This week's guest is Matthew Lee Anderson, author of The End of Our Exploring: A Book about Questioning and the Confidence of Faith. All of us have questions about God, the purpose of life, the problem of evil, and other serious issues. How do we ask those questions in a manner that honors God, and how can Christians create communities in which people feel free to explore? Also in this episode: The odd place Amy tried to read the book, an epic mix-up of nomenclature, and a reading from T.S. Eliot.
Links related to today's guest:
Further reading for this episode:
This week's guest is Matthew Lee Anderson, author of The End of Our Exploring: A Book about Questioning and the Confidence of Faith. All of us have questions about God, the purpose of life, the problem of evil, and other serious issues. How do we ask those questions in a manner that honors God, and how can Christians create communities in which people feel free to explore? Also in this episode: The odd place Amy tried to read the book, an epic mix-up of nomenclature, and a reading from T.S. Eliot.
Links related to today's guest:
Further reading for this episode:
( MUSIC PLAYING) what is the meaning of Christian? I'm feeling fully foolish spending my life on a message and no one ever heard it. Right.(MUSIC STOPS)
Amy Mantravadi:Welcome to the(A)Millennial podcast, where we have theological conversations for today's world. I'm your host, Amy Mantravadi, coming to you live from Dayton, Ohio, home of the famed National Cash Register company- that is until it moved to take advantage of favorable tax incentives. Today, I'm going to be interviewing Matthew Lee Anderson, who has written a book called The End of Our Exploring: A Book about Questioning and the Confidence of Faith. If you're a fan of the U.S. version of The Office, you might remember that Kelly Kapoor had a lot of questions, the first of which was,"How dare you?!" I have a feeling that this discussion will be taking a somewhat more philosophical turn. Whether you're a Christian or not, at some point in your life you've surely been struck with questions about the nature of our universe and the meaning of life. Perhaps you've puzzled over the problem of evil and wondered how a good God could allow so much suffering in the world. Maybe you've wondered whether God exists at all, or perhaps you've simply been confused by the idea that Jesus Christ could be both God and man, and wanted to know how that could be. Then there's the old standby:"What is my purpose in life?" Whatever your questions have been and will be, we're going to talk about the best ways to go about questioning in light of what we believe about God. I like to begin each episode with a relevant scripture passage or two. I'll start by reading from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 13:9-12. He says,"For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away. When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, and reason like a child. When I became a man, I did away with childish things. For now, we see in a mirror dimly, but then face-to-face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I also have been fully known." I'd like to also read from the Book of Job at the very end after God has appeared to Job and spoken to him from the storm. At that point, Job says,"I know that you can do all things and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.'Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?' Therefore, I have declared that which I did not understand: things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.'Hear now, and I will speak. I will ask you and you instruct me.' I have heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you. Therefore I retract and I repent in dust and ashes." And that was Job 42:2-6. Thanks be to God for His Word. Do keep those passages in mind as you listen to the interview, and if you stick around to the end, you'll get to hear me read some poetry.
Jon Guerra:(MUSIC PLAYING)
Amy Mantravadi:And I am here with Matthew Lee Anderson, who has kindly joined me today to talk about his book, The End of Our Exploring: A Book about Questioning and the Confidence of Faith. Matthew was educated at the Tory Honors Institute at Biola University and later at Oxford University for his master's and doctorate. He has a number of endeavors to his credit. He is the founder of the website Mere Orthodoxy and associate fellow at the MacDonald Center for Theology, Ethics, and Public Life at Oxford University. He's a perpetual member of the Torrey Honors Institute and host of the Mere Fidelity podcast. And he's contributed articles to The Gospel Coalition, Christianity Today, The Washington Post, and others. He is currently the assistant research professor of ethics and theology at the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University. And his published works include Earthen Vessels: Why Our Bodies Matter to Our Faith and The End of Our Exploring, which is the book we're going to talk about today. And you can catch him on Twitter@mattleeanderson spelled the usual way. Now, after reading off that impressive resume, Matt, I wanted to start out with kind of a fun little conundrum to test your education.
Matthew Lee Anderson:Oh, no...
Amy Mantravadi:No, I think you'll survive it. So I may have mentioned to you that I had wanted for a long time to read this book and I had never gotten to it. So earlier this year, when I was getting ready to give birth, I noticed on the birth checklist that I was given- it said,"Bring something to read because you might be at the hospital for awhile before you give birth." And I was thinking, you know, what do I have that I've been meaning to read for awhile? And your book was the thing that came to mind. So I put it in my bag with all the other things that they tell you you're supposed to bring to the hospital. Now I checked in on a Monday to be induced. I gave birth on a Wednesday. I went home on a Friday. So taking into account everything you know about these things, how many chapters of your book do you think that I completed during the five days that I was in the hospital?
Matthew Lee Anderson:I genuinely hope it's zero. Please tell me the answer is zero.
Amy Mantravadi:Your fancy book learning paid off! You're right. I did complete zero chapters of your book. I think I made it through about three pages in the really early hours before anything was happening. But yeah, after that, there was definitely no reading that happened the entire week, so that's good.
Matthew Lee Anderson:I think that that's the craziest story around my book that I have heard. That says a lot about you and just how much of a masochist you are that you're going in to give birth- this is not an easy thing. And you're like,"Here's what I want to do. I want to read The End of Our Exploring while I'm ejecting a human being from my body." That's the most insane life choice that I think could be made.
Amy Mantravadi:Well, you may have a point there, but you know, when I did get finally some reading on the book done was when my husband and I went to change our cell phones over to T-Mobile and that was a two hour ordeal. And I did get some reading on the book done then.
Matthew Lee Anderson:Good, good. So you have read it?
Amy Mantravadi:Yes, I have read it now. Yes.
Matthew Lee Anderson:I haven't, so I'm curious to hear what you make of it.
Amy Mantravadi:Alright, as long as we're on the same page, that's good. So assuming that you have actually read the book, thinking back to the period in your life when you wrote this book, were there any particular aspects of your research or experience that motivated you to do so at that point in time?
Matthew Lee Anderson:It's a long time ago now actually.
Amy Mantravadi:It is, and this year alone seems like it's taken about 20 years, so it was a really long time ago.
Matthew Lee Anderson:Yeah, several lifetimes ago. So I don't know that there was anything in particular that motivated me to write it besides fame, glory, landing on the New York Times Bestseller List, making a dent for Jesus, etc., etc. Um, sheer narcissism, really? Why does anyone write a book? That's I think probably too cynical. I was really distraught by what seemed to me to be a pretty lazy way of thinking about the intellectual life among Christians who were roughly between the ages of 22 and 35, the so-called Millennials. It seemed to me that they were using doubt in ways that were pretty destructive to what I took to be authentic Christian faith, and that they often just didn't understand what it means to question well, so I really wanted to just disentangle doubt from questioning. I think personally, in certain ways the book was a kind of therapeutic for me because I wanted to be able to question better, really wanted to reflect on my own intellectual inquiry and to reform some habits that I had gotten into. And the only way I know how to do that is by staring those things straight in the face and eventually writing something about it. So making my writing history what you will in light of that. But I really did- as an undergraduate spent a lot of time thinking about the faith. I'm thinking about how the faith connected to the world and my life, and I really wanted to be able to reflect on that process of thinking and inquiry and help even myself do it better than I think I had to that point. So there is an existential dimension to it. I did feel like when I wrote it, it would be potentially the last thing that I wrote, which was very weird to have that thought at such a young age. But that thought did cross my mind and in book form that's proved true actually: it's the last book that I have written. So it felt weighty to me in a way that I think- it doesn't always happen with a book, but to me, this one's, it's an important one for me.
Amy Mantravadi:And you definitely in the book draw a lot on your own experiences of teaching and trying to guide students through their own process of questioning, and it definitely seems like that was something that was motivating to you. And one point you make in the book is that if Christians aren't taught to question well, they'll almost certainly question badly. And I'd like to discuss a few of the ways that you say our questions tend to come up short. You go back to the temptation of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden and you highlight how the questions they asked or the questions Eve asked, I should say were not neutral. They definitely had a slant and just a quote from your book- you say,"It would be convenient to think that our questions are immune from the fundamental conflict of right and wrong- that they're quarantined from the possibility of confession and repentance. But the first moment of questioning well is the recognition that as a human endeavor, our questioning is fallen and broken, entangled with sin, and in need of reformation." So in light of that, how can we discern if our questions are coming from a genuine spirit of faith seeking understanding, or from a place of rebellion against that?
Matthew Lee Anderson:Yeah, it's a good question, and it's something that I worry about any time I talk with people about questioning because it's possible to make people seem too self-conscious about whether or not their question is a good one. And you see that a lot with- especially people who are young or young in the faith. They really will hesitate to ask their questions because they think that they need to ask a well-formed question in order to do so. And I really- that bothers me. I think generally the best question that we can ask is the question that burns most within us, the question that we can't help ourselves from asking, and whether or not that's a well-formed question, whether or not that's the right question the right time, it might not be. And hopefully over the course of a lifetime, we'll get better at discerning how to form our questions well, how to ask them at the right time. But I think that one way we can discern whether or not we're asking the right questions is whether we can contain it, right? Can we prevent ourselves from asking this question or does it just seem like it weighs on us so heavily that we can't not ask it? I think about Paul's language, you know, the love of Christ impels me to do this thing, right? Like it wells up within me. And I think a good question has that sort of spirit within it. There's a sense of inquiry, a sense of deep desire that it expresses and that covers a multitude of sins. And so when I talk with students, I really just want them to ask their questions, not the questions that they think will make them look smart to the class where they'd be posturing, or look smart to the professor, not the questions that they think are the right questions, but the questions that indicate their own sense of confusion and that are oriented towards finding peace from that confusion. So I really do want to set people free to question and as they question, as they practice that, to reflect on the practice itself and to hopefully then question better, but that only comes through an experience of freedom where we just start asking the questions that we have, because we can't do anything else. There's no sort of adopting someone else's question and making it our own and saying,"Oh, now I've got the right question." That just doesn't work.
Amy Mantravadi:You had a quote that seemed to be pretty influential in your book from Rainer Maria Rilke. Hopefully I pronounced that correctly. And she talks about, she says,"You must now live the questions. One day perhaps you will gradually and imperceptibly live your way into the answer." We don't typically think of questioning as a way of life, or as answers that- something we live, but you write in response to her quote that,"We will live ourselves into the answers only if we live the questions while orienting them around the good and the true that are revealed in the person of Jesus." So how should we as Christians live questions, as opposed to a non- believer? What makes our questioning unique in light of the fact that we're followers of Christ?
Matthew Lee Anderson:Yeah, that's funny. I'd forgotten that I had quoted Rilke. I almost regret doing that because that's one of those lines that hipster millennials would put on their Facebook pages because we all had Facebook before Twitter and be like,"Look, I'm a deep person! I'm living the questions!" So I regret a little bit turning to that. It says something about me that- that's true about me at the time, but...
Amy Mantravadi:Is there anything else from the book you'd like to recant at this moment?
Matthew Lee Anderson:"Have you ever quoted Rilke in your life?""Yes, I have. I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" No, I think that there's something within the faith that diminishes the existential need to get the right answers paradoxically, right? There's something about knowing that Christ is the answer to the question that allows us to sit in ambiguity and sit in the uncertainty of not knowing much else. And that I think is a wonderful type of disposition to have towards the world. It's in fact a disposition toward the world that animates a sense of wonder towards it. Which is to say, because we have the answer that is Christ, we're free to look at all of the rest of creation and to receive it as a gift and to marvel at it, and to not feel like through our questioning, we have to kind of dominate it, or we've got to search out every nook and cranny of it in order to be whole. I do think there's something very diseased about how moderns think about knowledge and the search for knowledge. I try to avoid sort of typecasting modernity and the like, but I do think that there is something to that. It's not incidental for instance, that the last Mars expedition, the Mars rover was named Curiosity. That this impulse towards curiosity is an impulse: that's a kind of frenetic search for knowing everything. And within the tradition, Christian tradition, that's a sin, right? That sense of coming to know what's not known is indicative of a malformed intellectual desire. And I think knowing Christ frees us from those malformed intellectual desires. It frees us to not know, but also not in the sort of cheap like- well, you know,"It's all gray areas. We don't really know any answers here, right?" The not knowing is a kind of wonder and joy and delight because there are answers there. You just don't know what they are yet. And in receiving creation as a gift, you can delight in it in such a way that you can linger over it and you don't have to hurry to answers, but you're going to get there eventually. And I think that that sense of restful inquiring is- it's paradoxical. It's very hard to describe how it is uniquely Christian. I don't think that we see it very much. I think a writer like Augustine in Confessions displays, especially as the book goes along. But I think that that restful sense of inquiry or searching is, to me, what's possible within the Christian life.
Amy Mantravadi:It makes me think very much about the times when I've just on my own been studying about the Trinity, and that's a subject that we're never going to be able to totally understand. So there have been theologians who have gotten themselves in trouble almost by trying to delve too much into things that scripture is silent about, but there is always that frustration of- especially when we're trying to know about God, that that's something that feels so essential to everything we are. And yet we have to be content with a certain degree of mystery. So that's where faith comes in, I guess, that you have to be content with what you've been given. So I think you have some good thoughts about that. Yeah, definitely.
Matthew Lee Anderson:And I mean, that sense of speculation about the Trinity, right? Like as you say, it gets people into trouble. And by contrast, the Trinity, the mysteries of the Christian faith are meant to be contemplated. And through being contemplated, they're meant to shape us as lovers, as people who desire these things. And that sense of contemplation can't be a kind of subordination, right? We can't dominate the thing that we're contemplating. The whole point of contemplating it is that it's distinct from us, that it's endless, that even in knowing it we can't, in fact, overwhelm it or bring it into ourselves in its fullness, that there will always be some dimension of it that remains unknown to us. And that sense of loving contemplation is to me the art of questioning.
Amy Mantravadi:When we think about questioning and scripture, at least for me, one of the things that first comes to my mind is the Book of Job, which is a long contemplation on the mysteries of life. And you talk about it as a good example of how God asks questions of us and not just the other way around. And a quote from your book: You say that,"Our assurance as Christians is not rooted in our own knowledge and love of God, but in God's knowledge and love of us." And that made me think very much of what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13, where he says,"For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face-to-face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known." So can you talk a little more about how that shift in focus to faith and knowledge that comes to us from God, rather than what we gain through our own pursuits?
Matthew Lee Anderson:Yeah, I'm so glad that you mentioned the 1 Corinthians passage. That"even as we are fully known" has been for me the secret pivot point of all of Paul's theology. It shows up at a couple points in his thought. It happens in Galatians as well, I think, where he says,"For those of us who know God," and he catches himself and says,"Or rather are known by him." The fact that we're known by God means that we're real. So there's a weird medieval doctrine that basically says that things have being, because God knows them rather than the other way around, like God can't know false things. And I think that being known by God is- it means that we have a reality and a substance and an existence that is inviolable, right? That's not going to go away. So from my standpoint, the freedom to question well just hinges upon that: that it doesn't matter which direction I turn in my intellectual life, I'm hemmed in by a God who's gone there before me and who is walking with me, who is accompanying me, guiding me, directing me in that pursuit. I think it's such a remarkable image. I've totally forgotten what your question is. I was just so enraptured. Sorry.
Amy Mantravadi:No, that's okay. I do think that if we start going on out about medieval theories of being, we're going to lose any listeners that we had.
Matthew Lee Anderson:I apologize. I apologize.
Amy Mantravadi:I know from personal experience that a lot was written that could probably put a lot of people to sleep. The question- you partially answered it, I think- I asked if you could talk about the shift in focus from faith and knowledge that comes to us from God, rather than the other way around. And I think that you addressed that.
Matthew Lee Anderson:Yeah, and I mean, I'm all about reducing the anxiety of the Christian life: diminishing the sense of possessiveness, diminishing the sense of that. Our security depends upon us getting the right answers. And I've got a correspondent right now: a young fellow who's in college who just cannot fathom getting the wrong answer about an issue even of significant importance. He just can't deal with it. And there's such an underlying concern that he has, that his salvation is going to be imperiled. If he gets the wrong answer about, say,"I don't know what Jesus thinks about marriage." And I think that you have to be able to balance an affirmation of the importance of these issues without descending into this notion that we're somehow saved on the basis of how right our answers are about them. And that's the line that I'm trying to walk. I really want people to care about what the right answers are, because I think it will matter for how a person's life goes at the end of the day. We're saved by a being- a person- and the doctrines that we affirm around that are short hands for that person's character, and allow us to describe that person in ways that matter for communication to others. But if we don't describe that person fully accurately, or we get some of the doctrines wrong, we're still saved by the person. And so I think that we can learn and grow. I mean, John's line that the Holy spirit"will lead us into all truth" just means that the Church and us are in a position at one point in our lives when we're not in all truth. And that's a time that we will be in at some point, which I hope diminishes the sense of anxiety that people might have. We don't have to have it all right. Right now, the beginning of wisdom is seek wisdom.
Amy Mantravadi:Yeah, I think that's a good word. I, like so many people, deal with anxieties in my spiritual life. So I think it is always good to keep our focus where it needs to be. Another thing in your book is how churches tend to be very good at discipling us in joy, but not very good at discipling us in lament. You said,"They've not taught us about mourning, and in moments when sin and brokenness come upon us, we don't know how to respond." So this is a point I've heard raised by a lot of people recently: that our Christian culture and contemporary America doesn't have any place for lament, despite the fact that scripture talks so much about- gives so much space to lamenting. What are some practical ways you think that we could introduce this into our churches and reorient our thinking a little closer to a historic Christian understanding of suffering, as opposed to one that I think has been very heavily influenced by pursuing the American dream and the culture that we live in now.
Matthew Lee Anderson:Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's interesting to me. I do have the vanity to go look and see what people are highlighting on Kindle and unequivocally that section on lament is the most highlighted of the whole book on Kindle. The people who read it on Kindle resonated with that section more than anything else, and I found that very interesting to me. It indicated a kind of desire for some type of religious experience that we're being denied. And I don't know how we can compensate for that besides reading the Psalms regularly as a part of our corporate worship and as a part of our private worship. I mean, God allows such space for lament in scripture, that he has a whole book dedicated to it in Lamentations, right? Jeremiah is just not going to hold back. But the Psalms are the center of sort of moral formation for the Christian life. They're the place where we can do the most therapy within our souls. And I think praying the Psalms regularly as a people allows us to have language for lament in our corporate worship that wouldn't come up otherwise. It would only come up on special occasions and that prepares us for moments when we need it, so that when we experience trauma, when we experience sorrow, we have the language of the Psalms ready to go as a part of our theological vocabulary. And I just think that we have to make that the centerpiece of our spiritual lives. And I don't, I don't know what else to do.
Amy Mantravadi:No, and I mean, I really put you on the spot and it's hard to come up with all of a sudden five different things. I think you've hit on a big one, which is that, depending on what liturgical tradition you're in- if you go to an Anglican church using the Book of Common Prayer, then you're on a regular cycle through the Psalms every 60 days or however many days, and you're constantly getting exposed to that. And there are other traditions as well that either will sing only from the Psalms or really incorporate a lot of the Psalms in their singing, but other Christian traditions- they might not be incorporated as much. So I think if you are teaching through the whole counsel of scripture in some manner, then you do unavoidably come to those passages and have to deal with them. Whereas if you're not doing that, then those are the kinds of passages that might get avoided. They just don't make people feel very good when they leave church in the morning always. But I think they would for- the fact is that people are always coming to church with things they're lamenting about in their hearts, and if they feel like it's never being addressed, they're never getting any resources for how to deal with that, then maybe that is what they need to be leaving and feeling a lot better.
Matthew Lee Anderson:Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, one of the other things I would say is in my first book on the body, I defended the practice of having church graveyards where we would bury the dead of the Christian community at the place where we would worship. I think that also allows for a form of lament because it keeps markers of our mortality all around us. It doesn't allow us to forget the fact that we are headed towards death, which is not a fact we can forget for very long. But I think having a kind of- even a spatial environment that allows for lament- and this is one thing that chapels, I think, in a church help with: nooks and crannies, where people can hang out and cry, versus huge open spaces where that's all we have, right? Even if there were a sort of lamenting chapel in a church where it was known that that was the place where you could go to deal with your grief and maybe even be prayed for it. I think there are properly evangelical ways of doing this, but I I'd like to see some creativity among churches on it.
Amy Mantravadi:Well, women have that: it's called the restroom and that's why we go in groups.
Matthew Lee Anderson:I have no comment.
Amy Mantravadi:No, that's fine. We would welcome another room if that were possible. One of the first things that Christians tend to do when they experience doubts about some aspect of their faith is to disconnect themselves in various ways from the body of Christ. And you talk about this and how our questioning has a tendency to turn our focus inward rather than outward to helping others, but part of that also involves having Christian communities that are open to dealing with questions together. So beyond what we've discussed so far, are there any other ways that you could think of for churches and Christian communities to create an atmosphere that's supportive of faithful questioning. I mean, there are people who ask questions just to provoke or to tear down, but we're thinking of people who have genuine questions about their faith and want to pursue it in a God-like way.
Matthew Lee Anderson:Yeah, so that makes me think of one more mark for people to think on as they ask whether they're questioning well. If it's expanding our capacity to do good work, then we're questioning well, right? If I'm more disposed to go serve at my neighborhood soup kitchen in light of my intellectual inquiries, then I think you can have a high degree of confidence that I'm asking the right sort of questions. And I think that that matters for a community because the types of communities where people feel alienated because of their questions are to me communities that have not integrated the cognitive side of the faith with the works of service that we're called to as Christians. It's very hard to leave a community if they're really immersed in serving their neighbor, regardless of how much they might struggle to give you an answer for your question. And in my experience, the communities that are most immersed in serving their neighbor are most alive to the suffering and the grief and the pain and the difficult realities of the world, which are the central source of most people's doubts, right? So people who are putting themselves in contexts where they would be prone to doubt all the time- I think we'll have a kind of generosity towards those who do doubt, cause they'll get it right. I think that I in certain respects get all the proclivities or inclinations to leave the faith. It's at points been attractive to me, and the points when it's been most attractive to me have been when the Christian community has failed in some particular way. They failed to uphold the integrity of their convictions and failed to love appropriately, and that inclines me to leave a community. And so I think in terms of creating community that's hospitable to those who are questioning, that's the first thing. Now, I think that the second thing has got to be leaders who are themselves wondering about the world and their faith- who are leading the community in the process of delighting, in learning new things about what it means to be a Christian and what we're called to and doing. So not in a grand standing way, but because it's an organic part of their Christian faith, pastors should retreat into their studies and read just for the fun of it. And if that means reading novels, rather than reading theology, that's fine. As long as those novels are novels by Anthony Trollope and they're not watching Netflix. You knew it was going to come up at some point, right? But I do think that pastors need to be learners first and they will set the tone and the trajectory for their community, and if they are themselves learning appropriately, they'll have lots of room for those who are struggling in the faith to ask their questions in ways that are not threatening to the structure of the community. The only way bad questioning can be reformed is in the presence of those who are questioning well, so I think that those are two central dimensions. I'm not sure about other practices and I'd be interested in hearing from listeners and from you what people should do because to me it's a hard problem.
Amy Mantravadi:Yeah, I think that the things you've already mentioned are good places to start, and I think that when it comes to asking questions that are really personal, as these questions often are, we have to have strong personal relationships with people. I've had people ask me in the past- because I've sometimes talked about my own struggles with depression and anxiety-"What should I do to try to help someone if they're thinking about wanting to commit suicide so that they'll talk to me and tell someone?" And I said,"Well, if you don't already have a relationship with them where they feel like they trust you, they're not going to come to you with this deepest, darkest thing that they're dealing with." So I think that would also be true for our questioning: that we have to focus on building strong relationships within church bodies, and a lot of ink has been spilled on that topic already. So I don't think I'm going to add anything more to it, but I'd say in general, that would be a good thing. And when it comes to reading in your free time, make sure to also check out the novels of A my Mantravadi, w hich are recommended for you when you're going to study, in addition to the novels of Trollope. So I think that probably about sums up our discussion for tonight. Thank you so much for joining me. It's been great.
Matthew Lee Anderson:Thanks for having me on, Amy. I've really enjoyed it.
Jon Guerra:(MUSIC PLAYING)
Amy Mantravadi:It was great to have Matt on the podcast today. However, it's time I let you in on two little secrets. The first is that I am not yet perfected in knowledge and have many questions yet to ask. The second is that I have never read Rilke. That possibly explains how I managed to not only mispronounce his name, but also referred to him as a she. A lesser podcast host would try to find some creative way to edit out that mistake, and I admit the thought crossed my mind, but I have decided it is better to let you know that your host is in fact a fallible human being. The one solace I take in all of this is that by my guest's own definition, my lack of knowledge about Rilke has perhaps ensured that I am not a hipster millennial. Matt's book, The End of Our Exploring, is available from Moody Publishers. That title happens to come from a famous poem by T.S. Eliot, the last of his Four Quartets, with which I happily do have some familiarity. The poem itself is called"Little Gidding" and happens to be one of my favorites. Allow me to just read the last section to you, both to compliment today's discussion and to convince you that I have some minor degree of appreciation for literature."What we call the beginning is often the end and to make and end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. And every phrase and every sentence that is right(where every word is at home, taking its place to support the others, the word neither diffident nor ostentatious, an easy commerce of the old and the new, the common word exact without vulgarity, the formal word precise but not pedantic, the complete consort dancing together) Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph. And any action is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start. We die with the dying: See, they depart, and we go with them. We are born with the dead: See, they return, and bring us with them. The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree are of equal duration. A people without history is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern of timeless moments. So, while the light fails on a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel, history is now and England. With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling...We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. Through the unknown, unremembered gate when the last of earth left to discover is that which was the beginning; at the source of the longest river, the voice of the hidden waterfall, and the children in the apple-tree. Not known, because not looked for, but heard, half-heard in the stillness between two waves of the sea. Quick now, here, now, always--A condition of complete simplicity(Costing not less than everything) And all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well when the tongues of flames are in-folded into the crown, not of fire and the fire and the rose are one." The suns, another episode of the(A)Millennial podcast. Thanks so much for joining me. The music you've been hearing is the song citizens by John Guerra off his album Keeper of Days. Now I'll send you off with a benediction from scripture in Numbers 6:24-26."The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up his countenance on you and give you peace." Amen. Have a great week!
Jon Guerra:(MUSIC PLAYING) Is there a way to love always? Living and ending in hallways. Don't know my foes from my friends and don't know my friends anymore. Power has several prizes. Handcuffs can come in all sizes. Love has a million disguises, but winning is simply not one.(MUSIC STOPS)