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Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Life in Compartments

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Ravi Z

It is similar to the parent who defers the questioning child with the evocation to “go ask” the other parent.  Professors who have dedicated their lives to the study of a particular subject are not fond of venturing into unrelated territories. So the student who asks a theological question in economics class is told to ask his theology professor, and the student who asks an economic question in theology class is told to ask his economics professor. The admonishment is laced with the not-so subtle, though common and accepted, language of specialization, privatization, and compartmentalization—namely, stick to the subject at hand and keep these things properly separated.

Undergraduate professor of theology William Cavanaugh is aware of the academic phenomenon of deflecting such questions, the cultural milieu that encourages compartmentalization, and the natural tendency of students to rebel against it. He sees in students an authentic discomfort with the idea that we need to compartmentalize our lives, a bold awareness that our culturally growing drive to keep politics from theology or theology from finance and religion from law doesn’t actually work. “I think they have a very good and real sense,” notes Cavanaugh, “that in real life things are not separated: that the way you buy has a lot to do with the way you worship and who you worship and what you worship.”(1) Cavanaugh encourages this awareness by commending the kinds of questions that recognize compartmentalization as unlivable, and by doing the historical work that shows this notion of separable entities as a modern, credulous construction in the first place.

Compartmentalization of religion may well be a way of coping with a world that wants to keep the confusion of many religions out of the public square, but it is evident that it is not a very good coping mechanism. Each isolated discipline wants to discuss on some authentic level the good or benefit of all as it pertains to their subjects. And yet they somehow want to bracket any and all questions that might lean too closely toward things of a spiritual nature—purpose, meaning, human nature, morality. While such restrictions might successfully allow us to avoid stepping too closely to religion, in the fancy footwork it takes to do so, we end up sidestepping the actual subject at hand as well.

On the opposite side of these contemporary fences, spirituality is restricted to private realms, personal thoughts, or a single day in the week, and thus becomes far more like one of life’s many commodities than an all-encompassing rule of life. Separated from the world of bodies and societies, the world of hearts and souls is not seen as appropriate or even capable of informing our understanding of business or capitalism, the principles behind our daily choices, how we live, what we buy, or what we eat. The presuppositions here are equally destructive of the true identity of the thing we have compartmentalized.  Held tightly in such compartments, the Christian way ceases to be a way at all.

But what if our categories are wrong? If our compartments merely confuse and obscure, failing to be the coping mechanisms we think they are, will we remove them? And what does life look like without such divisions? What if Christianity is not a category of thought at all, a set of beliefs, or a religion that can be privatized without becoming something else entirely? What if the life of faith is not about what we think or what we do, but who we are? Such a way would exist over and above every category of thought, every compartment and realm.

In fact, long before theology was ushered out of the public square, out of politics, economics, and the sciences, it was considered to be the highest science, the study of the rational Mind behind our own rational minds. It was the discipline that made sense of every other discipline, the subject that united every subject. Such a perspective is inherently foreign to the contemporary mindset, the “history” of theology and science remembered quite differently. But it cannot be shooed away like a meddling religion or deferred like an unwanted question without dismissing some sense of cohesion—and without dismissing Christ himself. His very life is a refutation of compartmentalized thought, belief, and action. His cross was neither public nor private; it spanned both, and every century following its own.

In dire contrast to the harried and highfalutin rules of compartmentalization, Jesus’s rule of life was undivided and down-to-earth, pertaining indivisibly to hearts and souls, bodies and societies. He paid theologically-informed attention to every day and everyday lives, and the institutions, ideologies, and systems that shaped them. He went to his death showing the inseparable nature of the spiritual and the physical, in who we are, how we live, and what we believe. Those who follow him to the cross do so similarly.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) William Cavanaugh with Ken Myers, Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 95, Jan/Feb 2009.

 

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Silent and Empty

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Gordon Hempton is of the opinion that you can count on one hand the places in the United States where you can sit for twenty minutes without hearing a generator, a plane, or some other mechanized sound. (His estimation is all the more dreary for Europe.) As an audio ecologist, Hempton has traveled the world for more than twenty-five years searching for silence, measuring the decibels in hundreds of places, and recording the sharp decline of the sounds of nature. ”I don’t want the absence of sound,” he tells one interviewer of his search. “I want the absence of noise.”  Adding, “Listening is worship.”(1)

For the Christian church, Holy Week begins a time of silence, a week of sitting in the dark with the jarring events from the triumphal entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem to the march of Christ to the grave. Holy Week moves the world through the shouts of Palm Sunday to the empty space of Holy Saturday. Though the Christian story clearly and loudly ends on the note of triumph and resurrection, there is a great silence in between, a great darkness the church curiously believes it is necessary to sit with.

Writing of Holy Saturday, the day most marked with this silence, theology professor Alan Lewis says of the Christian story: ”Ironically, the center of the drama itself is an empty space. All the action and emotion, it seems, belong to two days only: despair and joy, dark and light, defeat and victory, the end and the beginning, evenly distributed in vivid contrast between what humanity did to Jesus on the first day and what God did for him on the third… [Yet] between the crucifying and the raising there is interposed a brief, inert void: a nonevent surely—only a time of waiting in which nothing of significance occurs and of which there is little to be said. It is rare to hear a sermon about Easter Saturday; for much of Christian history the day has found no place in liturgy and worship it could call its own.”(2)

Perhaps this is because the world is generally uncomfortable with silence, uncomforted by waiting. And who can understand a messiah who stands at the crossroads of an identity as a deliverer, a political hero who could fight with force for our salvation and that of a servant, a messiah who chooses intentional suffering, who chooses to walk us through darkness on the way to redemption. If Holy Week is filled with events that silence all in disbelief, Holy Saturday levels us with the silence and emptiness that is the end of God.

Yet Holy Week attempts to prepare the world precisely for this silence. For certainly, here, after the end of God on Easter Saturday, we find not only the absence of sound, the absence of noise, but a vision of the world’s end—tipping the scales to despair and doubt, giving into suspicions that history is meaningless, evil in control, and our futures perilous. Such silence is one in which some can only manage a redirected cry for “Hosanna,” a reiterating of the lighthearted cheers of Palm Sunday, a desperate prayer for a Messiah to save us now, to deliver us from this evil and emptiness, from our suspicions and fear.

Such is indeed the cry of the Christian.

Professor and psychologist James Loder tells of the case of Willa, a young adult who was hospitalized and classified as schizophrenic of an undifferentiated type. She was born into a home where she was unwanted and abused. She was a bright child, but everyone took advantage of her such that she grew up with no sense of boundary or healthy relationships. Tragically, the very individuals who pledged to help her also became stories of abuse in her life. She was in the second year of graduate school when she finally broke down and could not finish her examinations.

In the hospital, she sat for hours rocking her doll and staring into space. The head nurse on the floor told Dr. Loder that they expected Willa would never leave the hospital. One day, however, while she was sitting in her chair, someone came up behind her, put arms around her and said, “The silence is not empty; there is purpose for your life.” She turned around, but there was no one there. The power of that experience began to build sanity, and to distinguish illusion from reality. While no one thought she would ever leave the hospital, she was released after three weeks. She was eventually baptized and returned to the profession for which she was training. Commenting on this encounter with God in the silence when all else seems lost, Loder writes: “The intimacy of the Spirit runs deeper than family violence and neglect, and has immense restorative power.”(3) The intimacy of God—even unto death—runs deeper than silence.

This is the story Holy Week sets before the world this week. There is much to listen for in between the crucifying and the raising. There is always much silence and darkness to sit with, but we are amiss to call it empty.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Diane Daniel, “Listening is worship,” Ode Magazine, July 2008.

(2) Alan E. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection:  A Theology of Holy Saturday (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 1.

(3) Story as told by James Loder, The Logic of the Spirit (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998), 264-265.