Saturday, September 06, 2003
(11:22 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Ministry of Holding One's Tongue
My title is one of the section headings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Life Together,* a reading for my class on Bonhoeffer and a new addition to the informal "Kotsko's List of Recommended Books." Throughout, he insists that the community he is describing is not some high ideal to strive for, but a living reality -- a reality that takes work to maintain, but something God has for believers in the here and now. It is an imposing discipline, setting up the Christian household as a kind of self-contained monastery preparing its members for life out in the world. A regular discipline of communal prayer, structured and lengthy Scripture readings, singing of hymns (only in unison), and private spiritual meditations equip one for a day of hard labor, punctuated and concluded by prayer.
In my own private life, I somehow managed to fall into patterns that are similar to those outlined by Bonhoeffer, mainly through following the simplified layman's version of the Catholic Church's Liturgy of Hours. The imposing thing is the idea of following this discipline with other people, which would also be known as The Entire Point. No more compressed versions if I decided I was in a hurry or if I got up late; no more dispensing with it at inconvenient times; no more speed-reading disguised as prayer. The burden of really living in community is considerable. There's all this overhead that a life alone just does not carry with it.
My only problem with this is that, taken in isolation, the spiritual disciplines contained herein might fulfill Weber's critique of Protestantism vis-a-vis capitalism (repeated in our day with Zizek's criticism of the explosion of interest in Eastern religions) -- the prayers help one to be a good worker (without any real reference to the content of that work), and the work helps one to pray. One can see here the seeds of big corporations whose members participate in morning Bible studies, up to and including the rather farcical White House Bible study sessions before the day's business of Keeping America Great. Admittedly, I have not finished the whole book as of yet, and admittedly, Bonhoeffer did suffer martyrdom at the hands of the Nazis due to the character of his "work," but this seems to be a possible pitfall of all heavily Reformation-oriented spiritual disciplines -- a modern formalism that I think is tied to an individualism that does not take seriously enough the doctrine of the Trinity. That is material for a future post. Now I have to actually finish the book. Hopefully there is someone out there in comment-land who knows more of Bonhoeffer than I, or who has access to this book and will read it at my prompting -- it is actually very short, and you could probably read it reasonably well in an afternoon.
* Note: It is no wonder that Amazon is one of the few companies to come out of the dot-com boom and begin turning actual profits: virtually everyone with a web page, at one point or another, provides them with free advertising.
