On the need for liberals to recover their inner Indiana Jones
A proverb that one should take seriously is, “Look before you leap.” I hope I don’t need to rehearse why it’s a piece of wise advice . . . well, it’s wise for the most part.
I say “for the most part” because proverbial advice works by radically simplifying the world and, in consequence, its greatest danger to us is that it serves to stop us from seeing those moments, those complex moments, when, inevitably, the proverbial advice is not only wrong, but positively dangerous to follow. The simplifying proverb serves silently to create a dangerous orthodoxy which tells us the way we can know beforehand, look at and analyse completely before we leap, is always safer than the way we cannot know beforehand, nor look upon before we leap.
Within popular culture, perhaps my favourite illustration which shows clearly how looking before you leap becomes a major problem is the scene found towards the end of the 1989 film, “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.”
Searching for the Holy Grail with the help, and more than occasional hindrance, of his father, Indy arrives at the edge of a huge chasm over which there is clearly no way he can jump. Looking down into the abyss, he opens his father’s Grail notebook one more time for advice and reads the line: “The path of flood. Only in the leap from the lion’s head will he prove his worth.” Indy looks around and notices above him the carved head of a lion. Not surprisingly, Indy looks again at the scene before him and says, “Impossible! Nobody can jump this!,” adding shortly afterwards, “It’s . . . a leap of faith. Oh, God.” His companions behind him are desperate for him to move forward and his seriously injured father, who needs the healing power of the grail if he is to live for much longer, is shown quietly muttering, almost in a prayer-like fashion, “You must believe, boy. You must...believe.” Standing there at the edge of the known and visible, Indy is forced to realize that at this moment he must make his own leap of faith and step down into the chasm. Indy gathers all his courage, deliberately does not look down, and steps out into the void . . . As I’m sure you all know, his act of faith allows him to step onto a solid stone bridge, hitherto invisible because it is built out of exactly the same material as the plummeting cliffs below.
Of course, as a whole, the film is a piece of Hollywood hokum, but this scene, at least for me, stands as a powerful and very accessible metaphor for the basic truth that there are moments when you simply cannot see or know before you risk stepping into what seems like the void or, to return to the well-known religious saying, before you take “a leap of faith.” As Indy discovers, at certain points in one’s life, looking before you leap only serves to encourage you not to do the only thing that must, at that moment, be done if you is going to find a way forward. It’s also important to notice that Indy steps out IN FAITH THAT a way to cross the chasm is there; he does not step out holding a BELIEF IN the bridge’s existence. The distinction is vital to recognize.
These thoughts were brought to mind last week when I reread a poem by W. H. Auden (1907-1973) written in December 1940, at a very, very dark moment during the Second World War:
The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short and steep,
However gradual it looks from here;
Look if you like, but you will have to leap.
Tough-minded men get mushy in their sleep
And break the by-laws any fool can keep;
It is not the convention but the fear
That has a tendency to disappear.
The worried efforts of the busy heap,
The dirt, the imprecision, and the beer
Produce a few smart wisecracks every year;
Laugh if you can, but you will have to leap.
The clothes that are considered right to wear
Will not be either sensible or cheap,
So long as we consent to live like sheep
And never mention those who disappear.
Much can be said for social savoir-faire,
But to rejoice when no one else is there
Is even harder than it is to weep;
No one is watching, but you have to leap.
A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep
Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear:
Although I love you, you will have to leap;
Our dream of safety has to disappear.
One of the things that struck me powerfully when I reread this poem with Indy’s leap of faith also firmly in mind, was how within liberal social, political and religious circles we have increasingly been losing the ability to make any kind of leap of faith. Faith has for us become almost entirely replaced by a reliance on positive knowledge and technology which, alas, has also helped create the dream that, somehow, all danger of injury can be removed from the world. In consequence, we have become pathologically risk-averse and cannot move forward because we are caught in a loop of looking and looking and looking, again and again and again. All this looking IS fine, of course, when the looking really can provide us with useful information about the best way to proceed, but what about those situations, those existential situations, when no further looking can deliver the answer we need if we are to continue living well and with genuine hope?
Part of the problem here is that our liberal culture has lost touch with the basic, structural, fundamental danger of being alive in the first place and the need for faith to live well in the face of that danger. It means we have lost touch with the reality, as Auden notes in his final verse, that life will remain “both short and steep, / However gradual it looks from here.” And, as he further observes, although we can (and at times we will all) look “if we like” to try to discern the difficulties and dangers ahead before we leap, there will always-already come those times when we “will have to leap” without knowing what comes next because what comes next cannot be known beforehand. Not knowing is fundamental for us, and we forget, at our peril, that everything about our world, as Auden calls it, the bed upon which we all lie, is sustained not by certain knowledge but by “A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep.” Mystery, not-knowing, the abyss, the void, and the chasm surrounds us always and everywhere. Even the astonishingly far-sighted James Webb Telescope comes to a point beyond which it cannot look.
And, although, when we look fondly upon our lover lying quietly beside us in bed we find ourselves wishing to remove from them a sense of danger by telling them that by looking before they leap they can be proved with an assuredly safe, known way to travel, this cannot be done.
Anyway, I find I am increasingly convinced that a key three-fold task faces us as religious liberals in the modern world.
Firstly, we have to find ways to ensure that our dream of safety disappears. Being alive is inherently risky, and it is always-already to be surrounded by a profound mystery, a solitude that, to we who are standing like Indy under the lion’s head, will always seem to be “ten thousand fathoms deep.”
Secondly, we have to find ways never to let the danger and mystery of living stop us from seeing that, if we want to live truly authentic lives, there will come moments when we have no choice but to leap dangerously before we look, because all further looking won’t, can’t help see what will not show up until, and because, we leap.
And thirdly, it is to develop the wisdom to help us discern appropriately when the moment to risk the dangerous leap of faith has genuinely come.
All this may be summed-up colloquially, but I hope not superficially, by saying that unless we liberals recover our inner Indiana Jones — our inner Indy — our liberal religious tradition is finished. Without a liberal faith, and the wisdom to know when to trust it, all our amazing, positive knowledge will count for nothing.
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