"In every community and society there are people who are inclined to abandon their faith and there have been many times when such people have spun out of control; other communities and societies do not have such powerful places to seek refuge when faced by these abysses and weaknesses as we have. Indeed, they have thoughts which soothe, beliefs which reconcile, days and nights which tremble with joy, festivals and carnivals; but, these days, these nights, these festivals, these carnivals are devoid of any holiness. They are like fireworks, shining for a moment and then are gone, giving only instantaneous pleasure; they are ephemeral and physical, not promising anything in the way of spiritual joy. Indeed, in their worlds you cannot feel the greatness of faith to God, nor can you feel that souls are free from the boundaries of time and space; everything starts with a false and transitory happiness, and takes place in a delirium of flesh. All is then transformed into painful memories, regrettable dreams, and disappointed hopes, and finally everything simply disappears." (Link.)
Gülen is a fascinating man, and if you aren't interested in him now, you should go to his website and read until you are interested. He is an advocate of tolerance, a friend of peacemakers, and a force in interfaith dialogue. He's a poet and a public intellectual, a prolific author and an inspiring preacher- in short, a face of Islam that I too often forget to seek out.
He makes an interesting contrast, in this section of the article, between secular society and Islamic society. In a secular society, there are no safeguards to protect those who are inclined toward atheism- nothing in the social structure tugs them back toward faith. Islamic society, on the other hand, has what Gülen calls "powerful places of refuge," which my secular friends (and to be honest, probably my religious friends as well) might rephrase as stifling traditions, limits on freedom, or invasive proselytizing. Gülen seems* here to come down in favor of building a social world in which the "greatness of faith to God" is inescapable, so that those who would be tempted to abandon faith can be strengthened by their more faithful neighbors. His portrait of a society without these places of refuge sounds like a blurb on the back jacket of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, next to a picture of decadent flappers smoking elegant cigarettes and wondering why the carnival disappeared; which is to say that, in some ways, it rings very true.
It's uncomfortable for me to sit with Gülen's article, and with this paragraph in particular. I keep rereading "Indeed, in their worlds you cannot feel the greatness of faith to God..." and wanting to ask this man (who has never met me, and knows nothing about my life) for some kind of reassurance that he's not talking about my world; that he didn't move from Turkey to Pennsylvania and decide that, nationwide, you just cannot feel the greatness of faith to God in the USA. I worry that that's exactly the comparison he's making, though. As a nation, we do a decent job of castigating honest atheists, but the dishonest ones? The ones who are willing to bow their heads while Grandpa prays at Thanksgiving, but are peaceably and quietly abandoning their faith? We wish them Godspeed, you might say; very little in our society calls them back to the churches. We call this freedom- Gülen calls it anarchy.
This strikes me as being one of the great ecclesiological questions: is faithfulness ideally a choice to reject the prevailing order to join a righteous remnant, or a choice to construct a more righteous order? That is, are we pessimists or optimists about the possibility of building a God-honoring society? Given that question: if our entire society was entirely focused on God, what would an individual's choice to worship mean? Conversely, can an individual choose to worship without also choosing to remake hir surroundings in honor of God; is remaking the world necessarily a part of proclaiming God's worth?
If you had the option to build a world in which acting righteously was supported at the expense of the individual's freedom to choose righteousness, would you do it?
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*I don't claim to be familiar enough with Gülen to know how this plays itself out across his oeuvre.
1 comment:
This has been tried many times, and there seems to be a recurrent problem: the people who found the society are rebelling against a different social order (e.g., the Puritans or the Quakers against the Church of England, but also various Reformed movements), but the next generation only knows the new order, and isn't as excited by it.
I like your analogy with F. Scott Fitzgerald; but I think the best thing to do there is to work towards establishing real alternatives for people who need and/or want them. And recognize that, for whatever reason, there are some people who are happier golfing or working in their gardens or sleeping in on Sundays and not really thinking about God at all.
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