David O'Hara

magic

Jan 24, 2013 ∞
Finding One's Way: Three Questions About Vocation
My students often ask me, "What should I do with my life after I graduate?"

The simple answer I usually give is this: you should pursue your vocation.

In answering that way, I hope to encourage students not to accept others' stories about how their lives should go, and to begin to give them some tools for answering their own question.

My reason for caution is that the word "vocation" is a tricky one.  It has tendrils that grow in many directions, and some of them don't need much fertilizer before they reach into some messy metaphysical and ethical questions. 

There's an important lesson in all those stories about magic that have been handed down through the ages: words have real power to change the world and to swerve the direction of others' actions.  Which means they should be handled with care. "Vocation" is one of the strong words.  It's got a kind of magic to it because it has the power to enchant our lives by drawing a lot of ideas together into one place, and by drawing some long arrows leading towards and away from the place where you stand right now.  Its root, the Latin word vocatio, means "calling."  This is what I mean by the "tendrils" and the messy metaphysics they can grow into: if you're called, that might imply a caller, which might imply some strong obligations. 

Here are some suggestions for how to handle the idea of vocation with care: 

First, don't tell other people what their vocation must be.  Imposing strong narratives on others' lives is what we do when we pretend to be God.  I don't recommend trying to play that role.  Read some Milton before you do, anyway.

Second, no matter how strong your sense of your own calling, remember that we see as in a glass, darkly.  You can't judge a voice except with your own ears, so remember the limitations of your hearing. 

Third, and along those same lines, don't make rash decisions about the last step of your journey; look instead to the next step. This means having some humility, and a lot of patience with yourself and with your own life.  It means not knowing how the story of your life will unfold, but reading it - and writing it - one page at a time.

With those caveats in mind, here are three questions that I offer students who are trying to figure out what their calling may be.  I recommend taking the time to consider them thoughtfully.  Write your answers down, and after a while, ask trustworthy friends who know you and love you if they agree with your answers.  As you consider these questions, don't think about jobs and careers, lest that limit your answers.  The aim in asking each of these questions is this: to know yourself better.

First, what are you good at?  What are your skills and your strengths? Don't just think about the things you enjoy doing here; include all your gifts and talents.

Second, what do you love to do?  Don't just think about what you're good at, but include those things you love but haven't any talent for.

Third, what do you want to accomplish? How would you like the world to be changed when you are done with it?  How would you like to be known?  What do you most want to do, or be?  What would you write in your autobiography?

Do any patterns appear?  As you answer these questions honestly, do you discover anything about yourself that you didn't see clearly before?  Answering these questions won't sort everything out for you, and I know I can't tell you what your calling is.  But I do think that getting to know yourself, your loves, your talents, and your aspirations can help you to avoid simply doing what others want you to do.  And they just might shed some light on the path ahead.


Oct 17, 2012 ∞
Watching Out For One Another
Something that has struck me lately, a new way (for me, at least) to think of some ancient religious texts:

"You are to do the same [sacrifices] for anyone who sins unintentionally or through ignorance..." 
and
"Early in the morning, he would sacrifice a burnt offering for each of them, thinking, "Perhaps my children have sinned and cursed God in their hearts."* 
These texts look only one step removed from magic and superstition, where a fear of evil consequences makes us undergo purifying rituals.

But maybe the one step they have taken away from superstition is this: they both speak of taking care of others. 

We may err intentionally, and that is our fault.  But we all err ignorantly and unintentionally as well.  We offend without meaning to offend.  We do harm without knowing the consequences of our actions.

It is good to be reminded of these things, if only so that we don't think of ourselves too highly.  The sacrifice is at least a reminder that we are not flawless, and that we should still examine our lives.  Even what we intend for good may cause harm.

If we know that about ourselves, we may know it about others as well.  And knowing it about others, we may have the same compassion for them as we have for ourselves.


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*The first passage is from the Book of Ezekiel, 45.20; the second is from the Book of Job, 1.5.  Both are from the New International Version, which happened to be the one nearest to hand as I wrote this.  The first passage is from a passage instructing priests; the second is from the ancient poem about Job, the good man who suffers unexplained evil.


Feb 13, 2012 ∞
Sorcery and Pollution
In the Apocalypse of St John on Patmos, he writes that some will be excluded from heaven by their wickednesses. [1]  He describes them with florid metaphor, calling them "the dogs," for example.  He goes on to name some of them: sorcerers, fornicators, murderers, idolaters, and so on.  A nasty lot, to be sure, all of them worshiping things not worthy of worship.

Of course, sorcery isn't much of a problem for us these days.  At least, that's how most of us see it. But some folks are concerned that magic in modern fiction poses a threat to sanctity.  Several years ago I wrote a book called From Homer To Harry Potter, in which one of my aims was to help Christians (many of whom were concerned about the sorcery of young Mr. Potter and its influence on their children) think about myth, fantasy, and magic.  Not all magic is equal, I argued, and not all of it should alarm us.  

So this word "sorcery" in St. John's Apocalypse caught my eye recently.  Perhaps sorcery is a bad thing, after all?  The word St. John uses is pharmakos, related to the Greek pharmakeia and to our word "pharmacy."  It means one who makes potions, and especially potions used to poison others. 

What's wrong with this version of sorcery should be obvious to everyone: it amounts to the idolatry of power and the abuse of nature to worship that idol.  To put it in simpler terms: it is an idolatry of power because it regards human lives as things to be sacrificed on the altar of power.  We kill because we desire to dominate.  Selah.

And it is an abuse of nature because it regards chemistry as a tool of domination of others.  It concocts in order to destroy, and, again, it destroys in order to dominate.

Christians who are concerned about magic should ponder this.  Is God concerned with hand-waving, spells, and incantations?  I doubt it.  But it would appear that God is not pleased with using chemistry to do violence, and with regarding natural science as a tool for domination of other people.  I know it alarms me, at any rate.

I haven't got a quick conclusion here.  My point is not that we need to do away with chemistry or hold witch-hunts for chemists.  But I frequently return to Francis Bacon in his Advancement of Learning, [2] where he offers a way to speed up science by dividing up the four causes that Aristotle said all scientists need to seek.  Bacon suggests that if we can find the material and efficient causes of things - the matter and energy that cause particular contingent states and arrangements of things in the world - that should be enough for science.  Seeking the other two causes - formal and final causation - amounts to something like seeking the meaning of things and their purposes in the world.  To require scientists to seek these things is probably an undue burden on the natural sciences, and it certainly bogs down their progress by engaging them in endless debates about metaphysics and ethics.  Bacon leaves these latter questions to theologians and metaphysicians, freeing natural scientists to much more rapid progress in their research.  Bacon's division of causes was a brilliant stroke, and modern science owes it very much.

In the same book, Bacon finds he must make a defense of chemistry.  He does so by means of an analogy between chemistry and sorcery. [3]  It is prohibited to converse or do business with evil spirits, he says, but it is not prohibited to inquire into their nature and power.  Those who do the former are sorcerers, but those who do the latter are theologians.  Bacon adds, as an aside, that he's not sure either one is doing anything real, because those alleged spirits are "fabulous and fantastical."  Still, the analogy is helpful: it may be unethical to use poisons on other people, but it is certainly not wrong to seek to understand the nature and power of poisons.  So natural science, when it seeks to understand the nature and power of chemical compounds, for instance, is doing something like theology.

Here is where I find myself at a loss: theology has a story it can tell about why we should not converse with demons, and for those who live in the community that is shaped by that story, it is compelling.  But what story can we tell that will teach us how to avoid modern sorcery?  We have traded albs and chasubles for lab coats, and for the most part, this has been a positive development.  But we have not been intentional about telling a good story about science, and we have liberated it from questions of meaning and purpose - a liberation that we have recently begun to question, as we "have become death, the destroyer of worlds."  We have become unwitting sorcerers all, crafting potions that do wider and greater violence than the ancient theologians could have imagined.

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[1]  Rev 22.14

[2]  See Bacon, Of the Advancement of Learning, 2.VII.3, e.g.

[3]  Bacon, op. cit., 2.VI.2.