Seminary stacks.

After finishing a long burst of necessary tasks and under considerable pressure and little sleep I thought to take refuge today, early this afternoon in the stacks at the old seminary here. It will never cease to amaze how tall, stately and beautiful are the structures here which are so often deserted in the middle of term. On a campus that one would expect to be teaming with life and the bustle of important work you can number the bluejays more quickly than people.

I come here because, as cold and dead as it feels, it reminds me of my own roots in scholarship and how I found it an adventure no less tantalizing as a lad of 20 than if I were one of the children in that story walking through the Wardrobe into a fantastic new world.

I suppose after such early exploits, and now some thirty years later, you can understand why I would be drawn to a place that might, at any moment, open more deeply into Him.

I lay my laptop down and chuckled a bit. Reminded me (not seriously) of Luke Skywalker before he goes into the dark forest grabbing for his gear for security. The exchange with his mentor were appropriate: (video)

Yoda: “you will not need that.”

Luke: “What’s in there?”

Yoda: “Only what you take with you.”

Rows upon rows of doctoral dissertations in their black covers…books bound in extremely limited editions and signed by various authorities for the candidates, but probably never read by anyone else.

Cave-like I found some areas very dark and cold. Lifeless recountings of controversies now so obviously irrelevant. I suppose, in some respect, not much different than a few of my decades. So much energy and toil to play to others or work out one’s own stuff under the guise of “ministry”. So much energy and time arguing over how a society should be and how hundreds or thousands of important issues should shake out when we have avoided the largest and most core issues that define and inform any and all questions.

To be sure, issues of the nation and of gender are important. But is it wise to argue these outward forms alone without any first and sustained consideration that the nations themselves are “but a drop in the bucket” and that “In Christ there is neither male nor female” (or at the very least that all those misogynist Christian men are, ecclesiologically* speaking, the “Bride of Christ” and therefore must show up to the Grand Wedding in “drag”)?

Rows upon rows of journals, now hard bound in sets consisting mostly of just a few scholars arguing minute esoterica while the real questions are not even asked. Or worse, every seventeenth book or so a good-sized paperback starting with the title “Towards a Preliminary Approach to…” some such new question that no one will ever care about, including the author a year later.

Note this about good authors. They don’t dwell on the same work long. True, they may become known for a certain area, but never be surprised when you see them at top form on some other needed matter that seems, at first blush, unlikely.

In that regard, I found a few old friends. Kierkegaard was first.

They can never quite put him away from them because, well frankly, they don’t understand him most of the time. I don’t either. I just admit it. A towering intellect who could create with such ferocity and brilliance I really see him as the Van Gogh of theology and philosophy.

It is more than a good theological joke that Kierkegaard wrote some of his books in an obscure matter on purpose and for his own deliberate reasons. I say this because most books about Kierkegaard are written just as obscurely…just not on purpose or for any good reason.

I like Kierkegaard because he loved the Church and so was merciless in calling her a whore on all counts. I also love him for his Journals and prayers where a deeply sweet and passionate heart for God are found. And a deep distrust about himself which is some sort of “red pill” (video) that should be given to all students of theology and biblical literature on their first day.

But Kierkegaard rightly saw himself as a corrective. It was an awful burden that ultimately killed him early.

Next, and a little lower, I saw some C.S. Lewis. His mixture of scholarship and playfulness is much needed about now, as it was just sixty years ago. He would have quickly seen the landscape changing from Modernity into a protest against it and addressed it in new ways. Fortunate for us, his works, for the most part, speak equally well to both Moderns and Postmoderns as well.

Then I saw a stack of Buechner books. I opened one of the small books of essays to the one on Easter and disagreed with his conclusion to the effect that “if the tomb is empty there is nothing to talk about. If the body is still there there is nothing to talk about.”

Let me say, I agree with the latter half, and I suppose I see what he is trying to get at in the first. My only suggestion is that, showstopper that resurrection may be, there s a great deal to be talked about after the empty tomb…starting with “He is not here. why do you seek the living among the dead?”

But I love Buechner and wish I was half the writer he is. Friends hope someday I will actually be a quarter of the writer he is.

The last friend was embedded deep in the Catholic section: Merton.

I have wondered often how Merton is so able to speak to everyone and yet be so overt about Christ.

To oversimplify two words come to mind: charity and depth. These two are encased in a certain fearlessness and lack of personal agenda (other than truth-telling).

I believe Merton is my favorite and when I need solace from a Modern writer, it is always Merton. Often it is from his journals, which have an uncanny way of being about him and his own life and struggles, yet always seem to point beyond in a spiritual nakedness that is utterly disarming.

There is a also the fact that Merton is so “unCatholic” (in a sense) as to be truly more deeply Catholic in every sense of that term.

And Catholics can get away with that (like Walker Percy, Brennan Manning, Bruce Springsteen, or half of Bono as a few examples).

For the most part, as I said, the stacks of that old library are cold with a certain lostness. In some darker parts (away from the likes of S.K., Merton, Lewis and others), I heard those same words quietly inside: “He is not here. Why do you seek the Living among the dead?”

Then there was the one great neglected area….the commentaries. This is the one treasured place of an old library where good scholarship can be a Wardrobe into another world, a world far more real than this one. Through the study of Scripture the mind can be opened and the heart turned and warmed to Him.

If you go in there, in that area, leave your laptop behind. Save that for later in the cafe down in town.

No…take only yourself in .