“What do you make of all this?”
It’s a question getting asked a good deal over the last several weeks, and it’s an interesting question both because of what it assumes and also what it brings about.
Why do we use the word “make,” a word characteristically associated with the tactile – our various trades and apprenticeships, a word for kitchens and workshops and factories and artists – to describe a synthetic act, which is to say an imaginative act, working on the non-tangible? We, as human beings, both subject and object always and forever, somehow observe the diversity of human experience and assimilate it into some kind of framework; we make sense (another metaphorical use). Humans make both things and frameworks, and the frameworks serve as conceptual strategies and patterns for bringing clarity and order to the things, and thus place those things in our broader experience. This is most certainly a component of being human (that is, it is ontological, eternity in the human heart), and as such it is human action directed to an end, some broader interpretive horizon. As an explicitly Christian-human act it is undergirded by the loving and gracious direction toward fulfillment (telos again) that is the triune God’s action to consummation; in technical theological speak, it’s providence, or what we’ve learned by reading our Scriptures, maybe especially certain parts of Genesis or Romans.
It’s kind of striking that in asking and answering the question at the head of these reflections each of us is channeling, more or less unknowingly, a mass of assumptions about anthropology, ontology, teleology, providence and the doctrine of God. And it is for this reason that the other interesting aspect of the question comes into focus. Since these various so-called “intellectual” assumptions are operating as we see and reflect on our experience in the world, they touch rock bottom (an insufficiently foundationalist metaphor to be sure) upon our creatureliness or our made-in-the-image-of-God-ness. Our making meaning or making sense or making something out of a tough situation is an aspect of our participation in the triune God who made us. Making meaning out of our experience, imaginatively looking for links and drawing out significance, brings about newness: a new view of whatever situation, yes, but more than that, a new person, insofar as we are no longer who we were before this experience and act of making meaning, but also a new opportunity for meaning-making for those who interact with our meaning-making (and, depending on the strength or weakness of your Pneumatology, this type of meaning-making could be classed as revelation).
I’ve had a front row seat to this act of making meaning in the midst of our COVID-19 crisis by dialoging with some really faithful and wise Christians, both in my role at the CPT but more generally as I’ve interacted with my Christian community in my home and on Zoom, iMessage, WhatsApp, FaceTime or whatever. The instinct on display in these conversations is to broaden the field of vision, quickly moving to speaking about…
the benefits of this situation for families, who sadly don’t get a lot of regular time together, but are now having meals together, learning together through “home schooling”, playing together and worshiping together;
or the helpful by-product of being, in some cases, forced to utilize technology for our churches, often causing those previously opposed to streaming and other various approaches to soften a bit, at least as an emergency measure to accommodate Christian worship of some kind;
or the joy of realizing that something as routine as going to church each week is indeed, once it’s taken away, a gift to be received rather than simply reducing it to an aspect of routine;
or the salutary awareness of the possibility of some kind of national unity as countries work together to contain and prevent the spread of the virus;
or – for pastors – some welcome perspective, reacquainting them with the basic elements of their pastoral vocation, weaning them away from the excess that, barnacle-like, attaches to pastoral ministry and church life over time;
We make meaning; that’s what we do as humans.
But we make a complicated kind of meaning. One other element of this imaginative act that needs noting, and thus serves to complicate matters, is that as each of the above forms of gratitude is expressed it is also quickly and rightly qualified by something along these lines:
“I hesitate to dwell simply on the positive benefits of all this, since a lot of people are dying and suffering – health workers who are overworked, economic hardships in homes and nations, job loss, isolation, kids who are stuck in a home that isn’t safe – and though we’ve had an opportunity to see this so far in most of our contexts as an interesting challenge, that isn’t the whole story.”
This empathetic qualification is also an act of meaning making, and it is essential and absolutely necessary as the paradoxical relationship between death and resurrection is played out in the stuff of our lives. The act of making meaning cannot erase the reality of suffering, but must acknowledge it as a constitutive element in the very act of making any meaning at all, for that is the deep grammar at work in all of creation as made by and sustained by the triune God.
Trying to hold all this together, someone in one of my WhatsApp groups directed all of us to a phrase that has served as a helpful articulation of our human vocation: we take part in “the art of making order where people live,” and I would add, “where people die.” As we all continue to learn as these weeks unfold, let’s go on making meaning and sharing meaning with one another, because our meaning-making acts – formed in prayer and worship and speaking to one another in whatever medium we’re able – have the potential not just to be helpful by underscoring unintended benefits of quarantine, but actually to make us, to form us in Christ by the Spirit as we speak, “Abba, Father, hallowed by your name….”
Jameson Ross is the Director of Fellowships for the Center for Pastor Theologians. He served in pastoral ministry for over 10 years before moving to England to pursue his PhD in Theology from Durham University. He joined the CPT staff full-time in 2019.
