The Habits of our Hearts
By Rosalie de Rosset
In another talk which probably many of you have heard, I give the following example. When I was in high school in the sixties, I went around with a little blue transistor radio glued to my head. I had discovered pop music, and it had its grip on me. As I moved from crush to crush, heat to heat, including my history teacher, band director and a boy called Eddie, I sang the songs that brought them to mind. I knew all the words—Johnnie Angel, how I love him, how I tingle when he passes by, every time he says hello, my heart begins to fly.
When I sat in study hall, in Eddie’s line of vision, and he wouldn’t even look my way, I went home and agonized to the tune of Simon and Garfunkel’s I am a Rock, I am an Island, and a Rock never cries, and an Island feels no pain. In 1964, the Beatles arrived. By then, my longing was for a boy named Frank, and with the Beatles, I wanted to hold his hand. In youth group we sang some dumb songs: Do Lord, oh do Lord, oh do remember me. Kumbaya my Lord, Kumbaya. We sat around the campfire part of the time and cast our twigs into the fire and warbled, It only takes a spark to get a fire going. Not exactly poetic wonders. No one sings them now.
But the little blue radio was not ALWAYS on though I would have liked it to be, and in my home and in my church there were historians, keepers of the gate, guardians of my soul….those who understood that people my age (your age now) should not run the format of a church or institution exclusively or be the only measure of what is valuable. These were the people who understood that time teaches us the measure of what is best for us, and that modeling that restraint was crucial, that boundaries are not prison walls; in fact they may be controls for more creativity. These guardians made sure our inheritance was not forgotten or swallowed up by what seemed important in the sixties or at sixteen. The church and my parents were the keepers at the gate, the keepers of my mind, and finally of my soul. The job had been entrusted to them by God, and they took it seriously.
You also, are called upon to be keepers of the gate for the next generation of Christians, even of students who will follow after you. What will you leave them? Changes that simply felt good which didn’t count the cost. Patterns of taking what you wanted before you had a solid theological basis on which to found it since all of life is theological?
In the prophetic novel, Brave New World, Aldous Huxley paints a picture of a socially engineered society which values happiness, stability at any expense, and the new rather than the old. Huxley uses a character named John to point out the dangers of such a society. At one point in the story this character says to someone with whom he has been arguing, Yes, that’s just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Then he poses a question using Hamlet’s words: Whether tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing them end them…But you don’t do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It’s too easy. What you need is something with tears for a change. Nothing costs enough here.
I have some questions for you today as you consider the issue at hand, an issue which is only a small part of a much larger philosophical question.
What is your philosophy and theology of leisure—and do you even have one? What we do in our leisure may affect us far more than what we do when we are self-consciously and purposefully studying our biblical texts and theology books. In leisure we are relaxed, inattentive and open.
What will be the ramifications of your decision for an institution such as Moody which has such a strong sense of mission and whose students are supposedly preparing for ministries which may be difficult and demand strong character? Are you operating as respectful guardians of what came before and what follows after?
Do you think you have the spiritual and intellectual maturity to engage in such substantial change?
Finally, do you understand the biblical injunction that we are our brother’s keeper? What is your responsibility for that group of students who genuinely can’t handle this rule change or are far too optimistic about their ability to handle it?
Christopher Lasch writes the following words in The Culture of Narcissism:
To live for the moment is the prevailing passion—to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. It is the waning of the sense of historical time—the erosion of any strong concern for posterity—that marks the end of the modern century and the beginning of the post-modern era. It hardly occurs to many of us to encourage ourselves and others to subordinate our needs and interests to those of others, to someone or some cause outside ourselves…at least not in our leisure…though we certainly preach it in our theology.
We tend to be in the business of changing things to meet our present needs, regardless of what that change may mean. And we do it with almost no sense of philosophical foundation. Low-church, evangelical Christians have little or no philosophy of leisure which makes us easily preyed upon and manipulated by the increasing exposure to popular culture which can lead us in Neil Postman’s words to “amuse ourselves to death.”
A student handed me a thoughtful, incisive paper recently which I thought deserved a place in this paper because he had said it so well.
FROM JAMES VENTRESS
There is so much more to this than merely DVD use or even the concepts of freedom and maturity although these are all part of it, he writes. He continues:. The first point to touch on is that of rules, since a rule change is the immediate and visible issue before us. Rules and laws are a form of discipline. All discipline comes in two forms: internal and external. This is a fact, from birth to death….Internal discipline is simply that rule that comes from within us. It is the power we have within to make us obey. The scope of this power and our resulting obedience is very limited, but it can be developed with practice and exercise helped along by rules.
The second form of discipline is external. This form exists as the laws and rules we live under in everyday society. We have laws in our nation, state, city, and family, and we here specifically live under the laws of the living Word of Jesus Christ and the rules of the Moody Bible Institute. The existence of this external discipline is one of the unpleasant facts of life. It is compulsory and usually non-negotiable even when we are allowed to participate in the democratic process that creates them. We live more easily with the internal discipline because this involves what we “ought” to do. This oughtness (as C.S.Lewis speaks of it) implies a suggestion to ourselves of a specific course of action or behavior that may be amended or wholly ignored. But external discipline often has the same good or desired result as internal discipline. The difference is that external discipline (because our will is not involved) is concerned with a “must” rather than an “ought.” External discipline demands a particular behavior precisely when the ought fails to do so. External discipline exists because internal discipline fails.
The relationship between internal and external, ought and must has direct relevance to our lives. The stronger our internal discipline is, the less we must rely on external discipline. In other words, the more our “ought” resembles the “must,” the better off we are, and the more superfluous the external law becomes for us
So what does this mean for us at Moody, asks this student? Some of you are clamoring to be given the freedom to do away with a rule, claiming to be mature enough to be able to live without it, when the most mature thing just may be to leave it in place. It is sometimes more character building to keep rules one does not agree with than to get rid of them. Especially if you do not have a philosophy of leisure, if you have not brought theology to bear on your thinking, have not considered the years ahead when you will no longer be here, but the change you made will. This sounds paradoxical, but there is wisdom in mistrusting our own ability to handle the freedom we give to ourselves. Any time people are given the ability to remove restrictions from themselves, they will invariably be tempted to do so. The easy road is a constant temptation. Why would we ever voluntarily make things hard on ourselves. The old Christian disciplines of denial and asceticism are strange to us; we do not even know the rich gifts they may impart, because we are not curious, nor have we paused long enough to consider just how they could change our lives for the better, perhaps in the words of Amy Carmichael, habits of the heart that make us mountaineers instead of picnicers on the lower slope.
By Rosalie de Rosset
In another talk which probably many of you have heard, I give the following example. When I was in high school in the sixties, I went around with a little blue transistor radio glued to my head. I had discovered pop music, and it had its grip on me. As I moved from crush to crush, heat to heat, including my history teacher, band director and a boy called Eddie, I sang the songs that brought them to mind. I knew all the words—Johnnie Angel, how I love him, how I tingle when he passes by, every time he says hello, my heart begins to fly.
When I sat in study hall, in Eddie’s line of vision, and he wouldn’t even look my way, I went home and agonized to the tune of Simon and Garfunkel’s I am a Rock, I am an Island, and a Rock never cries, and an Island feels no pain. In 1964, the Beatles arrived. By then, my longing was for a boy named Frank, and with the Beatles, I wanted to hold his hand. In youth group we sang some dumb songs: Do Lord, oh do Lord, oh do remember me. Kumbaya my Lord, Kumbaya. We sat around the campfire part of the time and cast our twigs into the fire and warbled, It only takes a spark to get a fire going. Not exactly poetic wonders. No one sings them now.
But the little blue radio was not ALWAYS on though I would have liked it to be, and in my home and in my church there were historians, keepers of the gate, guardians of my soul….those who understood that people my age (your age now) should not run the format of a church or institution exclusively or be the only measure of what is valuable. These were the people who understood that time teaches us the measure of what is best for us, and that modeling that restraint was crucial, that boundaries are not prison walls; in fact they may be controls for more creativity. These guardians made sure our inheritance was not forgotten or swallowed up by what seemed important in the sixties or at sixteen. The church and my parents were the keepers at the gate, the keepers of my mind, and finally of my soul. The job had been entrusted to them by God, and they took it seriously.
You also, are called upon to be keepers of the gate for the next generation of Christians, even of students who will follow after you. What will you leave them? Changes that simply felt good which didn’t count the cost. Patterns of taking what you wanted before you had a solid theological basis on which to found it since all of life is theological?
In the prophetic novel, Brave New World, Aldous Huxley paints a picture of a socially engineered society which values happiness, stability at any expense, and the new rather than the old. Huxley uses a character named John to point out the dangers of such a society. At one point in the story this character says to someone with whom he has been arguing, Yes, that’s just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Then he poses a question using Hamlet’s words: Whether tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing them end them…But you don’t do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It’s too easy. What you need is something with tears for a change. Nothing costs enough here.
I have some questions for you today as you consider the issue at hand, an issue which is only a small part of a much larger philosophical question.
What is your philosophy and theology of leisure—and do you even have one? What we do in our leisure may affect us far more than what we do when we are self-consciously and purposefully studying our biblical texts and theology books. In leisure we are relaxed, inattentive and open.
What will be the ramifications of your decision for an institution such as Moody which has such a strong sense of mission and whose students are supposedly preparing for ministries which may be difficult and demand strong character? Are you operating as respectful guardians of what came before and what follows after?
Do you think you have the spiritual and intellectual maturity to engage in such substantial change?
Finally, do you understand the biblical injunction that we are our brother’s keeper? What is your responsibility for that group of students who genuinely can’t handle this rule change or are far too optimistic about their ability to handle it?
Christopher Lasch writes the following words in The Culture of Narcissism:
To live for the moment is the prevailing passion—to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. It is the waning of the sense of historical time—the erosion of any strong concern for posterity—that marks the end of the modern century and the beginning of the post-modern era. It hardly occurs to many of us to encourage ourselves and others to subordinate our needs and interests to those of others, to someone or some cause outside ourselves…at least not in our leisure…though we certainly preach it in our theology.
We tend to be in the business of changing things to meet our present needs, regardless of what that change may mean. And we do it with almost no sense of philosophical foundation. Low-church, evangelical Christians have little or no philosophy of leisure which makes us easily preyed upon and manipulated by the increasing exposure to popular culture which can lead us in Neil Postman’s words to “amuse ourselves to death.”
A student handed me a thoughtful, incisive paper recently which I thought deserved a place in this paper because he had said it so well.
FROM JAMES VENTRESS
There is so much more to this than merely DVD use or even the concepts of freedom and maturity although these are all part of it, he writes. He continues:. The first point to touch on is that of rules, since a rule change is the immediate and visible issue before us. Rules and laws are a form of discipline. All discipline comes in two forms: internal and external. This is a fact, from birth to death….Internal discipline is simply that rule that comes from within us. It is the power we have within to make us obey. The scope of this power and our resulting obedience is very limited, but it can be developed with practice and exercise helped along by rules.
The second form of discipline is external. This form exists as the laws and rules we live under in everyday society. We have laws in our nation, state, city, and family, and we here specifically live under the laws of the living Word of Jesus Christ and the rules of the Moody Bible Institute. The existence of this external discipline is one of the unpleasant facts of life. It is compulsory and usually non-negotiable even when we are allowed to participate in the democratic process that creates them. We live more easily with the internal discipline because this involves what we “ought” to do. This oughtness (as C.S.Lewis speaks of it) implies a suggestion to ourselves of a specific course of action or behavior that may be amended or wholly ignored. But external discipline often has the same good or desired result as internal discipline. The difference is that external discipline (because our will is not involved) is concerned with a “must” rather than an “ought.” External discipline demands a particular behavior precisely when the ought fails to do so. External discipline exists because internal discipline fails.
The relationship between internal and external, ought and must has direct relevance to our lives. The stronger our internal discipline is, the less we must rely on external discipline. In other words, the more our “ought” resembles the “must,” the better off we are, and the more superfluous the external law becomes for us
So what does this mean for us at Moody, asks this student? Some of you are clamoring to be given the freedom to do away with a rule, claiming to be mature enough to be able to live without it, when the most mature thing just may be to leave it in place. It is sometimes more character building to keep rules one does not agree with than to get rid of them. Especially if you do not have a philosophy of leisure, if you have not brought theology to bear on your thinking, have not considered the years ahead when you will no longer be here, but the change you made will. This sounds paradoxical, but there is wisdom in mistrusting our own ability to handle the freedom we give to ourselves. Any time people are given the ability to remove restrictions from themselves, they will invariably be tempted to do so. The easy road is a constant temptation. Why would we ever voluntarily make things hard on ourselves. The old Christian disciplines of denial and asceticism are strange to us; we do not even know the rich gifts they may impart, because we are not curious, nor have we paused long enough to consider just how they could change our lives for the better, perhaps in the words of Amy Carmichael, habits of the heart that make us mountaineers instead of picnicers on the lower slope.
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12:03 PM
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