Down yonder, a reader writes:
I asked it once and no one responded, so I will ask again, would you give Christ a copy of Lovecraft’s books if He were standing next to you, and would you tell Him what you have told each other about these books in here? When you stand before Him on judgment day and He asks you why you read books that glorified murder and mayhem, what will you say to Him?
Let’s take this a piece at a time:
would you give Christ a copy of Lovecraft’s books if He were standing next to you
No, because I’d have much more pressing issues to deal with, like falling on my face and worshipping him and begging his forgiveness for everything I have ever done wrong and imploring his assistance for all my future and asking him certain critical pastoral and theological questions that I need the answers to–not to mention asking him what he wants me to do with my very limited time with him, if I’m not imposing on him too much with my worshipping and begging and imploring and asking. I mean, I know that he sometimes went off on his own to pray and so maybe what he really wants from me at the moment is to leave him alone so he can go do that without me being a distraction and I really don’t want to impose on him and so if he wants me to leave him alone all he has to do is say the word and I will be more than happy to do so and I hope he’s not mad at me for rambling on like this in the first place and actually my adrenalin level and heart rate and blood pressure would probably go down if he did just want to go off and pray and I didn’t have to deal with the anxiety of a sudden encounter with God Incarnate and man, oh, man I hope I’m not blowing it already and if I am then I really, really hope he’ll forgive me, because I want to do the right thing and I just haven’t ever had to cope with a situation like this before, but– HAVE MERCY ON ME, O LORD!
This is the natural human reaction to have. In fact, we see people having it even with angels in Scripture (as well as the Risen Christ in Revelation), which is why one of the first things that the visitor has to do when he shows up is to tell the person he’s appearing to to stand up and calm down ("Be not afraid") so he can deliver his message.
This illustration also shows the problem with the test that the reader is proposing.
Essentially, the test is WWYDIJP or "What Would You Do In Jesus’ Presence?"
I don’t think much of this test, or its counterpart WWJD. Neither one of them is a very useful guide for figuring out what one should do.
The problem with WWJD is twofold:
1) What was appropriate for Christ to do and what is appropriate for me to do are not always the same thing. As Lord of the Temple, for example, it may have been okay for him to whip sinners out of it, but that doesn’t mean it would be okay for me to do that.
2) More fundamentally, the test relies on our speculative imagination regarding what Jesus was like and whe he would do, and our imaginations are spectacularly bad in this area. The Gospels just don’t contain enough data for us to picture him fully. Unlike the apostles, we don’t have the benefit of having lived with him for three years and seen how he reacted to countless different situations, including ordinary ones.
We have to rely on our imagination of what Jesus was like, and these invariably lead us astray, either by viewing Jesus as a kind of etherial 2-dimensional icon that isn’t a full 3-dimensional man or–if we do imagine him as a 3-D man, we fill in that third dimension with bits of our own personality and those of our parents and such.
Both of these result in a falsification of who Jesus is.
It is better, when we don’t know what Jesus would do (which is the great majority of the time) to just say, "I don’t know what he would do" than to try to imagine and thus make up what he would do.
The real question that we should be focused on is not what Jesus would do but what he would have us do, and often that means not over-thinking the answer to a question and just going with your instincts.
In fact, "Go with your instincts unless reason tells you otherwise" is the basic paradigm that God built into human nature to guide our actions. He gave us instincts to motivate us to do things, and he gave us reason (including our conscience and the teaching of the Church) as a check on our instincts.
Trying to imagine what Jesus would do is a tool of very limited value (I’m not saying no value) that will lead us in the direction of scrupulosity and over-analysis if we try to employ it on a frequent basis.
The same is true of WWYDIJP.
Our real reactions to what we would do if suddenly confronted with Jesus in physical form are nothing like a reliable guide to what we should do when he is not present in physical form.
The closest guide we have to what that is like is being in Church, where he is present in the sacrament, and there is a certain decorum that is to be maintained in Church–a decorum that would be put on steroids if Jesus stepped out of the sacrament and stood before us in physical form.
There are whole classes of behavior that inappropriate in Church but which are necessary to human life (eating, sleeping, bathing, reproducing, doing your day job, etc., etc., etc.), making it clear that the "What Would You Do In Jesus’ Presence?" (in the Eucharist or in physical form) is just not a good test for whether something is okay for us to do.
In fact, the WWYDIJP test seems to me to be positively pernicious in a way that WWJD may not be, because if we try to use it as a test for what is okay then one of two things will happen: Either (1) we will refuse to do all kinds of things that are okay but inconsistent with the proper reaction to a Theophany or (2) we will degrade our view of what the proper response to a Theophany is by intruding all kinds of things from ordinary life into Theophany-acceptable behavior that really don’t belong in that category.
So as with WWJD, WWYDIJP is usually the WRONG QUESTION to ask.
A much better question is "What would Jesus have me do?" and the answer to that question is always "Go with your instincts unless reason tells you otherwise."
If someone has an instinct that leads them to enjoy suspenseful fiction when the read fiction then this is legitimate unless there is a specific reason why they shouldn’t.
Sometimes there will be a reason not to read a particular kind of ficiton. If it tempts you to sin then you shouldn’t read it. But if it doesn’t tempt you to sin (directly or indirectly by degrading your ethical sensibilities) then I have a hard time imagining another reason it should be avoided in principle (as opposed to being avoided right now because I don’t have the time to devote to it, for example).
Elsewhere in the combox, the same reader argued that Lovecraft’s story Dagon romanticizes suicide and this makes it an occasion of sin. It would be for a person who is already suicidal, but for a person who is not suicidal, Dagon ain’t gonna get ’em into that state.
READ IT FOR YOURSELF.
In fact, as was pointed out by another astute reader in the combox, Dagon does not romanticize suicide–it uses the character’s suicide to underscore how horrible the thing he encountered was–but Romeo & Juliet does romanticize suicide. The suicides of the two main characters in that are depicted as expressions of their love for each other and their unwillingness to live without each other because of how strong their romantic feelings are for each other, and if that ain’t romanticizing suicide then I don’t know what is.
Yet if you aren’t suicidally romantic at the moment or likely to become so then watching Romeo & Juliet does not constitute an occasion of sin for you and there’s no reason not to go to the Shakespeare festival the night that it’s playing.
would you tell Him what you have told each other about these books in here?
I can only speak for myself here, but yes. I weigh what I say on the blog very carefully, because I know that I am responsible to him for what I write–particularly when analyzing moral and pastoral problems for others–and I think very carefully about these.
Of course, I’m fallible, and I’m quite sure that if I went through the archives I’d find things that I would want to change–and I’m sure that Judgment Day will bring more of these to light–but I try (in my imperfect, fallen way) to live and write with integrity so that I have no reason to be ashamed before Jesus of what I have said.
When you stand before Him on judgment day and He asks you why you read books that glorified murder and mayhem, what will you say to Him?
I’m sorry, but I don’t think I’ve done this–certainly not to a significant degree. Lovecraft’s books do not glorify murder and mayhem; certainly not in a general way (though if I did a thorough review I might conclude that in individual passages he crossed the line).
Lovecraft’s books do refer on occasion to murder and mayhem but the are not simply glorifications of it. The reader’s facts here are simply out of order.
Folks may have heard about Elaine Pagels, who is most famed as the author of The Gnostic Gospels (not the Gnostic gospels themselves, but a book by the same name). She is billed as an expert in Gnosticism and early Christianity and has recently been used as the go-to gal for the MSM wanting juicy pro-heresy quotes on subjects like The Da Vinci Code and the Gospel of Judas.
