Don’t underestimate the power of your speech! Now, Western culture is phallogocentric. Let’s say it... It is predicated on the idea of the Logos. The Logos is the sacred element of Western culture. What does that mean? It means that your capacity for speech is divine. It is the thing that generates order from chaos. And then sometimes turns pathological order into chaos when it has to.

Don’t underestimate the power of truth. There is nothing more powerful [than the truth]. Now in order to speak what you might regard as the truth, you have to let go of the outcome. You have to think, alright, I’m going to say what I think. Stupid as I am. Biased as I am. Ignorant as I am. I am going to state what I think as clearly as I can, and I am going to live with the consequences no matter what they are.

Now the reason that you think that, that’s an element of faith. The idea is that nothing brings a better world into being than the stated truth. You might have to pay a price for that. But that’s fine. You’re going to pay a price for every bloody thing you do. And everything you don’t do. You don’t get to choose to not pay a price. You get to choose which poison you’re going to take. That’s it. So if you’re going to stand up for something, stand up for your truth.

We [he and his wife] asked about that. That’s not me. This was also one of those places where the literal and the metaphorical stacked, and when that happens, I watch. The first thing was, I didn’t know I was in the Emmanuel Centre.

Which is a church, obviously…

Right, and it’s a huge circle. So, I’m in the Emmanuel Centre in London, isn’t that interesting? And then I walked out there, and there was this Wizard of Oz thing and there was a halo, and I thought, “Jesus Christ, what the hell is up with this, man? There is something going on here.” So I said, “Look, Tam, I need to figure out how this happened, because I need to know.”

Dogmatic belief in the central axioms of Christianity (that Christ’s crucifixion redeemed the world; that salvation was reserved for the hereafter; that salvation could not be achieved through works) had three mutually reinforcing consequences: First, devaluation of the significance of earthly life, as only the hereafter mattered. This also meant that it had become acceptable to overlook and shirk responsibility for the suffering that existed in the here-and-now; Second, passive acceptance of the status quo, because salvation could not be earned in any case through effort in this life (a consequence that Marx also derided, with his proposition that religion was the opiate of the masses); and, finally, third, the right of the believer to reject any real moral burden (outside of the stated belief in salvation through Christ), because the Son of God had already done all the important work.

The Christian church described by the Grand Inquisitor [in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov] is the same church pilloried by Nietzsche. Childish, sanctimonious, patriarchal, servant of the state, that church is everything rotten still objected to by modern critics of Christianity.

The dogma of the Church was undermined by the spirit of truth strongly developed by the Church itself. That undermining culminated in the death of God. But the dogmatic structure of the Church was a necessary disciplinary structure. A long period of unfreedom—adherence to a singular interpretive structure—is necessary for the development of a free mind. Christian dogma [about which Jordan seems to know very little, just saying] provided that unfreedom. But the dogma is dead, at least to the modern Western mind. It perished along with God. What has emerged from behind its corpse, however—and this is an issue of central importance—is something even more dead; something that was never alive, even in the past: nihilism, as well as an equally dangerous susceptibility to new, totalizing, utopian ideas.

You can know that something is wrong or right without knowing why. Your entire Being can tell you something that you can neither explain nor articulate. Every person is too complex to know themselves completely, and we all contain wisdom that we cannot comprehend.

So, simply stop, when you apprehend, however dimly, that you should stop. Stop acting in that particular, despicable manner. Stop saying those things that make you weak and ashamed. Say only those things that make you strong. Do only those things that you could speak of with honour.

from Homer to Wilhelm Busch written out from the memories of many inmates on the paper from cement sacks. Their cement sack anthology was copied by others onto cigarette paper (with poppy-seed pencils), bound in remnants of the prison clothes of released comrades, and formed into little volumes, hand-size, that circulated and remained in demand. Eventually he translated poems of Pushkin and Lermontov into German, also writing them out onto cigarette paper. He credited the poetry with keeping him alive in an atmosphere in which the will to live was as important to survival as food, shelter, and freedom from attack.... “Happiness” was in poems; it was also in his work in a quarry splitting stones with wedge and sledgehammer. The two together—mind work and handwork—brewed an “elixir of life.”

*





I get it. Much of what Jordan says is inspiring. Man up. Clean your room. Sort yourself out. But what kept me going this time last year , when the whole world was coming for Milo and I got caught in the storm with him was not the thought that I was able by speaking the truth to give shape to reality, but the faith that reality was not dependent on me, but on Him.





What kept me going was the knowledge that whatever I was going through, He had suffered worse. The betrayal of his closest friends. The ridicule of his followers. The injustice of being accused of the worst imaginable crimes. The despite of all when he was innocent. The fear of being forsaken even by God.





What hubris to imagine that it was somehow up to me to fix everything! That anything I could do on my own strength would bring order to the world, even in my own soul. The best I could do was to be willing to suffer—and trust—that He loved me and cared for me, and to be willing to learn what it was that He was trying to teach me by giving me the courage to stand firm.





Jordan, again:

The Word that produces order from Chaos sacrifices everything, even itself, to God. That single sentence, wise beyond comprehension, sums up Christianity.

No, Jordan, it doesn’t. This one does:

For God so loved the world, as to give his only begotten Son; that whosoever believeth in him, may not perish, but may have life everlasting. — John 3:16