David Goa In Conversation With Andrew Bingham:

In The Presence Of Good Company

Foreword by Andrew Bingham

In general, Modern Horizons’ long-form dialogues are designed as a vesperal avenue for sitting down one-on-one with people who have dedicated their life to some particular area of work and discussing their personal provenance, vocational experiences, loved ideas, and sense of the future. David Goa and I have found ourselves in weekly or bi-weekly conversation for something like 20 years now; these recorded dialogues are only slightly more ‘deliberate’ than usual — less in subject-matter than in making sure they were conducted in person, in his study or kitchen, with plenty of red wine and pipe tobacco at hand. Here and there one finds many occasions to appreciate not only David’s lack of intellectual and spiritual fear, but also his eagerness — often full-throated — and joy — always well-tempered — when face-to-face with expressions and registers of meaning elemental to personal and communal life; in each case, David eschews the temptation of refuge in safely-established spiritual positions.

Precedents for this kind of work — such as may be — are found in works like Mircea Eliade’s Ordeal by Labyrinth, Emmanuel Levinas’ Ethics and Infinity, and Hans-Georg Gadamer in conversation. Taking to heart their respective grapplings with notions of understanding and of predication, one seeks to draw near, together with another person, to things felt to be essential. This is a matter not only of ideas, but more importantly of how one is with ideas. Ideas palpable to the moment are gathered into presence through time, and thus relate to the textures, rhythms, and foci of memory. Here one may apprehend memory as an intimately-honed form of tradition, which David reminds us is less of the blood than of the living soil. Hence his preference for metaphors of tilling rather than of mining — one turns anew rather than retrieves for gain. The metaphor indicates something significant: the inevitably grounded nature of the integral relationships from which one thinks.

Occasionally here on the prairies on a warm evening or fresh morning I am arrested by a scent in the air which transports part of me back to my favourite days and nights in Kingston; often in conversation with David there is a scent in the air through which the whole of one’s spirit is permeated with the vital ethos of our tradition.

1 : 16 – Childhood formation; Growing up in three cultures: Bible, Norway, British Canada; Conversation, grappling & gravity; The memory of natural community & common “wells”; Immigration, grief, and tending (or not) the graves of ancestors; Encounter, others, hospitality, & revelation; A city full of story; My father’s Gethsemane.

2 : 16 – Awakening to the intellectual life; Meeting Arius and Athanaisus; A Pietist “Yeshiva”; Discovering America; Thinking with Aquinas & Cervin; Reading the great tradition; Story, a way of knowing; Conversation as a way of life; Despair and the landscape of wilderness.

3 : 16 – The aims of education; History, the presence of the past; Tradition, the living faith of the dead; Philosophy: what does it mean to know; Theology, Tillich, and the play of meaning; The gift of thinking together; Eliade and religion as a form of consciousness; The dialectic of the sacred, iconic vision, liturgical time.

4 : 16 – Spiritual sobriety; On God who comes to mind; Returning home as “as private scholar”; The gift of being present; Joseph and His Brothers; Working in the fields of meaning; Living tradition, cultural memory, historical experience & sense of place; Alberta, a living laboratory of human culture.

5: 16 – Confession and human solidarity; The gift and dangers of spiritual friendship; Liturgy, the art of arts; Being present to what others are present to; Friendship and obligation; Taking for granted those “near-by”; That stance of presence; Exhibitions as landscapes of encounter.

6 : 16 – Spiritual Life – Sacred Ritual; The museum as domicile, the community as home; The marginal belong; Interpreting Pharaoh’s dream; The Apostle Paul’s body theology; The Rabbi and the Imam; Buber and Beckett on dialogue; Politics of representation; Seasons of Celebration: ritual in eastern Christian culture.

7 : 16 – Reading the church fathers and spiritual mothers; Present to the Passion of Jesus Christ; Liturgy or passion plays; The culture of amnesia; Anno Domini: Jesus through the centuries; Walking Christian pathways from Nicaea to the Wartburg; The Gospels as Midrash on Genesis 3.

8 : 16 – The politics of Anno Domini; Museums: institutions, temples of memory, places of encounter; The gifts and limitations of my formation; In the company of Jaroslav Pelikan; The double act: caring for the particular and for continuities; God loves a good story.

9 : 16 – Writing In the Fields of Meaning; Founding Director, The Ronning Centre for the Study of Religion and Public Life; The past coming to meet me from the future; Too important to be left for universities: issues of religion and public life; Conversation across deep difference; The Babylonian captivity of the humanities; Hospitality with the other.

10 : 16 – Shaping the work of the Ronning Centre; A new conversation on contested issues; Working in and with religious communities; Partnerships; The oil of gladness poured on the wounds of the world; Working in the House of Islam; The love of the local and global challenges; Tussling with the hermeneutic of suspicion.

11 : 16 – The art of conversation; Thinking together; The gifts of working in the fields of meaning; Contestation or caring differently; The matter of tradition and ideological captivity; “the surprised delight in discovering what I didn’t know I knew”; Antidote to fundamentalism; The co-dependent twins.

12 : 16 – Fear, faith and blasphemy; A walk with Athanasius and Arius; Thinking again about the prophet Muhammad; Dignity and free speech; Satire, the satirical spirit and dismissive laughter; Kitsch, the enemy of language; Intimacy and reconfigured self.

13 : 16 – Poetry, the polemical stance and the novel; The shape of the Ronning Centre work; The good company of so many; Contemplation and fasting; The Moses narrative draws near; Institutions, careerists and the importance of being a trickster; The civil purpose of the university.

14 : 16 – Intellectual companions and seminal ideas; The great cloud of witnesses; A five-decade conversation; Pietism and existentialism; Knowledge bearers on local ground; Tradition in conversation with a living faith; Persistent narratives; Myths for “the time being.”

15 : 16 – Persistent ideas; Matters of the polis; The delicate matter of welcoming presence; Appetites and idolatries; Community and fraternity; The end of natural community; Engaging the other and spiritual maturity.

16 : 16 – Community, the stranger and difference; Belonging and longing to be; Habits of the mind and habits of the heart; Putting the ax to the tree of culture; Putting the ax to the tree of civil life; The Enlightenment experiment; Encounter: usurpation, diminishing or deepening; Living out the heart of tradition; The Bushman’s revelation.

Afterword by David Goa

Some ten years or so into my work at the Provincial of Alberta Museum (now the Royal Alberta Museum), having arrived through a beautiful spring morning in the wake of a sun-up refreshing rain, I walked to the main door of the then-fresh Manitoba sandstone building. The words of the American poet, e.e. cummings came to mind: “walking forward into the past, walking backward into the future...” I thought, just for a moment, they should be chiseled over the doorway of the museum. Many years later, the second millennial year of the birth of Jesus Christ, I listened as Jaroslav Pelikan spoke of the words carved over the entrance of the great library at Alexandria in his Henry Marshall Tory Lecture at the University of Alberta, “For the healing of the soul.”

I met Andrew Bingham at All Saints of North America Orthodox monastery. He was in his later teens eager to think and talk together and our conversations unfolded; they continue to this day. A year and a half ago, as he was finishing his doctoral dissertation, he suggested we spend some time in conversation and that we think together about “walking forward into the past” and, by implication, how I may have come to think about the “healing of the soul”, the soul of the person, culture, and our fragile civil life. Those days of conversation brought a flood of gratitude, a heightened sense of how the echoes of the past have come to ring a new note (or is it an enlarged note?) in how life has unfolded. Gratitude and grace... to say nothing of the gravity that lingers in the shadows. Fragility and wonder and just how eternal matters are present in the many and varied particular encounters in the everyday.

Memoirs are by their very nature incomplete, partial, a thinking again, remembering that configures the body of one’s life in ways that pull forward matters long unremembered. I am grateful to my young friend Andrew whose gentle spirit and keen mind opened our easy conversation. The words I first heard in the synagogue — words of thanksgiving for “having come to this day” — echo in my word of thanksgiving for the friendship of a young man and say as much as can be said.

Over the last two months I have listened to these conversations twice following the fine work my son Gregory has done bringing the audio into a clear form. Hearing what was said and what was not said after it lay unnoticed gestating for nine months has brought several matters to mind. Hearing oneself while speaking is one thing. Listening to what one said is quite another. All conversations remake us. All listening makes new yet again. I am particularly struck by how intimate it has been to get to know several of my teachers through their books and their enduring impact on my thinking. In several cases, that of Paul Tillich and Mircea Eliade particularly, my time face to face was minimal, but the impression and the way they embodied the tradition has grown large throughout my life and work.

And regarding the matters not spoken, matters too intimate for public words, there are many and one can only hope word will be there if time arises. The presence of those of whom I have not spoken or only spoken briefly — of the first order SD, DRD, and AEA — are too deep for words.

All that has been takes on new texture and light in those who come as mysteries beyond measure and in whom the future unfolds, the nearest and dearest for us blessed to be parents. So it is for me. Those four loved more than all the world, Kirsten Esengo, Birte Hannah, Simeon Gustav, Samuel Gregory, who before they were born were beyond my knowing and the moment after the world was new reflected by their singular presence, the nearby ones.

As Titu Maiorescu used to say: “And how much more would remain to be said!”