What Are Soundings?
What Are Soundings?
An explanation of my essays on religion and my personal exploration of faith.
While idly passing an afternoon away in a second-hand bookstore, I was drawn to the slender red spine of a book called Soundings: Essays Concerning Christian Understanding. I’m not particularly drawn to the excesses of esoterica, but I felt compelled to slide the book off the shelf and glance at its pages. It turned out to be a collection of essays on Christian theology from the sixties, in which various authors grapple with “important questions which theologians are now being called upon to face, and which are not yet being faced with the necessary seriousness and determination”. Reader, I took the book home.
In his introduction to Soundings, A. R. Vidler expands on the metaphor of the title, saying that the modern world is in a period best suited “for making soundings, not charts or maps”. Soundings are an attempt to gauge the depths of an ocean, to simply understand the space to be explored, not to give directions to the bottom, the surface, or anywhere else. Leave the charts and maps to the scholars; soundings are the project of ordinary people, not studying religious experience, but living it.
Aquinas spoke of fides quaerens intellectum — faith seeking understanding. Faith (that is, the experience) is already there, and making sense of it comes second. Right now, wherever you are as you read these words, you’re in a space, be it a room or an outdoor area with some demarcations, maybe roads, buildings, or fences. You don’t need to be able to write a scholarly treatise on the aetiology, ontology, and teleology (the origin, nature, and purpose) of that space to experience being there. Faith, belief, experience, call it whatever gives you a thrill or the least embarrassment — this is the existential space you find yourself in, and mapping that terrain to explain it intellectually is a project that follows after the fact.
In making my own soundings of the philosophical space in which I live my life, some of my most useful instruments are the language, liturgies, and narratives of religion. The most useful religions to me have been Judaism, Protestantism, and to a lesser degree Catholicism. Enter the standard sardonic observation of the “funny coincidence” that these would also be the prevalent faiths of the culture I grew up in. This is no riposte to any position I hold — I’m not evangelising the superiority of these faiths over others, merely recognising that they are the religious languages I’m most fluent in. They are also those that speak most clearly to me.
For instance: Job’s struggles and Habakkuk’s lament.
For instance: radical forgiveness that requires sacrifice from the forgiver on the part of the forgiven.
For instance: confession, repentance, atonement, and mercy symbolically enacted through various rituals and practiced with dramatic consequence in the world.
So, these faiths usefully describe important features of my condition — and yet I don’t feel comfortable calling myself a Christian, or anything like it. I’m still very much on the outside looking in. When talking to those firmly within a particular faith, I constantly couch my opinions on religious matters in caveats such as “not that it’s my place to say” or “I might not have a dog in this race, but ...”
At the same time, I don’t feel at home in contemporary post-religious culture, which Howard Root describes in an essay in Soundings as “a state of mind and feeling in which questions about God, the meaning of life, the nature of reality and human destiny ... are no longer treated seriously, whether in belief or unbelief”. I continue to find that my home is with the believers and unbelievers who keep these questions alive because they burn in their hearts and won’t leave them alone. As Root puts it, “our greatest ally is not the dying establishments but the hungry and destitute world which is still alive enough to feel its own hunger”.
The idea of soundings also describes the manner in which I write and how these essays on religion should be read: they’re not arguments in favour of or against religion; they’re not an attempt to convince you of anything; they are an imperfect but sincere effort to describe certain experiences. I want to describe them for anyone who might be able to recognise something in them; who might understand their own experiences better in contrast to my own; who might hope for companionship on their own journey into what Christian philosopher Paul Tillich calls matters of “ultimate concern”.
The depths are there to be explored. I’m looking forward to making this journey with you.
Further Reading:
• “Beginning All Over Again”, Howard Root, in Soundings: Essays Concerning Christian Understanding, ed. A. R. Vidler (1962)