By Andrew Bohman 

As I scrape off half-eaten piles of food into a compost bin five hours into bussing tables, sometimes I wonder what my labor is for -- why I strive so hard to fund a degree in music that will ultimately lead to a life of yet more hard work. It can all seem so fruitless to us when we spend long nights studying and toiling to the point of exhaustion, and to what end? To make money, perhaps start a family, and then what? From these questions comes a sinking feeling that can lead anyone into self-doubt or despair. 

Yet, because we exist, we must have a purpose. While people subscribe to many different beliefs, the Christian can come to know of this purpose through scripture. The Bible says, “… everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.” In other words, our purpose is to bring God glory. That is how we benefit Him, and to us there is no higher calling. God’s glory exists whether or not we acknowledge it, but there must be something valuable about acknowledging it. To bring God glory does not mean we give Him glory that was not previously there, it means that we are serving as a showcase through which He displays His eternal, boundless majesty. For God to desire that our entire existence be centered around Him is overwhelmingly generous; it is thrilling that we might be the glass through which His glory shines, because otherwise we are left dull and unfulfilled. Nothing can ever truly and wholly satisfy us as much as fulfilling the very purpose for which our species was created.

So the question that remains is this: how are we fulfilling this purpose to display and acknowledge the glory of God? First we must dedicate ourselves to serving Him. Christians believe this can only be done by accepting the sacrifice of Christ which bridges the rift between man and God caused by our own rebellion. Yet a purposeful life does not end with simple acceptance. Colossians 3:17 says, “And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” We are to live a life of constant submission and deliberate glorification in all that we do. All is a frighteningly encompassing concept. If you are anything like me, this seems impossibly burdensome. How can one be thinking about God for every waking moment of the day and devote every act to Him? Is that what this verse implies?

It is clear that when we do things to directly honor God, such as prayer, scripture-reading, and worship, we are bringing Him glory. Matthew 5:16 says, “… let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.” So we are to do more than just spiritual behaviors, we are to live a life of light, which is ultimately the most important manifestation of our glorification of God. But wouldn’t doing this constantly require an explicitly religious vocation, such as missionary work or monasticism, not to mention an inhuman amount of self-discipline? Interpretations like this can leave us feeling as if our life goals are completely futile. How could pursuing a degree and career in biochemistry, economics, the humanities, or in my case music composition possibly be of any eternal value?

​Now the question turns to how our apparently secular life goals line up with our purpose. Our jobs, after all, will consume a majority of our waking lives. Is it then only acceptable to work in public places where you can display Christ’s light around you? Is then the point of all your goals and aspirations to put you in contact with people through whom you can glorify God, or do the goals in and of themselves have meaning?

Let’s look at Genesis. Imagine, for a moment, that the world is as perfect today as God created it to be, that there is no sin, no fall of man, and no curse. Imagine that Adam and Eve never took a bite of that forbidden fruit. What would we be doing? Would we be sitting around all day talking with God? Yes, in Eden the first man and woman walked and fellowshipped with their Maker and that’s important, but it’s not what the Bible says they were put on the earth to do. Genesis 2:15 says, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” He gave Adam a job. He was meant to work the Garden, given the responsibility to care for it. In verse 19 we see, “Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.” Here Adam is given another job—one involving creativity. 

We see here such an eye-opening insight into God’s initial plan for humanity. From the very beginning, God gave us the function of doing work.  He created us to have a relationship with Him, but for some reason instead of having man spend his time speaking with and singing to the Creator, He set him to work. He gave Adam his own, personal, separate function to tend the Garden and to name the animals. The reason we were created was so that we could serve and bring glory to God, but the purpose God granted us is to work! 

You may wonder, now, why there are two seemingly contradictory purposes for humanity. But it’s not a contradiction, it only proves the following statement: work glorifies God. In fulfilling what God wants us to do, when we use our unique talents and abilities to tend to this earth and be creative (there’s my justification for making art!), we are reflecting the image of God after which we were modeled. Our God is one who actively fulfills a role as the Master of the universe (i.e., He works), and is the literal definition of creativity (is there a bolder understatement?). We are made in His image, so to conform to that image is to give Him the glory. Think of the swell of love and pride a father feels when he sees his small child, who resembles him in appearance, also mimicking his actions. Would our Heavenly Father not also feel the same toward His children?

​Those familiar with the book of Genesis and subsequent passages might raise a red flag now, however: doesn’t it say that work is punishment? Hard work is not pleasant. We do it to make money and eat. Look at chapter three after the first sin, where God tells Adam, “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. ... By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground....” (vv. 17b, 19a) It doesn’t sound like work is a very good thing, does it?

But that’s not what it says. Work is not a curse. Toil is a curse. Toil is a perversion of work—it is not just a job, but it is undesirable and laborious. When we defiled our purpose and committed sin, when we tainted our good nature with evil, we perverted ourselves. So God, in His righteous anger and judgment, punished us by perverting our job—He made the very thing we must do something unpleasant, because we had made ourselves unpleasant. Toil is not our purpose, and it brings God no glory. Our joy in work has been sucked out because of sin’s curse in a fallen world.
The book of Ecclesiastes, which most scholars believe was written by King Solomon, a man to whom God gave more wisdom than any other, addresses this very topic in a passage far more concise and eloquent than I could ever hope to write. He concludes that, “A person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their own toil. This too, I see, is from the hand of God, for without him, who can eat or find enjoyment?”

Now that we have the opportunity to restore our relationship with Christ and be free from the bondage and curse of sin, we can reclaim that joy in toil and spend the rest of our lives satisfied in fulfilling our place in the world. Just as it was by God that our work became toil, so it is through Him that our toil can become work. We cannot expect to suddenly find satisfaction in the mere knowledge of our purpose. We must submit ourselves to Him and live in His strength, because He is the only true fountain of happiness and meaning.

We were all created with a unique set of gifts and abilities, and obviously we were granted them in enough abundance to end up in such a fine institution to cultivate them. That, my friends, is meaningful. By all means, pursue your degree, and live your life as God leads you! In order for our aspirations in life to come to fruition, we require His matchless wisdom and leadership—He is a far better planner than you or I could ever be for ourselves. 

Of course, that isn’t easy, and cannot be done through our own power—it must be done through the strength of God’s Spirit. The point is not to say, “Live like this even though it’s hard and you won’t like it.” The Christian life is not burdened by some command for rule-abiding righteousness. It is liberating! There is nothing better for us than to live our lives, put in a good day’s work, and as we do, to live a life of light bringing honor to the One who gave it to us. Freeing yourself through Christ is far more exhilarating than trying to live by some purpose we invent for ourselves. Aligning your life in submission to and glorification of Christ is deeply satisfying because that is why we were created. Living for yourself will never truly satisfy because it is contrary to your inherent, deep-seated human nature. It is only by a deceptive trick of the flesh and the veil of sin that we think a God-glorifying life is difficult and laborious, but as soon as one truly partakes of that submission, the veil is torn and we see the truth of how wonderful and thrilling it is. There truly is no greater joy, because there is no greater purpose.

 By Bobby Peretti 

​          You don’t have to accept Jesus.  I wish more people would.  But no one has to.  No one can make you nor should anyone attempt to do so.   But you do have to respond in some way upon learning of Jesus and his claims.  There are a great many historical and in some cases ongoing debates about the precise mechanics and the degree of volition involved in the process, but the fact remains once you know of Jesus Christ and his claims in any real capacity (which, if you are reading this journal you now do) you must ultimately accept or reject him.  Both sides of that coin are deeply personal and highly sensitive processes.  The former is one of the central talking points of huge swaths of Christian writing, preaching, and outreach, and rightfully so.  Christians everywhere are tasked with sharing the news of Christ in hopes that more people will come to know and embrace him.  I am not going to talk about that.  Instead, consider this article a guide for how to reject Jesus.  
         Before all that though, some clarification as to what I have said above.  By stating that there is a mandate to either accept or reject Jesus Christ and his claims, I am not demanding spur-of-the-moment decision-making.  It is a process that often takes time, information, and introspection.  A period of open-minded, curious agnosticism is not only expected, but can also be an expression of integrity and humility.  But it should not be permanent.  A permanent state of agnosticism (or as might be more appropriate given the changing census results on the topic of religion in America, “noneism”) says one of two things: either you believe the truth of the matter to be unknowable or unimportant.  To the first I say, how can you know it is unknowable without simultaneously asserting the same ultimate level of knowledge whose very possibility you have just dismissed?  The simple truth is that you can’t, and any insistence that “I don’t know” is acceptable as a permanent stance on the issue just amounts, quite frankly, to quitting the question.  And to those who think the issue unimportant, I think you will find as we unpack the claims made by Jesus of Nazareth later on in the piece, that the truth or falsehood of these claims would have radical implications and consequences on levels ranging from mundane to global.               Furthermore, I wish to clarify briefly what I mean by the term “encounter” and what constitutes a rejection.  By encounter I do not mean any kind of “road to Damascus” moment (see Acts 9), just becoming aware of Jesus and who he said he is.  By rejection I mean, and this is quite important, anything outside of accepting him as who he claimed to be, namely the son of God.   I do not mean only decrying him as a charlatan and a liar desperate for the spotlight.   Rejection includes calling him a great teacher or philosopher, grouping him with great peacemakers like Ghandi or Martin Luther King, or even calling him a prophet on the order of Moses or Muhammad, as these things are not what he said he was.            None of those people has ever made claims as grandiose as those made by Jesus of Nazareth.  
Now lets begin.  There are a number of approaches to rejecting Jesus Christ as being God.  I have chosen the four I find most common and most natural to assert.  There are myriad convolutions that could be made both of the Biblical text and the surrounding history such that Jesus is denied his deity, but even if those theories prove more difficult to directly do away with (which in many cases they do not), they also make gradually less and less sense the more tortured the facts of the case become.  Furthermore, they usually prove to be simply versions of the far simpler objections listed below with clauses, provisions, and other attachments in hopes that some good ol’ sound and fury will drown out their incoherence.  In the name of Occam’s razor, we can say that if there is an objection to be had with any very large and weighty claim, it will be simple, and fairly obvious.  We are then left with these:  
Jesus is not God because he never existed.  His “disciples” made the whole thing up.
Jesus is not God because he was lying when he said he was God.  His disciples bought it.
Jesus is not God because he was crazy to claim that he was God.  His disciples did not recognize his insanity because they were crazy too.
            Jesus is not God because he never said he was God.  His disciples lied about him after his death.
These complaints are the oldest, simplest, and best to be raised against Jesus’ divinity.  They have answers for the basics of the Gospel accounts, and they put forward other possibilities as to what might be the truth about Jesus of Nazareth.  They are tidy, or at least they appear to be.  Moreover, if Jesus is not God, then the truth of the matter must be in one of these four statements.  If you want to reject Christ, you must pick basically from these.  As such, I will now test each of them to see which is the most valid way to reject Christ.  
            Jesus is not God because he never existed.  His “disciples” made the whole thing up.   This is by far the flimsiest of the four.  Unsurprisingly, it has fallen somewhat out of favor in the past hundred or so years, to the point where very few educated people, regardless of theology, hold the belief.  I won’t spend much time on it but will only say that there are numerous accounts of Jesus by the foremost historian of the day, Josephus, and many details provided in the gospel are historically verifiable in their own right through other non-biblical sources.  Jesus of Nazareth did exist, that much is certain.  This objection is just silly.  
           Jesus is not God because he was lying when he said he was God.  His disciples bought it.  Now we have something to work with.  This recognizes that Jesus existed, that he claimed to be God, and that his disciples truly believed he was God.  These points will be problematic for several later objections, but this one has no quarrel with them.  It accepts them, but answers that claiming to be God and even having followers believe it does not a deity make.  This is quite correct.  There have been countless instances of rulers and charismatic figures claiming they were gods, and in some cases entire nations bowed to them.           There is a reason we are not having serious discussion as to whether we should worship or reject the pharaohs.  People gave their lives for Hirohito, and people killed for Charles Manson.  What makes Jesus and his followers any different?  One problem is the miracles.  Not necessarily that the disciples said he did them.  The trouble is in the specific circumstances of them, which, if we reject the idea that he actually did do them (as we must if we are to keep him from being God), require the disciples to either be either themselves telling parables or duped by the best illusionist in history.  As it is difficult to imagine someone without supernatural power seeming to walk on water, raise a dead man or feed five thousand people with a few loaves of bread through sleight of hand, the best recourse if we want to rid ourselves of these pesky miracles is to metaphorize them, to say that the disciples were telling parables about Jesus.  The trouble with this theory, however, comes when you actually read the accounts.  In the gospel descriptions of these events, there is absolutely no preface or indication that these stories are not to be interpreted as real happenings.  In fact, each of the descriptions of the miracles I have listed above is heavily logistical.  The writers are very concerned with conveying the physical circumstances of each event, specifically as it relates to travel time and catering.  These are not the stuff of parables.  It is more similar to a police report.  Locations, times, distances, and planning dominate these descriptions.                          Furthermore, we know from other passages what gospel parables sound like.  First, Jesus is always identified as speaking, the characters in the stories rarely have names and are instead identified as “a farmer” or “a rich man” and the like, and mode and timing of travel are hardly ever mentioned at all.  We know how parables are presented in the gospels; we know what they sound like.  These are not them.  And unless the gospel writers have invented a bastardized version of free indirect discourse 1800 years before Jane Austen (who, for the non-humanities crowd, did invent that) without anyone noticing or any observable advances in the field following from it, there is really no way they can be read so.  It is literarily impossible, try as many might. So, if the disciples were not telling parables, they must have believed these miracles occurred.  This means there are two remaining options: that the gospel writers, two of whom never even met Jesus, were fooled by some trick, or they really happened.  This objection, while better than the first, doesn’t totally satisfy.  It backs itself into the corner that Jesus, by sleight of hand or some other means, is the Jewish Cris Angel.  Stand there if you like, but I think most will look for someplace better. 
          Jesus is not God because he was crazy to claim that he was God.  His disciples did not recognize his insanity because they were crazy too.  This one shows legitimate promise.  In fact, there is something that feels vaguely irrefutable about it, not in the sense that it is unassailably true, but rather that it is very difficult to prove false.  But we are not concerned with the burden of proof, at least not in the traditional sense.  What we are trying to find is not grounds to acquit Christ one way or the other.  We are trying to find grounds on which to ignore him.  So, what if he were crazy?  A schizophrenic with delusions of grandeur, perhaps a persecution complex or something thrown in for good measure?  Could work.  His personality and generally rational portrayal doesn’t totally fit the profile, but of course he was not the one with the pen in his hand.  Lets run with it.  Lets assume for a second that Jesus of Nazareth was crazy. After all, that’s been SOP each time someone has claimed to be God since.  Then of course the disciples would have to be crazy or brainwashed themselves too, in order to explain how they followed him so fiercely in the face of danger after his death.  That’s fine.  Many people think that about them anyway.  As a matter of fact, the first time Peter preached in public, people assumed he was drunk because of his enthusiasm.  That event is actually quite illustrative for out purposes.  It comes in Acts 2, after Jesus has died and (according to his erstwhile disciples) risen and ascended.  His followers are in hiding, outlaws essentially.  Then they rush into the marketplace, Jerusalem’s Times Square, at nine in the morning and begin preaching, because they seem to think that the spirit of God has inspired them to tell others about Jesus.  In the text, they are speaking in the languages of the many foreigners assembled for a feast, though they do not know how to speak these languages normally. Another point for crazy.  Sure enough, the people initially think they are drunk.  What does Peter then do?  Does he start raving?  Attack his doubters perhaps?  Nope.  He makes a joke, saying we can’t be drunk, because it’s nine in the morning and the bars are closed.  His speech that follows, while certainly impassioned and emotional, is convincing, sound, and totally rational. In fact, he constructs his case by reciting from memory long passages of the old testament and showing that they were in reference to Jesus.   His argument is in fact so sound that he wins over three thousand people to a church whose entire earthly membership was at that point so small it could barely have fielded a lacrosse team.  But, you say, rightly, look at Hitler, look at Mussolini!  They were great orators who got hordes to join their cause while being, to put it mildly, bonkers!  If you read the entirety of Peter’s speech in Acts, you will find very a different argumentation from either of them, but for the sake of argument, I will concede that one convincing speech is not a clean bill of mental health.  But Peter did not write these events down.  Luke, the same one who wrote the gospel, did. I will talk more about him in a moment.  But for now, I enter as evidence a dozen carefully constructed and well thought out letters of theological explication.  Meet Paul, neé Saul of Tarsus.  He is an interesting case in that, while he wrote nearly half of the New Testament, he never met Jesus while Jesus was alive (he had his own encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus, but he never met him when Jesus was walking the earth and preaching). Paul is in a strange way insulated from the possibility of a cult of personality.  While we have just seen Peter preaching with surety that Christ was God, Peter was Jesus’ close friend and could easily have been blinded by charisma.  Paul is immune to that.  In fact, he for the first portion of his life not only rejected Christ but also tried to stamp out his following on the basis that it was heresy to his Jewish faith.  He then turned and became one of the biggest figures in all of Christianity.  And his writing is marked by argument and rationality.  The New Testament, and particularly Paul’s letters, do not read like some internet conspiracy website with red text on a yellow background, flashing popups, and liberal applications of caps lock.  I implore you to read at least Romans and see for yourselves that this is no kind of breathless rambling, but is rather complexly reasoned and thoroughly thought out.  The gospel writer Luke presents a similar problem to this line of thinking.  He too never met Christ, but even more troubling for those who wish to write him off as mad, he was a practicing medical doctor, educated and trained.  Matthew worked for the Roman IRS.  These are educated, thinking men, not loons on the margins vulnerable to be swayed by a madman.  All of the many words I have spent on this objection bring us back to how I began this paragraph: I don’t know if I can say this means of rejecting Christ is disproved, but there is considerable evidence to the contrary.  It requires the turning of more than a few blind eyes to accept it.  
          Jesus is not God because he never said he was God.  His disciples lied about him after his death.  This, I think, is the most common way people explain their rejection of Jesus as God.  This is comfortable.  It hurts the fewest feelings to say that Jesus was a great philosopher, that he taught love, and that he believed in peace.  It lets him be a good man, even a great man.  It shifts the blame to those ridiculous Christians who make him out to be more than even he thought he was.  The only problem is that it makes no sense whatsoever.  It depends on one of two things: either Jesus has been misinterpreted by those who read the gospel, or he was misrepresented by those who wrote it.  To the first point, I would recall John 8:58 in which Jesus says in response to being asked if he thinks himself greater than the Jewish patriarch Abraham, “Before Abraham was, I am.”  The tense of the verb to be here clearly evokes the passage in Exodus where God names himself to Moses as the great “I AM.”  Everyone listening would have recognized this and likely been appalled at the audacity of the statement.  It is unequivocal in its purpose.  It asserts, with no room for misinterpretation that Jesus claims to be God.  Unless, of course, he never said that.  Unless John made it up after the fact when writing the story of his personal hero.  This brings me to the second option we have if we take this objection to be the case: the disciples forged it all.  Jesus really was just a very wise and nice man turned into something more after a tragically early death.  This theory seems to work.  It goes through the gospel able to pick and choose what it accepts about Jesus until almost the end.  Then it comes to the resurrection, slips on it like a vaudevillian on a banana peel, and faceplants.  It has no adequate answer for the events that follow Jesus’ death.  The disciples did not put out a fiction about the resurrection of Jesus and then vault themselves into wealth or status.  Many say that the disciples lied to increase the legitimacy of their movement and thereby augment their own power.If the disciples were lying, why did so many willingly go to their deaths in defense of the truth of what they believed?  They could easily have said, no Jesus was not God, and then not have been beheaded, stoned, or crucified upside-down.  They got no personal power from it.  To a man, the early church leaders were hunted down, imprisoned, exiled, or killed.  Maybe they using it to achieve a political goal, something bigger than themselves.  Dying for a cause for which they thought Christ could be useful?  At first blush it sounds reasonable, but given the political diversity of the disciples (Matthew the tax collector worked for “the man”, Simon the Zealot wanted to kill “the man”) and the inscrutability of the gospel’s political stances (“give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s,” Jesus was executed for claiming to be a king over Caesar), it is impossible to present a cause other than the divine kingship of Jesus Christ and say that the gospel is secretly propaganda thereof.  It just doesn’t work.  Did they go to their deaths without any reason other than hoping to make themselves look good?  Its too petty, and it failed anyway.  They were reviled, beaten, and jailed in life and suffered greatly in death when all the while simply abandoning the ludicrous refrain, “Jesus rose from the dead “ would have put an end to it.  Peter and his brother Andrew gave up a prosperous fishing business, as did James and John.  Paul was a wealthy up-and-comer in the political establishment before turning to Christ instead.  All of them but John were violently executed for their assertions.  John died in exile.  And why in the world did those around them, who saw their fates and could have easily walked away and rejected Christ themselves as we are trying to do here, look at those men and say I want what they have to the point where Christianity has become the single largest, most global religion in history?  They had nothing!  Unless they had Jesus Christ.  Maybe the disciples were lying about Jesus’ divine nature, but if they were, nothing that happened afterward makes any sense.  This one falls flat, too, I’m afraid.  
           I have not proven that Jesus is God.  I have not tried to.  I have only attempted to show the obstacles to the most common counterarguments given against Jesus’ deity.  If after reading this article any of those theories remain satisfying to you, it is fully your prerogative to choose what you believe.  The reason I wrote this article is that many people seem think of Christ as a figure out of Homer, of the mind that because they do not follow him, they don’t have to wrestle with him.  He is a heritage, a mythology in the tradition of Europe and early America.  But this is a view that does not understand the real Jesus and how outrageous his claims are.  The man said that he was God, that he personally created the world.  While it’s easy to sit back and say that’s impossible, Jesus does not go away so readily.  His claims demand you find a place for him; among the lowest of the low as a liar, a lunatic, or a prop; or higher the very highest thing.  Most are not inclined to immediately enthrone Jesus in the heavens.  It is hard, in a bevy of ways.   Ignoring him is easy, or at least it feels so.  But I have tried to show why, when armed with the facts, simply tossing Jesus aside might be harder than you think.  

By Jesse Rines

Prayer is the little implement
Through which men reach
Where presence is denied them.
They fling their speech
 
By means of it in God's Ear;
If then He hear,
This sums the apparatus
Comprised in prayer.
 
Emily Dickinson

A Simple Question

         My first attempt at Christian evangelization came as a confused, not-so spiritual eighth-grader in the public school system. In a small-town neighborhood in central Ohio, it was at least culturally normal to go to church on Sunday and to profess Christianity. It will suffice to say that my friend was the odd-man-out as an atheist—and most people knew it.
         My friend knew that I came from a Christian background and often asked me questions about my faith, some of which I just had no idea how to answer. But I apparently did well enough, evidenced by the fact that she just kept asking. On the bus one day, though, she completely stumped me:
“I think God exists, and I tried church, but I don’t know. It’s just all so confusing, and it makes me want to give up.”
“Have you tried praying about it?”
I was thinking of my old AWANA Bible verses I memorized for candy and stickers as a kid.
“Jesus said, ‘Ask, and you shall receive!’” I continued.
“No, because I don’t know how to pray. How do I do it without sounding stupid?”
            Now what was I supposed to say to that? How can I possibly know as an eighth grade kid? I myself reckoned with the reality I faced: I also thought prayer was sort of stupid. It certainly felt stupid, primarily for two reasons. Firstly, I often believed that prayer was just talking to an empty room, into a phone with no one on the other end. This is a matter of pure faith, which all of us struggle with at various points in our lives. Greater still than this, however, was that even if God was listening, I felt pathetic in trying to reach Him—I had a sense of the absurdity of my smallness. I knew that I was talking to the Creator of the universe and, frankly, I cannot think of another task quite so daunting. An honest inquiry: who am I to speak to God? Who is anyone, for that matter? It is as if I am a worm on a hook, pleading the fisherman to do my bidding; an ant in a child’s ant-farm, requesting to be set free. How is it that a human could possibly be elevated to a level at which he himself can converse with or petition his own Creator? Are his concerns not infinitely petty to Him? Is prayer not stupid?
            And so came my underwhelming reply: “I don’t know.”
 
Of Kings, Gods, Prophets, and Righteous Men

            Mentioned in the section above are the two elements of prayer that tend to cause the most distress: the uncertainty of whether or not God is listening, and the sheer impossibility of reckoning with human insignificance—both of which are beautifully and eloquently addressed in the Psalms. Essentially, the Psalms are a collection of documents put together for Jewish worshipers in the Old Testament. Commonly used for examples of prayer, worship, praise, and petition to God, the Psalms can poignantly present the human condition and awe in the sight of God. For example, in Psalm 22, King David cries out to a God he is not sure can hear him:
 
Psalm 22.1-3:
“My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?
Far from my deliverance are the words of my groaning.
O my God, I cry by day, but You do not answer;
And by night, but I have no rest.
Yet You are holy,
O You who are enthroned upon the praises of Israel.”
 
            Jesus uses the first line of Psalm 22, also termed the Song of David, as he was postured and bloody on the cross in Matthew 27: “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” For those worried about the feelings of emptiness they may experience in prayer, they can hopefully find solitude in the reality that even the greatest king in Israelite history and God the Son once felt abandoned. King David illustrates this feeling as he reflects on God’s apparent lack of a response to his pleas: “‘Far from my deliverance are the words of my groaning. O my God, I cry by day, but You do not answer.” Perhaps David would have been reassured by Jesus in John 14:12-14: “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do, he will do also; and greater works than these he will do; because I go to the Father. Whatever you ask in My name, that will I do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask Me anything in My name, I will do it.’” We can read this today and know that God indeed hears us; the difficulty is now in understanding how.
            Given that God has not abandoned us as David fears in Psalm 22, another poignant difficulty arises in our attempts to pray: our feelings of insignificance with respect to God. This too was among David’s concerns, as we observe in Psalm 139 when King David stands in reflective awe of the pure power of the Lord:
 
Psalm 139.1-6:
“O Lord, You have searched me and known me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
You understand my thought from afar.
You scrutinize my path and my lying down,
And are intimately acquainted with all my ways.
Even before there is a word on my tongue,
Behold, O Lord, You know it all.
You have enclosed me behind and before,
And laid Your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
It is too high, I cannot attain to it.”
 
King David expresses a similar plight to every person who attempts to pray—is it not entirely insane to approach the Lord of the Universe with my requests?
            Outside of the Psalms, the Bible is rife with more examples of humans going to God with their concerns. Consider the story of Job, whose prayer merited perhaps the worst possible response from God—a divine scolding of sorts. The Book of Job begins by explaining that Job himself is a good man and righteous in the eyes of God. God then decides to test Job’s faith by allowing burdens to be placed upon him. Job loses his possessions and property, winds up alone, and is struck with sores and illness across his body. He angrily lashes out at God, curses the day he was born, and challenges whether or not God is truly just. God responds with a demonstrative argument to put Job back in his place as but a human in His creation:
 
Job 38.1-7:
“Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said,
‘Who is this that darkens counsel
By words without knowledge?
Now gird up your loins like a man,
And I will ask you, and you instruct me!
Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell Me, if you have understanding,
Who set its measurements? Since you know.
Or who stretched the line on it?
On what were its bases sunk?
Or who laid its cornerstone,
When the morning stars sang together
And all the sons of God shouted for joy?’”
 
God’s response here goes on for several chapters in a similar rhetorical style. Here stands a disturbing reality of the human condition: the condition of the race of man is unchangeable and impossible to reconcile to God by man’s own doing. Our role in the universe is incredibly small. We pray to God with His permission; we breathe by His permission; we wake up and lie down and think and speak with His permission. He is so vastly powerful that we cannot possibly claim to understand His nature except by what He has presented before us. People are thus so inferior and wretched and broken before God that they cannot even bear to see God’s face, as Moses experiences in Exodus 33: “But He said, ‘You cannot see My face, for no man can see Me and live!’”
            So there you have it. King David, Jesus, Job, and Moses all struggled with relating to God in their human conditions. The question of how their pleas are rectified is complex, but we may try now to begin answering it systemically through studying God’s nature, as Dante suggests in Inferno: “Because your question searches for deep meaning, I shall explain in simple words.”
 
God’s Nature Revealed through the Bible

            King David’s conception of God is generally the way we think of God the Father, one of the three offices of the Christian Godhead. But, importantly and graciously, the furthered revelation of God’s Triune nature by Jesus, God the Son, in the New Testament redefined and expanded the way humans understood their relation to God through prayer. No longer do we conscientiously pray to only the Father and the giver of judgment but, as we will soon discover, prayer also requires the Son and Spirit. Therefore, before digging into exactly how the Trinity illuminates the mystery and mechanics of prayer, it is important to understand the presentation and thus our knowledge of the Trinity in the Old and New Testament. This in turn will lay the framework through which the three natures of God operate in prayer.
To understand this Trinitarian framework of prayer, it is crucial to understand the presentation of the Trinity before the coming of Jesus. We will thus examine how God revealed Himself through time, primarily by investigating the differences in our relation to God in the Old and New Testaments.
            The means of accessing God in the Old Testament can be most clearly described as being through the Law laid down by God. The Torah, Hebrew for the books of the Bible in which this law is presented, establishes humanity’s foundational need for grace—for if no law exists and therefore no laws are ever violated, there is no need for a Savior to bring humans back into their original created and sinless state. Most germane for the present analysis of prayer is that the Law as a principle itself is unchanging. This is because the God of the Old Testament is in fact the same God as in the New Testament: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being,” (John 1:1-3). The Trinity—and thus Christ and the Spirit—existed long before Christ was incarnated as Jesus of Nazareth on earth. Therefore, the Law by which humans are judged did not change when Jesus was born to Mary—only our relationship to that Law changed. While the mechanisms by which this change occurred are complex, it will suffice to simply understand that this Law “consists of two parts—the precept that guides, and the penalty that binds; the one disclosing the purpose of God, the other proclaiming His supreme authority,” (Palmer, 185).
          Thus, God is revealed in the Law. Our fear of God and the difficulties that arise in our attempt to understand prayer are culminated and understood to be represented in the Law—the standard to which humans will be judged and thus the representative of the full power of God. When we look up and feel insignificant—when prayer feels stupid—we find difficulty in accessing God as transgressors of His Law. Because that standard is extremely high, it speaks to the awesome Power of God while also forcing us into submission as humans: “The alternative is, obey and live, or disobey and die the death which never dies. In the instant of transgression the law executes the mortgage which it holds on the life of the sinner, and brings it under forfeiture to the penalty by which it was covered,” (Palmer, 185).
This helps explains our struggle with prayer—we are legitimately afraid of God, and rightfully so as criminals under His Law. To reconcile this with the entirety of the Trinity, one must also understand that the Law relates directly to the peace that we find in grace—for without the Law as representative of God’s power, the beautiful gift that is Jesus Christ could not be fully realized. Jesus Christ is then the embodiment of God’s divine grace:
 
“If man is now under a dispensation of Grace rather than of unbending law, his intercourse with the Deity will be in accordance with the new relations which have been instituted. His prayer will be addressed, not to God absolute, known to him in nature only as the Creator and Ruler of the universe, but to God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, revealed in Scripture as devising and executing a scheme of mercy for the salvation of the guilty and the lost,” (Palmer, 199).
 
     The Trinity is therefore the means through which God administers this plan of mercy: “The subject of prayer will therefore open all the parts of this mighty plan, and the offices discharged severally by the Persons of the Godhead,” (Palmer, 199).
 
A Trinitarian Analysis of Prayer
​
       In the analysis of the Trinity, we must begin with God the Father, our knowledge of Whom comes in part through His relationship to Jesus, God the Son. Firstly, Jesus places Himself as both equal and subordinate to the Father. In John 10:30, Jesus states: “‘I and my Father are One.’” In John 14:28: “‘My Father is greater than I.’” The two statements clearly contradict each other yet, in context, their purpose is dually revealed. The Son and the Father are in fact of the same God; they are therefore of the same substance. Yet the Trinity clearly assigns separate roles or “offices” to each of the three members. Thus, in saying “‘I and my Father are One,’” Christ asserts that He is of the same essence as the Father—that they are both in fact God, and in that sense, one and the same. This does not exclude that Jesus is also subordinate in His role or His office; thus, “‘My Father is greater than I.’” Jesus further demonstrates this subordination in John 5:30: “‘I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father who sent me.’” This is also why Christ prays to the Father as a superior: “‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’” and “‘Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy Kingdom come, thy Will be done, on Earth as it is in heaven.’” The role of God the Father in prayer, therefore, can best be understood as the invisible and spiritual representative of the Law and of the creative power of God. All of that which we do not understand about prayer, and all of that which makes us uncomfortable with prayer, is in fact represented in the Father. It is thus by His eminent grace that He gave us His Son, our Mediator, to rectify us from fear of the Law.
        In order to further understand this mediation, it is important to acknowledge that we carry out the will of the Father by emulating His Son. This is the duty and calling of the Christian. Jesus prays to the Father—therefore so must we. Jesus puts Himself subordinate to the will of the Father—therefore so must we. We do this because, in contrast to our standing to God under the Old Testament Law, Jesus fundamentally transformed our condition before God through the cross. In Colossians, Paul writes concerning Jesus’s role in our salvation: “And although you were formerly alienated and hostile in mind, engaged in evil deeds, yet He has now reconciled you in His fleshly body through death, in order to present you before Him holy and blameless and beyond reproach,” (Colossians 2:21-22).
     The discussion of Jesus’s role in prayer may possibly be the most substantive, so much so that it certainly cannot be covered in full here. We will therefore focus exclusively on Jesus’s key role as presenter and mediator, He who reconciles us before God and gives us standing for our petitions in prayer. In the above quote from Colossians, Jesus presents us before the Father during judgment. This is analogous to His role in prayer—as humans, we are made in the image of God, yet we are broken in substance and in character. We are children of Adam, transgressors of the Law laid down and represented by the Father. Just as Jesus will present us before the Father in heaven, blameless and righteous, so too does He present us to the Father in prayer. We pray through the Son, to the Father, and in this sense, Christ is our mediator, God in human form. In 1 Timothy 2:5-6: “For there is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” The verse emphasizes here “the man Christ Jesus” in His role as mediator. In mediation, therefore, Christ uses His human nature to reconcile us to God through His own divine nature. In order for us to properly pray or petition God the Father, as is our duty, we must therefore move through the Son, appointed as both God and man. Christ can be understood then as having two kingdoms in His domain:
 
“We distinguish properly between the essential kingdom of Christ, as he is God, and his mediatorial kingdom, as he is the God-man. In his divine nature, being of the same substance and equal with the Father in power and glory, he is invested with the same authority and rule… but apart from the essential kingdom, the Mediator has acquired the right to rule in that complex nature which belongs to him as the Son of God and as the Son of man. The proper subjects of this kingdom are the redeemed, organized in a visible society, the church, over which… as mediator He rules,” (Palmer, 267).
 
As Christians, we are proud subjects of the rule of Christ; in Him we are fully realized and brothers and sisters to Jesus, as He is a man, and it is in this relation that we call the Father “our Father,” and that we are therefore adopted into His divine family as “sons.” Jesus takes our broken, wretched nature and elevates us into His holy mediatorial kingdom—presenting us before the Father to be adopted as His own, to stand in the same room as the Father and call ourselves His holy children, His elected saints. We do not deserve this. We deserve to be the subjects of the daunting unchanging Law, and without Jesus, we can only praise the greatness of the Father and feel diminished by the overwhelming grandeur of his creative power. Without Jesus, our Mediator, prayer is indeed awkward and it does indeed feel stupid. But we stand rectified as members of the Kingdom over which Jesus rules as both God and man, before God certainly not as equals, but certainly justified by the grace represented in its fullest in Christ. This understanding of prayer is glorified and realized in the Trinity and in the office of the Son.
            The last office of the Trinity is perhaps the least intuitive in our understanding of prayer. To lay the framework for the discussion, it is important to understand the Spirit’s role in connecting Jesus to the believer. It is clear that upon receiving Christ, a person is “a new Creation,” born again with the possession of the Holy Spirit as shown in 2 Corinthians 5:17: “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.” This new creation is filled with the Holy Spirit according to God in Ezekiel 36:26: “‘Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.’” Finally, we know that having the Holy Spirit is a condition of living in righteousness from Romans 8:9: “However, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him.” Jesus’s death on the cross is the sacrifice that allows us to live in a state of righteousness and grace, yet there is also something constitutional that occurs in the body of the Christian: he is born again in the presence of the Spirit. This is a necessary condition for the reception of grace. Thus the sustaining bond between a believer and Christ, and thus between a believer and the mediation of Christ in prayer, is the presence of the Spirit in that individual: “The Redeemer and the redeemed are thus lashed together into one party … due to the indwelling of the Divine Spirit, he remains the living bond of union between Christ and his people,” (Palmer, 311). These conclusions are confirmed further in Ephesians 2:18: “for through [Christ] we both have our access in one Spirit to the Father.” The Spirit’s role is then summarized: “Through the redemption by Christ giving us the right of approach, and by the Spirit giving us the power of approach, we gain access to the Father,” (Palmer 314).
            Our understanding of prayer thus becomes full circle in the Trinity. The ultimate goal of the Christian life being to access the Father, to stand before Him righteous and justified, can actually be fulfilled on Earth through the medium of prayer. Prayer is then rightfully understood as an incredible gift and a glorious miracle: that we as broken men and women on earth may have the ear of the Father through the Son and by the power of the Spirit. As pastor and apologist Tim Keller explains: “Prayer is awe, intimacy, struggle—yet the way to reality. There is nothing more important, or harder, or richer, or more life-altering. There is absolutely nothing so great as prayer.” It is my hope that readers in this light approach prayer not just with awe and a feeling of infinite smallness, but also with gratitude, that in spite of our stupidity and brokenness, God presents a framework through which we may access the Father.
We will close by returning to John 14:12-14: “‘Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do, he will do also; and greater works than these he will do; because I go to the Father. Whatever you ask in My name, that will I do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask Me anything in My name, I will do it.’” How great a promise that we not only have a method of petitioning God, but that He promises that He will listen, and still more that He will act upon it. Imagine the bounds of what we can accomplish with this gift on our side, for “if God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31)
 
References

• Alighieri, Dante. Dante's Inferno. Trans. Mark Musa. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1971. Print.
• Dickinson, Emily. "Part One: Life LXXX." The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson. New York, New York: Barnes & Noble, 2003. Print.
  
• Keller, Tim. Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God. N.p.: Penguin, 2016. Print.
  
• New American Standard Version. Anaheim: Lockman Foundation, 1995. Print.
  
• Palmer, B. M. Theology of Prayer. Richmond, VA: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1894. Print.

By Collin English

             On February 4, 2014 a debate was hosted at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. Among 749,000 other people, I tuned in as Bill Nye, a former TV star who built his fame on “Bill Nye the Science Guy” faced off against Ken Ham, founder of Answers in Genesis (an organization that focuses on providing biblical answers regarding creation, evolution, science, and the age of the earth). The question to be debated: “Is Creation a Viable Model of Origins?”
            As a Christian and naïve sophomore in high school, this topic captured my attention. For as long as I could remember, Bill Nye had been in the backbone of my scientific education and Ben Ham’s organization’s website had provided answers ever since the day I became conscious of the “Creation versus Evolution Debate.” As I sat down in front of my computer to watch the debate, I closed my eyes and prepared myself for the epic clash that would surely answer many of the questions lingering in my head.
            I was not prepared to be disappointed. I watched from one side for two and a half hours as Ken Ham insistently tried to prove the existence of creationist scientists and desperately attempted to distinguish “observational science” from “historical science.” I was even more exasperated as I watched Bill Nye shamelessly use the debate to urge Kentucky to have more nuclear medical technologists while repeating the word “extraordinary” to describe any concept or debate point he could not understand.
I walked away from the debate somewhat unimpressed and having no thoughts of ever reviewing what had transpired, but that did not stop others from doing exactly the opposite. Silently, and on a day quickly following the debate, I listened in class as a student next to me proclaimed “Ben Ham totally crushed Bill Nye,” only to be followed an hour later when some other student declared “Ben Ham was a total idiot.” In a few students' eyes Bill Nye had been elevated to a near legendary status, while others silently questioned the authenticity of the man. I watched as creationists and evolutionists became almost sickened by the sight of each other. Some friends, young earth creationists, needed only mention 6,000 years before cries of “ignorant” and “stupid” rang out. While other friends, atheistic evolutionists, had only to say “natural selection” before cries of “tell me you don’t mean it” and “so you don’t believe in God” silenced them.
            What exactly was the source of this division?
         One may look back to Dayton, Tennessee in 1925. The Scopes Trial was a result of John Scopes teaching evolution in a secular classroom setting. Although this is standard practice today, Scopes’ state of residence, Tennessee, had enacted the Butler’s Act, which aimed at preventing schools from teaching “any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animalism.” The case brought the creation versus evolution debate to center stage and, over time, creationism would be delegitimized by a Darwinian account of life's origins.
            With the slow incorporation of evolutionary theory into biology curricula, it is not surprising that there is a generational gap in belief systems. A 2014 Gallup poll found that around 47 percent of Americans over the age of 30 believe in a young earth creationist account while 28 percent of Americans ages 18-27 believed in a young earth creation.1 Brian Alters, president of the National Center for Science Education, estimated that only around 0.1 percent of scientists in the academic community still express belief in the young earth creationism. Thus, though impossible to say with certainty, education seems to account for the dichotomy that exists between the two groups. Intellectual superiority is often determined by the level of education one possesses. Considering the previous statistic with 99.9 percent of scientists accepting evolution, it might seem easy to conclude that creationists are unknowledgeable, and therefore intellectually inferior. In an interview by National Geographic, Richard Dawkins stated, “The best excuse for them [creationists] is lamentable ignorance. Ignorance is no crime, but it is something to be remedied by education.”
            In response, Christians who support the creationist perspective consider such perceptions as unfounded. To quote a Christian professor from my own experience: “what they [evolutionists] say is simply not true.” Edwin Conklin, a theistic evolutionist and former graduate student from Johns Hopkins University once said, “The probability of life originating from accident is comparable to the probability of the unabridged dictionary resulting from the explosion in a printing shop.” Similar to evolutionists who consider themselves to be on the intellectual high ground, Christians perceive a spiritual high ground built on God's omniscience as expressed through the Bible. This might seem unreasonable from a naturalistic perspective, but if an omniscient and objective force did take the time to reveal a physical manuscript then it may be logical to conclude that every statement in that text should be complete fact. As such, evolutionists might find some difficulty in debating a Christian not necessarily due to the Christian's ignorance per se, but rather from the fact that the Christian, despite understanding evolution, chooses to believe an account of creation founded upon a spiritual belief. They trust in an omniscient being over considering human understanding.
            Within the bounds of reason, it is safe to summarize that there are two driving forces to the existing division. First, and foremost, is the educational system which has managed to divide generationally those who believe in evolution and those who believe in creationism. Although it is frequently brought up in discussions that teaching religion in childhood shackles that child to the confines of religious thinking, the logic may equally apply to shackling children to the confines of evolutionary thinking. To obtain a naturalistic understanding of the world, a child does not necessarily need to understand evolution. The differences between a creationist biology textbook and an evolutionist biology textbook are typically found after the facts have been stated. Both versions will discuss the natural selection of a finch with either a large or small beak in order to enable survival of the species, but one will give credit to divine inspiration and planning while the other attributes nothing to an intelligent, creative process. Furthermore, evolution never will be the focus of all of science, just as creationism will never be either. They are backdrops to the primary subjects of interest: a way of putting a discovery into perspective after it has been found. Teaching a child either perspective from an early age does not hinder their growth within the sciences, but it does alter which backdrop they will choose to center any knowledge they gain from their education.
            Second is the polarizing and uncompromising nature of the opposing sides. A perception of greater knowledge gives evolutionists an intellectual cliff to shun creationists from above and a perception of spiritual superiority gives Christians an infallible trust. How does one go about bridging the division between two polarized groups? As with many things, and as is the opinion of this article, one has to go to the source of the problem. Neil DeGrasse Tyson in his renown series Cosmos once said, “perhaps the most important rule [of science]: remember, you could be wrong. Even the best scientists have been wrong about some things…they were human.” Science is rooted in open skepticism. A simple look at the continuously increasing complexity of the model of an atom gives credit to the scientists who were not satisfied with “plum pudding.” This is not to say that I am attempting to discredit everything within the scientific field, but rather to say that science, from an evolutionary perspective, should not be so quick to pass judgement on a theory that does have some evidence to support it. It is unfortunate that in the evolutionary arena, the need to be right has created such a hostile environment in what should be an open field of discussion. These attacks on the intelligence of creationists provide no effect other than the suppression of intellectuals who hold a contrary position.
            Christians, on the other hand, need to also take a step back and analyze the problem at hand. The evolution versus creationism debate has been a decisive factor in turning many away people from Christianity. For a concept that has had such a detrimental and demeaning effect on evangelism, Christians should be open to analyzing how firmly they are willing to adhere to a strictly literalist interpretation of the creation. In fact, as an important parallel, the vast majority of Christians in fields of theology have abandoned a literal interpretation of the Book of Revelation in favor of a more symbolic and poetic account. I bring attention to this because although most have abandoned this literal interpretation, many Christians insist on firmly adhering to a literal interpretation of what is found in Genesis. It is important to note that the theological explanation for the account in Revelation is often credited to its author, John, attempting to explain futuristic events to a much simpler society. This explanation seems just as likely when discussing the logistics of teaching a scientifically illiterate people group the basics of the origin of the universe. Indeed, if Moses had descended from the mountaintop proclaiming humans as descendants from primate-like ancestors then it seems likely that the Jews would have rioted on the spot.
        More importantly, Christian belief primarily revolves around the birth, life, and death of Christ. Although many topics are important to Christian theology, it is only without the birth, death, resurrection, and deity of Christ that the belief truly cannot be orthodox. Fortunately, how exactly the world came into being does not necessarily interfere with many of the theological claims implicated by the historical story of Christ. While the primary issue many theologians have with this position is that the origin of original sin and subsequently death is undermined by the quantity of death and destruction that must occur throughout the process of evolution, believe it or not, there are actually theological arguments to explain how Genesis can be interpreted around this problem, but the depth of such analyses are far beyond the breadth of this article. It will suffice to say that if we as Christians believe in an omnipotent and omniscient God, then it is not too farfetched to imagine he can manage incorporating original sin into an evolutionary framework. Furthermore, the term creationism has been used for far too long to describe a belief centered on a literal biblical account. Creationism (although used interchangeably with “biblical interpretation” in this article), by definition, is the belief that God created the universe.  To a Christian, it should not matter how the universe came into existence, but rather who brought it into existence.
             Altogether, the qualifications for being a Christian are almost entirely independent of a belief in either evolution or the biblical account. A seemly infallible pulpit has nothing of true significance when it comes to this topic. Similarly, in the field of science, it is difficult to imagine how one can condescend from an intellectual cliff when that very cliff was built on ideals that championed free thought and open discussion. It seems that what appears to be a divisive conflict has really been built upon a fundamental misunderstanding of both respective beliefs.
            
References
1. Gallup, Inc. "In U.S., 42% Believe Creationist View of Human Origins."Gallup.com. N.p., 02 June 2014. Web. 23 Sept. 2016.
 

By Jessica Harsono

​When I was young, Dad wasn't around much. He'd worked as a freelance window washer even before I was born. Sometimes we would get complaints from neighbors for "unsolicited services" as he went around, well past his scheduled appointment hours, spraying down every window he thought needed his aid. Whenever he'd come home in his old pickup truck, he smelled sharply of artificial lemon, but there was also that underlying scent of dirt, subtle and familiar.
            Dad was paid a lot because no one else wanted to do what he did. Usually, he would take on smaller jobs around our dry, suburban town, but sometimes he would fly out to bigger cities to squeegee the windows of some mega corporation's office, leaving for weeks at a time. I knew he was odd because he insisted on wearing a business suit wherever he went, no matter what he was doing, even while harnessed forty stories up in the air.
            After school, I would watch the other kids walk home with their dads. A cluster of fathers would wait around the elementary school's front metal gate, glancing anxiously at their watches as if they didn't do the same thing every day. Barry Withermore would always try to sneak up behind them, knowing which father was his just by the backs of their heads, and every time he crashed into his dad's side, not nearly strong enough to knock him over, his dad would spin around with a feigned look of surprise, quickly dissolving into laughter. I hid my envy behind the worn vinyl seats of the bus.
                                                                                           . . .
            It was a warm August evening when the psychiatrist told us over the phone that Dad was at the Richmond Road Clinic, clutching his elbows and out of his mind. I don't remember what day of the week it was, but I do recall the way the sunlight fell through the trees, and  the wall of cold wind that hit, separating the hospital's small fluorescent interior from the rest of the world, just after the automatic sliding doors. We found him off to the side in a stiff waiting room chair, so busy examining the patterns in the carpet that he didn't acknowledge  us walk in.
            "Moths?" I asked him again in the car after we picked him up. He was wearing his good suit, twill and leather. I was fifteen by then, and he sat in the back with me because Mom wouldn't let him drive.
            He didn't really respond, just nodded vacantly and stared at the radio.
            Later, Mom explained that Dad had been having hallucinations, almost falling from an office building he had been working on while trying to swat the moths that hovered around his head. The problem was, when you were that high above a city, there were no moths. A janitor inside the building had noticed his thrashing and alerted the fire department, who spent half an hour trying to get him down because he wouldn't listen to their befuddled shouts. It was one of  the more serious cases of schizophrenia, especially since it had come on so late in his life.
            Dad was given antipsychotic meds, the prescription label taped onto the white paper bag he clutched in his lap. Looking back, I wondered why his mental illness came on so suddenly, why there hadn't been any signs. But maybe we just hadn't paid enough attention. He was distraught the whole ride home, and wouldn't stop asking for the time.
                                                                                       . . .
            "The moths aren't real, you know." I told him a few days later. 
            "Yeah they are, I can see them."
            We were sitting in mismatched lawn chairs behind the house. A collection of dry weeds had gathered around the concrete, untrimmed since even before Dad had stopped working. It was a large backyard, the steps of the deck leading down into a flatter grassy area, though that was wild and yellowing too.
            I hadn't really talked to Dad in weeks. Up until the incident, he had been out of state, and I was finally getting to spend time with him. We didn't have much to say, though.
            "Your mother can't see them either, the moths," he said after a while, tapping on the cheap plastic armrest.
            "I'm sorry."
            He paused, looking suspicious of the air around him.
            "It's alright," he sighed.
                                                                                           . . .
            Once in a while, back when he still worked as a window washer, Dad would mail me pictures of him beaming from the top of a radio tower with a spray bottle between his teeth or shaking hands with people as obsessed with cleaning products as he was. I used to stay up late, crouched by the bare bulb of a night light, and sift through those glossy four-by-sixes. I never told him, but I couldn't help but feel hurt by how happy he looked in every one. Still, they were the best things I had, and he never sent enough.
            After the diagnosis, Dad stayed home most of the time, but he didn't really smile much like he did in the pictures. He was always on edge, carrying a can of bug repellant wherever he went. Every so often, without warning, the schizophrenia would take over at the most inconvenient times: during rare trips to the dollar store, inside the city public library. His fits would end with milk cartons scattered across an aisle or books knocked purposely from their shelves.
            Eventually, the cops stopped responding to the calls and he was banned from most establishments. It became a sort of routine for him to douse the backyard with pesticides I couldn't pronounce or hang up those Coleman lanterns that electrocuted insects on the spot. "To get rid of the moths," he would say.
            When Mom left, it was just the two of us. I never resented her for leaving, but I couldn't see how she could have done such a thing when we needed her most. She had offered to take me with her, back to her auntie's apartment in the city, but I chose to stay with Dad. It became harder and harder to care for him, but it was during those times of struggle that allowed me to give most, and made me realize how closely "love" was synonymous with "sacrifice."
            The psychosis was worst when Dad was at home by himself. I started cutting school, telling Dad it was some fake holiday so I could stay home and be there for him. To make some extra money, he participated those psychology studies—the kind that got you featured in late night specials on the public broadcasting service—and for a while, strange, middle-aged men with expensive cameras would come in and out of the house, following Dad around and watching him through a lens.
           Sometimes I genuinely thought that he was getting better, that, even though he might not completely recover, everything would be alright. There was a point when he hadn't had an episode in weeks, and I would come home from rugby practice to find him making a grilled cheese sandwich or reading the paper in the living room, leaving me struck by the normality of it all. I'd watch him out of the corner of my eye while he drank decaffeinated coffee by the open window.
            It was a lot to hope for, though.
            The pills the doctors prescribed usually kept the hallucinations away, but sometimes it wasn't enough. I could tell that Dad was trying his best not to be a burden by the way he avoided eye contact whenever someone entered the room. He tried to help with chores, scrubbing the same floor for days or replacing all the lights.
            "Dad, you've changed that light bulb twice this week," I said after I caught him in the den, standing at the top of a ladder.
            "It's not working."
            "It lights up perfectly fine."
            "No, this one attracts the moths too," he said, exchanging the old bulb for an identical one, and I wondered if I had lost him for good.
                                                                                             . . .
            Two years later, the moths finally swarmed him. At first there was only one moth. I was out on the back deck filling out applications for college while he sat inside by the sliding screen door. When I glanced up, he had that look on his face—deep set frown and furrowed brow. He whipped that morning's rolled-up newspaper above his head without even setting his coffee down. 
            By the way his eyes continued to dart around, I assumed he had missed. He swung again and again, pausing for tense moments before continuing blindly. I couldn't see the moth myself, but here's what I imagined: the paper tube would whistle through air and, at times, whack the creature clean on the abdomen, but every time the moth hit the tile and looked like it was dead, it would twitch and flutter up again, like those wind-up toys we used to play with when we were little, or the trick candles that can never really be blown out.
            Frustrated, he stood up and stepped outside, and then there was a second moth, and a third, and then a whole colony was buzzing around him, flapping their fragile wings in a frenzy. All I could see was him waving his arms wildly at nothing. Still, the moths would not scatter. They drew back and rushed at him, then drew back again, crawling through his ears and into his head.
            I thought that maybe he had forgotten to take his meds. I ran past him into the house, where spilled coffee dripped from the table and pooled on the floor. The pill bottle on the counter was empty.
            Meanwhile, Dad was still drowning. It must have been hard for him to breathe, through the dense cloud of moths, because he called out to me, telling me to go get his gas mask. I didn't know we had a gas mask. I found it in the second closet I checked, across the laundry room just before the garage, where we kept all the stuff we should have thrown away but could never bear to part with.
            I watched as he strapped it on, wondering if it even worked. His fingers moved clumsily as he tried to make it stay. The mask was old and severe looking, completely covering his face and making him look like a moth himself—a giant, wingless, human moth. He still wore a neatly-ironed suit, business gray with a dark blue necktie, something he always did even after he stopped working.
                                                                                          . . .
            In a way, the moths had affected me too. They ate through all the memories I had of my father before his disease defined him, until all I could see was a man made of moths. I noticed more grey in his hair, how the flickering kitchen lights washed out his already pale face. I found myself questioning if I ever really knew him in the first place.
            Here is what I do remember: wheat fields. A scattering of crows. Bales of hay, collected in piles by the farmers who worked the ranch behind our house. That dusty afternoon when Dad came home early from work, while sunlight still turned the fields golden—when, together, we hopped the fence and he chased me through the maze of swaying stalks, my faded red cap turned backwards, hair falling loose from its ponytail. I was pretty young, maybe five or six, and Dad still had that crinkle in his eyes when he smiled or squinted from the sun. Together we fashioned a kite out of garage scraps, the plastic frame taut against a multicolored sail, the tail of ribbon whipping in the wind as it looped and plunged. I wasn't even sad when the string snapped and the gust whisked it away. As it drifted from where we stood by the wooden posts, he lifted me up on his shoulders so I could see it for just a bit longer before it spiraled past the hills. Whenever Dad told the story, he liked to mention that I stopped by the weeds and tried to eat a ladybug. Before it could reach my mouth, he was there, broad shadow coming up from behind me. He grabbed me by the collar and yanked, hard, and I wondered why he was so angry, why was he yelling. I loved him for that, though. Not in that moment, and not for a while, but it was nice, the caring.
                                                                                        . . .
            I wasn't sure if he remembered that story now, and I was afraid to ask. I wanted to love him, and I tried, every day. But how do you love someone who won't respond back? I held onto his arm to steady him.
            "How are you feeling?"
            "The moths, they're everywhere," he said, voice muffled and distant through the mask. After a few moments, his breathing became a bit more regular. It was all I could hear, besides the cawing of crows above the slant of roof. I didn't know what else to do, so I kept talking.
            "Dad, there are no moths, you're imagining them again, please, stop."
            "It's bad," he insisted. "They're out to get me this time."
            "You didn't take your medicine today, did you? "
            I was usually the one to pick up the prescription from the drugstore, but the pills weren't supposed to run out for another two weeks.
            "I did take it, the entire bottle." His voice was strained.
            I thought back to the times we spent beside each other on the couch, not talking, just sitting, with the middle cushion between us. I would fall asleep to the sound of some nature documentary while he laughed to himself about a joke he had heard earlier in the day, momentarily forgetting the can of bug spray resting on the side table.
            It occurred to me that he must have been taking more of his medicine at a time to keep the hallucinations away, to make it seem like he had been getting better.          
            Through the tinted lenses of the mask, I could just see his eyes, but even though they were looking in my direction, he did not see me. His gaze was fixed on something invisible, right in front of him. He walked slowly past where I stood. As he made his way down the wooden porch steps, towards the chain link fence at the far end of the yard, I thought I heard him whisper they're following me. I stayed where I was, struck by the fear that nothing I said or did would get through to him. I felt like everything I knew on this world kept wearing away, and that I couldn't save any of it. Like there had to be something greater than all this, greater than me, that wasn't so fleeting. I could never believe that Dad was beyond saving.
            He stopped inches away from the fence, the cross-hatch pattern dropping thin shadows onto his still figure. It was almost peaceful. The weather was perfect: the sky a strikingly clear blue, a breeze barely sweeping the tips of tall grass. He looked very out of place, bizarre and alien in his gas mask and suit. After a while, he fell to his knees as if he had been shot, bowing his head beneath the crooks of his arms, to shield from the moths. 

BY BEN COSTELLO


            Russian composer and pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) is one of the most beloved composers of all time. His intensely beautiful and lyrical pieces such as his Second Piano Concerto, Second Symphony, and the Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini are still some of the most recognizable and moving works in the classical canon. Filled with yearning, nostalgia, and melodic searching for the Russia in which he grew up and from which he later lived in self-imposed exile after the Russian Revolutions of 1917, these pieces have a unique voice and power, even today. Why is this music so incredibly affecting among audiences more accustomed to the latest trends in pop music and rock than to the sound of a symphony or piano concerto? There is no single answer to that question. However, I think that examining how spirituality and the music of the Orthodox Church influenced Rachmaninoff’s works will help reveal why they remain so moving and resonant. In fact, I argue that understanding and fully appreciating Rachmaninoff’s music is impossible if we do not know a little bit about the Church. Rachmaninoff himself said, “the sound of church bells dominated all the cities of Russia I used to know…They accompanied every Russian from childhood to grave, and no composer could escape their influence.”[1] Although Rachmaninoff specifically mentions the influence of church bells, I will look at a few of his pieces to show how a little knowledge of the Church and its equally prominent liturgical chant can provide a more nuanced appreciation of these works[2].
            One particularly striking quality of Rachmaninoff’s music is the importance of the fourth note of a given musical scale (the note, “fa” in the familiar song “Do, A Deer” from The Sound of Music), known as the subdominant. What is strange about the importance of the subdominant is that in basically all Western music from about 900 AD through today, the emphasis is on the fifth scale degree, the dominant. The motion 5-1 (the movement from either the fifth note of a scale to the first note, or from a chord built on the fifth note to the tonic chord built on the first note of the scale) is what gives music a sense of closure and finality. 5-1 indicates a progression from tension and motion to stasis and rest, an arrival home. Well, Rachmaninoff never arrived back home after his self-imposed exile from Russia, and his nostalgia for his native country permeates his music. The 4-1 motion in his music allowed Rachmaninoff to express his unfulfilled longing to return to Russia. This motion is especially evident in his use of his signature chord (an extended subdominant chord blended with the dominant), which he resolves to the 1-chord, the tonic. It isn’t that he didn’t use the interval 5-1 in his music: if he did not, his music would likely have fallen into obscurity because our ears have a natural desire for the sound of musical closure provided by the 5-1 motion. What is significant is how dramatically more important the motion of 4-1 is in his music than in the music other composers or songwriters. In fact, Peabody music theorist and one of the world’s leading Rachmaninoff scholars, Dr. Ildar Khannanov, calls Rachmaninoff the “Poet of the Subdominant.” He vividly displays this poetic handling of the subdominant in the beginning of his famous Piano Concerto no. 2. The piece is in the stormy key of C minor, which is where the main theme begins when the orchestra enters. However, the piano’s deeply introspective introduction is in F minor, the subdominant. As Dr. Khannanov points out, every other composer puts the introduction in the same key as what is formally the main part of the piece, but Rachmaninoff dramatically begins in the subdominant key instead. In doing so, his transition to C minor already contains a feeling of restless longing.
            Those details about the subdominant might be interesting but it may not seem relevant to our exploration of the influence of the Church on Rachmaninoff’s music. In order to see the connection, we need to look at some other music, and the first musical matter we will examine is the Orthodox liturgical chant tradition, particularly the ancient chant of the Znammeni tradition. Few people realize the impact of Christianity on the development of music. Beyond the fact that monks developed our current musical notation and that the origins of “classical music” are sacred and liturgical music, there is the much subtler legacy of the Church in music in nearly every style and genre. That legacy begins with liturgical chant.
            The mention of chant probably evokes thoughts of Gregorian chant and monks singing in Latin. Gregorian chant is actually the Roman Catholic Church’s traditional style of singing. In part, its legacy is the musical primacy of the dominant. The monks who came up with Gregorian chant decided, for several historical reasons, to base their music on the octave, the interval from say “c” to the next “c” on a piano (or from do to the higher do in “Do, a Deer”). They divided the octave into two tetrachords (groups of four consecutive notes) a whole step apart. The interval from the first note of the first tetrachord to the first note of the second tetrachord is a perfect fifth. Thus the first and the fifth notes are the most important two notes in Gregorian chant, and in turn, Western music. However, in Orthodox Znamenni chant, the “scale,” called the Obikhod scale is made up of trichords (groups of three consecutive notes). The interval between each trichord is a perfect fourth. Consequently, the fourth plays an enormous role in Znamenni chant. The unique importance of the fourth scale degree in Rachmaninoff’s music resembles its role in Znamenni and other Orthodox liturgical chants.
            Perhaps you’re wondering if the importance Rachmaninoff places on the subdominant throughout his music is coincidental and not at all related to the importance of the fourth scale degree in Znamenni chant. We need to see if there are other more obvious aspects of Rachmaninoff’s music which come from liturgical chant. The most well-known and well-loved aspect of his music is its usually long, and haunting melodies. As shall see, these quite recognizably have the small intervals and the same vocal qualities that we find in Znamenni chant. These are the traits which give the melodies much of their expressive power. Clearly then, Orthodox liturgical chant had a major impact on Rachmaninoff’s music, especially on its most famous aspect, its heartfelt melodies.
            One reason that Orthodox chant played such a role in Rachmaninoff’s works is the fact that at the time of his childhood and early adulthood, the Russian Orthodox Church had an enormous hold on culture, and indeed on every part of daily life. That means that Rachmaninoff grew up hearing various styles of Orthodox liturgical chant in his home, on the streets, and even in a sense in popular folk music.[3] Yet in the music of all Rachmaninoff’s most famous contemporaries, however, there is not the same melodic or harmonic influence of chant. The reason why Rachmaninoff’s music shows this influence begins with Pyotr Tchaikovsky, who was the first non-Church composer in Russia to compose his own music for the Russian Orthodox mass. In order to do so, he had to win a long legal battle to break the official Church composer’s monopoly on writing music for mass and worship[4]. Once Tchaikovsky did, however, the door was open for other composers to write liturgical music, even though they had to use some traditional chants[5]. Many composers did exactly that, but few of the major Russian composers spent much time on liturgical music. Tchaikovsky himself, I believe, was too influenced by the West to regularly make use in his orchestral compositions of the chant styles he became familiar with while composing his liturgical music. Rachmaninoff, always inspired by the elder Tchaikovsky, also decided to try his hand at liturgical music, but unlike most of his contemporaries, he found something very affecting about it, and after studying chant in depth, he composed a significant amount for the Church.
            By far the most famous example of Rachmaninoff’s liturgical music is his All-Night Vigil, arguably the greatest, most beautiful setting of Orthodox liturgical texts by a modern composer. In this piece, Rachmaninoff draws upon centuries of Church tradition, infusing ancient chant with his own musical voice and harmony and composing several original chants so stylistically accurate that they are virtually indistinguishable from historical ones. Upon receiving approval from his former teacher, Taneyev, and the master of Russian chants, Smolensky, Rachmaninoff published the work[6]. The All-Night Vigil exemplifies both Rachmaninoff’s harmonic style and the characteristics of ancient Orthodox chant. When listening to it, you should hear many similarities between it and Rachmaninoff’s most famous instrumental melodies. Rachmaninoff’s great love for the small intervals, the long, breathless melodic lines, and for the expressive gestures of the Eastern chant traditions he used in his liturgical music like the All-Night Vigil evidently informed his melodic construction in general: these are exactly the traits which mark his beloved secular music[7]. It is important to note as well that the expressive gestures in Znamenni chant, which Rachmaninoff uses and imitates in his instrumental works, come from a very intense spirituality. In fact, Znamenni chant is filled with subtle inflections and vocal motions which have names with Christian-related origins, such as “the little dove.” The book which explains how to perform these motions and inflections gives very little in the way of an actual description of what the singer should do. It does though, for example, quote virtually every reference to doves in the Bible. The sound of “the little dove” motion must embody the essence of a biblical dove, with whatever implications it carries. This style of chant, with its musical gestures rooted in the Bible, is one of the deep origins of Rachmaninoff’s melodic style, even if such spirituality is not always his intention.
            We are now armed with some basic tools to analyze the many enigmas of the music which Rachmaninoff wrote at the end of his life. These pieces do not contain the same charm and immediacy that his other works do, and they seem to contain something elusive. Part of what these works are trying to express is an even more intense desire to return to his beloved Russia, and he wrote then with a musical voice refined in Russian allusions and in orchestral techniques borrowed from jazz. But in addition to that desire, we find other qualities in these pieces. Listen to Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 4 and Symphony no. 3 and compare them to his earlier pieces.
I would like to look at the very last piece Rachmaninoff wrote before he died: his Symphonic Dances. More specifically, I will discuss the third and final dance. Rachmaninoff, seemingly well-aware that his time on earth was rapidly running, gives his final musical statement in this movement. Although it begins hesitatingly, it soon turns into a fiendish, satanic dance, taking off at breakneck speed. The first Christian element we find here is in the musical backbone, so to speak, of the dance: the Gregorian chant Dies Irae savagely intoned by the brass. This chant comes from the Latin funeral mass and it describes the horrors that await the sinful man at the Last Judgment (the title is Latin for “Day of Wrath”). The Dies Irae chant has a long history of use in classical music, where it is almost always associated with Satan, death, and eternal punishment. Rachmaninoff himself uses it to great effect in his tone poem The Isle of the Dead about the underworld. Over time, he began to use it in many of his pieces. I believe that Rachmaninoff here is using the chant both nostalgically (that is, in looking back over his own life and music containing the chant) and in view of his coming death. The frenzied dance is abruptly interrupted by a harmonically dense and wistful section, recalling the music that made him famous, which seems to be one last glimpse at the beauty of this world. As suddenly as this introspective section began, the fiendish dance and the Dies Irae return. The music seems to spiral into chaos, until the moment where Rachmaninoff writes the word “Alleluia” in the score. Here replaces the Dies Irae with part of the Znammeni chant Blagoslaven Yesi, Gospodi (Blessed be the Lord), which he used as the 8th chant in his All-Night Vigil. The chant is what the joyous angels say to the women who find Jesus’s empty tomb. This is music about the Resurrection and here, at the end of the piece and of Rachmaninoff’s life, it has conquered the wickedness of death and destruction which are embodied by the Dies Irae chant. At the end of the score, Rachmaninoff wrote, “I thank thee, Lord!” having musically shouted “Alleluia” along with the angels at the Resurrection.
            I hope that you’ve seen a few ways in which Christianity (specifically, Russian Orthodox chant) plays an enormous role in inspiring some of the most defining aspects of Rachmaninoff’s music. His melodic style and subdominant-based harmonic progressions in particular are derived from ancient liturgical song traditions. Though it is not accurate to say that Orthodox chant is totally responsible for Rachmaninoff’s unique musical voice, I really believe we cannot understand his music (or, for that matter any music) without understanding some of its Christian origins. Rachmaninoff captured the Christian influence on his music best when he said, “what I try to do, when writing down my music, is to make it say simply and directly what is in my heart when I am composing. If there is love there, or bitterness, or sadness, or religion, these moods become part of my music, and it becomes either beautiful, or bitter, or sad, or religious.”[8]


[1] Sergei Rachmaninoff A Lifetime in Music 184

[2]You will not need to understand any technical terms and explanations-they are details that are in no way essential to grasping the main point of the article.

[3] The relationship between Orthodox chant and Slavic folk music is incredible, but unfortunately a little beyond the scope of this article

[4] Brett Langston, Tchaikovsky Research

[5] Musica Russica

[6] Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Life in Music pp. 191-2

[7] I recommend watching the video accompanying this article for a few selected examples which demonstrate how these traits from liturgical chant show up in his instrumental melodies, but virtually every melody shows this relationship with, for instance, the music of the All-night Vigil.

[8] Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music 369