On Communicating Truth, Goodness, and Beauty

This is a lightly edited manuscript of a talk I gave in Washington DC earlier this month.

In the past I sometimes taught a high school writing and literature class for a homeschool coop back in Lincoln. In the first week of class, I gave my students an assignment I lifted from Robert Farrar Capon’s book The Supper of the Lamb, which is a kind of basic theology of creation dressed up like a cook book. Capon’s book is written as a guide that ostensibly will help you grow as a home chef by over time learning a complex and elaborate recipe in which you prep a whole lamb that will feed eight people four times. In reality he is teaching you a love of the world God has made through a series of short culinary meditations.

The book begins with an exercise in which he demands that his readers spend one hour slicing an onion: He provides instructions for how this should be done and more commentary than you would imagine possible on the intricacies of a single onion.

So in the opening week of my class, I assigned my students the task of spending one hour slicing a single onion and then writing a few paragraphs for me about the experience. To this day I am somewhat amazed that I never got a single confused or angry email from a parent, but I never did.

Why would I do such a thing? Partially, I suppose for mischievous reasons to see what a group of teenage homeschool kids would do in response to being made to do such a task. But there were better reasons also closely related to Capon’s own purposes in the book: Learning to cook in the way Capon imagines it, including learning to prep that absurd lamb recipe, requires more of a person. It actually requires something deeper and more challenging of you–you need to not simply memorize a recipe or gather ingredients or chop them up and heat them up. You actually need to understand a bit about cooking–techniques, the interplay of ingredients, and what happens to x if you do y. It requires the combination of close attentiveness to particulars and a sufficiently broad and deep knowledge that you can feel your way through a complex task.

What it requires, in other words, is less an ability to do a single mechanical task or a series of mechanical tasks, and more a capacity to understand ingredients, understand techniques, understand the interplay between them, and out of that complex knowledge assemble something beautiful.

So I want to start my time today by making a distinction now between those two things: abilities and capacities. When I speak of an ability, I mean the sort of thing that one can do with minimal thought or engagement, the sort of thing that can be explained via a short bulleted list.

To remain in the kitchen, quickly dicing a carrot is an ability. Browning some ground beef is an ability.

To expand to other categories, when I ask my ten year old son to put his laundry away, that is an ability.

It is not that these things require nothing of us: If I am going to dice a carrot I need to know wear the carrots are, where the knife is, how to cut with the knife, etc. If my son is going to put his laundry away, he needs to know where the laundry is and where it is supposed to be.

So one does need some rudimentary skill when dealing with abilities. But they do not ask much of us.

Capacities, by contrast, are something that cannot be simply distilled to a bulleted list in the same way. If I asked you to prepare a meal for eight people using the food on hand in the cupboards and refrigerator, you can’t simply look at a list of seven steps and complete the task. You need to acquire a certain sort of copiousness about yourself which allows you to be given what many would see as a daunting task and discern how it can be done.

To again consider my children, if I asked my son to “help your mom around the house while I am away” or I asked him to go talk to his sister before going to bed to patch things up after a fight they’d had earlier in the day, those are not simple “abilities.” One can try to render them as such, of course, but we all recognize the insincere offer of help, the forced apology, and we regard them as something diminished or lesser. To do these things is not an ability, but a capacity, for they can only be done when we acquire certain generalized characteristics, even in very minimal or basic ways, that allow us to do these things.

When we talk about communicating persuasively with other people or expressing an idea in a beautiful way or helping someone perceive the good in a more profound way, we are working in the domain of capacities, not abilities.

I am starting here because I think there is a danger we can fall into very easily in talking about how to communicate truth, goodness, or beauty with neighbors who have different ideas of the good life than we ourselves do. We live in a fairly superficial, distracted cultural moment. You do not need to sit in solitude with your thoughts anymore–a myriad of distractions are always readily at hand. And this reality creates a certain superficiality that defines much of our world now. We have become people who lack a certain depth of character, depth of spirit, depth of soul. And yet developing capacity is in many ways another way of saying acquiring depth.

Because of this, it has become easy for us to largely forget the whole notion of capacity and instead think that everything we do in life can be reduced to abilities, provided we consult with the right person–or LLM. Thus the rise of AI therapists, to take but one example.

So when we talk about doing the things we are thinking about right now given all of that cultural background, it is very easy to get lost or frustrated because when we try to reduce the capacities required to do such things down to mere ability we find that it doesn’t work, that these things cannot be reduced to mechanical steps or bullet points, anymore than the sublime beauty of a certain moment we might encounter in life can be distilled down to a photograph or a series of numbered steps.

In other words, the problem before us is not one of technical mastery. And that is hard for us, I think. We are tempted, perhaps especially in a place like DC, to evaluate ourselves as persons in terms of our place within our economic system. So we are primarily producers and our value is bound up in our ability to master technical skills enabling us to solve discrete problems which lead to greater production, efficiency, wealth, and so on.

That isn’t the issue though. We are called as Christians toward a certain mode of life I can’t give you a step by step guide to do the things we are talking about today. What I can try to do is tell you about the kind of person who is able to do these things and commend to all of us–myself very much included because I also struggle for depth–the characteristics and ways of living that allow a person to acquire such capaciousness. So that is the frame I want to work within as we have this conversation. With what remains of the time, I want to do two more things:

First, I want to think for a bit about the characteristic excellencies that help someone mature and deepen in their encounter with the Christian faith and their ability to communicate it. There are three characteristics, or you might even call them virtues, that I want to commend to you:

Attentiveness

Some years ago a friend of mine, then a PhD student in New Testament at a program in the UK, shared a story with me of an encounter he had at a theological conference. He was at his hotel in the downstairs area getting breakfast when an older woman sat down at the table next to him. She was attempting to get her breakfast, but her elderly hands were struggling to open the packet of oatmeal. My friend offered to help. So he opened the oatmeal packet, gave it back to her, and they began to talk. The woman was deeply interested in his work–asking him questions about his dissertation, the scholars he was reading, and so on. The woman was clearly quite knowledgeable in the field and asked perceptive, probing questions that forced my friend to think more carefully about the project.

But what most impressed my friend was not actually the caliber of her questions, as great as that was. What he noticed first of all was that at no point in the conversation did this woman appear to grow distracted, bored, or as if she was searching for a way to exit the discussion. If you attend enough professional or academic conferences, you soon begin to recognize a certain sort of interaction you will have several times at each event: You’re speaking to a person, but they aren’t really looking at you or even listening, actually. Rather, they are distracted. Perhaps they seem anxious. Tellingly, they will glance over your shoulder every so often, as if scanning the room for more worthy or advantageous conversation partners.

This woman my friend was sitting with did none of that. She was fully absorbed in the conversation, even as it was plainly of no real advantage to her. After breakfast the two went their separate ways and it was only then that someone went up to my friend and asked him what he had been talking to Katherine Sonderegger about for so long. And that is how my friend realized he had been in conversation for the past hour with one of the greatest dogmatic theologians of her generation.

I share the story to illustrate a point: Attentiveness is a kind of resource we have and our dispensing of that resource is indicative of the health of our heart. When we spread our attention thinly, we become superficial. When we direct our attention only to what can materially benefit us, we become selfish and egotistical. But there is another option: We direct our attention to that which is worthy of it–and there is much in the world that answers that description. Sunsets and birds and trees and even the sound of the wind can all be worthy of our attention. So too is your neighbor. And the reason your neighbor is worthy of your attention is not because of what they might offer you, but simply because they are. They share in the gift of being itself which God gifts to us as his sons and daughters. And so they are interesting and worth attending to–and this applies as much to the homeless person you pass on the street without a thought as it does to your boss at work or the wealthy and successful businessman at your church.

Patience

Attentiveness can be sustained only by patience–one way of defining the act of patience is to say that it involves hopefully enduring some form of suffering which we judge to be less than the good we hope to obtain if we will wait and endure until it is obtained. Minimally, then, patience is what allows us to continue to be attentive.

But Augustine also argues that patience has a restorative quality to it. In his treatise on patience—and isn’t it telling that so many early church fathers wrote entire treatises on the virtue of patience?—Augustine says,

For this is just, that we who from our first felicity of Paradise for contumacious appetence of things to enjoy were dismissed, through humble patience of things that annoy may be received back: driven away for doing evil, brought back by suffering evil: there against righteousness doing ill, here for righteousness' sake patient of ills.

So patience transforms us. For our purposes here, your ability to discern and communicate what is good, true, and beautiful will be enriched and deepened through the practice of patience. So it is not just that patience allows you to keep attending to the good things you are already watching. It is also that the practice of patience will open your eyes to new good things to which you can then attend. The slave trader turned abolitionist preacher and hymn writer John Newton once wrote, “When I hear a knock at my study door, I hear a message from God. It may be a lesson of instruction; perhaps a lesson of patience: but, since it is his message, it must be interesting.”

Hope

Finally: We do not know how God will work or what he will do through us. But we know that God is at work and that he routinely is pleased to use us as means for accomplishing his ends. So when we are attending to his word and his world and when we are learning to love both and when we are attacked by things which we must patiently endure as we seek to attend to the world, we do this with a spirit of hope because we know that God is full of love and compassion, that he desires that no one would perish, that he hates injustice, and that he sometimes will use us to further his purposes in the world. We do not know when that will be or how he might do it, of course, but we trust that he will because we hope in his promises.

Second, I hope to offer three specific bits of counsel that are hopefully at least somewhat more immediately actionable for us as we go about our work.

Shun perfectionism.

People are finite, fallible, and sinful. That includes your peers you are working with and trying to communicate with and it includes you and me. What this means is that our attempts to convey and apply what is true are hindered both by our own limitations and shortcomings and by the same from our neighbors. There are two particular applications here for this point that need to be made:

• First, that people are broader and stranger than you think and are capable of surprising you–when we treat people as vehicles for ideological projects we miss this point.
• Second, that you are not going to ever arrive at pristine coalitions or bills, and that even triumphs will have elements of failure within them. These are simply the conditions of our life in the world–and, by the way, apply to all vocations, not just the work of government. You can confront this reality and respond to it in anger because it disappoints you, frustrates you, or challenges you. Or you can confront this reality and let it make you more merciful, humble, and forbearing.

Live on the razor’s edge.

I am taking this from Tim Keller who offered this exact council to his parishioners in the Redeemer family of churches in New York. The point is that seeking to live in this way in a mixed society of belief and unbelief inherently requires accepting a certain measure of ambiguity and complexity, as well as the genuine chance of failure.

The difficulty here is that if you do want to practice patient attentiveness and reckon with politics as they actually work, then these are the table stakes. There is no possibility of perfection, nor any chance of the immediate and complete realization of perfect justice. All we are left with is the complexity and tension of life in the world as it is. If you would be faithful in such a world, then you will necessarily live on the edge, because there is simply no other way of life that avoids these intractable difficulties. Far better to accept this and entrust yourself to God’s kindly care while availing yourself of his means of grace then to do anything else.

Identify points of contact.

Finally, identify the points of overlap or common concern with colleagues, neighbors, peers, etc. Recall the story of Paul in Athens. Who are the unknown gods that your peers worship in ignorance? Recall also that, as Augustine taught us, evil is nothing; it lacks substance. For that reason, a person virtually never desires evil itself. Rather, they err by confusing something that is evil for the good or they err by failing to value something appropriately.

This reality creates a variety of opportunities for Christians. In the domain of politics, where many of you work, it means there are many places where you might find common cause on a given issue with a surprising partner or ally. In the domain of relationships and church life, it means that there are ample entry points for talking about Christ and the Gospel, if only we would have our eyes open to them, and it means that no stranger is so far removed from you that they must remain permanently at a distance. For those who attend to the words of Christ and devote themselves to his way of life, another life is possible. Thank you.