If you are following real-time news about the fire, you’re likely to encounter stories of three kinds. First there are the strictly empirical updates, filled with place names and placeholders, numbers and stats, sometimes enhanced with live maps. Second there are the updates that go a bit deeper, forays into investigative journalism propelled by the search for answers and, most of all, somewhere to lay the blame. Third, there are the updates that forsake the statistical and investigative impulses in hope of finding some sort of respite. These tend to zero in on philanthropic rescue and reconstructive efforts and can be identified by their attempts to create hometown heroes.

The second and third journalistic productions noted here are the outworking of the first: given that empirical observation provides everything we need to know about this particular wildfire, the search for villains and heroes must also operate on this delimited reductively materialistic plane. As we consume these productions, we are given the promise that if we simply follow the empirical evidence we will be able to comfort ourselves by assigning culpability for the carnage, as well as celebrate those who have bravely worked to overcome it. In the days and weeks ahead, media outlets will of course do much of this dividing work for us, helping us reinforce lines they have generously drawn that separate the good guys of their world from the bad.

Inasmuch as we may find this predictable journalistic trajectory unpalatable, we will be inclined to follow suit by using it to confirm our prejudices about the identity of the world’s villains and heroes. But this is not the most important thing to note about our reception of the media coverage of the great fire. The most important thing is that it will fail to engage our theological appetites. It is this lack that palpably exposes the inability of brute empirical facts to provide the answers we need in the face of real horror, and which sets us adrift on the fool’s errand of moralistic casuistry. Once we have successfully litigated those we deem responsible and given community service awards to the heroes we have created, the meaning and the closure we will have given ourselves will still only be skin deep. The thick meaning we long for in the face of such overwhelming devastation will remain inaccessible to us, but only because it is theological.

We’ve pretty much done away with theological explanations of the news — indeed, this is one of the hallmarks of a modernity restricted, as it is, to Charles Taylor’s famous immanent frame. One reason we’ve done away with them is that we’ve found them distasteful, and this not without reason. We can note, for example, Pat Robertson’s announcement on The 700 Club that Haiti’s 2010 earthquake was divine retribution for having made a pact with the Devil in 1791 in order to enlist his help to expel the French. We don’t want this kind of theological explanation — after all, doesn’t Jesus say that the Tower of Siloam did not kill the 18 because of their sin? (Luke 13:4) — and the alternative we’ve opted for is no theological explanation at all.

But if there are three kinds of news reports, there are two kinds of theological explanation. The first, Robertson’s approach, is didactic. It uses a causal calculus to enforce a providential moral order (Robertson links Hurricane Katrina, the Haiti earthquake, and rampant American abortion). The method it often deploys toward this end, like today’s materialistic journalism, is to divide the world into heroes and villains. And like today’s journalism, it tends to assume that looking at the facts is in itself a dividing work: those who have been blessed are apparently God’s beloved children and those who have suffered expose themselves as his enemies.

Didactic journalism can deploy the Scriptures to reinforce its providentialism. Robertson was quite explicit that his reading of the Haiti earthquake was informed by the reading of Scripture: “I was reading yesterday,” he noted, “a book that was very interesting about what God has to say in the Old Testament about those who shed innocent blood. And he used the term that those who do this, ‘the land will vomit you out.’” Robertson here extracts a principle from the Bible and applies it to the news. His belief in a divine moral order is not to be despised, but he almost certainly commits the Aristotelian fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc (after therefore because of).

Like certain didactic readers, the figural reader is inclined to interpret the Smokehouse Creek Fire in relation to scriptural precedents. But in this case the correspondence would not be based, as it was for Robertson, on the use of a conceptual abstraction, “retribution,” to establish lines of causality. It would rather be the result of a verbal link forged by the word fire. And in this case the figural reader would be free not only to look to scriptural accounts of fiery retribution such as the story of Nadab and Abihu, but also Eden’s angelic sword of fire, the burning bush that remained unconsumed, the various Levitical offerings, the Beloved’s love that burns like a blazing fire, Peter’s warming himself by the fire in his denial or Paul’s notion of work refined by fire.

A sermon preached in the face of the current devastation could turn to any of these Scriptures to prooftext didactic certainties. But as the preacher immerses his subject in the Scriptures, his audience would increasingly find that — to use George Lindbeck’s famous turn of phrase — the Scriptures were absorbing the inferno at Smokehouse Creek. This is not to say that a fully orbed figural approach would avoid the uncomfortable topic of divine judgment. Indeed, any credible biblical theology of fire will have to reckon with the terrifying return of the Righteous Judge, whose eyes blaze as flames of fire. But it is equally true that the search for the scriptural form of any particular fire will be complexified by our multivalent scriptural witness. It is thus that in his City of God, Augustine, having refuted the pagan accusation that the sack of Rome was the result of Christian impiety, does not merely return the favor by proposing another simplistic causal mechanism. His alternative is to unravel a sprawling scriptural history of humankind, beginning with Adam, and ending with the Parousia and the age to come.

Figural engagement with the news generates a chastened providentialism. It chastens the human propensity to speculation by relying on Scripture words all the way down. It proceeds only as far as the Scriptures do when it comes to offering theological explanations for current events, ever mindful that “we see through a glass, darkly.” And as it proceeds with its own creaturely finitude in mind, it longs for the revelation of the Divine and scriptural form of all things: “Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Cor. 13:12).

Since the early church, suffering Christians have been those who have most eagerly anticipated the Parousia. A case in point is the Coptic Christians of Cairo, who secretly dug a church out of the mountain that towers above the Garbage City where they lived. Having built the church, they inscribed the words, “Amen, Come Lord Jesus” in the rock face wall.

But while persecuted Christians feel God’s absence acutely, God cannot be, for them, a God who has left his people to their own devices, only to return at the end of time to clean up the mess. The Copts of Garbage City testify to their belief in God’s abiding presence through their figural engagement with the Scriptures. Thus, the rock faces above and around their Cave Church are alive with carved depictions of scriptural scenes.

When the Copts ascend the mountain to worship in their church, they ascend with Elijah. And with Elijah they call out to their own God even as the nations surrounding them call out to theirs. The terms of this confrontation are the same for them now as they were in Elijah’s day: “The god who answers by fire — he is God” (1 Kgs. 18:24). And the God who does not answer by fire, well, he is not.

As there was fire in the beginning, there is now, and ever shall be, world without end — for God is a consuming fire (Heb. 12:29). As we anticipate our inevitable reckoning with this fiery God we must ask ourselves what we wish for in the meantime, whether we wish to suffer the fires that now threaten us as from his hand. The decision to do without him has been costly, for it has also been a decision to admit to the world that we have nothing to say other than that which it is already saying as it churns out its three favored journalistic productions — empirical, investigative and philanthropic. At stake is not merely whether we will choose to engage the fires theologically by means of the two approaches outlined here, the didactic and the figural. The question that is put to us is the one great question of the age, which comes in the form of atheism’s enticing whisper: for if he does not answer by fire, he is not.

Contrary to popular opinion, America was not founded by Puritans. It was founded by many religious groups, including Anglicans. Indeed, the Church of England was the first denomination to plant its foot in the New World. Anglican services were held in North Carolina and California in the 16th century, and Anglicanism established itself for good in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. As David Holmes puts it, the Jamestown colony followed the liturgical and ceremonial directives of the Book of Common Prayer:

The colony required morning and evening prayer daily, two sermons each Sunday, and the administration of the holy communion every three months. During the difficult early years of Jamestown, the Prayer Book office for the burial of the dead was used frequently. (Holmes, A Brief History, 20)

Virginia was founded as an Anglican colony, and the General Assembly soon legislated for the church, supported it through taxes, and protected it against dissent. Yet this strength couldn’t conceal the fundamental problem of colonial Anglicanism: it was episcopal without episcopacy. It functioned as an extension of the Diocese of London. It lacked its own bishop, and it was thus beset by a perpetual shortage of clergy.

There was, you might say, an ecclesial vacuum, and this vacuum was filled with the one key form of English Anglicanism the colonists did have: the prayer book. Lauren Winner identifies the role that the prayer book had in the lives of everyday colonial Virginians. She recounts, for example, that a certain Jesse Lee recalled with fondness that as a child he was “summoned to church on Sunday” and would “seat himself in his pew, with his prayer book in his hand, and repeat the service in a manner which did credit to one of his age” (A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith, 100).

While lay Anglicans opened their Books of Common Prayer in Church, they did so at home far more often. There was thus a shift in emphasis in relation to the Church of England. As Edward Bond notes, “Unlike English divines who treated private devotions as a form of preparation for the church’s public worship, ministers in Virginia reverse this sequence, placing greater emphasis on private devotions than on public and communal prayer” (Damned Souls, 269).

For much of Anglican history Anglicans wrote their private devotional thoughts and prayers in little notebooks, called commonplace books. One of the extant commonplace books we have from colonial Virginia is that of Maria Carter of Cleve. On the last page she wrote:

Almighty God, the Fountain of all wisdom, who knowest my Necessities before I ask, and my Ignorance in asking; I beseech thee to have Compassion upon my Infirmities, and those things which for my Unworthiness I dare not, and for my Blindness I cannot ask, vouchsafe to give Me for the Worthiness of thy Son Jesus Christ, my Lord & Saviour. amen.

This prayer comes from the Book of Common Prayer; it is one of the Collects from the order for Holy Communion. It is intended to be said by the entire congregation and is cast in the first-person plural. As Winner puts it, “Carter recast the prayer in the singular, absorbing the liturgical we into her personal I. She made the prayer book’s public, performative language her own” (A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith, 108-109).

So we see from the personal use of the prayer book that the corporate use of the prayer book, whether in church or in homes, was seen as a complement to personal, extemporaneous prayer, and, to take things one step further, that the personal use of the prayer book, and thus so-called liturgical prayer, was not impersonal to begin with.

The prayers offered corporately were internalized and expressed individually by colonial Anglicans. Today young Christians in America continue to discover in the Prayer Book a powerful resource for their personal devotional lives.  But we might question whether it can teach them to read “in common” as a personal devotional guide. In America the prayer book quickly came to be identified primarily as a tool to help you personally find God. And in this new context, the distinction between Anglicans and non-Anglicans became a matter of choice; whether you believed liturgical prayer, or extemporaneous prayer, was the surest path to individual spiritual formation.

By the middle of the 18th century, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist immigrants were shifting Virginia’s religious landscape. They found that one of the most effective ways to stake out ground for themselves in Anglican Virginia was to discredit liturgical prayer. The dissenting minister Samuel Davies warned against all prayers that came from tongues rather than the bottom of hearts. For Davies, “thoughtless, unmeaning prayer” was akin to blasphemy and would bring punishment, not blessing, on those that uttered it. In response to such accusations, Virginian Anglicans heroically defended the prayer book. They lambasted “Tumults and Distractions … Discords and Confusions” of the unruly ejaculations of the “newfangled Methodist Enthusiasts,” and they inadvertently reinforced the false binary between personal and liturgical prayer (Winner, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith, 97).

The context for Anglicans in New England was obviously very different from Virginia, but it often proved merely to be a different theater in the same war. In 1722, the proudly Congregationalist institution Yale University was rocked by one of its greatest scandals: the Yale apostasy. Six tutors, all Congregationalist ministers, led by Samuel Johnson (1696-1772), declared their intention to become Anglicans. Johnson had to go all the way back to England to make good on his promise. He returned to America as an SPG missionary and founded King’s College in New York (which became King’s College in Halifax after the Revolution).

Johnson fought heroically to make the case for the Anglican understanding of the gospel in a Congregationalist context. In one public discourse in 1733, he offered an analytic defense of Anglican principles and extended a plea to his non-Anglican neighbors to put aside their insults and come back to the bosom of the Church of England and enter the Ark to enjoy true Christian communion.

In this discourse, Johnson lists elements that he thinks mark Anglican superiority. He complains that the Congregationalists’ churches do not demand the regular and ordered reading of Scripture in worship: “You jostle out the reading of God’s holy word through your conceited promotion of what you call your gifts,” he complains. He also complains that Congregationalists choose whatever they want to preach on whenever they want: they return, in their sermons, to the same texts again and again, and the people are therefore barred from hearing the whole counsel of God.

Johnson’s underlying concern, it seems, is that his denominational opponents have rejected the Book of Common Prayer. He decries their extemporaneous prayers and reminds his readers that the problem is that the prayer book is designed to ensure that prayers are scriptural. Johnson boasts that Anglicans offer their scriptural prayers to God unanimously, a unanimity further embodied in gestures that symbolize the submission of the whole people to a common obedience before God.

As a convinced Anglican, I am deeply sympathetic to many of Johnson’s arguments. It comes as no surprise, though, that even his best arguments were merely fuel for the fire. His Congregationalist, Quaker, and Baptist opponents redoubled the old Puritan polemic against liturgical prayer, arguing that to pray liturgically was to perform hypocritically, by duplicitously separating words from affections. In the second half of the 18th century, these groups condemned liturgical prayer as merely performative, artificial, boring, and repetitious. Only free-form prayer was authentic because only free-form prayer captured the cries of the human heart.

As he states in his preface to the 1549 BCP, Thomas Cranmer wanted his little book to draw all people toward a common center, the Word of God, in order to create a scripturally ordered commonwealth. In the religious free market of colonial America, this is something it could not do.

For the committed Anglican, the goal is always to gather the people of God through Common Prayer. But there is a crucial, if subtle, difference between calling Christians to Common Prayer as an insistence upon Anglican superiority and calling them as an invitation to gather around the Word of God. What would happen if Episcopalians and Anglicans started to see liturgical form not as that which distinguished them from other Christians but as that which could gather the baptized around the Word of God? What if we were known throughout the land as the great gatherers? At the heart of Cranmer’s vision for a scriptural commonwealth is a simple request: “Drop what you are doing, and come with me to listen to the Scriptures.” As conceived it thus has far more in common with the Muslim call to prayer, which bellows throughout the neighborhoods of Islamic states, than it does with the modern devotional manuals that it has often been forced to emulate.

It is not obvious that Americans should have been unresponsive to Cranmer’s request. Perhaps we have found ourselves too busy to invest in those we might invite to common prayer. Perhaps we have so exacerbated our differences that it has become impossible for us even to listen to the Scriptures we supposedly hold in common together.

Probably the fault lies as well with those that have asked others to gather, together, around the Word of God. They have, like Samuel Johnson, stood over and against us. They have inadvertently weighed down their simple request with loads that even they have been unable to bear. They haven’t made it easy on us to comply. But perhaps that is the point. The invitation to common prayer is not disembodied. It is an invitation that comes from a particular person, with a particular history and particular sins. And that is perhaps the real barrier: the person into whose fellowship you are being invited.

If I hear someone calling out, “pick up and read,” as Augustine so famously did, it will perhaps be enough for me to believe that the book is worth my time. But if someone calls out, “pick up and read with me,” I will also have to decide whether they can be trusted. That is the great challenge that common prayer puts before us, one which exposes all the more clearly our failures to embody this vision and obey the summons: the same issued to us by Christ the Lord.

Noted American sociologist Christian Smith teamed up with two of his doctoral students, Bridget Ritz and Michael Rotolo, to investigate how American parents conceived of the task of intergenerational religious transmission. To this end they interviewed 235 parents living in 150 households across America in order to ask them what they thought. The results of this rigorous program are distilled in Religious Parenting: Transmitting Faith and Values in Contemporary America.

Since they interviewed parents from a wide variety of religious traditions (Catholic, Mainline Protestant, Conservative Protestant, Jewish, Mormon, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist) and ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds, the researchers anticipated that their findings would be idiosyncratic. What their interviews produced, rather, was a startling homogeneity. The consensus that emerged from the interviews was that parents overwhelmingly sought to pass religion on to their children as a tool to help them successfully navigate the journey of life on earth (pp. 156; 265).

This conclusion appears somewhat generic at first, but Smith, Ritz, and Rotolo show that it is not sleight of hand, or a generalized abstraction masking distinctives within the data. Religious parents have this particular conviction in common, the authors contend, because they share beliefs which compel them to see specific aspects of intergenerational religious transmission in the same way. The authors divide these beliefs into three categories: convictions about the purpose of life (Chapter 1), convictions about religion’s value and truth (Chapter 2), and convictions about the roles and responsibilities of children, parents, and families (Chapter 3). Religious parents hold that religion should be passed on to children to help them succeed in life because they take for granted that (1) the purpose in life is to live a happy and good life (happy because it goes well and good because it is well lived), (2) the positive use of religion is to help people live a happy and good life, and (3) children innately possess a best and true self, which parents must labor to cultivate, with the transmission of religion directed towards this end.

A number of pressing parental concerns appear: worries about the dangers of a hostile world, concerns about children’s ability to navigate difficulty, desire for family cohesion, and awareness that religion needs to be authentic, embraced by choice rather than by force. It is only in working through these and other details that the reader will come to appreciate the force of the claim of the researchers that religious parents tend to regard the task of religious parenting similarly regardless of their specific religious affiliation.

The researchers highlight common beliefs held by religious parents in America which will be sure to trouble the devout, and especially religious professionals. This includes a surprising lack of concern for the particularities of inhabited religious traditions. “Most religious parents,” they find, “tend toward an inclusive, ecumenical, and sometimes relativistic view of religious pluralism” and were therefore at pains to emphasize, during the interviews, that they were not religious fanatics, and that they were tolerant and respectful of other religious traditions (pp. 57, 89). Religious parents also tended to express a highly individualistic view of religion which proposed that “religious traditions are primarily resources from which to benefit, not authorities that help to define what one should be and want in the first place” (p. 99). According to this perspective, the primary responsibility of intergenerational religious transmission belongs to parents rather than institutions. Parents tended to downgrade what the researchers call the “specifically ‘religious’ aspects of congregations” — things such as “theology, liturgy, and doctrinal teachings” — as “not especially important when it comes to parenting” (p. 177). They displayed a strong emphasis on the importance of modeling the faith rather than teaching it (p. 188).

There is no doubt that the kinds of things parents say about religious transmission is an important aspect of what the authors call the cognitive culture of parenting for religious transmission. We might ask, however, whether knowing about such a culture, especially if it is understood as a “cognitive” one, is really what a broadly-religious American public needs the most. The heart of the matter, after all — and this is something the parents that were interviewed reiterated again and again — is not what parents say about religious transmission, but what they do.

In 1998 C. Kirk Hadaway and P. L. Marler published a groundbreaking article in The Christian Century entitled, “Did You Really Go to Church this Week? Behind the Poll Data.” This article highlights research the authors performed which calls into question not merely the findings of sociologists regarding church attendance, but also the method they have pursued in going about this research. In short, Hadaway and Marler had the good sense to actually go and see how many people showed up in church on Sunday. Their research, which was corroborated by follow up studies, focused on Church attendance in Ashtabula County, Ohio. This research confirmed, in the end, that while 40% of Protestants reported having attended church on a weekly basis, only 20% actually did, and that while 51% of Catholics reported having attended church on a weekly basis, only 24% actually did.

Hadaway and Marler emphasize that this incongruity does not necessarily imply that Americans are liars, discussing several possible explanations for it. They point out that for a small minority of respondents “going to church” denotes activities such as Sunday school, choir practice, and even mowing the church lawn. They also observe strong evidence that the answers respondents gave reflect the values they hold and the kind of person they believe themselves to be. In short, if you ask me, as someone who values church and regular attendance, whether I was in church last week, I will likely answer affirmatively. To say “no” in this case might trigger cognitive dissonance, since I might feel, in giving this answer, that I was denying my convictions and my identity.

This all points to the existence of a distinct culture the interviewing process creates with its own set of practices, protocols, etiquette, mores, boundaries. While it reflects the ideas and praxis of those who partake in it (both interviewer and interviewee), it also reflects larger cultural realities — familial, local, regional national, international. All of these are in play, and so must be acknowledged as possible sources of the data culled from the interview experience.

When it comes to Smith, Ritz, and Rotolo’s study, we might ask whether it is possible to detect and distill these larger cultural forces at play in the interviews. For instance, when respondents claimed that they wanted their children to learn about other religious traditions, was it because this sentiment reflected their actual parenting practice, or because they assumed, within the culture of the interview, that this was the right thing to say? This is a pressing matter when applied to the central finding of the book, the existence of a homogeneous culture of intergenerational religious transmission. We cannot say, within the parameters of the study, that religious parents in America share common practices in order to facilitate such transmission. Nor can we even say, with certainty, that they share the same thoughts and beliefs about such transmission. All we can confidently say is that, within the delimited space of the interview experience, they speak in similar ways when they are invited to bring matters which had seemed to them to be private and personal out into the open.

The burning question thus remains: why did they speak with one voice? The answer, no doubt, is multivalent. It has to do with similar ways of thinking as well as similar ways of interacting with children. But it also attests to similar life experiences and similar ways of engaging American culture. Getting to the bottom of this would have been easier had the authors told us more about their control group, the non-religious. We learn, in an appendix, that 20 non-religious parents were also interviewed. But this is all that we are told. We are not invited into their conversations. To my mind this reduces the value of the study, as the data from these interviews is essential if we wish to learn whether there is something unique about religious parenting.

It is reasonable to suppose that some of the non-religious parents differed from their religious counterparts in the answers they gave to the questions outlined in chapter two, “Religion’s Value and Truth.” While religious parents affirmed that “Religion provides feelings of peace, comfort, protection, and belonging,” for instance, we might suppose that non-religious parents would say otherwise (p. 58). But there are other answers that we might expect the religious and non-religious to equally affirm, including “Humans have a natural tendency to stray and misbehave in self-harming ways” (p. 67) and “religious exclusivity, superiority and fanaticism are bad” (p. 89). Furthermore, there is reason to believe that at least some non-religious parents would have been quite willing to sign off on every summary statement which is given in chapter one, “The Purpose and Nature of Life,” and chapter three, “Children, Parenting, and Family.” If religious parents say that “Good lives must be self-determined and pursued in ways that are true to each unique individual self” (p. 19) and that “Good lives achieve a certain quality of life in this world” (p. 26), we might expect non-religious parents to say the same. And if religious parents opine that “Children are unrealized bundles of personally unique ‘ideal outcomes’ that need to be prepared and cultivated” (p. 107) and that “parents must never violate their children’s ultimate self-determination” (p. 118), so too might the non-religious.

Had the study pursued such comparative analysis, we might probably have been led to believe that the homogeneity that exists among religious parents extends to non-religious parents as well. In this case we would have been compelled to conclude, not that there are important demarcations which establish the contours of a specifically religious culture of intergenerational transmission, but rather that powerful cultural forces in America today incline religious and non-religious parents alike to describe their job similarly. I am left with the question I brought with me to the study: are religious parents any different?

There is … a time to be born and a time to die.
— Ecclesiastes 3:1

The last chapter of George Marsden’s award-winning biography on Jonathan Edwards begins with the following sentence: “Jonathan Edwards spent his entire life preparing to die.” When I first read this sentence, during seminary, it got up in my face. It had never occurred to me that the purpose of my life was, in fact, death. Certainly, the church context I inhabited had never asked me to think in this way, or at least it hadn’t done so in a way that led me to believe that my ultimate object was to die well. And yet I have come to learn that I am the odd one, or rather that contemporary Western Christianity is novel in this respect. The point of course is not that we don’t prepare for death; but rather that we do so as a necessary evil, and having done so, we quickly return to our habitual denial of death.

Acknowledging that the Grim Reaper may knock at the door as an actuarial computation, and living in anticipation that he will inevitably do so, are two very different things. I wonder if this difference can account for the allergic reaction so many Americans had to the request that they habitually wear a mask during the pandemic. And while I continue to be unconvinced by the argument that those that complied to institutional, municipal, state, and federal mask mandates inevitably did so out of fear, the pandemic did seem to wake certain individuals from a deep slumber of indifference to the horror that death might suddenly appear as an unexpected guest.

There are few countries in the world, if any, in which the mask became the cultural-dividing issue that it was in America; few countries seem to have a propensity to make such things into cultural and ideological shibboleths. But it is easier to see why it became what it became given that it violated entrenched cultural assumptions about death. The mask is an extremely intriguing object along these lines given its hybridity, something which both shields from death and brings the reality of death as close as the air you breathe. It is able to do this, it seems, because it is both an extension of the human person into the world and an imposition of the world upon the human person. As an appendage to the human person, it shields the person from the world; yet as an exterior object it is, quite literally the world up in your face.

As it both shields the person from the world and confronts him with it, the mask is an all-too-palpable reminder that the world exists. That the world exists is perhaps obvious enough, though we might ask ourselves how it exists, or rather where it exists. And as Charles Taylor has so eloquently argued, it exists for moderns in a way that it did not for pre-moderns. Unlike pre-moderns, moderns take for granted what Taylor calls the buffered self. In other words, they see and experience themselves as distinct from the world in a way that manages to make sure that the world doesn’t “get up in your face.” On one hand the mask buffers the self from the world, but as the world up in your face, it is, curiously, equally a threat to the buffered self.

“Buffering” the self is, evidently, a coping mechanism, or is, rather, a stand-in for coping mechanisms: it is a key component of the modern denial of death. The self must be buffered from the world since the world quite literally kills you. While the buffered self is adept at deploying strategies that hide the uncomfortable reality of death from view, these all fail to account for the world the way it actually is: in bringing death and decay, the world is just being what it is, the world. Nothing is more evident; and yet few evident truths are so eagerly avoided. Only one thing can be said with certainty of the earthly life given to a newborn, and that is that it will end in death.

The church that acknowledges the most obvious truth, that physical life must end in physical death, conceives of Christian formation as a preparation for death. The Western church of the cataclysmic 14th century was not unique in the interest it had in such preparation; but its hellish circumstances made it urgently and idiosyncratically explicit in this regard.

There were frequent crop failures between 1290 and 1347 which climatologists have associated with the cooling of the atmosphere and soil fatigue. In 1304 and 1305 famine struck in France and the Netherlands, and by 1310 Italy had lost 10 percent of the urban population. The famines of 1315-1317 were so severe an English chronicler stressed that horsemeat, normally scorned by peasants, was too expensive for all but aristocrats. As for the poor, they were reduced to the state of eating cats, dogs, rodents, and creepy crawly things. The animal population was further reduced in the livestock epidemics of 1316-1322 called murrains. These famines and murrains constituted an agrarian crisis that killed 10 to 25 percent of Western Europe’s total population.

Dominican Priest Henry Suso (1295-1366) grew up during the agrarian crisis and it must be understood as the backdrop of his bestselling devotional manual, The Little Book of Eternal Wisdom, published early in 1328. Some regard it as the most beautiful fruit of German mysticism. But it is also an eminently practical manual, addressed to “simple men who still have imperfections to be put off.” With the coming of the “Big Death,” the Bubonic Plague of the mid-14th century, the agrarian crisis took on the new title of the “Little Death,” for while it had swallowed up a quarter of Western Europeans, up to half succumbed to the plague. It is easy to see why Suso’s manual was so popular; it became a crucial text during the Big Death and in the new order that followed. The Big Death solidified an enduring culture of death since the plague repeatedly returned to haunt Europe and the Mediterranean until the 17th century: it was present somewhere in Europe every year between 1346 and 1671.

Suso’s little manual takes the form of a dialogue between a true servant of the Lord, who is presumably a layman, and the Lord himself, who goes by the name “the voice of true and Eternal Wisdom.” This voice urges the servant to prepare for death by embracing religio, the ascetical life. While this advice took for granted the superiority of the monastic way of life, it was spurned by many cloistered communities as a casting of pearls before swine (Matt. 7:6). It was, however, part of a growing tide of democratization: with death everywhere around them, Europe’s populace eagerly sought the Holy Life. The Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life are the clearest testaments to this trend, as women and men across Europe developed creative new arrangements which allowed them to pursue devotion to Christ within indigenous communal contexts.

Suso’s servant, who is eager for theological instruction, tells Eternal Wisdom that he longs for the wisdom of the Doctors of the Church. Eternal Wisdom urges him, though, that there is something far more valuable which must become the object of his affections. He needs the treasured possession, which monks possess, the gift of being prepared for death.

I will give to thee what will profit thee even more. I will teach thee to die and will teach thee to live. I will teach thee to receive Me lovingly, and will teach thee to praise Me lovingly. Behold, this is what properly belongs to thee. (Suso, 2.21).

Suso’s advice was received by so many of Suso’s readers as sound because they took for granted that death was endemic to their status as fallen creatures; it was obvious to them both that it would soon come to fetch them, and that the intervening time was to be construed as a time of purgation and preparation. Such a fixation upon death was not, for them, dark or dreary or sadistic. It was, to the contrary, an energetic embrace of the form of creaturely life as a life which invariably must be lived within a world in which physical life ends in death. And as such it was a courageous and open-eyed embrace of a way of living which was, simultaneously, the art of dying well and the art of living well.

The official response to the new culture of the Big Death was, predictably, far slower in coming. An anonymous Dominican Friar produced the long version of a text known as the Ars Moriendi, in 1415, probably at the request of the council of Constance. A shorter version appeared in 1450. The Ars Moriendi was translated into most European languages, and boasted 50,000 copies before 1501. Both redactions offer advice on the protocols and procedures of a good death, how to die well. And both assume, following Suso, that the good death has an unmistakably ascetical component, and that it is nevertheless within reach of all. The Ars Moriendi became part of the Church’s program for educating priests.  But it was also for lay people, intended to be used by them in the absence of a priest, since so many had recently died. This amounted to giving the secret possession of priests to the laity; something that would have been unthinkable in the High Middle Ages.

An English translation of the longer treatise appeared around 1450 under the title The Book of the Craft of Dying. The first chapter praises the deaths of good Christians and repentant sinners who die “gladly and wilfully” in God. Because the best preparation for a good death is a good life, Christians should, the translation continues, “live in such wise … that they may die safely, every hour, when God will.” Merchant and writer William Caxton (1422-1491), who was probably the first person to bring a printing press to England, made the link between the Ars moriendi and advice literature explicit. He translated a text from the French as The Arte and Crafte to Knowe well to Die around 1490. His manual included texts on how to converse, use correct table manners, and play chess.

The 15th-century culture that refashioned living well as the art of dying produced many literary monuments that express this point of view. Among them are personal directives. These directives tend to be disarming in the dispassionate way they gaze at oncoming death. They are matter-of-fact in the way they dispose of temporal goods and they are always chiefly concerned with spiritual matters, for they recognize, with Suso and the Ars Moriendi, that the best way to prepare for the first death is to prepare for the second death: for the second death holds no power over those who, through endurance, share in the resurrection of Christ (Rev. 20:6).

When Edwards knew he was dying, he wrote his directive to his beloved daughter Lucy, who was attending him.

Dear Lucy, it seems to me to be the will of God that I must shortly leave you; therefore give my kindest love to my dear wife, and tell her, that the uncommon union, which has so long subsisted between us, has been of such a nature, as I trust is spiritual, and therefore will continue forever: and I hope she will be supported under so great a trial, and submit cheerfully to the will of God. And as to my children, you are now like to be left fatherless, which I hope will be an inducement to you all to seek a Father, who will never fail you. And as to my funeral, I would have it be like Mr. Burr’s; and any additional sum of money that might be expected to be laid out that way, I would have it disposed of to charitable uses. (Marsden, 494)

Edwards had lived his Christian life with death in mind; and the little directive he wrote therefore has little sense of urgency. There is a sadness about leaving loved ones behind, no doubt; but there is no need for a last-minute turn of face or an urgent phone call. His directive was not, as we tend to suppose, what made him ready for death; it was, rather a testimony to his long-standing readiness as one who knew well the “arte and crafte” of dying well.

Plagues and protocols come and go; as conceived along a chronological access, time simply moves on, consigning the past to oblivion. As it is conceived liturgically, though, time mercifully returns to us, in a form which is ordered by the Church and ordered for our life in God. Lent too comes and it goes; but it also returns. And as it returns it invites Christians to inhabit their mortality. It begins with the words “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” and ends with the words “it is finished.” As it carries us along it asks us to fix our eyes upon the man on the cross. But it doesn’t merely end in his death; there were two others who died on Golgotha, though only one was found to be prepared for what would follow. Since ancient times Christians have seen the two thieves as figures which encompass the entirety of the human race, and they have traced Jesus’ steps through Lent in preparation for the death that they knew was coming to him and to them, only weeks, then days, then moments away.

Since ancient times Christians have also assumed, with Suso and the Ars Moriendi that there is invariably something intractably ascetical about this participation in the death of Christ. The self-denial inherent in the traditional practices of fasting, almsgiving, and prayer is about more than living well.Around a thousand people in America continue to die every day from COVID-19; the plague, however, shows little sign of having altered our entrenched denial of death. Perhaps the time for masks has passed; we are tired of them, understandably so. Yet there can be no doubt that we need the presence of tangible reminders of our mortality up in the face. Lent was designed to be just this.This Lent the invitation to live into the scriptural truth that there is a time to be born and a time to die returns again to each one of us, and with it comes the opportunity to learn the “arte and crafte” of dying well.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16)

It is, surely, one of the universal experiences of fatherhood. After a day at the beach, a quick trip to the park, or an afternoon in the backyard comes the quiet request: “This, Daddy.” This rock, that is, or sometimes, this seashell, or this piece of weather-worn glass. Sometimes the request is, rather, “These, Daddy.” But the father, in these instances, is of course wrong to dismiss this small assortment of objects as “just a handful of rocks.” Each individual rock has been chosen with care. “These,” in this case, must be translated: “This and this and this.” And the care with which each has been chosen now becomes, in this simple request, a detailed imperative: “The care with which I have selected each one, with its distinct properties, now demands the same affection from you as I entrust you with the urgent task of safekeeping.”

This intimate exchange testifies to the remarkable (perhaps innate) wonder that children attribute to the existence of individual things. This sense of wonder often shrivels up with the coming of adulthood. If they still have it as adults, Christians often express it in the form of a cosmological argument. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that this argument is based upon the basic human experience of wonder and “arises from human curiosity as to why there is something rather than nothing or than something else.” The argument can be traced through the work of Plato and Aristotle, Ibn Sina, and Thomas Aquinas, into the modern age. In the 18th century it was defended by greats such as Leibniz and Clarke, and deconstructed by the cogent arguments of Hume and Kant. In the modern West, however, the argument is most well-known through the more accessible work of the liberal Anglican cleric William Paley (1743-1805). It was Paley’s version of the cosmological argument that Darwin ultimately rejected as he migrated from a position his detractors continue to embrace today, intelligent design, to a tired agnosticism.

The rhetorical success of Paley’s version of the argument, first published in his Natural Theology (1802), has much to do with the great strides that had been made in the realm of natural philosophy, thanks in large part due to the incremental improvements in the realm of scientific instrumentation. The wonder with which 18th-century Christians beheld, as never before, the microscopic and cosmic dimensions of the universe was leveraged by Paley’s apologetic. Paley, following Joseph Butler, relied on several analogies to defend the Christian faith. The most famous of these was his watchmaker argument, an analogy which remained popular enough among conservative Christians to warrant a vitriolic counterblast by Richard Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker (1986).

While the continued debate over the merits of Paley’s argument gives the impression that his was a cutting-edge and distinctly modern innovation, it belongs rather within what Collingwood perceptively called the Renaissance view of the world. This view, associated especially with Descartes and Newton, took for granted that the universe is a well-oiled machine, which may or may not need its Creator to give it a boost through the periodical injection of motion or energy. Newton and his disciples had deployed the great advances in cosmology to full apologetic effect, flirting even with the idea that Newton’s mathematical demonstration of universal gravitation confirmed it to be the very hand of God. Paley’s watch–which is a figure of Newton’s cosmos–is expected to generate wonder both because of its mathematically precise movements and because of its complexity. Paley’s watch is an intricate machine, whose movements are marked by exactitude, and whose intricacy and exactitude presupposes the existence of a watchmaker God.

One of the important answers that must be demanded of Paley’s analogy is whether it relies upon an apprehension of complexity. If you walked through a field and stumbled upon a watch upon the ground, you would take for granted the existence of a watchmaker, so the argument goes. But if you stumbled upon a small rock as you walked, would you be equally compelled to assume that there must have been a rock-maker? Paley thought the answer was “no.” Indeed, he set up his watchmaker argument by pointing out that the person who stumbles upon a stone might fairly suppose that it had, happenstance, lain there forever. But if Paley is right about this then it follows that theism is buttressed not merely by scientific and technological advances but by the widespread apprehension of these advances, when in fact our culture–the most scientifically and technologically advanced and informed in history–is also the most atheistic.

If he is wrong about the rock, though, then Paley’s apologetic conceals its banality with florid rhetoric–there is no need for either his intricate argument or his intricate watch. Assuming, for the moment, that the rock demands an explanation as well as the watch, the argument from complexity might be reintroduced on the basis of an appeal to something like quantum physics. After all, the sub-atomic complexity of a rock is analogous to that of a watch. But the person who comes across the rock can succumb to wonder without any knowledge of quantum physics, and my daughter is a case in point. In other words, the apparent simplicity of the rock does not obscure its ability to procure wonder. Indeed, it may well be that Paley would have been more compelling had he offered a rock-maker argument. His watchmaker argument presupposes that it is the material attributes of the object in question, and especially the most impressive ones, which generate the cosmological argument, and in this he obscures that which is most impressive about the object in question.

Sometimes the rocks my daughter carefully places in my hand are colorful or shiny or smooth. Other times they hold no apparent distinction, surprisingly nondescript. These unimpressive rocks help me to understand my daughter’s psychology and her juvenile cosmological argument. What a rock is, whether vibrant or plain, is a wonder in itself. But what it is is also a hook which leads her on to an even greater wonder. For her, what is most impressive about the rock is that it is, at all, and that as it is, at all, it is this rock and not some other one.

One of the most profound aspects of the epoch-making Toy Story franchise is the distinction it incessantly presses between two kinds of toys. There are, on one hand, the toys that have been abandoned to the dumpster, the local daycare, or the local antique shop. On the other, there are the beloved toys of the individual child. Woody, the talking pull-string cowboy, forcefully highlights this distinction throughout the movies. He, above all the others, seems to understand that his vocation, as a toy, is to be beheld and loved by a child. At the end of the fourth movie, however, Woody comes to the grim realization that he is no longer beheld or loved, and, in a staggering about-face, he sets off in pursuit of his own liberated happiness. This about-face is more than just a rejection of the franchise’s charming portrayal of what might be called “family values” — the safety of the nuclear family, the value of children, and the joy of sharing in friendship and community. It is an ominous Promethean rejection of a remarkably Christian understanding of created identity and vocation.

A watch may or may not objectively testify to the existence of a watchmaker in the way that a rock gives tribute to a Creator-God. But a rock that is beheld and loved by a child testifies to the existence of a Creator God in a way that a cast-away watch or toy never could. For the immeasurable worth of this particular rock cannot be accounted for just by looking into its physical properties; it can only be understood when it is beheld as an object of peculiar affection.

The mother whose child has suddenly grown up and left for college leaves her son’s room just as he left it for as long as possible; and she holds onto his favorite shirt, maybe in order to pass it along to a hypothetical grandchild, but mostly because she understands the great significance it holds as an object of affection, an affection which somehow instills in it the immeasurable worth of the one who has lately loved it. This mother senses, intuitively, that my daughter’s cosmological argument is far more compelling that Paley’s. And it is more compelling, since it sees that while knowledge puffs up, love builds up (1 Cor. 13:4), for love is strong as death (Song 8:6). The one who supposes that the death of one who dies alone and therefore without human affection is still, because it is just this person’s death but also because it is an immeasurable loss, writ large, will have to acknowledge the superiority of my daughter’s cosmological argument too. As will anyone who supposes that the conflagration of the world would also be an unspeakable tragedy quite apart from the loss that this would incur for any living or future organism. The point isn’t just that the world is; the point is that it is loved: therefore, God exists.

As I do the laundry I must proceed more reverently as I decide what to do with the assortment of curiosities I discover in the linings of my pockets.