God be merciful on me: a couch potato
Last January, I was a few months away from finishing my four years in the religious studies program here at Trinity Western University.
As I started to settle into the semester, an event thousands of miles away forced me to begin the process of confronting a very stark reality that I had been trying to ignore for quite some time. The earthquake that shook Haiti rattled me out of my comfortable academic career in theology.
Theology had become my safe haven from the realities of life, like suffering and pain. I felt helpless watching images on TV knowing I had to read a few more chapters for classes that seemed utterly irrelevant in comparison to practical acts of service.
You’ve probably heard it said that the greatest distance in the world is 16 or so inches: from the head to the heart. I couldn’t agree more. But I also would say that another great distance is about another 30 inches if you have long arms like me: from the heart to the hands. My personality makes it very difficult to connect these essential aspects of living a fully human life: thought, love, and action.
Sadly, I have used thus theological training to become a bit of a theological couch potato, and I take full responsibility. I can speak eloquently about various theological issues like the Incarnation or the Trinity, but when it comes to make these theological “ideas” a reality in my life, well, let’s just say it’s less that stellar.
In other words, I have lots of “thoughts,” however; “action” and “love” trail far behind. I can think, but I have a difficult time doing. It is far more comfortable, safe, and easy to sit in my Ivory Tower, waxing lyrically about Chalcedon or Chrysostom. I can avoid the challenges of living a more fully human life, one that requires me to be vulnerable and tested by the world around me; one that requires me to incarnate what I am thinking. On occasion, things like Haiti jolt me out of my theological slumber and I realize that the Christian life is also one of service.
But there is hope. Last Christmas, I read a chapter that extolled the vigorous intellectual life of the early Christian Fathers. But this author didn’t quit there. He went on to demonstrate how many of the early Christians had beautifully married a life of holiness and service with a life of the mind.
The theologian John Chrysostom was an impressive theologian who was clearly blessed with a deep and reflective intellect. But he was also a bishop in Greece who was tasked with caring for orphans, widows and the poor. If we look at the great saints, of the Christian tradition throughout the past 2,000 years, we can’t help but notice that this marriage of thought and action is prevalent in the lives of many of them.
Moreover, Jesus himself is the Incarnation of God’s logos, his reason or word; in other words, Jesus is the embodiment of what God thought or spoke. It sounds strange, I know, and I’m still trying to wrap my head even an inch around it. God shows us how to live: Jesus himself is God’s intellect in the flesh. God spoke and something happened: the Incarnation. It was a “speech-act,” some theologians have said. As one who claimed to be Truth himself, Jesus also demonstrates how theory (truth) becomes personal and practical.
This doesn’t negate learning how to reason or, how to do some good old-fashioned thinking. Action must be accompanied with good thinking as much as good thinking needs to become action. We need people who can think, which is why I haven’t sold everything and moved to a leper colony; but we also need to be people who think and act — who speak and act. Hans Urs von Balthsar writes that “the complete concept of truth, in which the gospel offers us, consists precisely in this living exposition of theory in practice and of knowledge carried into action.”
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