dirt with hands or tools in order to draw anything of value from it for sustenance, so we often face hard, emotionally backbreaking challenges to interact with family members in order to bring forth the joys of familial life we all know are available.  

So, I'll ask again.  What would your life look like if you raised your eyes from the problems and hassles that beset you on a daily basis and became lost in the life of your infinite Father, the one who loves you beyond what you or I could ever define the word "love" to mean?

Vowels and Baptism

It can be caused by viruses, bacteria, and parasites.  Lactose, fructose, and artificial sweeteners can cause it as well.  It can even be associated with diseases such as ulcerative colitis, and despite its relatively simple treatment, there is some debate over how to spell it, or at least there was recently among some of my friends.

When Wordsmiths Text

In a text thread of three other friends and me, one of us had shared a screenshot from a news update on a certain illness, one of the symptoms of which included the condition described above.  What bothered someone on the thread was that the word was spelled "diarrhoea" instead of the more familiar "diarrhea."  One of my friends quipped, "I'm sure Steve will give us a full etymological report, replete with Latin roots -- whether we want it or not!"  Since I am the obliging type, sent them a diagram tracing the roots of the word to the original Greek noun "diarrhoia," and began unpacking the matter at hand.

You will notice that the Greek noun ends with iota alpha (ia in the transliteration).  That iota often comes into English as "e," as in "Phoinix" becoming "Phoenix."  Same thing with Phoibos -> Phoebus, as in Apollo.  There is a tendency in English to collapse diphthongs into single vowels.  The spelling you see is legitimate and is closer to a transliteration from the Greek.  This is why "caelestis," the Latin word for "heavenly," comes into English as "celestial."  The "ae" diphthong has collapsed into the single vowel "e."

[Referring back to the original issue of why someone might spell "diarrhea" with an "o," I added the following.]  Richmond Lattimore did this kind of thing in his translations of Homer.  He wanted to convey a sense of the Greek, so he used transliterations of names, e.g. Achilleus (Achilles), Hektor (Hector), Achaians (Achaeans), etc.

After introducing Richmond Latimore into the discussion, I thought I would share with my friends the translation of the New Testament that this renowned translator of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey had produced, and it was then that our conversation took an important turn.

From Vowels to Baptism

As I searched for a link to Lattimore's New Testament, I ran across the story of his baptism in 1983, just a year before his death.  The story was told more than twenty years later by Rev. Andrew Mead in a sermon on Sunday, January 16, 2005.  The message is short, and I urge you to follow this link and read it now.

I remember excitedly discovering Lattimore's translation of the New Testament nearly thirty years ago, and I was drawn, as I always am when picking up any translation, to the preface.  This preface did not, as one might expect in a Bible, give historical or theological or other specifically biblical information.  It did, however, as one would expect in a translation of Homer or Vergil, present stylistic information and a discussion of the translator's method and underlying theory of translation.  This was a scholar's work.  It was the work of a poet, and it never occurred to me that there might have been something more going on for Lattimore himself.  Yet there clearly was, as Lattimore revealed to Rev. Mead, to whom he had just admitted his desire for Christian baptism at the age of 73.  Mead shares in his sermon that he pressed Lattimore on what had apparently been Lattimore's known difficulties with the faith.

"Dr. Lattimore [though he preferred it, it was difficult for me to call him Dick], I thought you had reservations about the Christian faith and the Church."  "I did," he replied.  "But you don't any longer?"  "No, not any longer."  "Please then may I ask you, when did they go away?"  He was silent for a space; then, again with that smile and twinkling eyes, he answered, "Somewhere in Saint Luke."

The Closeness of Reading

Translation involves the close reading of a text.  Even someone with a cursory knowledge of another language can skim a text in that language and glean information, but translation is something entirely different.  Is the verb in the indicative or subjunctive mood?  To what does this relative pronoun refer?  Answering questions like these is essential to making an accurate translation, but when it comes to the biblical text, this close reading leads to another kind of closeness, one that Lattimore clearly experienced.  When we slow down and ponder a biblical text, when we look at it from multiple angles and ruminate on it, as it were, at the atomic level, we are drawn closer to the One Who is the author, or more simply, to The One Who Is.

There is a difference between “to hen,” The One, of Plotinus, and “ho ōn,” The One Who Is.  It is the latter that we see surrounding the head of Jesus in icons and that we find in Revelation 4:8.  A close reading of these two Greek phrases reveals an impersonal quality to the former and a personal aspect to the latter, and therein lies all the difference.  God is not an idea, but a person.  To be precise, He is three persons eternally existing as one deity, and it would seem that this is Whom the renowned translator Richmond Lattimore encountered when reading closely the biblical text.  It is not necessary, of course, to read Hebrew or Greek or Latin to encounter God in the Bible.  What is necessary is a slow, careful reading, one that does more than skim a text to glean information.  Lattimore said that his reservations about the Christian faith were allayed "somewhere in Saint Luke."  What an exciting proposition to think that you, too, may encounter “ ho ōn,” The One Who Is, as you read the Bible today!

Teaching In a Coat and Tie

I teach in a coat and tie.  Never in my career have I been required to do so, nor am I making a fashion statement.  As far as that goes, my sartorial selections are quite traditional, e.g. navy jacket with tan or grey slacks, blue tie with grey jacket and navy slacks, and so forth.  My reason for how I dress to teach each day is rooted in one of the most fundamental aspects of my teaching philosophy, the importance of modeling.  If anyone is having visions of me as a runway model, please stop.  That is not what I mean.

I am speaking of what the historian Livy meant in the preface to his Ab Urbe Condita.  He begins his 142-book history of Rome from its founding to the death of Drusus in 9 A.D. by stating his desire that his readers pay close attention to quae vita, qui mores fuerint, the life and habits of life that once were.  Cicero had earlier said something similar in his speech Pro Archia, an ostensibly defense oration that was more of an encomium on learning.  He asks rhetorically, "Quam multas nobis imagines--non solum ad intuendum, verum etiam ad imitandum--fortissimorum virorum expressas scriptores et Graeci et Latini reliquerunt?"  "How many images have both Greek and Latin authors left us, not only for gazing at, but also for imitating?"  (Pro Archia, 14)

What do an ancient Roman historian and statesman-cum-philosopher have to do with how I dress to teach high school students?  They both speak to the importance of models of behavior.  I dress as I do because that is how my dad dressed.  He had been an elementary teacher before I was born, but as I grew up I knew him as an elementary school principal.

Norman Perkins, Principal of Galena Elementary School, 1968-1991l

This picture, which was converted into a painting and hung in his school when he retired, represents the image of my dad that I saw every day when he came home from work.  It was a professional look, one that conveyed respect for his job as an educator and the people with whom he worked.  When I began teaching at a middle school in Kansas City, his was the model for my own apparel.  In fact, it was not until years later that I realized why I had made the dress decisions that I had.  At the time it was simply the natural thing to do.

Surely, you must be thinking, this cannot be the point of this blog post.  There must be a more significant purpose to this, and indeed there is.  Cicero and Livy were right.  Imitation is far more than a form of flattery, sincere or otherwise.  It is a foundational principle of learning, and this is part of why Cato the Elder's definition of an orator, quoted by Quintillian in Institutio Oratoria 12.1.1, was "Vir bonus dicendi peritus."  For both Cato and Quintillian, the ideal orator was not merely a person skilled in speaking, but a good person skilled in speaking.  It was not enough to learn phrasing and breath control and all manner of rhetorical devices.  These cannot exist in a vacuum but must be used by particular human beings, and what kind of people they are matters as much as the abilities they express.  The Stoic philosopher Seneca gave voice to this in his Epistle 88 when he suggested that rather than spending a great deal of time to earn the title o hominem litteratum, o well read man, "Simus hoc titulo rusticiore contenti:  O virum bonum!"  "Let us," he argues, "be content with a more rustic title:  O good man!"

Perhaps this is the reason that imitation of the true, the good, and the beautiful is rarely discussed in schools of education or in professional development conferences.  We have always, even in Seneca's time, distanced ourselves from that which smacked of the rustic because of an urban prejudice that values the supposed sophistication of the city over anything else.  It is helpful, as with any prejudice, to forego judgment until one has examined all sides fully, and once this is done regarding imitation of the good person, it will become clear why this should be a foundational educational principle and not merely a quaint rustic notion best forgotten.

Simply put, we do not like hypocrites.  We are unlikely to take seriously the advice to quit cigarettes if it is given by our chain-smoking doctor.  Once again, it is Seneca who speaks to this in Epistle 52 and summarizes the idea by admonishing his readers, "Eum elige adiutorem quem magis admireris cum videris quam cum audieris."  "Choose a guide whom you admire more when you see him than when you listen to him."

As a teacher I am called to a certain nobility of character.  Since I am a Latin teacher, that character should reflect the nobility and beauty of thought and creation expressed by the best of the ancient Greeks and Romans.  Teaching involves incarnation.  It is not enough that I dictate facts that students could just as easily and possibly better glean from a text or online source.  I must embody what I teach, for it is the witness of my life that will produce the most memorable lesson.  For a fuller discussion of this, read George Steiner's Lessons of the Masters, one of the finest books on what truly transpires between teachers and students.

Yet I am not a teacher first but rather a follower of Jesus Christ.  As a Christian I am called to follow my Father's example in far more significant ways than I did in patterning my professional dress after that of my earthly father.  This, of course, would be impossible if God were merely an abstract deity, an idea, a notion developed in the collective human mind over centuries.  Our Father is real and in the most basic, etymological sense of that word.  Those questioning this with the challenge that they have never seen Him join the ranks of Philip, the disciple of Jesus, and Christ's response to him applies today.

Philip said to him, "Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us."  Jesus said to him, "Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip?  Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.  Hw can you say, "Show us the Father?"  (John 14:8-9, ESV)

I hope, at the end of the day, I have done more than just dress as Norman Perkins once did as the principal of an elementary school in southern Indiana.  My goal as a Christian teacher is to model, however imperfectly, my life on that of my Father in heaven, and this each of us can do by looking to the fullest representation of Him the world has seen, Jesus Christ.