Session Notes

Opening Question

I want to dial in on Chapter 13 of Corinthians, the Ode to Love, and this is where I want to center the inquiry. Paul says: ‘For now, we see by a mirror obscurely, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know in full, as I am myself fully known. And now there remain faith, hope, and love, these three. But the greatest of these is love.’ What is it to see through a mirror obscurely? What is this puzzle actually indicating toward us? And what does love provide to the context of seeing by a glass darkly?

We arrived at Paul’s letters carrying the thread from Jeremiah: a holy law the people could not keep, and the promise that the covenant would one day be written on the hearts of men. Jesus has now come and taught what it means to actually keep the law, and Paul calls it the folly of the cross, the doing away with wisdom and knowledge. The puzzle has been removed, so things should in theory be easier. And yet 1 Corinthians opens onto believers already fracturing into camps (I follow Paul, I follow Apollos, etc, etc, etc), prompting Paul’s exasperated question: “is Christ partitioned? Was Paul ever crucified for you, or were you baptized in the name of Paul?”

One of the first moves of the evening reached for Tom Bombadil. When the hobbits arrive at his house, the ring, the single most important object in the world, has no power over him at all; he flips it in the air and it vanishes. The Jews seek signs and are disappointed by the crucifixion, the Greeks seek wisdom and are disappointed by a crucified God-King, and love, like Bombadil, is simply playing a different game with different stakes. We also noticed that Paul never defines love. He does a nice poetic dance around it, sharing some of its contours, but he doesn’t pin it down. “Patient, kind, without jealousy, without swagger”: these are descriptions of what the thing feels like, not an account of what it essentially is. He tells us plainly what it is not (faith strong enough to move mountains, without love, is nothing), and we suspected the withholding is deliberate. A supreme definition would disappoint us. What Paul seems to offer instead is love as the praxis of faith, a way of living the thing rather than pinning it down.

Romans came into view as the broad architecture underneath this opener. The law is good, Paul argues, because the law lets you see the negative space the law does not strictly cover. One could do everything but steal and still take from another; one could avoid the deed and still do the damage, in other words. We pondered the law as a dialectic stepping stone into territory it could never itself legislate (i.e. the Spirit). From there we wandered into why this problem exists at all. The Greek pantheon offered a channel for every need: lay laurels at the temple of Dionysus for a good party, appease Vulcan when the business fails. Cause and effect ran through legible, rational pathways. Monotheism, here, though, compresses every dimension of spiritual pursuit into a single entity (“the Greeks were Bushwick”, someone quipped, “the Jews were just East Williamsburg”), and that compression creates a genuine puzzle of access. For how could you ever approach the God of everything through wisdom or power? As our conversation developed, Love began to look like the axis that makes relationship with “the One” possible. We were led back to Plotinus, who reached something remarkably close (but not the same) to Paul’s through pure Greek philosophical inheritance: an ascent of the self, through “Contemplation”, into unity. But his “One” is impersonal and his ladder points only upward, whereas Paul’s motion is top-down, a God who loves downward first, with morality bundled into the first principle of belief. We read Tao Te Ching 18 and 19 aloud (“eliminate sageliness, throw away knowledge, and the people will benefit a hundredfold”) and heard almost exactly Paul’s words about “foolishness of the cross”. These different traditions, we agreed, need not secretly be the same thing to be pointing at the same destination.

The most useful testbed turned out to be our own personal relationships. Love keeping no record of wrongs landed hard against the domestic ledger we all know intimately, whether it’s the chore counts, the who-took-the-trash-down-this-week tallies, or the god-forsaken dishes. But thinking that way just doesn’t work with Love; the tally is the corruption.

This brought us to the sharpest struggle of the session: the carrot. Throughout both testaments there is a constant leveling in this idea of “ok you have to suffer now, but LO! You will receive infinitely later… in the afterlife. One marshmallow now or two in the afterlife. Doesn’t the carrot undermine the entire project by reinstating the tally at infinite scale, reducing everything to Pascal’s Wager (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager)? A counterweight came through C.S. Lewis’s tin soldier, who fights being turned into flesh because all he can see is his tin being spoiled. The kingdom of heaven is here, now; the carrot exists because we are still tin, and a loving God would leak the truth of what comes next even knowing we would misread it. Perhaps the indulgence-sellers and the tally-keeping Christians have simply missed the parable of the vineyard, where the workers hired at the eleventh hour get paid the same as everyone. We did not fully resolve this, however, the carrot still haunts us a bit.

We landed back at the image of the mirror offered in the opener. “We are”, as one of us put it, “very bad at the Turing test of belief: we cannot quantify anyone else’s faith, and barely our own”. The one place the quantifying works at all is six inches from a mirror. Jesus telling us to pray inside, where nobody sees, started to read less like modesty and more like an instruction to check whether you actually mean it. If we journaled honestly what we did each day, it would tell us more about our beliefs than anything we claim. The difference between doing the dishes from love and doing them like a Pharisee is the whole game (you can hear the voice in your head: “I don’t want you to do the dishes, I want you to want to do the dishes”), and we wondered whether professed belief itself has become the new circumcision (we also learned to stop chuckling at the word circumcision… or didn’t we???), since some people who never name Christ walk the path more clearly than some who claim him loudest. The parable of the two sons who were asked to work in the vinyard hung over the ending: the one son who said he wouldn’t go and ended up going, against the one who said he’d go and didn’t. Simple enough for fishermen and prostitutes, and so hard to do. The mirror is often dirty and dark, but it’s the tool we have.