My great spiritual ideal is John XXIII. He was a big, roly-poly guy who, while vicar in Turkey, signed fake passports for Jews, allowing them to escape. One of my favorite pictures in the world is of him with a wine glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other. As Pope, he said, "See everything, overlook much, correct a little." He opened up the world in a way ascetics don't. At the same time, the Desert Fathers are very compelling to me, though I don't want my kids to be Desert Fathers. I don't want to be a Desert Father. I want to go to the movies. I want dogs. But if you get rid of the ascetic, everything tends toward a middle ground of comfort and well-being, and you end up with Dr. Phil. I don't want that either.
There are calls on the right and left -- both in different ways -- for more religious literacy. Are you, like those, urging people to know the Bible better?
It depends on what you mean by "know." Fundamentalists know yards of scripture. They've memorized it. They've clearly read it a lot. But how do they read? I would like people to read better rather than reading more. We have some fantasy that, at some point in history, things were fixed and therefore life was easier. The Gospels are not fixed, they're complicated and contradictory. A lot of the evil in the world comes from not being able to endure the pain of contradiction. Rather than endure it, people act violently, because anger and aggression cut out contradiction. They say, "We've lost something." But reading the Gospels carefully and openly means blasting through a fantasy of stability that never was.
At the end, you insist on remaining in the question rather than the answer. But aren't there times when one needs some kind of answer, when a question isn't enough?
What would the answer be? Jesus was a failure. He died on the cross. He died like a criminal. How can there be an answer to why human beings suffer? There's no good answer to that. There are only a series of bad answers: because it will all be all right after death, or because God knows better. That stinks. The only good answer to the problem of human suffering is, "I don't know." "I hope." "Love unto death." I would rather be in uncertainty than a false fixity, as painful as that is. To have an answer to meaninglessness, or to the mystery of suffering, is a little disgusting. It betrays those who have been betrayed. It betrays the innocent who have suffered. It betrays abused children. It betrays children who were born with horrible diseases and will only suffer and die. It betrays the starving. It betrays abused women. Jesus is a model of someone who suffers grotesquely. His model is of accompaniment rather than comprehension.
This article was first published by Religion Dispatches, a Patheos Partner, and is reprinted with permission.
Nathan Schneider is senior editor of the online religion magazine Killing the Buddha and a founding editor of the blog Waging Nonviolence. Visit his website at The Row Boat.
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