Helmut Thielicke (via Alan Jacobs):

You will never learn who Jesus Christ is by reflecting upon whether there is such a thing as sonship or virgin birth or miracle. Who Jesus Christ is you learn from your imprisoned, hungry, distressed brothers. For it is in them that he meets us. He is always in the depths. And we shall draw near to these brethren only if we open our eyes to see the misery around us. And we can open our eyes only when we love. But we cannot go and do and love, if we stop and ask first, “Who is my neighbor?” The devil has been waiting for us to ask this question; and he will always whisper into our ears only the most convenient answers. We human beings always fall for the easiest answers. No, we can love only if we have the mind of Jesus and turn the lawyer’s question around. Then we shall ask not “Who is my neighbor?” but “To whom am I a neighbor? Who is laid at my door? Who is expecting help from me and who looks upon me as his neighbor?” This reversal of the question is precisely the point of the parable.

Anybody who loves must always be prepared to have his plans interrupted. We must be ready to be surprised by tasks which God sets for us today. God is always compelling us to improvise. For God’s tasks always have about them something surprising and unexpected, and this imprisoned, wounded, distressed brother, in whom the Saviour meets us, is always turning up on our path just at the time when we are about to do something else, just when we are occupied with altogether different duties. God is always a God of surprises, not only in the way in which he helps us — for God’s help too always comes from unexpected directions — but also in the manner in which he confronts me with tasks to perform and sends people across my path.

Thielicke’s words on the parable of ‘The Good Samaritan’ bring two things to mind.

1. Some time ago, I wrote on Ivan Illich’s interpretation of this same parable here. Illich makes the point that hospitality is not owed out of obligation, particular to ethnic constraints but is, rather, “A free creation between two people.” The sense of “a free creation” seems to suggest that hospitality is gift, an aspect of the given life. In this way, I find a great connection between how Thielicke talks of “This reversal of the question,” into “To whom am I a neighbor” and Illich’s “free creation”.

2. The second thing might be joined to the first by tracing a theme of improvisation (more on this later). “God’s tasks,” says Thielicke, “Always have about them something surprising and unexpected.” In this way God calls us to improvise. Often we take the opportunity for improvisation as an inturruption to the planned form we fantasize our days to hold. Some time ago, I posted some quotations about ‘time managment’ here. one of those quotes came from CS Lewis who had a lot to say about how the present moment is the place where we make contact with eterninty and encounter the grace sufficient for the time. About work ‘interruptions’ he says this:

The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own’, or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life – the life God is sending one day by day.

Ivan Illich via L.M. Sacassas:

I would like to get … people to think about what tools do to our perception rather than what we can do with them … how their use shapes our perception of reality, rather than how we shape reality by applying or using them. In other words, I’m interested in the symbolic fallout of tools, and how this fallout is reflected in the sacramental tool structure of the world.

Carl Truman mentioned the Benedict Option in a podcast interview I heard recently. It led me to see what he’s written on the subject. I found a helpful shortlist Truman made after hearing a talk that Rod Dreher gave on the topic. I want to highlight the one point I heard mentioned on the podcast but here is the whole list:

• Conventional politics will not save us. Nota bene: This is not the same as saying that political engagement must cease. It is simply a claim about the limited expectations we should have regarding political engagement, particularly at the national level.
• The church is not the world. As Rod merely agrees with Jesus on this point, it should not be too controversial.
• Christians must retrieve their own traditions as the fundamental sources of their identities. Again, with the Apostle Paul on his side here, Rod is hardly breaking dangerous new ground.
• Christians must prioritize the local community as their sphere of action. Once more, nota bene: This is not, repeat not, the same as saying that Christians should head for the hills. It is simply to say that they should be far more concerned for what is happening in their neighborhood than on Capitol Hill.
• What we face is not a struggle within a culture but, strictly speaking, a clash of alternative cultures. This is where the language of the end of the culture war needs to be understood correctly. It is not that we are to surrender to the dominant culture. It is rather that we are to model an alternative culture. And we are to do so first in our local communities.

I couldn’t help but think that Ivan Illich had the same sort of Christian resoponse in mind when he made the case that we should take on the culture war with friendship and hospitality (A theme I mention here).

Today, I want the framework of my consumptive desires visible. I want to denaturalize the compulsion to soothe myself through consumption — make it strange and ridiculous. I want to continually name the script in my head and, in so doing, chip away at its power over me. I want to do all of this without shaming myself or others, because it takes years to unlearn a learned behavior this invasive, this robust. The problem isn’t buying shit, at least not exactly. It’s misidentifying, again and again, the source and character of our sadness.

This from Anne Helen Petersen’s Cultre Study describes the individual, existential game each of us must play with our needs and desires. It connected with something else I heard from Michael Sacasas on The Outsider Theory podcast. He says that we would be well served to “Reconfigure what we think we need.” He says that the historian Ivan Illich worked to catalog a history of needs and pinned a critique on modern institutions generation of neediness that “generates a demand for themselves.” Illich’s books Deschoolong Society and Medical Nemesis offer this perspective on generated needs in education and healthcare. His human-scale countermeasure for how to subvert the modern, neediness project is friendship and hospitality.

Anne Helen Petersen recognized her need for what she names as “community” when she was worn down from over work, travel, and found herself with the impulse to medicate with consumption of goods. She vectors toward a similar cure. I would make a distinction between “community” in general and frienships constituted of hospitality. For this distiction I will channel Illich. Hospitality, he says, is “A free cration between two people.”

Illich arrives at this defenition by his study of Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan. In his study, he comes back to the importance of the question that initiates Jesus’ telling of the story, “Who is my neighbor?” He explains the grammatical-historical context of the parable and the distinct point that Jesus is making.

This doctrine about the neighbor, which Jesus proposes, is utterly destructive of ordinary decency, of what had, until then, been understood as ethical behavior… In antiquity, hospitable behavior, or full commitment in my action to the other, implies a boundary drawn around those to whom I can behave in this way. The Greeks recognized a duty of hospitality towards xenoi, strangers who spoke a Hellenic language, but not towards barbaroi. Jesus taught the Pharisees that the relationship which he had come to announce to them as most completely human is not one that is expected, required, or owed. It can only be a free creation between two people, and one which cannot happen unless something comes to me through the other, by the other, in his bodily presence. ¹

It seems to me that “The source and character of our sadness” that AHP invokes in her astute observation of modern human, consuptive habits, might have something to do with our longing to host in the way that costs us something. What might be more unsettling is the thought that our own hospitality finds its seat at the table of the self-sacraficial love feast God has spread in the manumition from sin and death, the resurrection feast. “…Something comes to me through the other, by the other, in his bodily presence.”

In order that a new asceticism of reading may come to flower, we must first recognize that the bookish “classical” reading of the last 450 years is only one among several ways of using alphabetical techniques…I have not written this book to make a learned contribution. I wrote it to offer a guide to a vantage point in the past from which I have gained new insights into the present. No one should be misled into taking my footnotes as either proof of, or invitation to, scholarship. They are here to remind the reader of the rich harvest of memorabilia—rocks, fauna, and flora—which a man has picked up on repeated walks through a certain area, and now would like to share with others. They are here mainly to encourage the reader to venture into the shelves of the library and experiment with distinct types of reading.

—Illich, Ivan. In the vineyard of the text : a commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993 (p3 and 5).

I wish more folks, including myself, thought of footnotes this way!