In the wake of Geneva College’s annual (and awesome) Bitar Memorial Lectures, I return to a subject I have spoken of before—the stuff of the world, and how we value it.  –And, somehow, how we taste that value.

Jamie Smith (philosopher at Calvin) presented two lectures from his forthcoming (once-removed!) book, arguing that humans are never secular, despite the prevailing absence of belief in God, if you train your “radar dish” to pick up, not belief content but rather practices. He defined “liturgies” as rituals of ultimate concern. He suggested that the locus of liturgical practice is the realm of the precognitive orientation of our being—that most primordial way each of us construes our world, that is who we are, and that shapes the way we “world.” A couple other features of that fundamental “attunement” are that it is bodily-rooted, and that it has the dynamic of love, or care, as we orient to the world.  (Yes, you should be hearing something Heideggerish here.) Humans are liturgical animals. In his second lecture Jamie supported his proposals by drawing on postmodern literary pieces (Wallace, Infinite Jest; Baker, The Mezzanine; McCarthy, The Road) which, although belief in God is neither presumed nor entertained, evidence liturgical practice at the core of humanness. And while he didn’t actually say it in these lectures, I think Jamie would say that one corollary of all this is that liturgical practice is a good thing for Christians to engage in for the sake of reshaping our fundamental orientation to the world.

RJ Snell (philosopher at Eastern) both roundly seconded the importance of Jamie’s proposals and also raised the central question: if you find the liturgical everywhere, and thus see all human attunement as religious, do you not make the religious secular, rather than making the secular religious? What is more, isn’t it the case that liturgical acts can only be understood as encounter with the presence of God, even if they do also function as formation?

In their ensuing public conversation, it was evident that each of them was also tacitly displaying a precognitive attunement to the world. As they verbalized it, it had to do with a neo-Calvinian orientation (Jamie), as over against a Thomist one (RJ); but a certain kind of each. The cool thing was that the certain kind of each held uncanny resonance with that of the other; both seemed to love the Augustinian in their traditions. But it appeared that Snell was happy in a more sacramental approach to the world (“It gave me the freedom to embrace and love the world. It is irenic. I don’t have to be afraid of the world.”). And it appeared that Smith, though a liturgical-wannabe, was not ready to abandon a fundamentally neo-Calvinian approach that both affirms both the goodness and religiousness of the world but also its need of more than superficial redirection. Yet he kept using with approval the zesty word, “charged,” from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ famous line: “The earth is charged with the grandeur of God.”

But here’s the question that I have come away pondering: How should a Christian believer be attuned to the world? Does seeing the world as religious inadvertently advert to seeing it as non-religious? And how could a sacramental approach, which I thought was flawed because it didn’t see the world as sacred (only at points), turn out to be that which issues in a reverent enjoyment of the world? How may we have our Smithian cake and our Snellian eating of it too? Or rather, do we not already have our cake and eat it too?

I recall my own first serious engagement with a Kuyperian Calvinian outlook, as I worked through his famous Lectures on Calvinism. The question that preoccupied me then is, I think, just this question. I kept asking of the approach, “So…why do I need to go to church?” If all of life is religious, then church is no more religious than anything else. Of course I knew I need to go to church; I was trying to figure out what the rationale is for it in a neo-Calvinian approach.

I found a helpful metaphor in a translated essay of Herman Bavinck’s: the church is in the world the way the hearth is in the home. The home isn’t the church, and the church isn’t the home. It centers and heats the home. We aren’t meant to live in the fireplace. But the fireplace is in and there for the home. Duality, not dichotomy. Integrality without dispersion. Cool!

I also thought of those human-made ponds near corporate headquarters, in which one single fountain is placed. All the water filters through it and is cleansed for the pond. At church I meet God, and that encounter is what changes me, restores me, makes me a good earth-carer. I think that this integrated duality is what RJ is living out, and what Smith is wanting to live out.

But how does it orient us to love the world—to love “stuff,” as I have written in CGO before? I think it works like this: Jamie is right about humans: we are prototypically, precognitively, oriented in rituals of ultimate concern. But the actual transformative encounter with the divine presence in a central, hearth-like setting forever attunes us to anticipate and in fact experience it everywhere. The world is prototypically, pre-noticeably, oriented to display God—that’s what general revelation just is. Every cell in mitosis is God’s present activity, waiting only for our Scripture-spectacled, Lord-encounter-transformed eyes to “look it back to grace” (Robert Farrar Capon’s incredible phrase).

“I can bless anything!” playfully boasted an octogenarian Episcopal priest friend, in the context of a house blessing in which recently I participated. I think she nailed the truth. We may and should delight in the world, both for its created goodness and for an implicit directedness (also) in the right direction—the way it signposts and longs for and may become the locus for the surprising existential, transformative, inbreaking of God. And all this ingrained deeply, liturgically, in the primordial attunement to the world that we are—precisely because we have been encountered transformatively by the living Christ.

May the Lord encounter you this Holy Week. And then may you taste His inbreaking also in all the buds of spring.