The Suffering that Becomes Us

Nothing that we despise in the other man is entirely absent from ourselves . . . We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.¹ — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The balance of power in human relationships often turns on the contempt we feel for those who suffer. There is something in us that finds the crack in the shell, the split in the veneer, the tear in the fabric, irresistible to the touch. More dangerously, some find the weaknesses in the armor we construct around ourselves. These cracks can be wedged open and widened by those skilled in the art of humiliation—of making a person regard himself with shame and even derision. Then the humiliated stands apart from himself, seeing himself as the abuser does—as an object, not a subject—that is deserving of punishment for pretending to be that which “It” is not—a “Thou.”

In accepting humiliation a person enters into an implicit contract with those who cause the suffering. In that moment of exquisite isolation, the humiliated one desperately seeks to belong again at all costs. A line is flung out to the drowning person, who believes that grasping it might save his life—but the price will be his soul. Jacob’s cunning tricks robbed Esau of his birthright because Esau was famished—near death’s door by his own account. The resentment and hatred unleashed by that humiliation reverberated through their family for decades.

***

The story of the woman caught in adultery usually appears in the Gospel of John in the eighth chapter, although in some versions it is dropped in at the end of the book. There is dispute about its authorship, but the consensus of the centuries places it within John’s message.

It is early morning in the temple. Jesus, as is his custom, has spent the night under the olive trees in the Garden of Gethsemane. He makes his way down through the quiet streets to the courts of the temple. A crowd gathers to hear him, and he sits down to teach them. Then, in a commotion of jeers and shoving, a woman is flung down on the stones in front of him. A knot of temple authorities and Pharisees stands triumphantly over her. She is on her knees, her hair disheveled, her hands trembling. It is clear that she is naked under the blanket she clutches to her.

“Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery,” crows one of the men triumphantly. Some in the crowd laugh and a few of the women shake their heads scornfully. Their husbands angle for a better look, but when the woman pulls her hair back from her face, several of them quickly turn away.

“Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women.” There is no irony evident in his tone, despite the clear omission of any condemnation of the man with whom her adultery was committed. This woman, murmur some in the crowd, is what’s wrong with society today. Women like her trap our boys. “And if I ever caught my husband with her . . .”

The crowd begins to stir restlessly; the promise of a stoning heats the air. The priest in charge looks around at the crowd and then at Jesus. He pauses dramatically, swelling with the knowledge that all eyes are upon him.

”Now what do you say?” He smiles and arches an eyebrow.

There it is: the Law of God up against the Son of Man. To the priests, the woman is merely useful. They’re not concerned with the man she slept with; he has been paid to slip away and keep his mouth shut. They are after a bigger prize.

What shall we say then? If we are the priests, we cannot find it in ourselves to forgive this woman. After all, it’s the Law. Obedience to the law is what keeps a society together and functioning well. Flouting the law, so clearly in evidence here, is simply courting chaos and disaster.

And it is God’s law. As religious leaders, it is our responsibility to ensure that those entrusted to our care are compliant with the commandments of God. The burden is on us to carry out the penalty if God demands it. Wouldn’t it be the height of hypocrisy to wink at so grievous a sin? And wouldn’t we be punishable if we didn’t honor God’s law? Really, we have no choice; our hands are tied. There can be no waffling, no equivocating in matters like this. To excuse such wrongdoing is to open the floodgates of sin. No, the commandment is clear: death is the penalty, and this woman was caught in the very act.

That would be the end of the story in any other time and place. But not today. Jesus bends down and writes with his finger in the dust of the temple floor. The priests are badgering him for an answer, the crowd is restive, the woman has slumped to the ground, leaning on one arm, and still Jesus writes in silence. “What do you say, Master?” demands the priest. Jesus straightens. “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” And he bends down again and continues to write.

The priests slip away, beginning with the eldest. They are silent, red-faced, confused. They find themselves in a moral vortex. While they have no love for Jesus, they grudgingly admire his fluency in debate, his charisma with the people, and—truth be told—his intimate relation with God. They are people tasked with the responsibility to know the Scriptures. They know the Law and the Prophets, and they meditate on them day and night. Keeping the commandments is what God calls them to do. Keeping the peace is what the Romans demand of them. Jesus disrupts and distorts both of these; he seems to see the world through a different lens. They fear him, for encounters with him leave them with vertigo. He insists that they know God first and that love toward each other is a way of knowing God—an epistemology of love. Then what about the Law? they ask, as they slink away.

“God’s relation to the world is personal and particular,” says John Taylor in his book, The Christlike God. “He knows each thing only as a ‘thou’, and his knowing is not by cognition but by communion. Only by becoming this one man has God brought humanity in general into such communion with himself.”²

In the incarnation, God’s infinite openness to the human experience is echoed in our finite possibility for transcendence. Taylor offers Karl Rahner’s insight that “Human beings are creatures with an infinite horizon and, though they have become so flawed as to settle for the self-centered here and now, they still possess the instinct to reach out toward the limitlessness of God.”³

The woman’s accusers stole away because, having denied that infinite horizon to people such as her, they could no longer see it for themselves nor did they want to. Guilt narrows our vision, lowers our heads, confines us to our immediate steps. And they could not let it go, the priests. Having lived their lives within the circuitry of sin = punishment, they resisted the rewiring that would give her—and them—a new life.

At last, Jesus straightens up. The elders are gone, the crowd is silent. They watch Jesus and the woman without moving. “Woman,” says Jesus gently, “where are they? Has no one condemned you?” And she looks up, “No one, sir.” Jesus smiles then. “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.”

***

This is a story about God, for having seen Jesus in action, so we see God. There is a wondrous truth that we awaken to the closer we get to that infinite horizon of new chances for life, and it is that God cannot be other than true to his nature—and his nature is only and ever that of life-giving love.

And this is a story about us, for we are that woman and we are those priests, and like them we will fall again and again, and in our falling we will condemn and lash out at those we hold some power over. Suffering will beget suffering.

But in Jesus we have a priest who was tempted as we are and more so. What he suffered in temptation we could not bear. “And what his struggles seem to have produced,” writes Rowan Williams, “was a sense of the precariousness of goodness, love and fidelity so profound and strong that no failure or error could provoke his condemnation, except the error of those legalists who could not understand that very precariousness.”⁴

He understands us, he knows us, he sees our paths, errant and erratic as they may be, and he loves us still. Through his sufferings we are healed, and in our sufferings we find common ground with those we are tempted to condemn. We may take him at his word, knowing that he will not break the bruised reed nor crush the smoldering flax.

There will come a day, an ordinary day, when we realize with a shock of gratitude that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself,” and as a result we have not judged, but have loved because we first were loved.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison. The Enlarged Edition. Edited by Eberhard Bethge. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997, p. 10. ↩
Taylor, John V. The Christlike God. London: SCM Press, 1992, p. 129. ↩
Taylor, p. 133. ↩
Williams, Rowan. Open to Judgement: Sermons and Addresses. London: Dartman, Longman and Todd, 1994, p. 17. ↩

Good People Made Evil

“We have seen

Good men made evil wrangling with the evil,

Straight minds grown crooked fighting crooked minds.”¹

Edwin Muir was a Scottish poet, raised on farms on the Orkney Islands, whose family fell apart when they moved to the slums of Glasgow in 1901. They were forced off their farm by high rents, but the move to Glasgow proved even more devastating. Within five years, Muir’s mother, father, and two brothers were dead. Muir himself—who went on to become one of the most respected translators, poets, and critics of the mid-twentieth century—likened the transition to being born and raised in the eighteenth century and suddenly finding himself in the twentieth. “When I arrived I found that it was not 1751, but 1901, and that a hundred and fifty years had been burned up in my two days’ journey. But I myself was still in 1751, and remained there for a long time.”²

That fascination with time and our movements through it, forward in hope and turning back in memory, characterized his poetry, which he came to rather late in life. In “The Good Town,” a poem that describes a town where no one had to lock their doors, Muir reveals how drastically it changed after two wars.

The soldiers came back from the First World War, maimed and ragged, to find the countryside divided up, the roads crooked, the light falling strangely. But after the second war the houses that sprang up from the rubble looked like prisons, families and friends were scattered, and all that was good and kind was thrown away. “How could our town grow wicked in a moment?” he laments.

His answer is that in the past the townspeople were swayed to follow good leaders; now “the bad are up . . . And we, poor ordinary neutral stuff/Not good nor bad, must ape them as we can/In sullen rage or vile obsequiousness.” He closes with the epigram quoted above, and adds, “Our peace betrayed us; we betrayed our peace/Look at it well. This was the good town once.”³

The disappointment and regret evident in his tone might be dismissed as simple nostalgia for a past that can only stand in the way of progress, except that it stands as a warning just as relevant today as he thought it to be in the early Fifties: how to fight evil without becoming evil?

In the good town, people went about their lives without much thought given to how their town might devolve into fear and suspicion. In the absence of threat, families took up their responsibilities and cared for others when needed. Vigilance for such freedoms was not pressing because everyone followed, more or less, the example of conscientious people.

But therein lay the weakness, Muir seems to say. Most of us simply follow those who lead, happy in the confidence that they will solve—or at least deflect—problems which we would have to face without them. But when the bonds of community evaporate and the corrupt and cunning thrust themselves into power, we must suddenly “ape them as we can,” either in “sullen rage or vile obsequiousness.”

Muir’s warning takes us to task for our naiveté, while mourning the loss of good will that made life peaceful and harmonious.

***

Recently, an incident was reported in national news in which a couple who wanted to rent a facility for their marriage ceremony and reception were denied on the grounds that the prospective groom was black, and his fiancée was white. The owner explained that the Bible did not condone mixed-race marriages and thus she would not rent the facility to the couple. The groom’s sister asked for clarification, but the woman refused to elaborate. It was simply part of her Christian belief.

The video of the exchange between them, while civil and restrained, went viral. In the aftermath of a wave of outrage, the woman and her husband issued an apology. Having been raised in Mississippi, it was her belief, she maintained, that such marriages were condemned by the Bible. However, her pastor had helped her to understand, she said, that the Bible does not condemn or prohibit bi-racial marriages. She and her husband were sincerely sorry.⁴

When I read this account, my immediate reaction was to condemn outright such obvious racism being justified by the Bible in the name of Christianity. It was yet another example of an agenda fueled by inbred prejudice, an assumption of white superiority, and a grievance reflex in which evangelicals believe their religious freedoms are in jeopardy. Added to that was the unthinking assumption that one’s dominant culture—in this case white Southern culture—was somehow ordained by God in the natural order of things, and that Christians who questioned or refused to honor that order were disobedient to God’s law as outlined in the Bible.

Then I began to reflect on my reaction. It was not that I regretted it or questioned my beliefs. They sprang into light spontaneously and I knew they were genuine. What I began to wonder about was if my reaction was a mere accident of geography.

If I had been raised in that woman’s culture in the South, growing up with legalized and socially acceptable discrimination and racism, would I have questioned those embedded assumptions? She looked like somebody’s grandmother, the kind who bakes cookies and keeps an immaculate house—hardly the face of evil. Nevertheless, I felt a surge of anger and impatience. In order to suffer from cognitive dissonance, you need to be engaged in cognition. Would I have felt that dissonance, now so evident, had I grown up in the Sixties in Mississippi?

Where I did grow up—in the foothills above the Napa Valley in Northern California—my private Christian college was only fully integrated in the early Seventies, when a group of African American graduates from a Christian academy in Oakland came to campus. It wasn’t that there was an official policy barring them, it was rather that they did not feel welcomed or respected.

With numbers comes strength; one of those young men ran for Student Association president in his sophomore year and won. Gradually, attitudes began to change, and friendships developed. But if those African American teenagers hadn’t questioned the status quo, those embedded assumptions, how long might it have taken for understanding and acceptance to flourish?

We Christians are too easily satisfied with our cultural assumptions. We are living in a country founded upon some of the highest ideals in human history. But the tragic fact is that those ideals, in order to be fully realized, were made possible by our original sin of systemic racism. Freedom, prosperity, and the pursuit of happiness—all of them were premised on the foundation stones of slavery, prejudice, and discrimination. We are enmeshed in this historical legacy.

“The unbelief of believers,” wrote Thomas Merton in 1968, “is amply sufficient to make God [appear] repugnant and incredible.”⁵ In words startlingly current, he writes, “A ‘Christian nationalist’ is one whose Christianity takes second place, and serves to justify a patriotism in whose eyes the nation can do no wrong . . . The pastors themselves tend to look to the state as a font of divine decisions in the practical order. All dissent in the civil sphere thereby automatically becomes a religious betrayal and a spiritual apostasy.”⁶

“Rust never sleeps,” sang Neil Young, and we may be sure prejudice and racism never do either. Christians are no strangers to it—it was there from the beginning and it nearly tore the nascent Jewish Christian community apart. It took a strange and disturbing vision for Peter to put behind him centuries of ceremonial religious exclusivism toward all those outside his heritage. Peter, the disciple most likely to get things right about Jesus, was also the one who could show spectacular obtuseness when stretched beyond his norms. Yet, it is Peter, together with John, who responds later to authorities with the words, “Is it right in God’s eyes for us to obey you rather than God? Judge for yourselves. We cannot possibly give up speaking of things we have seen and heard (Acts 4:19,20).”

And what had he seen? Jesus constantly challenging the cultural norms against women, against the poor, against the weak and dispossessed, against the established means for grasping and preserving power. What had he heard? Jesus, setting his face toward Jerusalem and his death, turning to the disciples on the road to say, “What does a man gain by winning the whole world at the cost of his true self? What can he give to buy that self back? (Mk 8:36,37).”

“What matters,” suggests Merton, “is not simply to set conformity over against dissent, to call the one evil and the other good, and be satisfied with that.” In a way that requires patience and humility, it is not enough for the dissenter to accuse and condemn, but “after showing the need for spiritual awakening and constructive analysis, to break open the way to dialogue and keep it open.”⁷

Edwin Muir was right to be dismayed that good people can become crooked while fighting against crookedness. But he was off the mark to assume that neither the “good” nor the “evil” can change.

All of us fall short of the glory God sees in us, but none of us is beyond redemption.

Muir, Edwin. “The Good Town” in Collected Poems 1921-1951. London: Faber and Faber, 1952, p. 161. ↩
Quoted in “Edwin Muir,” The Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/edwin-muir ↩
Muir, “The Good Town,” 161. ↩
https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/9/3/20847943/mississippi-event-hall-interracial-couple-wedding-religious-exemption ↩
Merton, Thomas. “Violence and the Death of God,” in Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968, p. 197. ↩
Merton, Thomas. “The Unbelief of Believers,” in Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968, p. 203. ↩
Merton, Thomas. “The Unbelief of Believers,” in Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968, p. 204. ↩

The Magnificent ‘If’

”I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.” — Thomas Merton

Among the benefits that today’s smartphones have brought to us is the GPS. It’s true that it is a mixed blessing: my location can be known as I can know the location of others. The idea that I can pinpoint my own stance under the heavens, relative to the world around me, is both intriguing and slightly spooky. Do I know where I am? Other people do.

But for someone with SSD—Suspected Spatial Dyslexia (my diagnosis)—GPS has been a godsend. It means that despite my ability to get myself completely turned around on a simple foray into unknown territory, I now can be reasonably assured of arriving at my destination. Best of all, if I make a wrong turn, the eye in the sky will find an alternate route, smoothly adapting to my errant ways.

I love maps. I have spent hours poring over world atlases, fold-out maps of the United Kingdom, maps of Europe, the South Pacific, Asia—tracing out mountain ranges, sounding out city names, and learning the shapes and boundaries of countries. But for me, driving while mapping my route is like watching a butterfly in a field of flowers—there’s a lot of motion, but little in the way of consistent direction. Having a plummy British female voice guiding my every turn is so much better.

When it comes to plotting out my life course I haven’t shown much navigational skill either. I’ve never had the ability to plan, much less to predict, where I’ll be in five years, something apparently not covered by the Americans with Disability Act. The question, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” assumes a linear progression farther along and higher up. Asked during a job interview, it hints at ambition, not necessarily spiritual growth and a deeper understanding of life’s vicissitudes.

I had friends who were pre-med—for them, the future was laid out with admirable clarity. They knew where they would be and what they would be doing for the next ten years. After that, their lives would unfold with the assurance of upward mobility and the rewards of discipline. Me? Not so much.

In college, I had a vague notion that my future would be the product of what I carried in two bags—ability and affinity. If I was lucky, these two would combine at a point where I could do something I liked and was fairly good at. I did not want to be in the position of friends whose parents demanded they take on a certain profession because it was lucrative. They may have been good at a number of things, but none of them were what they wanted to do or be the rest of their lives. And if their hearts weren’t in what they had to do every day, it was a job, not a vocation.

Having choices is a precious gift, one that we probably don’t appreciate enough when we’re young. To know that one has options about the most important aspects of life is something we should never take for granted, especially when it’s most likely the case that a majority of people in the world have little say over their careers, where they live (or wish to leave), who they marry and how they live their lives.

On the other hand, in more trivial matters, we have too many choices: do we really need six flavors of Ritz crackers or eight kinds of Doritos? Walgreens sells three hundred and fifty-six cold remedies in their stores and another one hundred and eighteen online. By the time I’ve figured out the exact remedy for my bespoke cold, I’ll be over it.

When I was advising college students on a major course of study, there were always those few who were stymied by having to choose among the disciplines. Choosing one felt to them like closing the door to all others, especially those for which a student felt a burning curiosity. We insist that young people have a full life-plan worked out by the time they graduate from high-school, when most of them haven’t yet distinguished their affinities from their aptitudes.

Early in my teaching career I fancied that I could read a student’s abilities well enough to steer them toward a specific profession. This was more a mark of my pride than it was a real service to a student. In one particular case, I advised a young woman not to choose a career in public relations because I thought her too impulsive, too distracted, to work well in a field that demands constant attention, not only to details, but to the global picture. She took it as a challenge, graduated in the major, and recently celebrated more than a decade of successful work in project management, a field where a grasp of detail, process, and goal is essential.

Where does God fit into all this? Michael Mayne, once the Dean of Westminster Abbey, wrote in his last book, The Enduring Melody, — a journal he kept of his harrowing journey through the ‘country of cancer’—“Do I believe that God was guiding me in this direction rather than that at the most important forks in my path? Yes and no.” He goes on to say no to that which would compromise his freedom, as if there was always only one plausible outcome for his life. But ‘Yes’ to his prayers for guidance which resulted in “a deepened understanding of myself and my motives, and of where I might best fit and have something useful to share.”¹

In high school I cherished the notion of becoming a marine biologist, not because I had the slightest aptitude for it, but because I loved the beaches and tide pools of Northern California and I thought the character and life of Doc in John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row was worth emulating. I lasted two days in Chemistry I before opting out, shuddering at the long slog through sciences I could admire from afar, but could barely comprehend. Because writing came easily to me and because I loved it, I thought I might be a newspaper journalist. So, I took a double major in Journalism and Religion. Then I discovered I had no appetite to be shouting questions at public figures and I wrote too slowly to meet daily deadlines. Well, okay then. How about religion? I had already tried being a youth pastor, and while I was passable at it, I knew I would inevitably hit the wall over evangelism methods and bowing to authority.

What then? How many ‘what-if’ scenarios could I imagine? I remember climbing an apple tree and writing up a list of pros and cons about going to graduate school in philosophy of religion and becoming a college teacher. I wrote in two columns everything I could think of that would recommend for and against this. And while I wasn’t comfortable with prayer, I laid it all out to God as best I could, what I thought I could do and what I was sure I couldn’t do. Then I showed the list to friends and listened to what they had to say. After that, I went back to the apple tree, and from its branches I put the proposal to God that I was going ahead with plans for graduate school. I felt that I wanted to be a teacher and that I had the qualities for it. I asked God to slam the doors if I wasn’t meant to do this, on the theory that it would take something obvious to pull me up short.

I applied to five universities, got rejected by three, and chose one. My teaching career was a long and winding road, with numerous detours, reversals, chasms and heights. I can’t imagine having done anything else quite so satisfying and challenging.

What if I had decided to take that editorial position right out of college? What if I had followed through on my interest to study Church History at Aberdeen University in Scotland? What if I had turned down the offer to teach at Trinity? Perhaps most important, what if I had skipped the committee meeting at which I met my wife, Joy?

“We all decline so many alternative lives,” comments Mayne, “yet if we’re lucky we end up feeling that the life that has been ours had to be the way it was, and we wouldn’t wish it otherwise.”²

I still love maps and I am blessed to drive with a GPS. In my life, as I look back on it, I imagine God nudging me patiently, adapting on the fly as I swerve or enter a blind alley, graciously offering me another way home, always and ever leading me on to that which lies at the end of this journey.

Mayne, Michael. The Enduring Melody. London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 2006, p. 137. ↩
Mayne, 137. ↩

Lear to Luton

”So we’ll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh . . .

And take upon’s the mystery of things,

As if we were God’s spies . . .” — Shakespeare, King Lear¹

I am trying to take account of my life, of how I have spent my time, what I have given and received, what I have seen and not understood, what I have understood that has changed my steps. I have often had the prescience—felt more than reasoned—of a vast world surrounding us under a dome of patient silence. That world waits for us with the dignity of ancient headlands fronting the sea, less in confrontation than in invitation. At the “thin places” between our worlds one can step through, even if only for a moment, into a bracing freshness and light much to be desired.

***

I was driving out to church through a pack of police cars, emergency vehicles, cordoned-off areas, and press vans near the entrance to our neighborhood. When I got back, the story was all over our local news. A young man, a recent high school graduate, had been murdered. Details were sketchy, but he had been shot in the early morning hours outside his home. He was a week away from beginning university, the eldest of four boys.

The next morning, when I was returning from a walk in the woods, I met the woman—every neighborhood has one—who knows everyone and everything that happens around our streets. Every day she walks the sidewalks and lanes of our court, constantly on the phone, puffing her cigarettes. She had spent most of the previous day with the family, doing what she could to help ease their pain as relatives arrived from North Carolina and other parts.

“You heard what happened?” she asked hoarsely. I nodded. She told me of the impromptu vigil that had been held the night before, of the media asking everyone for their comments. “Don’t go visit them,” she warned. “They’re in a lot of pain.”

Somewhere, Ellen White urges us to “heed the promptings of the Holy Spirit,” or less didactically, to join the impulse to do something good. In spite of my neighbor’s well-intentioned argument, I was being prompted. The incessant shootings—not only the frequent massacres in public spaces in America, but the steady ratcheting-up of violence toward young African American men—ticked away in my head. I could picture the scene: three shots in the night, the mother recovering from back surgery, but oblivious to her pain as she flings herself down the stairs to where her son lies bleeding out. However belated, however ineffectual, perhaps I could share in that family’s suffering and in some way push back against this madness.

But then my impulse tripped over all the socio-cultural-political furniture strewn about in the living room of my generation. What presumption to suppose that an older white man could understand the accumulated grief of an African American family. What hubris to intrude upon someone’s home. What foolishness to imagine that anything I could say would bring them solace. The paralysis of second-guessing one’s motives. “I assume,” observes Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, “that when an individual appears before others he will have many motives for trying to control the impression they receive of the situation.”² I could only wonder what mine were. Was it inevitable that I had any motive other than “bearing another’s burdens?”

Then I stepped through the thin place and saw things more clearly. When the particulars complicate unnecessarily, go with the universals. The universals, as I saw them, were father to father, man to man, human to human. At some level of working faith, we have to trust that the Spirit will guide our steps in humility and give us the words.

As I approached the townhouse, a boy and a young man were on the front steps. I was led inside, and the father was called to come down. We shook hands. “I am so sorry,” I said. He looked up then and his eyes moistened. He waved his hand and shook his head. “He’d come all this way, no trouble with the police, no drugs, a good boy. Going to university next week. His whole life before him.” He choked up then, as I did, and he turned toward me, tears glistening on his cheeks, and we wept on each other’s shoulders. I asked him if he had a photo of his boy. I saw a young man, bright with promise, forever held in the amber of his high school senior portrait. He thanked me for coming; I walked out into the heat and humidity of the day and exhaled.

That afternoon my wife and I went to see Blinded by the Light, a gem of an indie movie about a young British-Pakistani teenager growing up in Luton, an industrial city just north of London. Amidst the strains of being a child born in England to immigrant parents, Javed faces racial harassment from local skinheads, and misunderstanding and contempt for being a Muslim. In Margaret Thatcher’s era, with millions being laid off, coal mines closing, and the National Front on the rise, it is an anxious and discomfiting time. When his father loses his job at a factory, the burden of paying the bills falls on Javed’s mother, a seamstress. With his older sister preparing for her marriage and his father making the rounds of hiring centers with no luck, the young man is desperate to get out of Luton (and as someone who once trudged across that city in the dead of night after crossing the Channel, I can sympathize) to pursue his dreams of being a writer.

At his sixth-form college he is befriended by Roop, also the son of immigrants—and a passionate fan of Bruce Springsteen. He lends Javed two cassettes of Springsteen’s music. “Listen to them, guard them with your life,” he commands. “They’re by the Boss.” “What boss?” Javed asks, confused. “The Boss of us all,” says Roop.

And he does listen, at first with curiosity and then avidly, as Springsteen’s songs of factory workers, broken dreams, and a will to rise above it all through grit and hope surge through him. “It’s like he was speaking right to me,” Javed enthuses to Roop, who nods knowingly. They are secular psalms that reach him in the pit of his despair and raise him up. His English literature teacher asks to read his poems and journals, and through her encouragement and prodding he begins to blossom as a writer. His dream is to enter the creative writing program at Manchester University.

In one of the best scenes in the film his father asks, “Do you know why I want you to study hard?” “Umm,” responds Javed, “so I can broaden my mind, learn about the world, and be inspired to make a difference?” “No,” his father snaps. “It is to get a good job and make money.”

Springsteen’s father could not understand his son’s driving ambition to make music; Javed’s father cannot understand why his son wants to write. When Javed gets an unpaid internship at a local newspaper his father is both furious and bewildered. “Why would you work and not get paid?” he shouts. “It’s experience, Dad. It’s what I want to do.” Father and son face each other across their own desperation, the father in shame because he cannot provide for his family, the son because he wants so much to know who he is and what he can do.

“Mister I ain’t a boy, no I’m a man/And I believe in the promised land,” is the mantra that impels him onward.

“For the ones who had a notion

A notion deep inside

That it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive . . .”³

He wins a scholarship in a writing contest that brings him to Monmouth College for a conference, just a few miles from Asbury Park, New Jersey, where Springsteen grew up. When he and Roop return home, after a delirious tour of The Boss’s hometown sites, Javed stands up at an awards ceremony at his college to read from his winning essay. But a few paragraphs in he falters, seeing his parents and his sister coming in to stand in the back of the hall. Extemporaneously, he speaks from the heart about what he’d learned from The Boss, what he was growing to be, and how much he wanted to make a bridge between the world of his father and his own rising world.

“I believe in the love that you gave me

I believe in the hope that can save me

I believe in the faith

And I pray that some day it may raise me

Above these badlands”⁴

***

At the end of that day I thought about fathers and sons, about dreams deferred and hopes placed in others. I thought about our stumbling attempts to walk a straight and true path, and the burdens we place on each other from fear. I thought about Life and Art, and how they can be distinguished, but not separated. Like Javed, Springsteen’s music has brought me light and hope in dark times. It is one of the many trails to the Spirit that I have found.

And I thought of the grief of my neighbors and prayed that it could be borne until such time as they could take a breath without pain in remembering the joys of a young man who lived as if to say, “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

Shakespeare, King Lear, Act V, Sc III. ↩
Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday, 1959, p. 15. ↩
Bruce Springsteen. “Badlands.” Downtown Music Publishing. ↩
Bruce Springsteen. “Badlands.” Downtown Music Publishing. ↩

The Ignored Familiar

“This or that particular, in nature or in a person, which will probably be the ignored familiar, is not to be forgotten or overlooked; it is to be noticed, and maybe (in the world of a great artist) made to glow with light.” — Michael Mayne¹

In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard opens up the agony and (occasional) ecstasy of writing. “This writing that you do,” she says pitilessly, “that so thrills you, that so rocks and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else.”² The reader comes in from the noise of the street of life, and picks up your book, she says. He or she can’t hear a thing. “It will take half an hour to pick up the writing’s modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.” Learn a trade, she cautions the young writer. Something to support your consuming addiction of laying down a line of words and seeing where it leads.

Perhaps less tongue-in-cheek, but no less heartfelt is George Orwell’s famous admission that “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”³

We who love books can only be grateful that these tortured souls persevered. From their travail is birthed for us flights of imagination, ladders to the sky, that line of words laid down which carves a path through the wilderness. Seamus Heaney, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature (1995), found that “The achievement of a poem, after all, is an experience of release . . . A plane is —fleetingly—established where the poet is intensified in his being and freed from his predicaments.”⁴

At the end of a long journey of false starts, glimmers of light that dance away and fade, rockslides that block the path and countless other metaphors, there is a moment in the bracing sharpness of clean, mountain air. From the summit, one takes in the view with joy and gratitude. However momentary, that is reward enough. Down below, in the shadows of one’s achievement, is the valley which one must traverse on the way to the next peak.

The popular stereotype about writers, that they wait for inspiration, is only half right, but it’s the half that students often claim in the backwash of a late paper. Writers do wait on inspiration, but it’s a waiting that is active. “Arse in the chair,” says Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin, and other bestselling novels. That’s the only way the words will show up, and if no one is home or that writer is mesmerized by YouTube, the moment may pass with nothing to show for it. “You lay out a line of words,” says Annie Dillard, the most basic and necessary move that can be made.

“An intellectual must always be ready to think, that is, to take in a part of the truth conveyed to him by the universe,” wrote the Dominican priest, A. G. Sertillanges, in 1921. “The Spirit passes and returns not. Happy the man who holds himself ready not to miss, nay rather to bring about and to utilize, the miraculous encounter! Every intellectual work begins by a moment of ecstasy . . .”⁵

Sertillanges wrote his book, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods, for anybody who wanted to think—and capture those thoughts—in a more disciplined and systematic way. His book, while compact and serious, is not an “elitist” work; that is to say, it does not recognize the great divide artificially constructed by those in American culture who regard “book learning” with suspicion. For him, thinking and studying, writing and art, are avenues of the Spirit. “Listening to oneself is a formula that amounts to the same thing as listening to god. It is in the creative Thought that our true being lies, our self in its authentic shape.”⁶ This takes time. The most mediocre mind, he says, can come up with a brilliant idea: the difficulty is cutting that into a jewel and placing it in a setting that illuminates its brilliance.

Colum McCann’s Letters to a Young Writer, strikes me not only as practical and wise words for writers, but as a witty, philosophical, and tender parallel to the work of faith. Yes—I put those two words, “work” and “faith,” together. More on that later. “Do not allow your heart to harden,” McCann encourages us. “Enjoy difficulty. Embrace mystery. Find the universal in the local . . . Transcend the personal. Have trust in the staying power of what is good.”⁷

***

Annie Dillard’s first non-fiction book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), garnered her the Pulitzer Prize at the young age of twenty-nine. It chronicled a year that she spent in the company of Tinker Creek, a tributary of the Roanoke River in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. It is a work of seeing—of regarding, with attention and patience—the life beneath the leaves and the waters. Dillard thinks of it as a “work of theology.”

She notices that a flock of migrating red-winged blackbirds are noisily feeding in an Osage orange tree down by the creek. She approaches carefully—and a hundred birds fly away. She walks closer and another hundred lift off and vanish into the sky. “Finally I walked directly to the trunk of the tree and a final hundred, the real die-hards, appeared, spread, and vanished. How could so many hide in the tree without my seeing them? . . . I wandered downstream to force them to play their hand, but they’d crossed the creek and scattered. One show to a customer . . . It’s all a matter of keeping my eyes open.”⁸

How much is there, just beyond our present gaze, close enough to fingertips, welling into consciousness, if only we are aware! I am beginning to understand how a God who is near to us but not visible, transcendent but accessible through the world and the Word, can be apprehended. Michael Mayne, one of the handful of great poet-priests in the Anglican tradition, writes of the cantus firmus, the deep bass line that anchored medieval plainsong, as being akin to that which we discover is authentically ours and authentically us. He sees it as comprised of three strands: human love and friendship, experience of beauty and order found in art, literature, music, and nature, and “the third strand, undergirding the whole, has to do with those ultimate existential questions that come under the general heading of ‘faith.’”⁹

It is the business of writers, artists, musicians, to notice and to pay attention. That which counts as inspiration—the drawing in of breath—comes as the shock of the new emerges from the “ignored familiar,” to use Mayne’s phrase. The familiar story in the Gospels, read a thousand times until its edge is dulled, comes up fresh and new through the eyes and thoughts of the writer, the preacher, the artist, each of them alive to story as the touchstone for unexpected treasure.

To be sure, this experience is not always a common one. Sometimes we go through the motions, looking but not seeing, reading but not comprehending. This is where the Spirit enlivens us as we are receptive—and that, I think, is key—when we look for the unseen and expect the unexpected. Like a writer, this waiting is not passive, but an active receptive spirit tuned to the faintest vibrations that may come to us. Our faith is our constant experience of seeking and finding, rousing ourselves to “lay out a line of words” in the hope and trust that it will lead us to our story.

Amidst the din of our culture and times, this seeking takes effort. It may seem that the signs around us point in any direction but toward the Spirit. We must be alert; there will be no thunder and lightning, no shaking of the mountaintop. The Welsh poet-priest, R. S. Thomas, muses about the Spirit’s movements, so essential in our understanding as people of faith and as thinkers and writers:

“As I had always known

he would come, unannounced,

remarkable merely for the absence

of clamour. So truth must appear

to the thinker; so, at a stage

of the experiment, the answer

must quietly emerge.”¹⁰

All our seeings—the remembered, the present, the yet-to-be-seen—are blazing portals to the holy. Leaping through, we may glimpse a burning bush, hear “a still, small voice,” squint against the light cast into the desert by a stairway to heaven, and—catapulted forward by centuries—peer through an open door to a room where a man asks for a piece of fish from his dumbstruck friends. All these stories transcribe the notes of the cantus firmus by which we live and sing.

Mayne, Michael. This Sunrise of Wonder. American edition. Cleveland, TN: Parson’s Porch Books, 2012. pp. 175-176. ↩
Dillard, Annie. The Writing Life. New York: Harper and Row, 1989, p. 17 ↩
Orwell, George. Why I Write. Great Ideas ed. New York: Penguin, 1984, p. 10 ↩
Heaney, Seamus. The Government of the Tongue. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989. p. xxii. ↩
Sertillanges, A. G. The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. Translated from the French by Mary Ryan. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1987, p. xix. ↩
Sertillanges, p. xx. ↩
McCann, Colum. Letters to a Young Writer: Some Practical and Philosophical Advice. New York: Random House, 2017, p. 4. ↩
Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York: Bantam Books, 1974, pp. 17, 18. ↩
Mayne, Michael. The Enduring Melody. London: Dartman, Longman, and Todd, 2006, pp. 6, 7. ↩
Thomas, R. S. “Suddenly,” in Collected Poems 1945-1990. London: Orion House, 1993, p. 283. ↩

Beauty and Truth in a Time of Plague

”I recover my tenderness by long looking.” — Theodore Roethke¹

Sometimes it feels like we are in our plague years. Not a plague such as millions suffered in the Black Death or the Spanish Flu, or the thousands with Ebola, but a plague of despair and hopelessness. Having said that, I know that for many people this is a time of ascendancy—not plague—when beliefs they fervently hold are coming true and people in power are making that happen. It is a time of vindication.

Still, if we see through the rising and falling of hopes to the generalized need for hope as such, there is a commonality of restlessness and anger that infects us all. We are creatures who have adapted to the uneven surfaces upon which we walk to such an extent that even when we come upon a level plain, we walk as though we were at sea.

We demand our place, we want our words to strike home—the metaphor, taken literally, is violent in its imagery—we confront, we stand with, we never retreat nor give an inch. In short, we are at war with others and the Other.

It should be evident that things we care deeply about are worth defending. In fact, one sign of a society whose members no longer regard it as defensible is the callous reply, “Whatever,” to matters of importance. But we are crippled by a lack of moral imagination for making a defense that itself does not complicate the problem. In Yeat’s phrase, “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

***

Poet Seamus Heaney tells a story from 1972 in Belfast: he and a musician friend were on their way to a recording studio when a series of bombs ripped through the city. Within minutes of them arriving at the studio the air was full of sirens as ambulances rushed to the wounded and the dead. Heaney recalls that they looked at one another in unspoken anguish, his friend packed up his guitar and they left. It seemed indulgent to be doing something so enjoyable. What he called Art and Life—or again—Song and Suffering, had seemingly clashed. And what he and his friend, David Hammond, were feeling at that moment was that “song constituted a betrayal of suffering.” ²

Poets and writers, said Kurt Vonnegut, are our early warning system, the canaries in the coal mine—they are the first to be affected by the deadly fumes of a culture in extremis, and their warnings must not be overlooked. Examples abound throughout the ages, but one that still echoes for me on the fiftieth anniversary of Woodstock, is Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a howl of feedback with a melody line that staggers, backtracks, and spirals, at once raging and raw and yet somehow wistful in the way the notes hang, looking for a safe place to land. In the midst of a tragic war, in a society tearing apart from the disparities between its promise and its peril, Hendrix’s interpretation was a cross-section of a felled tree, revealing the rot at the core.

From the opposite angle comes the sigh of the oppressed, the longing of the exile for familiar hills, and the mockery of captors who demand a tune from back home for their entertainment.

By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down and there
we wept when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our harps.
For there our captors
asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth,
saying,
‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’
How could we sing the Lord’s song
in a foreign land?³

Can suffering be healed by beauty? Does it dishonor the gravity of the situation to try?

***

Online discourse in these times falls along predictable lines. Someone posts a provocative article or viewpoint on, let’s say, an anguished response to the mass shooting(s) of the week. Common sense cries out for a ban on assault weapons: the various attack ships uncloak themselves and swarm into view overhead as their troops beam down. “It can’t be done,” “It’s video games,” “Guns don’t kill people . . .”, “Don’t take away my guns,” “It’s a mental health problem,” “Godless people are to blame,” “It’s the Democrats’/Republicans’ fault.”

Solutions are proposed and derided, facts are claimed and scuttled, sweeping generalizations jolt aside private duels over verb tenses. In time, with the battlefield littered with bodies, the survivors limp away to their rendezvous points. Truth, bound and bloodied, is led away captive. Almost no one notices.

After all that, to claim, as Keats does, that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” almost sounds quaint and anachronistic. And yet, there is something in us that wants, above all, to believe that Beauty and Truth are within reach and can be brought into our lives, even in such toxic and arid times.

***

I return to Seamus Heaney who, as a native of Northern Ireland, grew up within the centuries-old sorrows of its history, and who lived through the sectarian “Troubles” that claimed so many innocent lives. The questions he raises about truth and beauty, about being a poet in a time of war, open a way to understand our times—and may also cast a light upon the path of faith through this world.

“In one sense,” he says, “the efficacy of poetry is nil—no lyric has ever stopped a tank.” But recalling how he and Hammond clammed up around the sirens, he wonders again, “Why should the joyful affirmation of music and poetry ever constitute an affront to life?”⁴

I am reminded of the experience of Sting, who had scheduled a concert near his home in Tuscany for the evening of September 11, 2001. When the news of 9/11 stunned the world, he almost cancelled, feeling that such a celebration would border on sacrilege in the aftermath of a tragedy of those proportions. But friends persuaded him to go ahead, assuring him that light and beauty in a dark time would be a kind of prayer for hope. One of his songs, “Fragile,” is forever linked to that time.

If blood will flow when flesh and steel are one

Drying in the color of the evening sun

Tomorrow’s rain will wash the stains away

But something in our minds will always stay

Perhaps this final act was meant

To clinch a lifetime’s argument

That nothing comes from violence and nothing ever could

For all those born beneath an angry star

Lest we forget how fragile we are

On and on the rain will fall

Like tears from a star

On and on the rain will say

How fragile we are

How fragile we are⁵

Heaney’s essay brings forward the experience and the poetry of Wilfred Owen, an English poet and soldier who wrote from the trenches of World War I, and who was killed shortly before the end of the war. Owen was a leader and a soldier, but he was vehemently against the carnage of a war that took the flower of European civilization. His poems are bitter at times, usually melancholy, always directed at deflating the false glory of dying for one’s country. He sought to awaken conscience. “True poets must be truthful,” he wrote. “All a poet can do today is warn.” Art seeking to change Life.

Heaney also points to Mandelstam, a Russian poet of renown, who would not write propagandistic drivel for Stalin’s regime. Mandelstam saw poetry as rising up within the poet like a flood or growing from within like a crystal. He could no more stop writing than he could stop breathing and still live. He went to his death with the view that the creative impulse is its own reason for existing. “For him,” writes Heaney, “obedience to the poetic impulse was obedience to conscience; lyric action constituted radical witness.”⁶

So, Owen writes poetry which rebukes beauty in favor of truth; Mandelstam seems to hold Keats’ dictum that beauty is truth, and truth beauty. “He is a burning reminder,” says Heaney, “of the way in which not only the words ‘truth’ and ‘justice’ may be salvaged from the catastrophe of history, but the word ‘beauty’ also: a reminder that humanity is served by the purely poetic fidelity of the poet to all words in their pristine being, in ‘the steadfastness of their speech articulation.’”⁷ We need both: the hard edge of Truth and the softer light of Beauty. There are moments in our lives when we can only take in one or the other; in time, as it may be, we will be sustained by both.

Poetry gives the attentive reader a moment to take a breath and to give attention, fully and freely, to what is there on the page or in the ear. In a time of war and in a time of social tension, it reminds us that beauty and justice and truth are not at odds.

What is efficient may not always be what is effective. And if poetry, art, and music touch us it is in part because we have entrusted ourselves to their power to lift us and transform us, another kind of faith.

Like calls to like: when we respond to beauty seen and heard, it is a revelation that Beauty is still within us.

Quoted in Mayne, Michael. The Sunrise of Wonder. Cleveland, TN: Parson’s Porch Books, American Edition, 2008, p. 214. ↩
Heaney, Seamus. The Government of the Tongue: Selected Prose 1978-1987. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p. xii. ↩
Ps 137: 1-4 ↩
Heaney, xii. ↩
Sumner, Gordon. Fragile. Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, BMG Rights Management. ↩
Heaney, p. xix. ↩
Heaney, xx. ↩

The Getting of Wisdom

”These are but the fringes of his power and how faint the whisper that we hear of him! — Job 26.14 (Revised English Bible)

I had just delivered a lecture to my class in Twentieth-Century Theology and conducted a discussion on Jesus’ cry from the cross of his forsakenness by God. It was my view that Jesus felt his abandonment at the very core of his being, and that far from being an example of faithlessness on his part it reflected, to a depth we can hardly comprehend, the trust he had placed in God. I had quoted several major twentieth-century theologians and noted the origins of their thought as well as the conclusions they had come to. As the class ended, an enraged senior theology major approached me. “You are thinking man’s thoughts!” he hissed. “I stand on the Word of God alone, not on man’s thoughts.”

I was taken aback. Rather curtly, I replied, “But I am a man; how else am I supposed to think?” It was my first year teaching theology and I had made the fundamental error of new teachers in assuming that my students held the associations, assumptions, and inferences that I did. My conclusions were not theirs. In fact, as I thought about it later, their assumptions, grafted into their young trunks without their awareness, were those I had given up for other starting points.

But it was not my place to jerk them out of their seats, grab them by the neck, and force them to their knees in order to submit to my truth.

My truth, as I was coming to understand, was not even the Truth, but a version of a truth I was growing into and, actually, it was not a singular truth but plural truths that branched and leafed and grew in all directions away from each other, yet were tied to a stem that flourished from a root that was planted with a desire to know Jesus, and through him, to know God. How simple it all seemed to me!

***

“Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding.” —Proverbs 4:7

Reading through the book of Proverbs feels like threading beads of many sizes on a string. Clearly, it’s a compilation of sayings built up over centuries, practical wisdom tested every day and handed on through the generations. You can almost hear the “Uh-huh” after each one.

Some patterns begin to emerge. The character of the wise person is one who is thrifty, hardworking, honest and fair, does not despise the poor, but also does not fall into the indolence that leads to poverty. Such persons respect their parents, obey the king, worship God, and know their place in the social and divine order. That order can be shaken up when people get above themselves:

Under three things the earth trembles;
under four it cannot bear up;
a slave when he becomes king,
and a fool when glutted with food;
an unloved woman when she gets
a husband,
and a maid when she succeeds her mistress. (Proverbs 30: 21-23)

Wisdom is correlated with insight or understanding in a way that suggests mutual dependency. Both can be admired independently, but neither achieves its end without the other. Ground coffee smells wonderful and a French press is a handy gadget, but either one alone isn’t worth much.

Wisdom is often ascribed to the old—all that experience counting for something beyond mere knowledge. It isn’t chronologically assured though, since an old fool is no better than a young one—in fact, worse—because a young fool can change, but an old fool . . . not so much. The young are inevitably foolish, lacking both the ability to see around corners and the experience to anticipate what they can’t yet see. Hence the need for Proverbs. But we older fools must look elsewhere.

Perhaps wisdom in this form is overrated. Proverbs is most often cast as a father’s advice to his young and ambitious sons. Wisdom is following the commandments; the opposite of wisdom is following a loose woman home. Wisdom is avoiding drink, getting up early, and taking care of business. Check your anger, submit to discipline, don’t be insolent. Wisdom brings long life and satisfaction in its train, for the righteous will be prosperous while the sinners will die in poverty and ignorance. The quick takeaway on wisdom, according to the adults I knew as a child, could be reduced to the notion that it was smart to obey your elders.

There’s much to be said in favor of this; wisdom like this keeps the streets clean and peaceful, employment up, crime down, and business humming, families intact and social roles clear. But this is prudence, not wisdom of the sort that would cause one to sacrifice everything for the ‘pearl of great price.’ It is not the love of wisdom, personified throughout the ages as Sophia and revered as the Spirit of God.

***

Harvey Cox’s The Secular City (1965) intrigued me in high school. My curiosity was triggered by Time Magazine’s infamous April 8, 1966 “Is God Dead?” cover story. Cox predicted the waning of religion in America, something which has not happened. But of more interest to me was his discussion of the roots of secularity and its history as a social phenomenon and a counterfoil to religion. I found the distinction between the sacred and the secular puzzling—were they opposed? were they complementary? did we have to choose between them? could we keep them together? I was struggling to work out a way to be a Christian and to “be in the world.” The thing to avoid, as I saw it then, was being “of the world,” which, in my naïveté, meant my address should be Heaven—and not this world.

I wanted to be someone who could appreciate the beauties of the natural world, as well as the best of art, literature, music, science, and philosophy. Over against that was the imperative of fulfilling the mission to make all people Christ’s disciples—which, in practical terms, usually meant bringing other Christians into our fold. In my case, as a teacher of religion in a denominational college, there was an explicit expectation to keep the ones we had untainted by the world.

I hoped I could find a way to live through a humanized Christianity that unashamedly sought transcendence from within and through this deeply flawed but wonderful world. There was no simple solution to this, of course, “but the waking mind,” as Seamus Heaney says, “desires constantly some clarified allegiance, without complication or ambivalence.”¹

My search is that of anyone who seeks a meaningful life. I don’t want a theocracy nor could I live within a joyless ideology, political or otherwise, that seeps bitterness. Neither would I want a self-indulgent form of religious hedonism that placed my comfort at the center of the universe. To speak in the language of the parables, I wish to be salt and light to the world.

Even that has its traps if we delude ourselves into thinking we’re indispensable or that we’re somehow owed special favors because of our membership in the church or our self-designation as followers of Christ.

***

For many years I taught courses in ethics: bioethics, communication ethics, public relations ethics, journalism ethics, business ethics, theoretical ethics, Christian ethics. Ethics as a discipline has been sliced and diced into a thousand pieces, every field claiming a particular slant of the light all its own. This proliferation has been driven by a belated recognition that moral values are both good business and should be at the heart of human endeavor. Curriculae are developed that offer a feast of courses, each of them claiming their own vocabulary and featuring specialized case studies. These courses become islands of power for their departments and their instructors. Textbook publishers readily oblige, offering expensively updated books every year or so.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed teaching, especially when discussions with students got beyond their reflexive relativism (“Who’s to say what’s right or wrong? Who are you to judge?”) to an informed and thoughtful reflection on their own moral and spiritual discoveries. At those times, the burden of being expected to provide the answers to moral dilemmas eased and I could feel that the students and I were fellow travelers. I could give them historical ethical models of how humans have wrestled with these common dilemmas and then they could try them out for themselves. These were not formulas with a right answer; they were ways to think practically about complex human actions, using fairly simple methods.

***

At the heart of learning is the answering of a call, vocare in Latin, a vocation that lures us onward no matter what the discipline. The calling is from God, God as Subject, calling to us as subjects in a world of objects. There is freedom in the realization that in God’s eyes we are subjects worthy to be loved and to be listened to. “How things are between man and his idea of the Divinity determines everything in his life, the quality and connectedness of every feeling and thought, and the meaning of every action,” remarked the poet Ted Hughes.²

What we know of God is what he has chosen to make known to us. In spite of our limitations, we have spoken in myriad languages, during thousands of years, of the One who calls us to rejoice in our search for transcendence.

In the fullness of time (a felicitous phrase), God enfleshed his Word, that Word which had first been spoken and then reverberated down through the millennia. It appeared among us as Immanuel, God-become-human.

I am more and more convinced that Jesus in Word and Spirit is everything we can know of God. This learning is the deep quest of our lives. Out of the secular, the mundane, the earthly, we form the sacral and lift it to God. Music, art, literature, science, history—even religion—all of this, if we allow it, points beyond itself to a transcendence that calls to the deepest part of us. There is in each of us a homing device for the Garden, for a place and time that is open-ended, fully satisfying, never finished nor complete, ever new.

“How faint the whisper that we hear of him!” marvels Job of God. And yet the consciousness of God fills Job’s spirit and thoughts, first, in the argument he would take up with God and then in the knowledge that everything is, finally, within God’s embrace—the universe, the world, and us.

If I were to encounter that irate student today, with his claim to speak the mind of God, I would say, “Thank you for the vote of confidence! As one of my friends says, ‘I know more and more about less and less.’ But I know that someday I shall know as I am known. Perhaps that is the beginning of wisdom.”

Heaney, Seamus. The Government of the Tongue. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989, p. xii. ↩
Quoted in Michael Mayne, The Sunrise of Wonder. American edition. Cleveland, TN: Parson’s Porch Books, 2012, p. 212. ↩

Regarding the Distance Between Us

”The decisive thought in the message of the prophets is not the presence of God to man but rather the presence of man to God.”¹

I had a recurring dream as a child, one that continued well into my adulthood, showing up every few years, as if to say, “I’m still here. I’ll be here as long as you are.”

In my dream I see my father floating in the deepness of space, like an astronaut untethered, helmetless, a fragment of light. He is drifting away from me, his arm outstretched, like God straining to touch Adam’s fingertip. But we will never touch, and I know it and I know he knows it too. In my mind I call out to him, although I know he can’t hear it, because sound does not travel where there is no air. We remain like that, suspended, until he is a point of light among the thousands of diamond-hard points of light out there.

I can recall this image with perfect clarity even now, although it has been years since it came to me unbidden. Its meaning seems quite clear to me. No doubt there are depths still unplumbed, but I don’t need to plumb them. There is wonder enough that such a remarkable image could arise from my unconscious, almost as some kind of mythic totem.

My parents divorced when I was nine months old. Three years later, having lived with friends and family, I was taken in by my father’s parents and given a childhood that was unusual for my time and place, but wonderfully secure and loving. Like any child of divorce, there were moments of bewilderment and uncertainty, and tears were shed. If I were to write a memoir it would not be about a childhood of violence and trauma, like so many have suffered. But it might move in the regions of how our image of God is influenced in our earliest years.

When I read the Psalms, I read the cries of a child to a father, one who is all-powerful, yet who inexplicably does not appear when the flood waters rise, and death is near. The Psalmist rages at his enemies, cursing them and threatening a showdown between his father and theirs. Then there are the many texts in which the writer is comforted, exalted, swept up in love for God. He even rejoices in the Law, as sweet as honey to him, something to be meditated upon day and night. Reading those passages, I marvel at that surety and love. The Psalmist tells his Father—and us—everything, even that which for us might be too much information.

The Psalms are memoirs of corrosive violence, abandonment, family loyalty, and the ache of love. They make my staid and quiet upbringing seem like the placid hours of a cow.

***

In the last decade of my teaching career, I taught ethics and philosophy at Trinity Washington University. Most of my students were young women, many of them Hispanic. In their papers, essays, and presentations they would often mention their families, both here and in other countries. There were strong bonds there, so much so that if any family member was in a situation which put them in the emergency room, my students would leave class immediately, texting me with apologies later. There was simply no question: family came first.

Some of the young women found their fathers to be overbearing at times and felt themselves to be caught between cultures. They wished to honor their parents, but they also wanted to forge their own identities as confident young women. In our discussions in class, particularly those about the nature of God, I could sense that their views of God were colored by their relationships with their fathers and with their priests.

Is it inevitable that we transfer our feelings about our caretakers, particularly our male caretakers, onto our impressions of God? Are we like ducklings, imprinting our familial muscle-memory from whoever cares for us in our earliest years, our perception of who they are and how we are to be with them?

If that is true, then my grandfather was my first God-model. Kindly, patient, reticent in his Englishness, my grandfather held integrity without revealing his feelings. He had emigrated from Yorkshire as a young man, purchasing a ticket in steerage on the Titanic, but then selling it and sailing instead on another ship, one that picked up the survivors. He had landed in Nova Scotia, hitchhiked across Canada and ended up in a mining camp in Alberta, where his honesty and forthrightness meant that he held the men’s wages in trust when they went into town after paydays for drinking and women. Eventually, he found his way to a small Christian junior college on the Alberta prairie, where in time he met my grandmother, a farm girl from Vancouver Island. They became teachers, working for a total of one hundred years in Seventh-day Adventist colleges in Canada and America. My father, their only child, was raised as a campus kid in Alberta at Canadian Union College and left home early, heading out to Toronto and eventually, the US.

I used to play a game as a child in which I imagined having been born to other people, perhaps in another time and place. Would I still be me? These were intriguing questions to ponder—questions of identity, personality, even epistemology. What could we really know about others and about ourselves? What was our lineage? Whom did we “take after?”

I could not see any resemblance between my grandparents and me. The only photograph I had of my mother showed a girl of nineteen, blonde, pretty, a Canadian teenager in the late Forties and early Fifties. I couldn’t see the boy I was in my mother either. Photos of my father holding me in his arms on one of the visits he made to me and my grandparents, showed a tall, lean man with deep-set eyes, high cheekbones, and hair combed like Elvis.

We would pick him up from Toronto International Airport, his long coat smelling of travel and cigarettes, and he would scoop me up in his arms, where I could survey my surroundings from a new vantage point. There are photos of my father smiling, looking up at me. I look bewildered. Then he would be gone again and after his departure my grandmother would tell me the story of his quick-wittedness in saving a child whose scarf was caught by an escalator, nearly choking her to death. God-like qualities of heroism to a four-year-old.

***

In time, my father remarried and settled in Chicago. Later, he worked for IBM when it was centered in New York and then took a transfer to San Jose, where he and his wife raised five wonderful children. I was living with my grandparents in Northern California, so he and the family would come up for visits.

I finished graduate school in Southern California and moved east to teach near Washington, DC. It was not his way to write or to call, so years went by with no words between us except for family Christmas cards. One day he left a message on my answering machine. He was consulting for Lockheed and would be in Philadelphia. He wanted to take the train down and spend some time together. I erased the message with a swiftness and coldness that was involuntary, almost instinctual. I was shocked at myself, but nevertheless, I didn’t respond. That’s when I knew there was much more under the surface that I was not facing.

Just before my fortieth birthday my father wrote me a letter, one of two I received from him in my life. He wanted to fly out from San Jose and tell me what had happened all those years ago, why he had made the decisions he did that had resulted in our separation. I picked him up from the airport and we talked until late. The next day he sat in my classes and watched me teach.

And I know a father
Who had a son
He longed to tell him all the reasons
For the things he’d done
He came a long way
Just to explain²

***

I have a memory of my father teaching me how to ride a bike. I am quivering with excitement. His hands are on my shoulders; he leans down next to me. I feel the warmth of his face next to mine. “Are you ready?” he asks. I nod. His hand is on my back then, and I am pedaling, slowly at first as my front tire wobbles. I hear his footsteps behind me as we gain speed. My legs are pumping now and the bike is cruising straight and true. I am exhilarated and I shout over my shoulder, “Okay, Dad, you can let go now!” I don’t hear an answer, so I throw a quick glance backwards and I see him half a block behind me, smiling, his hands on his hips and I am flying.

“My soul thirsts for God,

for the living God.” (Ps 42:2)

Are we to desire God? I’m not sure what that means, to desire God. Would it be God, there behind us, kindly seeing us to the door to the world, “Go on now, you’ll be fine. Trust me.” —and in that moment to know, with a pang, that we have never loved God more?

Heschel, Abraham Joshua. God in Search of Man. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1955, p. 412. ↩
Paul Simon, from Slip Slidin’ Away, 1975. ↩

A Fractured Gift to God

“The color of water is that of its container.” — Al-Junayd (14th c. Sufi)

Our ability to both experience and examine religion is the cause of both inspiration and disillusionment. Entering college in the early Seventies, I wavered between a major in English or a double major of Religion and Communication, with a minor in Sociology. I had a vague notion that communication studies and sociology would fit together well, and it wouldn’t hurt to know how people acted in groups. I have a wariness of crowds and crowd behavior, and I thought knowing more about it might give me some insights into religion and help me as a writer.

I knew I wasn’t made in the pastor mold, but I couldn’t shake religion. It fascinated, irritated, and inspired me—and still does—and I wanted to know why it was there and how it worked. My tradition regarded religion as something handed down to us and recommended by God—acting as our loving Father—rather in the way that implicit suggestions from your father are actually veiled commands. Even then, I had a half-formed view that religion ran the other way—from the downside up—that it was a human construct that appeared in all times and in all places. I wondered why.

The English Department chair, a personal friend, talked me out of majoring in English. “If you love books,” he said, “the process of dissecting them might not be for you.” In the event, I stayed with Religion and Communication, and kept my interest in sociology strictly amateur.

A complete neophyte, I started with Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, and then jumped to C. Wright Mills and Erving Goffman, with an ongoing trek through Gustave LeBon’s, The Crowd. But for the most part, my mentor in this has been Peter Berger, an Austrian-born American professor, one of the premier sociologists of our time, and a Protestant theologian. He spent a good share of his life (1929-2017) working over ideas in the sociology of religion that could be understood by laypeople in books such as A Far Glory, The Noise of Solemn Assemblies, A Rumor of Angels, The Heretical Imperative, and In Praise of Doubt.

His most famous work was The Social Construction of Reality, written with Thomas Luckmann, in which they examined how society builds up the layers of what it terms “reality.” “Society,” says Berger, “not only controls our movements, but shapes our identity, our thought and our emotions.”¹

Berger’s book, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, helped me understand how religion could be a human construct, while not excluding the possibility that this longing pointed to a transcendent being we call God. Or as Berger put it, “the projected meanings may have an ultimate status independent of man.”²

In graduate school I read Ludwig Feuerbach, who reduced theology to anthropology—God as a proportionate magnification of our own fathers. Berger casually offered up the idea that “man projects ultimate meanings into reality because that reality is, indeed, ultimately meaningful, and because his own being . . . Contains and intends these same ultimate meanings.”³ Anthropology, then, could be reconstructed as theology. Berger playfully called this “an intellectual man-bites-dog feat,” and begged off pursuing it further while wanting “to at least suggest the possibility to the theologian.”⁴

Every society, says Berger, is in the business of world-building. Religion is a part of that. We make our societies and, in turn, our societies mold us. This is not a contradiction, says Berger, it is rather how this dialectical process works. We find ourselves in an open world, one that must be fashioned by our own activity. It does not come to us as an Ikea kit, ready for assembly with one simple tool. We must establish a relationship to the world, and because we are finite and tend to slip on the one banana peel within range of our feet, that relationship has a built-in instability. We are always out of balance with ourselves and with our world, and so we constantly strive for the ultimate while living the penultimate. As Tillich warned, we often substitute the penultimate for the ultimate.

What we produce is culture, something that has to be continuously produced, repaired, maintained, and reproduced. Religion is a part of culture and that tremendously complicates life for any person of faith. As Berger notes rather drily, “suffice it to say that, while it is necessary that worlds be built, it is quite difficult to keep them going.”⁵

To put this spiritually, we yearn for ultimate meaning and that yearning picks up the faint signals of the memory of Jesus, God-become-human, transmitted to us by the Holy Spirit. As incomplete and as wobbly as we are, if we listen to our deeper self that self is straining to hear the music and the rhythm of God, despite the booms, tweets, whistles, pops, and thuds from the culture around us.

Somewhere, C. S. Lewis encourages us in the face of our frustrations with the forms and outcomes of our religions. Standing for the hymn during Evensong, he winces at the braying of an old woman next to him, but clings to the notion that God rejoices to hear such praise offered up.

Religion is the locus of some of the most heinous acts of human beings, but it also gives us humans at their most sublime. If we regard it not as something handed down to us by God and subsequently bent out of all recognition, but rather as our fractured, misshapen, but well-intentioned gift to a loving and bemused God, we’ll all be better off.

***

Berger led me, via his footnotes and bibliography, to Georg Simmel, who was born in Berlin in 1858 and spent most of his professional life there lecturing at the University of Berlin.

Although Simmel was a sociologist, his interests and influence spanned ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, metaphysics, and intellectual history—in addition to blazing new trails in sociology. He refused to stay rigidly within his discipline, however, and as a result was viciously excluded by his colleagues in philosophy and the social sciences at Berlin, although he counted as friends such luminaries as Max Weber, Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin, Martin Buber, Albert Schweitzer, and Ernst Troeltsch.

An expressed anti-Semitism and a bias against sociology kept Simmel from getting a regular faculty appointment for most of his career. It probably didn’t help that he was extraordinarily original in his thinking and did not quote his predecessors or contemporaries.⁶ He was less interested in creating a full-blown system of thought as he was in following his interests where they led him for the intellectual and practical cultivation of individuals.

Although his publishing career was haphazard, he wrote over two dozen books and more than two hundred articles. He was considered one of the most brilliant lecturers of his generation, and he constantly led his students to think for themselves, rather than to push forward a narrow set of his own thoughts at the expense of discussion. He was a multi-disciplinary adjunct teacher, who cared more for his students than for scholarly advancement, God bless him.

I keep dropping in on him from time to time because he always stimulates thought. And since I’m not constrained either to master his sprawling fields of interest nor to fit them all into a system, I feel free to take what interests me at the moment and come back later for more.

He describes the difference between the young person and the old in an essay entitled “The Adventurer.” Comparing an adventure to the danger and attraction of love, Simmel says the decisive point is that an adventure is “a form of experiencing. The content of the experience does not make the adventure (author’s emphasis).”⁷ He goes on to say that the color, ardor, and zest for life which we bring to love decisively transform a mere experience into an adventure.

Attitude and perspective make all the difference. “Such a principle of accentuation,” says Simmel, “is alien to old age. In general, only youth knows this predominance of the processes of life over its substance; whereas in old age, when the process begins to slow up and coagulate . . . it then proceeds . . . in a certain timeless manner, indifferent to the tempo and passion of its being experienced.”⁸

Lord preserve us from such rigor mortis.

There is the world “out there” and there are the worlds we carry inside us. Each shapes the other, each one influences us in ways we may feel more than understand. There are days when, as Christian Wiman says, I can wake up a believer and go to bed an atheist. On those days a certain distance toward religion may be an act of self-preservation. A sociological perspective which regards religion as a human construct offered up to God restores our equilibrium and good humor on those grey days when our adventure of faith slows, coagulates, and loses its passion.

Here, we draw inspiration so we may exhale religion as adventure, one that both entices and extends us, even as we are both immersed in it and observe it from a distance, a kind of wave and particle theory of divine and human interaction.

Berger, Peter. Invitation to Sociology. New York: Random House, 1963, p. 121. ↩
Berger, Peter. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Random House, 1967, p. 180. ↩
Berger, 180. ↩
Berger, 181. ↩
Berger, 6. ↩
Simmel, Georg. On Individuality and Social Forms. Edited and with an Introduction by Donald N. Levine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971, p. X. ↩
Simmel, Georg. “The Adventurer,” in On Individuality and Social Forms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971, p. 197. ↩
Simmel, 198. ↩

Aloneness and Chosenness

”Amazement is the thing. / Not love, but the astonishment of loving.” — Alastair Reid¹

Photo: Arif Wahid, Unsplash.com

With the possible exception of Judas Iscariot, there are few figures close to Jesus more tragic than his cousin, John. Before his birth his destiny was promised, during his life his focus on the Judgment was singular, and before his death his aloneness was excruciating.

Early on, he had been the very picture of a prophet of old, a mouthful of fire and an ax in hand to cut down these desiccated trees of Israel. But he’d been jolted with joy when baptizing Jesus. The man came up from the dirty stream aglow, his face lifted to the heavens, hearing something beyond the audible spectrum of the people around him.

John hadn’t seen him since that day at the Jordan River, but it was hard to miss his influence. The news of Jesus had spread through the region as his healings became known. Even after some of John’s disciples had gone with Jesus, John was not discouraged. He was a forerunner, an Elijah to the Messiah, the one who would prepare the way for the Way, the Truth, and the Life. While Jesus was out sowing the seeds of the kingdom up and down the country, from Galilee to Jerusalem, John was at the river baptizing. Judgment from one, forgiveness from the other. But that was then.

“Now when John heard in prison about the deeds of the Christ, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, ‘Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another (Matt. 11:2,3)?’”

It is impossible to hide the disappointment in that question. It is the cry of those who have thrown in their lot with every messianic figure throughout history. Are you the one? Are you really? The wheels of history turn slowly and where they stop can’t be known beforehand, only hoped for. It is a question that had buzzed in John’s head for weeks, but he’d never breathed it out loud until now.

He did have occasional visitors in Herod’s dank prison, disciples from the days when they were all encamped in the wilderness together. They brought him reports of Jesus, his signs and wonders, each one a down payment on the kingdom John insisted was coming.

In those long days he was like a man adrift at sea who hears the breakers on a hidden shore at night: what lay ahead was either death or deliverance.

We cannot know what was in his mind toward the end, but we might imagine. He was at once Everyman and yet unique, as we all are. What might we think and feel in that place? How would we face our death or our deliverance? Both are certain—either one will happen or the other—and the numinous anticipation of each arrives with every building wave. It’s the breaking wave that is uncertain: we are tossed without control. Beyond the breakers, on the shore, lies our fate, and we are released into it only after a churning downside-up dragging across the reefs of our doubts and fears.

***

In his aloneness, John considers: had he been wrong about Jesus? From his childhood (miraculous in itself as his mother never tired of reminding him) he had been taught that his kinsman would bring Yahweh to the world. All nations would stream to Jerusalem on highways leveled, widened, and straightened. All creation would sing the praises of the Creator. Righteousness would rule, peace would prevail, the lion and the lamb would lie down together.

But before all that would come Judgement, the cleansing by fire of a people to be presented as pure before the Lord. John would be Isaiah’s echo, “Prepare a way for the Lord; clear a straight path for him.” He kept it simple when he emerged from the hills and erupted into the wilderness. He had a message that cut like a sword across the generations, dividing one from another: “Repent; for the kingdom of Heaven is upon you!” And the people came, at first in ones and twos, and then by the hundreds, panting in the heat and clambering over the rocks down to the stream that gushed in the spring season and slowed and pooled in the summer. “What should we do?” they cried as they pressed together along the banks of the stream. “Repent of your sins!” he had roared.

When the Pharisees and Sadducees had shown up, gathering their robes about them, demanding baptism, he had called them on it. Their hypocrisy was like a blackness in front of his eyes; he could hardly bear the sight of them. “You vipers brood!” he had hissed. “Who warned you to escape from the coming retribution?” They were all words and theories, no action. They were trees without fruit, they were bastard children claiming a heritage they did not deserve. God could raise up children out of the stones in the river that would be more faithful to their Creator than these snakes and frogs. “I baptize with water, but there is one coming after me who will baptize with the Spirit and with fire.”

And then Jesus arrived at the Jordan from Galilee, asking to be baptized. John demurred, drawing back, but Jesus gently insisted. And so he had plunged him under and seen him rise, water cascading down his back, his hair wet and clinging to his shoulders. After the voice, he had turned toward the wilderness, not toward Jerusalem, and John had shuddered for knowing what lay ahead of him in that vast and cave-pocked landscape. He knew the whispers and voices that the wind carried, the weight of heat under the bronzed sky, and the cold solitude of the nights.

They were both chosen, both alone, even in the midst of crowds. After years alone and then years with others who, like him, agreed to a community of few words, the incessant chatter of the people was like the swarming of bees for John. Jesus seemed to welcome the crowds around him. They pressed up against him on every side, dancing in front of him like children skipping backwards. He smiled, touched them, looked in their eyes, tousled their hair. John, hearing of this from his disciples, could only shake his head in admiration.

***

So when John’s disciples come to Jesus with the question, “Are you the one?” Jesus does not answer at first. He bows his head; those closest to him see that his eyes are closed, and his mouth is set in a hard, straight line. He begins to speak, his voice a quaver at first but steadying as he raises his head.

“Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind recover their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are clean, the deaf hear, the dead are raised to life, the poor are hearing the good news . . .” He looks around at the circle of faces before him and his eyes blur with tears. All of the power he feels when he touches someone to heal them, all the assurance he receives that he is on the right path, all the pain he absorbs from those who are frightened, alone, hanging by a thread—all of that thickens his sight. There is a ringing in his ears, and he drops his head. He gasps and takes a step back; it is as if he feels a sword thrust in his side. He jerks upright, then, and cries, “And happy is the man who does not find me a stumbling-block.”

Silently, the messengers nod and turn to leave. Jesus looks after them for a long moment. He takes a step forward, as if he would call them back. Suddenly, he is angry. “When you came out to the wilderness looking for John, what did you expect to see?” he exclaims vehemently. “Silks and satins? Only people in palaces wear that!” He almost spits the words. “What then? A prophet? Yes, a prophet, but so much more.” Now he is pacing, his fists clenched. “I tell you this: never has a mother’s son been born who is greater than John, and yet even the least in the kingdom of Heaven is greater than he!”

***

There is more. Jesus rages at the indecisiveness of the people, at their shallow attitudes. What do you want? he cries. You’re like children who can’t make up their minds. We pipe, but you don’t dance. We mourn, but you won’t cry. John doesn’t eat or drink and you think he’s crazy. I come along eating and drinking, and you call me a glutton who hangs around with sinners and tax-collectors!

And most enigmatically, “Ever since the coming of John the Baptist the kingdom of Heaven has been subjected to violence and violent men are seizing it.”

Jesus is nothing if not a realist. He’s not seduced by our flattery nor discouraged by our ignorance. Neither will he explain everything he says, and if we are perplexed or discomfited by that, he does not expect it should prevent us from following him.

And what are we waiting for? Jesus proclaimed the kingdom to be within us and surrounding us. Evidence for this comes through acting on it in our own time and place. Is he the One or should we look for another? “God’s wisdom is proved right by its results (Matt. 11:19).” Each of us, alone and chosen, creates the kingdom together.

John, lying awake in the night, hears the hurrying footsteps toward his cell and stands to his feet. Though the violent are seizing the kingdom, he knows who is the One.

Reid, Alastair. “Growing, Flying, Happening. Quoted in Michael Mayne. This Sunrise of Wonder. Cleveland, TN: Parson’s Porch Books, 2012. ↩

Dante's Woods

Writing to see what I think . . .

Category: spirituality

The Suffering that Becomes Us

Good People Made Evil

The Magnificent ‘If’

Lear to Luton

The Ignored Familiar

Beauty and Truth in a Time of Plague

The Getting of Wisdom

Regarding the Distance Between Us

A Fractured Gift to God

Aloneness and Chosenness

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