Where do the ducks go?

What do you do when you stumble upon a truth that is too big for theology?

The question reminds me of another one: Where do the ducks go when the lagoon in Central Park freezes over?

Recognize the words? It’s from Salinger’s famous The Cather in the Rye (spoiler alert), and it is so subtly asked in the novel that the careless reader is bound to gloss over it. It also remains unanswered, which is significant. There is an idiotic attempt at a response by a nameless cab driver, but that does not count. If anything, his answer adds to the mystery.

Why does the question matter? Because it encapsulates the aimlessness of the protagonist Holden Caulfield’s wanderings. Everything remains open-ended, it seems. His efforts at meaning-making and finding answers lead him nowhere. Ultimately, he fails to discover where one goes when your circumstances become unbearable. That’s the point.

No one knows, it seems. Least of all the grown-ups.

So what does Holden do? This is where the beauty comes in, and, in my view, the single element that has catapulted the book to the top lines of must-read lists for decades. Salinger manages to say more through a single image – a catcher in the rye – than libraries of philosophy have done for centuries.

Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.

When your life becomes unbearable, and you wish you could spread your wings and fly away from it all, but you cannot – because there simply is nowhere to go – then there is a single sensible thing left to do: Help others not to fall into the abyss that your life has become.

Yes, I know. Not everyone interprets the book in this way; as though there is some moral compass to discover in it. The book has little to do with Christianity, and no one can be exactly sure what the famously elusive Salinger was thinking when he wrote the words above. Yet, somehow he tapped into the collective psyche of the human race by confronting the aimlessness of mortal human existence with a viable and practical alternative; to give up the quest and substitute it with a life of selfless service.

If you get this, you can skip reading the book. You can skip the profanities and references to sex (although moderate by today’s standards). It’s not a book Christians have generally felt comfortable reading or recommending. But we can certainly note that Salinger does a brilliant job of using a single unanswered question as a premise for painting a beautiful scene of a life dedicated to the well-being of others and, in the process, a life that becomes progressively oblivious to its own pain.

This life-out-of-death motif is central to Christianity. It underlies the sacrificial theme of both testaments. It illustrates what Jesus meant when he said that if you seek to find your life you will lose it, but if you lose your life you will find it. Here’s the connection.

To be clear, we do not serve to escape or forget our pain. We do so because Christ is our life and it is his divine nature to love and serve. The catcher-analogy breaks down at a point. Yet, at a practical level, to be other-centered is a great way to forget about yourself and your own misery. No rational person would deny this.

Which brings me back to my own question above: What do you do when you stumble upon a truth that is too big for theology?

Ironically, as I am writing, my friend Siju from India posted in the comments section of last week’s blog-post. His words so perfectly and serendipitously describe where I am heading with the question above that I will borrow them (Thanks Siju!):

Bible study done by the natural mind happens in the realm of the flesh/natural which consists of “IMAGINATIONS, ARGUMENTS, PROPOSITIONS & CONCLUSIONS” which do not have the SUBSTANCE of LIVING BREAD that gives/maintains life. And such bible study (or ministry ) inevitably ends up in debates such as “Calvinism vs Arminianism”. It is like a hungry man given a fantastic menu in the restaurant, it tantalizes him but he is still hungry! And he does a deeper study about the dishes that he thinks will satisfy him and finds out their recipes and is thrilled for a time because of the discovery but faints because he has yet not got the meal!!! He then slanders this hotel and goes to another hotel and repeats the same thing but still does not receive the meal that can sustain/maintain his life with “vitality to perform daily tasks “, “pleasure satisfy his longings”, and “comfort in times of troubles”. New Covenant learning and ministry is NOT “learning and transferring concepts” but the broken and hungry being fed with “Living Bread by the Father” ( https://biblehub.com/matthew/5-6.htm ) and due to a “love overflow” ( https://biblehub.com/psalms/23-5.htm ) the same person is able to distribute “Living Bread in brokenness provided by Christ from the Father”.

The “study of the dishes”… What a powerful way to describe the practice of theology apart from partaking of Christ as the living bread from heaven!

The point is that there is no answer that can satisfy the yearning of the dying soul (Hence the Catcher-analogy above). The life that God alone can give is not an ideological construct and can never be reduced to one, which also happens to be the main point of last week’s post on Ravi Zacharias.

In the garden, God became an idea – an intellectual concept – the moment the humans sank their teeth into the forbidden fruit. By opting for an alternative source of life, namely the knowledge of good and evil, humanity subjected their notions of God to that source. And so God (god?) became a recruit into the thought-world of humans instead of the Creator outside of it.

In the process, God-talk became an intellectual and speculative thing, on the same par as Siju’s menus served in the different hotels apart from any real food that possesses the power to still appetites.

The idea of God as our life is too big for theology. In fact, it is not worthy of the designation “idea”. It is too real. Too incarnate. Too experiential. Too accessible. Too inviting. Too irresistible for the hungry and thirsty.

And the charge, that we will all lose our mental faculties and instantaneously become heretics if we dare conceive of life as something to partake of instead of reduce to a creed (menu?) of our choice, is too outrageous to be dignified by a response. As discussed elsewhere, the Biblical idea of heresy has to do with the act of choosing opinions and causing divisions in the process.

So where does one go?

You exchange the quest for a new lifestyle. You give it up. You walk away. You leave it all behind. You become like Salinger’s catcher in the rye. You become like Siju’s feasters at the banquet of living bread.

In short, you begin to conceive of Christ as your life, and his doctrine as a moment-by-moment adventure of impartation and response that will constitute a type of learning that can only be described as the school of Christ. You will soon find that not only your God-awareness but your other-awareness will increase with leaps and bounds.

This does not exclude study or discussion or deliberation. Rather, it provides the groundwork for it. Some of us have found that we cannot stop talking after we’d walked away.

There are great discussions in the rye, believe me. But they are wholly different to the depressing ones we had before we packed our bags.

What happened to Ravi?

Miller & Martin, the Atlanta-based law firm hired by Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM) to investigate allegations of sexual impropriety against their founder, released its report on Thursday.

It is devastating, to say the least.

Zacharias died in May 2020 from sarcoma. At his funeral, Mike Pence referred to him as “the C.S. Lewis of our day” and “the greatest Christian apologist of this century”, echoing a sentiment shared by millions of evangelicals worldwide.

As the RZIM website puts it, “For over 30 years and across 43 countries, RZIM has met millions of questioners with thoughtful answers concerning faith and God.” At the helm of this influential organization was the phenomenon of Ravi Zacharias – the Indian-born Canadian-American with the gentle spirit and razor-sharp intellect.

For years, the quickest draw in a duel with an atheist has been to grab your phone and swiftly swipe to a YouTube snippet of one of Ravi’s talks or viral answers to a doubting student during a Q&A in a packed auditorium at some or other famous university.

Now, we are all forced to deal with sentences such as “Tragically, witnesses described encounters including sexting, unwanted touching, spiritual abuse, and rape.” This particular statement comes from RZIM’s “Open Letter” that accompanied the release of Miller & Martin’s report, so no rumours or conjecture here.

I cannot help but wonder what the student in that video is thinking.

So what happened? Why? What are we to make of it? How should we respond?

I think the most important thing we should do is not look for new answers, because there aren’t any. Humanity is still the beast it has always been, an issue that has been dealt with in depth in the pages of Scripture. The clearest presentation of the dilemma of being human is found in Paul’s letter to the Romans, and we are all under discussion there. Ravi, you, me; all of us.

Our lives are a composite of two worlds, we read in Romans: The world of the flesh and the world of the Spirit. If we are dead in our sins – unregenerate, as we say – the world of the Spirit is reduced to the voice of the conscience; a law in our hearts that manifests as thoughts accusing or excusing us. Because of the power of conscience, Paul tells us, gentiles are just as accountable as the Jews who have a written law to guide them in matters of wrong and right.

However, neither the voice of conscience nor the Torah can provide the life-energy that is required to live up to their prohibitions and commands. For this to happen, one needs to enter the world of the Spirit and become a citizen there. This can only happen through a very real crucifixion and death to the world of the flesh and a subsequent resurrection in the world of the Spirit.

We have all kinds of fancy words to describe this passage, such as regeneration, new birth, conversion, getting saved, and so on. But it all boils down the same thing: I have died to my flesh and I am alive to the Spirit, who has now become my guide in the place of the fuzziness of my conscience and the impersonal dictates of a written code of regulations.

But here’s the thing, and Romans is pretty clear about it: Even though I have participated in this glorious transition from death to life and flesh to Spirit, it is still quite possible to exit the world of the Spirit and conduct my life in the old way of the flesh. In fact, at a certain level it is inevitable. And that is okay, because the immediacy and finality of the transition takes time to filter through to my cognition and from thereon to my actions. Life unveils itself in a fashion that can only be described as hesitantly; like a woman who guards herself ferociously until convinced that the one who pledges a commitment to her can be trusted with her gifts. It’s all one glorious process of growth and ever-increasing intimacy, until we shed our previous allegiances; not because we have to but because we want to.

In Romans, love fulfils the law and meets its obligation because the problem of illicit desire, underlying all the works of the flesh, has been overcome by non-elicit desire.

An analogy might be suitable here: It is the love that I have for my wife that has delivered me from my attractions to other females. She is the fulfilment of the law my mother gave me when she warned me against a certain type of girl. The commandment could not sustain me, I must confess, and even my nagging conscience proved little help when I was swept away by adolescent lust. But all of it disappeared when the power of love for the girl of my dreams invaded my soul. Those girls now seem bland and boring in comparison to the love of my life. I no longer have a need for mother’s prescriptions.

In Romans, as in the rest of Scripture, immunization against desire and the actions that spring forth from it is found in the realm of love. The Bible is a story of greater love subduing lesser love. It is as simple as that. The two greatest commandments are great exactly because they contain the power to deliver human beings from all their vices and addictions . “If you love me you will obey my commands,” Jesus said, and he was not kidding.

It is here where the world of the Spirit and the world of the flesh part ways. The world of the Spirit is governed by the force of love – love for God and love for neighbour. The satisfaction of intimacy with God banishes the need to be satisfied in other ways. Contentment is the distinguishing characteristic of the true believer. Just and right living is no longer legislated from the outside in, but has become an unstoppable force of passion from the inside out.

If this is true, then it means spiritual growth is nothing but an ever-increasing awareness of the beauty and sufficiency of God; not as some or other doctrine of transcendence but as a very real moment-by-moment life experience. I am constantly being weaned off my infantile dependencies. My maturity exists in my ongoing discovery that the shepherd’s green fields and still waters surpass all other sources of nutrition. My childhood cries are substituted by a single confession: “I shall not want.”

But it also means something else. Those who have wandered back to the world of the flesh and its works have done so because of one reason only: They have broken the first and greatest commandment. They loved something outside of God more than God himself. And the reason for this is that they have found a satisfaction and release in that thing – a satisfaction and release that they never discovered in God.

 “I need it,” the women quoted Ravi as saying. The great apologist understood and could defend the gospel better than anyone on the planet, but he had a need that was never satisfied in his walk with God. Whilst he excelled in the letter of Scripture, he failed in its spirit.

Ultimately, the great challenge is not to understand well, but to love well. I am convinced that our blindness and stubbornness in this regard constitutes the single biggest sin of the church of God in this present age.

This, I believe, is the word that God is speaking to us through the public disgrace of Ravi Zacharias.