Shifting Culture
On Shifting Culture we have conversations at the intersection of faith, culture, justice, and the way of Jesus. Hosted by Joshua Johnson, this podcast features long-form conversations with authors, theologians, artists, and cultural thinkers to trace how embodied love, courage, and creative faithfulness offer a culture of real healing and hope.
Shifting Culture
Ep. 417 Steven Garber - Making Peace with the Proximate
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What do you do when the world refuses to become what you know it should be? In this conversation, Steven Garber introduces the concept of "the proximate" - learning to make peace with what is nearly, but not yet, true - in our marriages, our work for justice, and our longing for God's kingdom to come. Drawing on Tolkien, Augustine, the Clapham Society, and the surprising cry of a postmodern novelist, Steven helps us understand the difference between hope and optimism, what it means to carry our wounds into the world as healers, and why the question of what it means to be human may be the most urgent question of our age. His new book is Hints of Hope.
Steven Garber has been teacher of many people in many places for many years, a professor for undergraduates, graduates, and people at work in the world. The founder of the Washington Institute for Faith, Vocation and Culture, he now serves as the Senior Fellow for Vocation and the Common Good for the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, Senior Advisor for the Economics of Mutuality and Senior Fellow for the Institute for Marketplace Transformation; and for several years was the Professor of Marketplace Theology at Regent College, Vancouver BC. The author of several books, his most recent are Hints of Hope: Essays on Making Peace with the Proximate, Visions of Vocation: Common Grace for the Common Good, and The Seamless Life: A Tapestry of Love and Learning, Worship and Work. With his wife Meg, they are the parents of children and grandchildren, and have long lived in Virginia among family, friends and flowers. A native of the mountain valleys of Colorado and California, a geography of people and place which is still a deep home to him.
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A thoughtful, deep dive into one of the most talked-about movements in American history.
The words that have stuck with me over time are pretty close to this. We cannot know what we are to do unless we know what story of which we are part that's true for Hindus, like it's true for evolutionary materialists, you know, like it's true for street level hedonists, like it's true for Jews and Muslims and Christians too. You know, the story, the meta narrative, shapes how we think about our place in the world, or for blessing or for curse. It just does that.
Joshua Johnson:Hello and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host. Joshua Johnson, you know, we live in a world that won't cooperate with our best hopes for it, the causes we give ourselves to don't fully succeed. The marriages and families we love are marked by the now and not yet, the justice we work toward remains incomplete, and somehow we have to figure out how to keep going with gladness and singleness of heart. Stephen Garber has spent decades thinking about this exact problem. He's a teacher, cultural translator and the founder of the Washington Institute for faith, vocation and culture. His new book, hints of hope, is a collection of essays about making peace with what he calls the proximate not giving up on the world that ought to be, but learning how to faithfully live within the world that is today. We talk about the difference between hope and optimism, what it means to be a wounded healer, how the Clapham society and Tolkien's hobbits illuminate our moment and why the question of what it means to be human is more urgent now than ever. This is a conversation for anyone who has ever felt the gap between the world they long for and the world they inhabit, and still they choose to show up anyways. So join us. Here is my conversation with Steven Garber, Steven, welcome to shifting culture. Excited to have you on. Thanks for joining
Steven Garber:me. It's a gift to be part of your life for a little bit, Joshua,
Joshua Johnson:and it's a gift for everybody who's listening to be able to listen to you. We're gonna be talking about your new book, hints of hope, essays on making peace with approximate that word proximate is something that you use often. It is a word that guides some of your thoughts in your life. What is proximate and what's that to you?
Steven Garber:I would never say that proximate is a magic word, Joshua, because it can't be that. But I would say that all of us need a word like that to keep our hearts alive, just too hard in this wounded, broken world to keep going. And as Anglicans put it, with gladness and singleness of heart day after day, without having some ability to make peace with what's not quite right, maybe what sometimes is grievously, grievously tragically not right. Of course, that goes from the most intimate parts of life, like marriages and families, all the way across to public squares and nationally, internationally. How do you how do you long for the world that ought to be but realize when you wake up in the morning you go to bed at night. It wasn't like that. It didn't become like that. Today, I tried, I hoped, I prayed. I did it again. You know, yesterday and last week and all last year. But you know, even with my best shot, it didn't become all that I wanted to be, maybe all that I imagine God wants it to be. So how do you live with that? How do you live with as the theologians put it, the now, but the not yet, and for me, proximate is a wedge or a prism into making sense of the life that we are called to live in this wounded world that's still a beautiful world.
Joshua Johnson:I mean, I love that I get to pray in the Lord's prayer that your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And we get tastes of that, and we get some beautiful pictures and pieces of it, but we're not going to see it in full until the consummation, right? And so what does that then, look like? Your Your kingdom come on earth as it is, Heaven in this now and not yet period that we're living in?
Steven Garber:Yeah, that's a wonderful question. Joshua, in the introduction I've which I've called seashells on the seashore, have reflected a little bit, first on Leonard Cohen's evocative, haunting song, broken Alleluias. But then walking along, you know, a seashore, and you know, sure I was seeing down below me, six feet below, beautiful seashells and the morning sun and the glistening water coming across the sand and stopping to pick it up and thinking, oh, there's a little hole here, isn't there? The other side of it's broken. There's a broken piece off this beautiful shell. The colors are so beautiful, and the shape seems so wonderful. But looking at it more carefully, you see it, it too is broken. So the book begins there, in some ways, in a very ordinary experience for most all of us who you know are watching. The world and thinking, well, that's beautiful, isn't it? But then when you begin to pick it up more closely and look, you think it isn't quite the way it's supposed to be, isn't it? Is it's too is broken. Well, that's true with seashells on the seashore. You know, my wife and I've been married for 49 years this year, and I would say it has been a signpost of the kingdom coming in these 49 years, does that mean that, in fact, that every hour, every day, has been just wonderful and happy and perfect and complete in all imaginable ways? No, it can't be that way. Why? Because it's a now, but a not yet world, you know, and still fallen, and I'm still fallen, and we miss each other. We heard each other. We say and do things which each other and but I would say there's a touchable happiness between us. There's an almost true, real happiness and joy between us most of the time. Bob Dylan has a song which I've quoted in the book, simply called most of the time, and it's pretty good, actually, most of the time, most of the time, which accounts for, well, there are signposts of as you said, say that prayer that you yearn for, as I do Your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven, I live now my life more for signposts than having to think, Well, God in heaven, you are the sovereign over the whole of history. Make this happen today. I don't think that way anymore. I don't think and it because I have given up on hope, but I've come to, you know, in the title of this book, I'm more content, I think, with instant hope, making peace, with the proximity, with things which are true and honest and real and right, but they're not everything.
Joshua Johnson:There's so much brokenness in the world. You're talking about, brokenness and in in family and marriages, in brokenness, and just how the world works. There's dehumanization that's happening in front of our eyes constantly on our screens. We're just seeing brokenness always. And I know that there are people that said, I want to do some really good work in this world to actually help alleviate some of that brokenness. And so if there are signposts and just hints of hope, what does justice type of work of trying to bring some healing to this world, what does that then look like, if it's there's just hints and signposts, and we can't see it all come to fruition yet.
Steven Garber:Well, it's a in some ways, it's the question of my life. Joshua, I, I taught politics for a long time, and with eager 2021, year olds who wanted to do their best for history with their shoulders to history to change the world. Really, when I I respond to that as their professor, I was eager to take up the questions with them and but I also, you know, came over the course of years, teaching them to give an end of the semester lecture, which I argued that there's the difference between hope and optimism, that optimism is a an idea that's rooted in a lie about History and the world, if I'm smart enough, I've got the right resources, I know the right people, then I'll get it done. And of course, in a Washington, DC, kind of a swirl, you can imagine, well, is the question going to be immigration reform, or the US, Israel relations, or, you know, tax policy, or you can pick a question, but you know, there's nobody smart enough. There's nobody you know, well resourced enough to make all justice happen in this time in history. I mean, if they call of God in the scriptures, is what do I require of you a man? Do justice, love mercy, welcome you with God. Well, that has personal meaning, of course, but it has public meaning too. And for those of us who long for the public meaning of our faith. You know, there has to be, you know, a sense that, well, could you put your shoulder to something that matters, realizing that without going into it as Eeyore thinking, well, well, well, it won't all be and you know, why even try? You know, I would say I give my life in many ways, Joshua, to people who are doing good work, who still believe that good work matters to the world. So I do that with my life. I join in on efforts with people who think, well, this is this. There's something true about the world still. It's still God's world, after all. And if we can put our shoulders together and try and hope and pray together and work at it, well, there's good work that can be done. I could name names if you wanted me to do that, but I There are things I give myself to that I would say, whether they're more local, more national, more international, where I think, well, it's, it's that that's worthy of my life, to give myself to trying to do something that's touchable, that's honest, that's true, that's right, that's important, that matters. One project I would just name, in the briefest of ways, has been called for 20 years now, the economics of mutuality. It's an unusual name, I suppose, but it's brought into being by, of all companies, the Mars Corporation, which makes Eminem's, of all things. It's a privately held company 100 years into its life. It isn't a faith born company like Chick fil A it. That way. But I would say there's been a conscience within the company of the family to try to think about the right things, do them in the right way. Long time, and 20 years ago, I was drawn into a conversation with two executives who wanted to who've been asked by one of the owners, what's the right level of profit for a company like ours. Most of the times, that wouldn't even be a question. The only question would be, how do we maximize profit this this quarter? But if you actually you want to keep making money because you're privately held and sustained profitability is more the reason behind what you do, then maybe you could have other questions. I've actually took these executives to meet a writer named Wendell Berry, viewers into our work together, and on his farm for a day, we talked and talked about this idea of trying to rethink the business of business we were trying to do at the end of the day. Put it like this to us, you know, if you want to make money for a year, you ask certain questions, don't you, but you'll make money for 100 years, you have to ask other questions. And I would say we're trying to ask the other questions because the vision is a longer vision. So we the project moved from, you know, McLean, Virginia, to now. It's headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. It's a global effort to try to engage companies and countries over this idea. Could we rethink the business of business? Now I have no, you know, pretend, in my mind, I'm not romantic at all that somehow Heaven will come to earth in all of its fullness with this project. But I do think it's worthy of my life to give myself to trying to create signposts of the world that could be and should be
Joshua Johnson:you've already mentioned a few times from now, asking good questions and the right questions and maybe some better questions. How has questions shaped the way that you see the world, and you enter into the world, and you partner with others to bring about these this hope.
Steven Garber:I'm looking at the sign behind your head, Joshua, shifting culture. And I don't know all that it means, you know, for you in this, but I think back to my own, you know, dropping out of college days, you know, long time ago. Now, I was 20 year old, and I the counterculture was sort of dominant in the West, Western world, and I ended up living in communes for a while of my life in the Bay area of California, when I went to Europe the next year, and I ended up at a place called labri. And if there was a word on the street, you know, among the hitchhikers of Europe, like I was there was said there was this place up in the mountains where you could ask an honest question and get an honest answer. And that really drew me and a lot of other people into this little place, you know, the possibility that there could be an honest question asked and the possibility there could be an honest answer given, I would say Joshua, in the professor life. I've had the teaching I've had for all the years of my life. You know now, I've always wanted that ethos, intellectual ethos, to be the Pentagon, the pedagogical air we breathe. My students that I want you to know, you know student, that you are for me, this year, this semester, in this period of your life. That for me, it matters centrally, crucially, that back and forth between us that you need to know that I want honest questions, honest answers to be the air we breathe together in the classroom.
Joshua Johnson:So what does an honest question look like?
Steven Garber:That's good. That's a very good question, of course. Well, in some ways. I mean, this is maybe too pedantic, but it's to say it that way, you realize, of course, you could ask a dishonest question, you could get more for dishonest answer. So an honest question, for me, is a question where there's a hunger for what is real and true and right now, it doesn't mean that you have any idea. Oh, but there's a sense in which you know, because you talk to people all the time like I do, you realize that you know in the course of the days of your life, Joshua, there are sometimes you meet somebody you think I'd like to know more, because you have a sense of urgency or honesty or candor, or the heart is yearning for understanding in a way. So for me, when I think about the honest question, it is something born of that kind of honest yearning. St Augustine is called the apostle of longing, for good reasons, because he understood that the heart of every human life most fundamental is our longing what to long for. So when I have a sense that a student you know, or somebody I meet on the streets you know is longing for reality, he's long for this. To understand the meaning of this. I want to understand, please. I want to know, well, I will give my heart away to that kind of a person. Frankly, I would say a dishonest answer would be, well, that I don't take the question seriously, I have a canned reply. You know, these are the things they always say to everyone everywhere. I have not really listened to you carefully, because I don't care what you think personally, and I have, I have what I want to say, and you need to be willing to hear what I have to say
Joshua Johnson:to you. You mentioned Augustine there and his longings. You talk about love and the longing of love as well in your book, and that all. Ordering our loves is is quite important, and making sure that we have our loves aligned with what is right and good, and you know what is true. How does that work? To make sure that we align our love, we align our longing into something so that we can actually bring about some of these signposts and this hope in the world.
Steven Garber:That's very, very, very good question. Joshua, we can't do it by ourselves. That just doesn't happen. So it has to be done communally or corporately, I would say, which is why the prayer you offer said that you pray yearningly Day after day. You know your Your kingdom come. It begins with our Father, who art in heaven, give us instead. So I would say that, you know, a good life, a godly life, a whole life, a holy life, is always going to be a life which begins with, I can't do this by myself. You know, on my own, one of the best stories I know is a story of a group of serious Christian people, 250 years ago in London, and they were representing diverse vocations in banking and politics, the arts, education, church and they decided to move to a neighborhood outside of down to the Thames just about two miles away. We would call it Wimbledon today, but they called it Clapham, and it's still known as Clapham. It's a neighborhood, but they bought houses near each other, where they could have meals together day by day, and pray together, day by day, and live a life out together over the course of years together. We've sometimes called them the Clapham society, the best known person in the story. He's not the alone's person. It's a misreading of history to put William Wilberforce as the story, because he wasn't the story. He was part of a story with other people. But I would just say, thinking about their time in history, what they were doing. They took on the primary engine of the British Empire. When the British Empire was the empire that ruled the sea, ruled the world, the sun never set in the British Empire in those years. And what made that so economic? The political economy was born of the slave trade, which is amazing to think about. And they called that into question. Took them a long time for the law to change, but together, they lived a life out day by day, thinking, talking, praying, you know, being aware of your work in the world of banking, my work in the world of politics, your world of the work of the church, your world the work of the arts, you know. And there was a sense of we're in this together. I don't think we can order our lives well ever on our own. So if I talked about, you know, to my students years ago, you know, peace and politics, about the difference between hope and optimism, I would also leave them the end of the semester with another lecture I called the politics of self deception. And I wanted them to think about this as a problem that, in fact, we are most of all prone, as human beings, sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve, to lie to ourselves about ourselves. We're most of all prone to that father, Adam. What did he first say, the very first word of His mouth after the fall, where that woman you gave me, you know, was deflecting immediately, initially, just by his instinct. We've been doing that ever since then, all of us have been rumbles and rumbles and roars and roars across the centuries, through the cultures. But that's of course, has its own poignancy and terrible face in the pool of politics. You know, we are most of all prone to lie to ourselves about ourselves, so if we're going to order our lives rightly, remembering that Augustine wrote his book, his magnum opus, the City of God, while Rome was literally burning. It was imploding. While he wrote his book about, what about how does a city order its loves rightly. And he was identifying, of course, that in Rome, which was the Eternal City, it would go on forever and ever and ever, it was falling apart before his very eyes. And he was at he was analyzing it principally through the lens of disordered loves.
Joshua Johnson:Yeah, a lot of what we we've been talking about here, one thing that really helps me is to put myself into the the meta narrative, the big story, the story of God, which is, you know, creation, fall, redemption and consummation, like put myself here, like I'm in the now and not yet, and that's really helpful. Know what Christ has done, what he will do, but also real stories, human stories, stories like the Clapham society that you just said, or stories of myth and legends, and stories of something like Lord of the Rings, you you say in your book that we are all hobbits, or you're a hobbit. I read that little piece to my wife this morning because it's so, so good, but so how do then these stories like Lord of the Rings becoming a hobbit? How does that then help us situate ourself on the journey to let us know what is reality, what is true, and then how we actually then interact with what is true and bring about goodness.
Steven Garber:I wish we had more time to talk, Josh, because I'd like to know more, a lot more about you. But I'll try to respond to your question here. One of the writers, it's the. Why I thinking a lot, was a professor of moral philosophy at Notre Dame named alas McIntyre, and he very much discussed book called after virtue a generation ago now. But of all that, he said was complex and challenging read for me in those years of my life. But the words that have stuck with me over time are pretty close to this. We cannot know what we are to do unless we know what story of which we are part that's true for Hindus, like it's true for evolution and materialists, you know, like it's true for street level hedonists, like it's true for Jews and Muslims and Christians too. You know, the story, the meta narrative, shapes how we think about our place in the world. What for blessing and for curse, it just does that. So you're right. I've lingered over the story of Tolkien's hobbits, and they have much influenced my thinking about myself. I think if I wrote in the book, you know, when I read the stories, when I was a young almost, just still a bigger boy, you know, a young, very young man, I love them, and I love them, and I love them even more, really,
Joshua Johnson:you
Steven Garber:know, but didn't like the last 100 pages of the story at all. I thought was kind of boring, thinking, well, Mount Doom has come and gone. What are we gonna do now? To walk back to the Shire to do what you know, the story's all over, isn't it? And I read the books. Years later, I found myself thinking I wasn't old enough to know to understand why this mattered, why Mount Doom wasn't the end of the story. Why? In fact, those 100 pages, you know, walking back to the Shire mattered. I didn't understand. But now I do. I've lived a longer life now. I hadn't been able to hear Gandalf say to Frodo, not all the wounds of this life are going to be healed, Mr. Frodo, well, that's a sober word. You know, at age 20, I don't think knew that was being written in the book. I didn't even think about it. Didn't even I didn't stop to think about at all. Years later, I thought, wow, I know that life. I know that world, because I've lived in the now, but the not yet for a long time now, been aware of the wounds of the world for a long time now, it does not mean Joshua that I've given up. So one of the last chapter I've written about that fascinating story in the gospels, where after the the death of death and resurrection of Jesus, or at least that, I mean, I guess the debt resurrection too. But the apostles are very aware that Jesus has died. All the hopes they had seemed to be crushed. Now, everything is done with all that we wanted to happen, all the things that we had given our lives to what else is there now? It's all over, isn't it? Now? All over now. So here are these two disciples walking to Emmaus as the story goes, and they're just lamenting out loud about all the hopes that have been crushed, finally by what has happened in the last days in Jerusalem. And mysteriously, of all mysterious mysteries, all of a sudden, there's a third person in the conversation. Turns out to be Jesus. Somehow, the somehow is of divine or, you know, mysteries of life. He's listening in and he asked, well, what's what do you what is this? And he says, Well, are you the only person all Jerusalem doesn't know what's happened these last few days. Well, of course, we know the story now we understand that. Jesus says, Well, let me tell you the story, the deeper story, the longer story. And of course, he says, I starts off with the beginning and walks his way all the way through the Old Testament, scriptures. And shows, in fact, how his death and resurrection were, in fact, the point of the longer story. And it says, of course, when they got, you know, to where they're going that night, they wanted him to join them for for supper, you know. And their hearts were alive. They were awakened. They were, you know, flamed, you know, because now all the new, the relationship between what it seems so despairing, so discouraging, and what, in fact, the deeper, longer story promised.
Joshua Johnson:I mean, as you started to relay what Gandalf said to Fredo, that not all wounds will be healed, and then you're bringing it into the story of Christ, and he's like here the deeper hope. One of the things he said is Christ's vocation is of a wounded healer, and that as imitators of Christ, ourselves, as those who do follow Christ, that's part of our vocation. That's what we should be, as well as wounded healers, even Frodo in the Shire, as he's there. And for us in this now and not yet, what does it mean to carry our wounds into the world to bring about some healing?
Steven Garber:Oh, that's a very, very good question. Josh, you know, again, I think whenever I've read the Lord of the Rings, you know, especially, but especially the older I got by reading them, you know, now, as a longer lived man, you get to the very last part of the whole book, the last of the third book, and you get back to the Shire. And the chapter is called The scouring of the Shire. And after they've lived for gone through all of the travel, all of the tort the terrible things have gone through, they've longed to be home. Finally home again. They realize it's been overturned completely. The star Yaman has come to over and changed everything you know, and Tolkien calls the chapter the scouring of the shower. I remember thinking it. Seemed fair to me. They have to have to bat, after all they've been through. So that was part of me reading, thinking, how could this even be fair? They have to do that, you know, at the end, like that. So that in that chapter called wounds and scars, I wrote about my own physician, and named him a wounded healer, you know. And I wrote a little bit about his life, why that made sense to me to put him put him in that language of JB Phillips and then Henry Darwin, but realizing that, if it is true for all of us, that we take part, we are called into the Imitation of Christ, which is fundamental to our own identity and our own calling as the people of God in the world to be giving ourselves to the Imitation of Christ. And if I've mentioned Augustine and Tolkien, I can also mention MT Wright here, who wrote a book, a lenson meditation, many years ago, that had some words that caught my imagination. He said the vocation of Jesus was to take into his own heart the most remarkable joy and the most remarkable sorrow, and as we take up the Imitation of Christ in our lives, we too will find that same remarkable joy and remarkable sorrow, and we are called to weave them into the pattern of our days. Well, I knew it even at that time, because this has been true for most of my life. I'm not going to be a Buddhist in this life Joshua, you know, and Buddhism requires you know for all of its quietness and all of its simplicity and all of its beauty. And I get that part of the appeal, but it requires a denial of the difference between joy and sorrow, because everything has to be one at the end of the end of the day. All has to be the same the end of the day in its illusion to imagine otherwise, but I knew in my life then, and I know it now even more, quite painfully, more poignantly, there's true joy and there's true sorrow in this life. There's true joy and there's true sorrow in this life, and I'm aware of both every day of my life. So to be a wounded healer, in my mind, it is to walk into the rooms of the world that that are worlds that are ours, and somehow be able to communicate that, you know, I hold into my in my own being, both the joy and sorrow of Christ. I know because of what I do for in my life, I speak a lot to people in different places in the world. And I know that I have a hope Joshua, that every room I walk into that when I'm finished speaking, people will know that I live in the same world they do. I don't live in a world that's, you know, unmarked. I'm wounded. That's, you know, happy, happy, happy all the time. It's true joy in my life, and I want to honor that, but I also live in the world where, you know, we have tears too.
Joshua Johnson:One of my favorite art pieces there is by Makoto fujimara is tears of Christ that for me, brings me sorrow and pain and loss, but it brings me also joy just seeing that our piece of the beauty of it in the midst of the sorrow and the pain, and you can, you can actually hold that. It holds tension in that piece. How do you think we can hold the tension of joy and sorrow in this world together? I
Steven Garber:mean, it's a wonderful question again, Josh, you're, you have the best questions. Actually, I think we do it with frailty. We do it with some mystery, you know, because we're never going to get it all right all the time. You know, I think in some ways, to to have a theological imagination that accounts for both probably matters very, very much here, because if we are theologically formed in a way which cannot make sense of both. That's a problem. I have a lot of friends in Nashville who sing a lot of songs, and been doing this for years and years, and there, once upon a time, was a, you know, a movement called CCM, you know, contemporary Christian music. And I don't have a grief against the idea of Christians making music at all. A lot of my friends are very good musicians and live in Nashville, but I know that, you know, there was, you know, in the worst of those days. You know, they counted how many times you mentioned Jesus in every song, and you couldn't say sing songs about unhappy things either. You know, my I had one group of great, close friends who, you know, were very well known all over the world and for their good music and and they'd had a very heart aching tragedy happen in their lives. In course of a weekend, the frame was terribly killed in a car accident. Came to the studio on Monday morning wanting to do their work, but they couldn't get beyond the tragedy. You know, they wrote a song about that. There weren't, wasn't a Christian radio station in America. It would play the song because it wasn't happy enough. Well, that's pretty bad, awful. Actually, it's really awful because you, of course, you, you set up a Christian public, a listening world, which thinks, well, it's all happy, happy, happy all the time. Well, it's not. Nobody really lives that way. Has that life. But in some ways, we we act as if we should pretend with each other that it is that way. It's not that we should be Eeyore. I don't want to be or it isn't we model them. We should just be talking about grief all day long. I don't be that either, you know, but I don't want to be somebody, whoever comes off as I don't live in the world that really is there
Joshua Johnson:as you were walking through holding both joy and sorrow together. It seems to me that as you're walking through these stories, these stories of what it means to be human to live a strong life, a lot of times we forget what it means to be human in this world, and for you, what is humanity? What does it mean to be human? I think this is, I actually think this is probably one of the most important questions we're going to be asking going forward in our days, especially with AI and other types of things, what do you think it is to be human?
Steven Garber:It's such a good question, such a deep question. This is for more than we can get into right now. Joshua, but when I was in my again, the reason I dropped out of school and lived, you know, where I did and doing what I did for a while, was I wanted better reasons to be a student I wasn't. I wanted more reasons just to pass the next test. In the first year, I was living in the Bay Area in Palo Alto and in a commune, we did a magazine together and but I was living in kind of week by week, between UC Berkeley world and the Stanford University world. It was just listening to all kinds of people say all kinds of things. And I began to realize over that year that the deeper question behind everything I was listening to, whether it was about, you know, the arts, about beauty, about sex, about politics or economics, the deeper question behind every one of those was, what do you believe to be true about human beings? What does it mean to be human? And then, what does it mean to be human? Really was the guiding, you know, vision behind everything, everyone said about everything, actually, literally, that was true. And I was at my in my 2021, year old life, I was thinking, huh, I know enough of my family's faith which was Christian, where Christian people could honest, Christian people to know that Christians believe that we're made the image of God. But I remember thinking, that's a very short sentence. What would you say after you said that, you know, so when I went to labri, you know, the next year, I really went in with that question, what does it mean to be made the image of God? What does it mean to be human? So it's fascinating to me that your question will be what it is, you know, as we talk right now, what does it mean to be human? I do think in some ways it's maybe the most perennial of all the questions. It's what is man? You're mindful of Jim Psalm number eight gives it to us poetically, you know, realize that human beings, as human beings, have been asking this question for a long time. I think along the way, I began to realize that some that sometimes the church in its disposition to dualism, which is profound plaguing to us around the world, that we make a disjunction between to be holy and to be human, as if those are somehow different things, different conversations to have. And that, of course, is to miss the meaning of the deeper story, the meta narrative we've talked about together, you know, is to somehow say, Well, to be holy, is this? The human is this? Whereas, I think the biblical vision is to hold them together, finally, beautifully, mysteriously with complexity, but beautifully they are held together. To be truly human is to be most holy. To be most holy is to be truly human. And I think to see that, understand that, in some ways, maybe changes the conversation we will have about, what does it look like in the ordinariness of daily life for all of us, because we're having to talk about, you know, doing a special religious thing, what they talk about, what does it mean to be human, a human being. Then, in God's world, you know, one of my dearest, trusted, most friends, is a musician and producer of musicians in Nashville, Charlie Peacock, and he wrote a book years ago about this very question, and he made the argument that Christ didn't come to make us be Christians. He came to make us be humans. You give us the possibility to be human beings again. Well, yet that is a different mindset to have, isn't it? Work of Christ, redemptively is to allow us, sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve, that we are to become human beings again. Well, that's a different way to tell the story. It has meaning for how we eat and what we eat and how we live, and the clothes we wear and the gardens we have and the work we do, and the politics we take up and the art we believe in, and your graphic behind you you describe is purposely chosen because it it says certain things about what it means to live in this world for you because of what you Why does that matter, or because of the things you. Feel most deeply Joshua about what it means to be a human being in this world, in God's world. So I would just say the question of being human, you know, runs everywhere. It has profound implications, and it has to be always seen as being the very same longing that to be most holy is to be most human,
Joshua Johnson:something you said near the end of your book about having a Telos in our hearts is really helpful in the midst of all of this tension that we live in and and struggling to find hope and becoming hope ourselves. What is that telos? What is that aim for hearts?
Steven Garber:I mentioned that book by Alistair McIntyre, after virtue. And in that book, he wrestles himself with that relation of Telos to praxis, or at least, talks about Telos quite a bit. But of Telos based ethical vision. For him, that was part of the book, actually. And his argument was, we've given up on that telos, which is makes for disastrous consequence for the how we live in the world. I mean, again, if we were just sort of talking face to face, sitting in a park bench somewhere, we could talk about this extensively. But people both know the world well enough to know that there's a lot of Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die. That runs its way through history and through every place we imagine on the face of the earth today, I would say it fascinates me, and has for years, how in both Old and New Testaments, those poetic words are repeated in both Old and New Testaments. Why are they repeated? Well, you have shifting culture behind your head there. That's the name of your podcast. Well, in the culture of the day, prophets and the apostles both heard that language as well. Why not then? Why not then? Just eat, drink. Remember, tomorrow we die, and you can see that that's a way to get at the tell us question for a certain kind of a person, I would say, in some ways, why lingered over Nietzsche as I did, you know, and that in the book, was realizing, well, you know, here he argued, you know, the mid, middle years of the 1800s that God was gone, we need to grow up and get, get over that. You know. Well, there's a chapter that may perhaps you remember I began in Vancouver, British Columbia, and looking at the beauty of the mountains and the ocean and writing about the novelist Douglas Copeland, maybe the most postmodern of all postmodern novelists that we have in the world today, you know. But he has fascinatingly, quite Intriguingly, and surprisingly, a book, little novel called Life after God. So in some ways, he's reflecting on the Nietzschean world a century and a half later. Now. Friedrich, thank you. Let's talk about it. Okay, what's it really look like to be alive in the in your world where God is gone the very last page of the book? You know, to everyone's surprise, you think, really you're going to say this, Mr. Post Modern novelist, that you are your face. Boy, picture. Boy, me. You are the person who's given us the language of Generation X of all things. You know you are that man in the world. And the last page has these words, well, I need you to sit down now. I need to say very important to I want to be a kinder man. And I've come to realize that to be kinder I need God. I want to love more fully with my life, and I realize that to do that, I need God. Now I'm not interested in a cheap belief about anything rash when you aren't either. We would say there's a line in the sand in terms of telos, of what is the point of life that has to do with Is there a god in the universe or not. Now, how to get that right and understand that well and be have commitments and convictions that are informed, you know, rightly and truly Well, that's a chill and challenge, of course, you know. But I would say that you know, from what, why to me when I listen to the Old and New Testament writers quoting the poets of the day, why not? Then, eat, drink, be married for tomorrow. But I realize now I live in Charlottesville, Virginia, the largest landowner in Albemarle county is Dave Matthews, the musician, interesting. He bought all these historic farms in Albemarle county because of the millions he made. You know, singing his songs to the world, one of his best known songs is called trip and bellies. So he is the poet laureate of 21st Century, Albemarle, county, Charlottesville, Virginia. Trip and bellies has what line in it? Why not? Then? Eat, drink, be married, for tomorrow we die. So the question of telos, to me, matters supremely. We don't have to be Presbyterians to believe this to be true, but the Presbyterians and the Anglicans of 400 years ago, together, over 10 years, wrangled their way through Christian conviction for the moment. They called it the Westminster Confession, and then catechism. And the first question of the Catechism is well known to many of us, what is man's chief. End, and we realize that as a tell us question, isn't it? It's a question, what is your life all about anyway?
Joshua Johnson:It's beautiful, Steven. Couple quick questions here at the end. It's been a fantastic conversation, but I like to ask, if you go back to your 21 year old self, what advice would you give?
Steven Garber:I can only smile as I come back to you, back to be back to what we've already talked about, to learn to ask honest questions and to not be willing to take anything last and honest answer,
Joshua Johnson:anything you've been reading or watching lately, you could recommend.
Steven Garber:Well, I mean, I could say 1000 things, because I read pretty regularly and mightily. But since we're between sort of Christmas, Advent and lent and Easter, we put it within those bookends. Okay? Every year for a long time, I have read Dickens's A Christmas Carol during the Christmas season, and I do so because they are really the important questions that are asked by Dickens, in some ways harder for us to put the minds of our hearts around the reality that Dickens and Marx wrote their stories, wrote their books, at the very same time in the very same city. So Marx was writing Das Kapital, Dickens was writing A Christmas Carol, literally the same years in the same city, literally the same neighborhood in London, actually both about the very same thing. Though, we do like Dickens better than we like Marx, don't we? But what's Marx writing about? Well, industrializing Europe, the haves and the have nots, keeping intention with each other. His answer wasn't a very good one. He misread the human being, human person at the heart of the analysis. That was the fundamental flaw for Marx. I get that. I'm not romantic about those things, but what did Dickens write about? Well, you know, we can sort of maybe miss the moment if we fail to understand. He was writing about the haves and the have nots industrializing Europe in middle years of the 20th of the 19th century. And he names them, gives them names Ebenezer, Scrooge and Tiny Tim. But don't miss the point of the story. His story, and many profoundly, is the same story that Marx was writing the racing time. And because of my work in the marketplaces of the world in these years of my life, I'm very interested, of course, in Scrooge as a man of the marketplace. And he'd really, in some ways, he'd missed the point of his own life. He because he missed read the point of money, the meaning of money. He'd imagined it in that language of Augustine. You know, he'd misread the loves that could actually animate and give meaning to a man in the marketplace. He made money mean too much for him. He disordered his loves. So the story is what fundamentally the story of the reordering of loves in that sort of dramatic, long night of his soul. I read that every year, and think about it again every year, coming into the weeks of Lent, you know, and the weeks of towards Easter, you know, I have for years and years, read the first 125 pages of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. It's the story called a just man, the story of the bishop, Bishop BM, the new now, I have loved more than loved the stage version of Les Mis as we call it. It's grand, and it's gloriousness, as you get actually, but you get about five minutes of the bishop's life there on stage, which is beautiful and it's profound. And, you know, I've bought your soul for God, those are the best words you probably ever hear on stage, you know. But you don't, you miss the story of the bishop's life. You under you don't understand why it was that he lived the life that he had. And I want every year during the days of Lent, to rethink my own life, you know, to make sure that I'm I'm learning again, who was this man they called that Hugo. Called a just man in my frailty in the longings that are deepest unexpressed most time in my life. Joshua, I want to be more like that,
Joshua Johnson:very impactful for me as well. So great recommendations. Thank you for taking us back to something that we should be rereading again and again to ask the right questions of what life looks like hints of hope. Your new book is out. Anywhere books are sold, people could go and they could get that highly recommend it. It is just, it's a beautiful, beautiful work, and thank you for helping us make peace with approximate it is something that is much needed in this world, is there anywhere that you'd like to point people to to even find out anything else you've been doing your work, or anything else?
Steven Garber:Well, maybe just to say, of course, the book is available at every every bookstore and every online marketplace. If I was to say, to pick a bookseller, I have a man I much respect, who, among my peers, is called the best bookseller in America, named Byron Borger at hearts and minds bookstore, easily found. He offers as good as maybe even better book service than Amazon does. So put that in your you know, in your mouth, Jeff Bezos, but he offers the best service anywhere as far. I'm concerned. I, you know, I write, I mean, I do a lot of things week after week. Some things I post on through LinkedIn these days. Sometimes I, you know, I offer things people surprise that I I write more serious things on Facebook, but I have for a long time. You know, I've done that for a long time. I somebody said, you're trying to redeem Facebook. I said, not really. But they'd say, Well, it seems like you just, you refuse to kind of go along with, you know, kitty cats. And I said, Well, or with political diatribes, I don't do that very often at all. I want to reflect on deeper things. There's a website called the Washington Institute for faith, vocation and culture, where a lot of my writing is located there is a book we'd like to talk about today at all called the seamless life, tapestry of love, learning, worship and work, which is a collection about 40 essays with photos that I took over time and wrote. Most of those first appeared on the pages of the Washington Institute. So that would be a repository of some of this excellent
Joshua Johnson:Well, Steven, thank you for this conversation. I just pray that we could all make peace with proximate and that we could live in a way that is like our vocation, that is as imitators of Christ, we be wounded healers, that even in the scars the world of the pain of the world that there is actually hope and healing, and we could find some hints of hope. So thank you, Steven, it was fantastic.
Steven Garber:You're very welcome. Thank you. Joshua,
Joshua Johnson:yeah,
