The Shaking of the Foundations

When I first heard the phrase, Shaking The Foundations, I immediately thought of someone walking around a department store, until they found the women’s intimate apparel section and then periodically stopping, to shake a corset, to rattle a girdle and giggle at other foundation garments.

Then too, I imagined taking all the names of Foundations, putting them in a box, and jumbling them up, National Endowment for the Reader’s Digest, The MacArthur Public Broadcasting System, The Jesse Helms Memorial Firing Range.

Rather, this book from which many of our ideas and premises are derived (The Shaking of The Foundations by Paul Tillich) speaks of the reality of events turning around and over in our lives and what the ensuing responses say about us and our life in faith.

Madeline L’Engle once spoke of people she admired and wrote about as Universe-Disturbers, iconoclasts who turn expectations on their heads and create alternate worlds using their daring and vision. Ghandi, Edison, Einstein, Oppenheimer, Kennedy, Picasso, the Beatles, Madonna, --contextually all part of the world we see around us, but responsively and creatively disturbers of the universe, creators of a different order.

Paul Tillich specifically is writing in 1948 in response to the horror of the reality of the destructive capacity the world now had in the power of the atomic bomb. The very powers of science that were harnessed (or unleashed, depending upon your viewpoint) were now poised to create our ultimate destruction and demise. The paradigm of the ultimate use of the power of nature became in one swift night of death and horror, the paradox of our future if there were to be a future, and man’s responsibility to each other in this dilemma. "The greatest power of science, was the power it gave to man to annihilate himself and his world. And those who brought about this triumph are speaking today, like the true prophets of the past—which is to say, not of progress, but of disruption; not of happiness but of doom."

The paradox extends even further in that the very forces of destruction harnessed by the scientists for further potential devastation, were created by God and are part of the foundations upon which we all rest. Jeremiah 4:24 "I look out … lo, the sown land lies a desert: and the towns are all razed by the Lord’s rage." The problem seems to be when we try to be like God and misuse these forces; we stumble and are "thrown into disintegration and chaos".

When our universe or foundations are disturbed, several things happen. Perhaps the disruption can be a call to awaken to something bigger and better—a reveille to change and growth. Perhaps the destruction is one that shatters our world order and demands a response that we might not see or hear clearly at the moment but might have to grow into. What changes and growth, what pain and dissociation will result from these shaken orders? What will replace our complacency, our comfort zones, and our inertia? Will we be able to find the energy, the desire to rebuild, to reconstruct, and to respond to save ourselves?

Tillich’s description of the choices at the moment of chaos is precise—"If the foundations of this place begin to crumble . . . only two alternatives remain—despair, which is the certainty of eternal destruction, or faith, which is the certainty of eternal salvation". Tillich suggests that a destruction of the world around us provokes these two responses. If there is to be no future, but one of doom and gloom, why go on, why keep on? There is a certain comfort in misery and the struggle to rise above seems impossible. The trap of despair is a strong one and many who follow it are locked into its hold for a long time of suffering. But to disturb the universe and change the way of despair to one of hope and faith is equally difficult and lengthy.

My own particular universe was never the same after the birth of my third child. Two I could manage. I had two hands, two feet, two sets of eyes, here and here, there were two parents, it all worked. However, 18 months after my second daughter was born, actually loaned to us from God for us to nurture and Him to guide, my son came along in the July heat and humidity that only the Hudson Valley can create. As months went by, I could not get it together. I would have two settled and one would arise and need something. I would sit down with one and two needed to use the lavatory. At the park, one would be on the slide, another climbing a tree, and the third still need pushing on the swing. I didn’t have enough hands, enough time, enough energy, and certainly, I knew most definitely not enough love to keep this boat afloat. How could love be equally divided into three parts? I had yet to learn the exponential quality that love has, the more you have to give, the more there is to give, not even to mention what comes back to you.

I was frustrated at every turn. Germs, viruses, chicken pox, colds, flu ebbed and flowed and swirled around in a sea of tissues, Sudafed, dry toast, nasty diapers, juice and constant fatigue. I am human. I got angry with my oldest child, who, I thought, ought to be able to step in as my surrogate at 4 years of age and cook and clean and run things, what was her problem anyway????

I remember one moment when I had given out the last glass of juice, the last sandwich, the laundry staring at me, the dust balls arrayed like Roman legions, there was a hush for a few seconds and mouths were full and chewing and then the telephone rang; someone poked someone’s eye out with the Tommy Tippee cup and juice went everywhere. I exploded, and screamed and cried and lost all sense of reality and purpose and retreated like a wounded animal to my bed in utter incoherence and hysterics, unable to speak, or think or be or want to go on. My daughter in her confusion tried to comfort me. Part of me felt her little arms stroking me, but I was so far into myself that they felt like the wisps of spider webs brushing my face—coming from nowhere, going nowhere, gone in a second. I cried, convulsively, I screamed, I pushed comfort away. I retreated into myself, and saw no way out. I was failing at the very job no one had trained me for, or had told me would be this bad, but it was my fault, my wrong to right, my doom, my own devastation. Whatever foundation of strength I sensed in my own resources was crumbled, shattered, irrelevant to the task. I had no tools left in the work-shed, no more tricks up my sleeve, no more magic to work—I was exhausted, spent, empty—

The foundations of the earth do shake.
Earth breaks to pieces
Earth is split in pieces,
Earth reels like a drunken man,
Earth rocks like a hammock;
Under the weight of its transgression earth falls down to rise no more!

Lift up your eyes to heaven and look upon the earth beneath:
For the heavens shall vanish away like smoke,
And the earth shall grow old like a robe;
The world itself shall crumble.
For my righteousness shall be forever,
And my salvation knows no end.
Isaiah 24: 18-20

Of course, the ultimate universe-disturber was Christ himself. He came as a tradesperson to undo the legalistic Judaic society with his never-ending message of love and service and care for others. His message of grace and salvation here on earth, rattled the structured Jewish society bound up in the philosophy of good works and abiding by the laws as the only path to a just reward. One of my favorite hymns sums up what Christ did for us and how mysterious it remains:

My song is love unknown, my savior’s love to me
Love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be
But who am I that for my sake my lord should take frail flesh and die?

C.S. Lewis, in his "Screwtape Letters" speaks of this love of God for us and how it is to be interpreted:

My Dear Wormwood:

Has no one ever told you about the law of undulation? Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. To decide what the best use of it is, you must ask what use the enemy wants to make of it, and then do the opposite. Now it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs more than on the peaks; some of his special favorites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. The reason is this. He really does want to fill the universe with loathsome little replicas of himself—Creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like his own, not because he has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to his. And this is where the troughs come in. You must have wondered why the enemy does not make more use of his power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree he chooses and at any moment. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For his ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it. He will set them off with communications of his presence, which though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please him best. He wants them to learn to walk, and must therefore take away his hand; and if only the will to walk is really there, he is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood, our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending to do our enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished. And asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

I began to drawl slowly and lamely out of my trough and seek God’s help to keep me going. Ever so slowly, like the movement of the ocean liner as it pulls away from the dock, change began and peaks of joy and success happened. I was not locked into despair; I could see an alternative. Not only had I been saved, I was worthy of the salvation. The overturning of my life, the crumbling of my solid foundations, in fact saved me from myself and allowed me to be saved by God.

One of my favorite painters is the impressionist Georges Seurat. Like most of the Impressionists in the late 1800’s, Seurat was a fine technician—a master sketcher and organizer of drawings. He had a keen sense of order, of method, and his delicate sensibility was always in conflict with this passion for logic and mathematical precision. Seurat began to look at color and what made up the tones and qualities we see as certain color. He began to worry about the balance and harmony of the subjects on the canvas, their interrelationship and how it all affected the final product. In his experiments with the application of paint, he began to build the illusion of a color on the canvas itself with small dots of paint—dots of red and blue to make a black—in a style which later came to be known as Pointillism—the point of light and the point of color interacting to produce a tone different from its components. He shattered the art world in the 1880’s with his studies of the island in the Seine around Paris, which culminated in the painting now in Chicago, "Sunday afternoon on the Ile de la Grande Jatte" 1884/86. People in silhouette dominated by a woman in black (is it really black?) and her parasol and pet monkey on the right and a group of seated fishermen and picnickers on the left. Trees are strategically located to maintain the vertical order and people are placed in positions of repose to characterize the slow summer nature of the painting. A close look reveals that the woman’s hat and parasol are thousands of dots of paint that are red and blue, layered carefully upon each other to create a rich purple-black. The size, scale and intensity of detail of the painting were ultimately the end of Seurat—he was not capable of making the leap from pure color in the abstract to abstract shapes as well—he was perhaps 50 years ahead of himself in that regard. He died in 1886 broken in spirit but so rich in his legacy. (essay continued below copy of painting, which shows only the right half of Seurat’s work)

Another trailblazer and personal favorite is Stephen Sondheim, who writes lyrics that everyone loves and musicals that everyone loves to hate. His dissonant chords, strange key changes, songs written for the character and not for elevators, do not endear him to the world’s largest audience. It is all these qualities of genius that make him so appealing to me as universe disturber of the first order. Sondheim took the canvas and setting of the painting, the Grand Jatte, gave the characters names and lives, brought the painter to life and set the world of Paris in 1883 to music and vitality ("Sunday in the Park with George"). Dot, the woman with the parasol and Seurat’s model and lover eventually has a falling out over his preoccupation and manic devotion to the painting. She talks about how he taught her about painting and color and discipline that set her free, and how he needs to set himself free as well. This song is from the second act as a reprise of their separation.

Let us think of ways our universe needs disturbing, how we are fearful or cheerful about that prospect, what feeling it produces in us and what paths lie before us.

At the beginning I jokingly referred to what my first impressions were of the word foundation. I still wonder if we might not all have similar responses and can find things or aspects of our lives that have become embedded and solid and foundation-like that might benefit from some disturbance. A minor tremor under the footings, a rattling of some cages, an examination of what is immutable and inviolable in our minds, but which in fact needs some fresh air and turbulence. In whose hands is the power of some of our personal foundations—do we control them or do they control us??? The paradox of dominance and dependence created by: money troubles, chemical dependencies, emotional stresses, environmental turmoil, icons of success, wealth, power, and independence.

What do we keep and shop for in the way of emotional groceries that bind us to our own destruction? How do all of these things keep us from our faith—keep Jesus out and self-concern in? What foundations do we have, which we want to hang onto, and which ones might need some examining? What would a shaking of these foundations do to our lives in Christ?

The Rev. Robert Jewett, August 1992