Grafted In: Challenging Supersessionism, Knowing as an Outsider, and the Genius of Willie Jennings

I'm admitting right up front that I'm trying to say too much in this one blog post.

As a budding scholar, a seminarian in the early 1980s, I watched the firestorm began to tear down the edifice of the Southern Baptist structures in which my life had been formed.  A new breed of white male leader committed to fundamentalist patriarchy and American exceptionalism rose to prominence (in contrast to the old breed of white male leaders who had begun to open the door a crack to white female leaders).  My first years out of seminary were spent in the trenches of struggle.  I did not like the possible future I could see on the horizon of struggling against fundamentalist ideologies, powerful authoritarian bishopoids, and absolutist idiosyncratic scriptural interpretation masked as inerrancy.  By the time I had gotten established in my doctoral studies I began to see the path that was being laid for me:  I was on my way out of the churches which had reared me to be something different than they were now becoming.

In my college days, there had been occasional interactions with a kind of hypercalvinism that held itself up as far superior to us lowly, confused baptists, but I had always assumed they were a kind of oddball fringe movement.  Later, when I heard on occasion that a new Calvinism was taking hold in some intellectual circles of Southern Baptist life, I still doubted it could fly.  Who in this contemporary world would finally accept notions of double predestination, limited atonement, irresistible grace, etc?  Wasn't that a scholasticism that had seen its moment in the sun, then gone on its way?  Sure, there was a "soft" kind of Calvinism which taught activism in faith while reserving the presupposition of comprehensive divine guidance of the world.  But actually reasserting the Puritan hubris of belonging to the elect for salvation, looking out at the rest of us as elect for damnation--I really didn't think that dog could run in our day and time.

I have taken my position as a former Southern Baptist very seriously.  I try not to be aware of what is happening in Southern Baptist organizations and life any more than I have to.  Even in the South, Black Baptist church life is dramatically different from the SBC.  But with some remaining institutional ties from college days at Baylor, and with family and friends who still have direct or indirect Southern Baptist connections, I do now and then get a glimpse into that world.  Fellow baptist scholars now and then talk to me about conversations they have had about Calvinism.  Facebook sometimes points me to something about Al Mohler's latest bending in the winds of doctrine, which has made him a poster scholar for Calvinism.  I occasionally take a look at Roger Olson's blog to learn about the current conversation about Calvinism and Arminianism.  And here and there, in conversations about "emergents" and new movements, I keep hearing about young Calvinists. 

A recent conversation with a professor at a baptist university in the South got my attention.  He told me that for the most part, the Christian students on campus who are very serious about living their faith are reading John Piper and convinced of this Calvinist theology.  I found out that this Calvinist resurgence really is a thing.  If it is a thing, I'm going to have to learn more about it.  The Puritan Calvinism that was so influential in shaping U.S. culture has left a residue that this sort of theology helps to rationalize and justify.  That residue, which is common among Calvinist and Southern Baptist and Evangelical and even Liberal churches in the U.S., is theological supersessionism.  Anglo-American culture is the new "chosen people."  Even not very churchly U.S. folks tend to believe that "we" are the ones destined by God to make the world what it is supposed to be.  Not all these believers in American exceptionalism actually have an argument to sustain it theologically, but the Puritan heritage of Calvinism definitely knew why they believed it.

The precipitating event for writing this post was my stumbling upon a critique of contemporary Calvinists by Christian Piatt.  I was impressed with Piatt's insight into one of the serious problems of this theology.  He points out that there is a suspicious assumption by those who believe that God has elected certain persons for salvation that they are the very ones who are the elect.  The forerunners of this kind of thinking in North American theology were the colonial era Puritans.  They were critics of the national churches of early modern Europe, influenced by Protestant Scholasticism and hard predestinarian theology.  I'll get back to their theological dilemma and anxiety later.

Moreover, a hard notion of predestination leads to the conclusion that genocides, murders, epidemics, disasters, and every form of death and time of death happens by God's direct will, as John Piper seems willing to affirm.

It's right for God to slaughter women and children anytime he pleases. God gives life and he takes life. Everybody who dies, dies because God wills that they die.

God is taking life every day. He will take 50,000 lives today. Life is in God's hand. God decides when your last heartbeat will be, and whether it ends through cancer or a bullet wound. God governs.

So God is God! He rules and governs everything. And everything he does is just and right and good. God owes us nothing.

If I were to drop dead right now, or a suicide bomber downstairs were to blow this building up and I were blown into smithereens, God would have done me no wrong. He does no wrong to anybody when he takes their life, whether at 2 weeks or at age 92.

God is not beholden to us at all. He doesn't owe us anything.

Now add to that the fact we're all sinners and deserve to die and go to hell yesterday, and the reality that we're even breathing today is sheer common grace from God.

Piper presents his point of view as purely logical.  He allows the "logic" of ancient tribal notions of God, combined with his assumptions about the nature of the sovereign God of monotheism, to make it easy for him to accept despicable acts.  The pervasiveness of sin in Piper's mind makes nothing surprising or alarming to him.  Such calmness and coolness in the face of immense evil seems problematic to be coming out of the mouth of one whose faith is in the God who says, "I have loved you with an everlasting love," and who teaches us to "Love your neighbor as yourself."  But within the cool calculations of double predestination, he has no trouble saying these things.

This aspect of predestinarian overconfidence was the theological underpinning of domination and genocide of Native Americans.  Reformed doctrine combined divine predestination with a hermeneutical endorsement of Old Testament stories of conquest and monarchy that called them the way of God in history.  Thus, Puritan immigrants appropriated for themselves the biblical notions of the Promised Land, the genocidal conquest, and the no quarter given policy toward idolaters and the nations.  This theology took root in New England and in South Africa, though the South African colonizers were less successful in their genocidal wars.  This is another argument I will return to later.

I have always admitted that because of being a slow reader I am not able to keep up with all current theology.  I depend on my colleagues to be reading other sources I'm not able to get to.  Now I guess I'm going to have to pick up some more writings by John Piper.  Christian Piatt argues that statements like that one of Piper's quoted above provide a theological justification for racism.  I tend to agree, but need to make sure I read enough from an author to be able to accurately draw such a conclusion. 

In my little bit of reading so far, I find that Piper believes he can hold his double predestinarian doctrine in full compatibility with a commitment to racial harmony.  His book, Bloodlines, addresses the social problem of racism as a serious one for the church.  He admits to having been formed in racist thinking and acting it out in his youth.  In this book and elsewhere he cites Martin Luther King, Jr., John Perkins, Rosa Parks, Jackie Robinson, and other African American anti-racists to bolster his case.  The book is not making a hard case for racial equality, although he seems to believe that is a good idea.  His favored term is racial harmony.

I will concede one of his theological defenses.  He says it was not really his Reformed doctrine upbringing that made him a racist.  His defense is that other Protestants, Catholics, Christians and religious folks of all sorts also lived and believed racism.  This is true. 

The links between racist ideologies and Christian faith are not limited to the Reformed tradition.  Luis Rivera-Pagan demonstrated the ways that Catholic theologies became adapted to racism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in their participation in the conquest of the Caribbean and Latin America in his book A Violent Evangelism.  The structuring of racialized ontologies into modern Enlightenment thinking and the pervasive influence of white supremacy on European and North American worldviews and Christian religious thought receives excellent analysis in Race, by J. Kameron Carter.  Willie Jennings displays episodes through which racism reshaped Christian thought in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and North America, in The Christian Imagination.  James Cone's recent The Cross and the Lynching Tree leaves little doubt that as progressive a thinker as Reinhold Niebuhr, among many others, was unable to escape the ways that North American culture has so thoroughly encoded the violence of atonement upon racial violence.  A Christian does not have to be a Calvinist to be a racist.

It seems Piper's primary motivation toward hoping for a church that demonstrates racial harmony is the vision of Revelation.  There we find that every tribe, nation, people, and language join together in unison praise of God.  Piper rightly understands this consummating vision as pointing to the nature of God's purpose for the church even in our time.  I'll want to come back to this matter later, because it is not clear to me how in a predestined world that exists in division, a racially integrated church makes much sense.  For now, let it be acknowledged that not only Reformed Christians are racists, and that Piper has good biblical basis for advocating racial harmony in churches.

That defense aside, I have not yet found in Piper an attempt to address the particular linkage between Reformed doctrine and imperialist/colonialist ideologies that comes from a distinctive Reformed hermeneutical claim.  In arguments against Anabaptists, Calvin advocated a dual path of divine authority over the world.  Christ rules immediately in the spiritual realm.  Christ rules through mediation of rulers in the temporal realm.  This variation on Luther's "two governments" responds to the Anabaptist belief that Jesus' words from Mark 10:42-45 was the only model for human society for those who follow Jesus.  Calvin said that Jesus' saying might apply only to the spiritual realm.  In its place, he offered the Old Testament Davidic Monarchy as the divinely ordained model for temporal rulers. 

It was this hermeneutic among Puritan divines that gave rise to the idea that Puritan settlers in New England and South Africa should overlay the biblical stories of Abraham and Joshua upon their communities and destinies.  God would give them a Promised Land, but they must drive out and exterminate the heathen inhabitants.  It's secularized translations of Manifest Destiny and American Exceptionalism carry forward the supersessionist heresy that says God has revoked the election of Israel and chosen in their place the Anglo-American Christian Protestant Capitalist as the new improved replacement elect.  This hermeneutical conviction is at the core of supersessionism.  And it is an inherently racialized vision, an ecclesiology of white supremacy.

I gather from my initial reading that Piper has not directly embraced this sort of thinking.  He is not likely to fit into the committed camps of theonomy, dominionism, or reconstructionism, which he seems to disavow.  These groups find themselves quite disappointed with him for not advocating Christian use of force to fight the Satanic powers in the world.  For instance, Piper argues that Christians ought not to kill in self-defense for the sake of the gospel, but be willing to die (knowing they are saved by God) rather than take the life of someone else (whom they suspect has not been saved).  Here he sounds somewhat less predestinarian than elsewhere, and even echoes some ideas one might find in Yoder's writings.  If it matters that one wait before taking another person's life who may not be saved, that implies one's active faith is critical to carrying forward the divine decree of election.  He seems to be allowing that a person must have faith activated to fulfill his notion of the five alones:

Salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, because of Christ alone, to the glory of God alone, on the authority of Scripture alone. At the center of these "alones" is the precious teaching of justification by faith alone.

Yet he teaches this in the very same context as the TULIP acronym of Calvinism.  To challenge Piper, a reconstructionist Calvinist might reply that if a person without faith were one of the elect and about to die, the irresistible grace of God would activate faith necessary for salvation in a timely fashion in the final moment of life (or some such technical solution that could maintain the closed loops of predestinarian doctrine).  Or maybe the reconstructionist would not care.  But my point is that in such a tightly fashioned system of certainty, there is a way to answer his objections and question why Piper need bother to encourage nonviolence.

This problem of violence seems not to bother him so seriously in his earlier cited remarks about mass murder of women and children.  And it is this core commitment of double predestinarian theology that always demands my attention and critique.  Nonviolence, for Piper, seems like the way that Jesus would have us go, but it does not characterize the way of God whom Jesus is supposed to reveal.  Rather than rereading the Old Testament understandings of the One God in light of Jesus, finding inconsistencies between the received and written insights of those who did not have the final revelation in Christ, and questioning whether they accurately represented this One and the Same God that Jesus revealed, Piper says God does this sometimes and that sometimes.  Could the Israelite leaders and writers who had not heard from Jesus have assumed that their God, like the gods of the nations, would want Joshua to lead genocidal raids on Canaanites?  Could they have been mistaken?  Could the revelation in Christ offer a corrective?  Piper says maybe we should pay attention to Jesus on these matters of using violence, even though the very same violent actions in other seasons can very well be what God wants.

Roger Olson helpfully analyzes the dilemma of predestinarian theologies.  They cannot overcome the inconsistency in the concept of God's goodness.  If God is good, as revealed in Jesus, and we have received revelation of God's goodness, then we must be able to give at least some account of what that goodness means.  To refuse such an account by placing the divine counsels beyond all human comprehension, mysteries in eternity before the foundation of the world, then to allow for all sorts of despicable evil to fit within some elusive, incomprehensible, incommensurable, transcendent, opaque, inscrutable notion of God's goodness, is to say that we have no idea what God's goodness could mean.  And that leaves us only with goodness that is equivalent to arbitrariness and whimsey.  If God has revealed Godself, then we must be able to know some measure of what divine goodness must be.

The age in which we find ourselves now living is dominated still by white supremacy, so that the lives of non-European, non-United States white folks continue to be worth little and less, so that people are marked by their skin color for poverty, slavery, and death, all for the sake of unhindered natural resources and inexpensive consumer goods flowing to the privileged and powerful.  In a predestined world, we know that total depravity is a mark of humanity.  Sin abounds.  Many die every day from violence and its minions, poverty, disease, starvation, and pollution.  By this set of theological assumptions, they also die as God intends.

Are these who die and are not members of certain Reformed churches--are they elect to damnation?  Are those privileged to argue theology among the wealthy leisure classes elect to salvation?  Or is the mystery of divine election far less certain?  The Puritans of the seventeenth century became anxious about this very question.  They understood themselves to be a vanguard for divine truth.  They stood against the established Anglican and Catholic orders to purify doctrine and the church.  It should not be surprising, then, that they initially had confidence that their specific calling gave evidence of their being among the elect of God.  But the logic is not airtight.  What if they simply by their social location had learned these true doctrines, but had not been elect from before the foundation of the world for salvation?  Certainly, the teaching said that the merit of having true doctrine or of attending a true church or of living a righteous life would not be effective for salvation.  Only God's grace in election could do that.

On the other hand, if faith is a measure of election, and they were demonstrating faith, then it could be true that God's grace had initiated and sustained faith in them effective for salvation.  On this basis, the Puritans of the seventeenth century developed a theory of evidences or "signs of election."  First, the participation in a true church was one sign of election.  To be drawn to God in this way might indicate the existence of the faith that comes by grace.  Second, a righteous life might be a sign of election because the person demonstrates evidence of regeneration of their sinful human nature to serve God, which only comes by grace.  Finally, John Cotton is often credited with drawing focus on the quintessential American doctrine of an experience of grace.  If a person had mourned over sin and feared its results, only to find surprising joy and release through grace, forgiveness, and the desire to do good works, that person also shows evidence of the grace of election.  Together, these three signs came to be considered adequate evidence of being among the elect, although frankly the anxiety of double predestination never quite went away.  Some claim that the anxiety over predestination was a dominant characteristic of Puritan culture.

This awareness of an indecipherable, seemingly arbitrary divine election, would seem to elicit an air of futility for those who hold such doctrines.  The anxious questioning would seem to be the unraveling of such a faith.  Yet it still survives with some vigor.  What is the likelihood that racial harmony in the church falls under the divine intention at any specific time in history?  If God is directing the murders, the infanticides, the eldercides, the genocides, the racial and ethnic cleansings, the religious wars, the mass murders, the nuclear annihilations, the serial killers, the drug wars, the industrial accidents and poisonings, the slave trade and middle passages, the death camps, the disappearings, the human trafficking, the weapons trafficking--if the regimes and technologies of death occur, as Piper seems to believe, within God's intentions, who is to say that in any particular age God has elected people with various racial and ethnic assignations to be saved? 

Maybe during the mass deaths of Africans from the Atlantic Slave Trade, all the Africans were elect to damnation.  Maybe that's why blacks and whites were not in church together.  Maybe the Africans elect for salvation come from different centuries than those.  In the eternity envisioned in Revelation, they would coexist for shared worship, even though in history they were centuries apart.  People from different tribes, nations, peoples, and languages might have lived in different eras, but in eternal life they all live together.  Maybe none of the white people going to church in the 21st century are elect from before the foundation of the world.  How can we know?

I suspect someone as intelligent as John Piper, who also displays credible devotion to following Jesus, could offer replies to many of my questions.  I think he might catch some weak arguments on my part here and there.  But I do not think he can quite escape the web of questions his system of doctrine creates.  The attraction of a system of theology that seems to close all the loops is, from my perspective, why people keep returning to this kind of Reformed predestinarianism.  And the internal arguments and divisions are myriad.  There is a wide range that goes by Reformed or Calvinist theology, although some would claim that it is possible to find a subset of common convictions, and place John Piper somewhat off the center of things.  So if it seems I am denying the good in any Reformed theology, I am sorry to have communicated poorly.  That is not my intent, even if I am ever engaged in doctrinal battle around many matters of difference I have with Reformed, Lutheran, Catholic, and even my own Baptist theologies.  While all dominant streams of modern theology have failed to adequately overcome white supremacy, I would stand by my argument that Reformed double predestination is especially vulnerable to this failure.

So to get back to the title, what is the genius of which I speak?  Christian Piatt makes another remark worth noting at the end of his post.  He points out examples of many different streams of faith who claim that they are God's chosen, that place "themselves at the center of such a God-and-humanity love story when they are the ones telling the story."  In light of that, he lifts up a challenge:  "show me the faith that looks outside of their own tradition to point to another group as the ones favored by God."

That line took me back to a specific text, a specific conversation.  It is an argument made in the theological writing of Willie Jennings.  It is addressed to the racialized existence of modernity and our churches which organize themselves within this racialized logic.  Jennings argues that the uniqueness of Christian faith is that it offers a message of salvation to those of us on the outside.  God's elect of Israel (the people, not the nation-state) are chosen to be a light to the nations.  That destiny, fulfilled in Jesus yet continuing in them, invites Gentiles (the nations) to be grafted in and beloved of the God who was not their God.  Those who are not the chosen people are invited into the fold.  The ones who were far off have been draw near.  We who were not a people have become a people.  We are a people who exist only because we have been invited by the Jews' God to make of our differences a way of living and loving one another in the full beauty and diversity of God's creation.  That theology, I think, is an answer to what Piatt is asking for.

Piatt is on to something.  The notion of finding ourselves as God's favorites in the world is a destructive notion in theology.  Doctrines of predestination linked to imperial and colonial programmes created some of the worst examples of that destructiveness.  Supersessionist conclusions follow too easily on such distortions of the faith.  A theology which does not separate faith from faithfulness, divine grace from co-operation in grace, divine unction from willing reception, and the power to create from the power to allow other free beings to act creatively--this sort of theology gives room to make sense of our duties to struggle against racism, empire, colonialism, and evil in all its structural and systemic forms.  And in the church, we do so as those who know from the outside what it is like to want to be on the inside, and to receive the graceful invitation to join those chosen of God and become one people.

Picking Brackets and March Madness

One thing that our family has enjoyed over the years is the excitement of the college basketball tournaments.  When Everly and I were making decisions about my graduate studies in 1986, the ACC had one of its great years with Duke and Georgia Tech battling it out as two of the best teams in the country, and no slack from UNC and NC State as well.  We got hooked on the tournament that year, seeing a great Duke team lose to Louisville in the championship.  By then, we were making plans to move to Durham, and David was getting close to being born.

Living in Durham and attending Duke turned us all into basketball fans.  One of our favorite family stories comes from a time when I was still a student at Duke and Everly was a visiting clinical professor in the department of education at UNC.  One day as we were driving in the car together, Naomi did as little ones often do.  She was sorting out the world and announcing it to the rest of us.  That day, she informed us that "Daddy's school is 'Go Duke' and Mommy works at 'Beat Carolina.'"  I couldn't have been more proud of how well she learned our sentiments.  Out of the mouths of babes....

David and I spent many an evening watching Duke basketball with neighborhood families.  David gets anxious about tense situations in ball games or movies.  He still is likely to hide his face.  But as a boy, he would pull his coat over his head, run to the other room, climb the stairs, get behind the couch, and otherwise entertain us with his acting out the tension in the room.

Eventually we bought season tickets to women's basketball at Duke.  David and I went most often, but Lydia got very interested during a few years when Iciss Tillis played for Duke.  We made posters with her name, and we managed to get some autographs and meet various players.  David was a huge Alana Beard fan.

After Baylor won the national women's championship in 2005, we spread our loyalty back to Baylor, where Everly and I met and earned our bachelor's degrees.  Then, when Lydia attended Baylor and Everly was working in Texas, we added season tickets to the women's basketball games there.  Many of our happy family times and pictures from Everly's last two years came at the Baylor basketball games.

So today I'm preparing to pick my brackets for the two tournaments.  It's happy to have both Baylor and both Duke teams in the mix.  Also having some other teams we're glad to see succeeding (at least this year) like NC State, Virginia, Mercer, SF Austin, and NCCU adds to the fun.  Getting to hate UNC, Texas, Louisville, and others from the legions of evil will also make it enjoyable.

Until getting interested in Baylor basketball and living in Texas, Everly was the least fan of basketball of all of us.  She would usually wait until the Final Four weekend to pay attention.  But her new interest led her even to pick brackets last year.  Not really a basketball aficionado, she did not excel in her picks.  This year, those of us in the family who get organized enough to do our brackets in time will not be able to count on Mom's bracket to be at the bottom of our group.

We'll miss Everly and we'll miss Brittney Griner this year for the tournaments.  But having Everly with us through these recent basketball seasons makes our joyful memories of basketball past even better.  She was a sold out fan for Baylor Women's basketball, and that makes me love the game more.

There Might Still Be Hope for That Little Seminary Down the Road

Today at the Shaw University Ministers' Conference, we heard from a young preacher who was new to our gathering.  Rev. Chalice (pronounced shah-LEASE) Overy, youth minister at Baptist Grove Church in Raleigh brought a message.  She is a graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill with a bachelor's degree in Public Policy and African American Studies.  From UNC she went to Duke Divinity School, that little seminary down the road from us here at Shaw University Divinity School.  The message she delivered with great power made me (tongue in cheek) say that there might be hope for that school.  As many of you know, my fellow Mt. Level members and close friends teach at Duke Divinity School, and I also earned a Duke degree.  I would say they are doing fine.  But still, hearing Rev. Overy gave me great encouragement for the type of student who has studied and learned in those halls of divinity.

She selected the text, Acts 8:26-39, which is the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch.  She paired it with a few verses from 2 Corinthians 5 about the new creation and the ministry of reconciliation.  As she began to tell the story from Acts, she made note of the barriers to admission to Jerusalem worship that the eunuch must have encountered.  There were physical walls, steps, doors, and curtains constructed in the Temple of Jerusalem, all designed to keep certain people far away from what was considered the holy place of God.  No doubt, the eunuch had been held at bay and unable to participate in many aspects of divine worship while in Jerusalem.

When Philip asked him whether he understood the Isaiah scroll he was reading, it is not surprising that he said he did not.  Who among the religiously accepted would have been willing to teach such an outsider and outcast?  Overy said that it was good that they were on a wilderness road for this conversation, because Philip himself might have been worried about associating with this man if other religious folks were looking.  Not only was he an outsider from Ethiopia, but his physicality as a eunuch might have raised many questions for those who would watch the two men converse.  The sexual undertones are not hidden, even if unspoken.

Overy brought the 2 Corinthians text as a contrast to the likely experience of the eunuch in Jerusalem.  Then she asked why our churches have turned away from the ministry of reconciliation and taken up the regime of death by setting up barriers to keep people out of our congregations.  She described the ways that church people try to be the respectable people and keep out anyone who differs or questions or challenges or diverges.  She implied that the entire regime of death that the law brings had become the playground of domination systems (my term) in Jerusalem and now in our churches, so that some of us become the gatekeepers and protectors of God from the rabble and the outsiders.

Overy shook us all up with a message about the gospel that lets the Ethiopian's rhetorical question need no answer--what's to keep me from being baptized?  No legalism, no wall, no steps, no evil-eye, no harumph, no gate, no curtain--no that was torn from top to bottom.  It was a powerful sermon calling on churches to be welcoming communities and to get out into the streets to let people know that our God receives them in all their variety and diversity.

Thank you Rev. Chalice Overy, for your care in reading the text and listening to the Spirit.  Thank you to her teachers for contributing to a powerful ministerial formation.  And thank you God for the immeasurable gift of the Good News.

Public Reading of Scripture

It's the last day of the Shaw University Divinity School Ministers' Conference.  This morning was my morning on the dais.  I was scheduled to offer the Invocation.  One of our alumni was called away, so I also filled in to read the Scripture Text.

Some of you who know me realize that public reading of scripture is one of my favorite forms of worship leadership.  Having grown up in church, I have been hearing people read aloud from the Bible all my life.  In children's Sunday School classes, it was a challenge, a duty, and sometimes a competition to see who could get through some verses without stumbling over big Bible words.  We excellent readers and pronouncers felt smug toward the ones who couldn't sound out Nebuchadnezzer or Amalekite.

Eventually, it came to be the "gracious" thing to do to allow anyone to "pass" or "prefer" not to read publicly.  We learned that we should not force people to do something they were not comfortable doing, lest they feel humiliated by struggling with the words and sentences.  I never got completely comfortable with that policy, thinking that we ought to show the grace through loving one another enough to encourage everyone to continue to grow and improve in public reading.  That was a kind of internal white church conversation.

At Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church, I came to see that there was another kind of conversation about public reading of scripture to which I had not been privileged.  I don't know the story as a participant, although I have had some opportunities to study in books or listen to testimony about that different world from the one in which I was raised.  What I did learn was that the social function of public reading of scripture at Mt. Level carried with it a communal memory of injustice:  the injustice of being denied the sacred text and the training to be a reader of it.

So at Mt. Level, when a person stands to read the scripture publicly, it is not the same kind of pressure to perform flawlessly to prove one's pedigree that might have fed our competitive spirits in Sunday School where I grew up.  It takes on more of a shared consciousness of liberation struggle, as people whom outsiders might not expect to read sophisticated texts join hearts of encouragement to read and hear the sacred writ.  Almost any time a young person or child reads publicly, there is an outpouring of congratulations and encouragement for achieving this important task.  Now the feeling about children's public reading is not so different than what I grew up with, but the expression is more overt through words of praise and applause.  Getting an education is not something to take for granted, and gaining the skill to handle sacred things is a reason for gratitude to God who made a way where there was no way.

As a seminarian at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary, I gained another insight into public reading of scripture.  Certainly, I had experienced different styles of reading as I grew up.  Some people read in a monotone, giving little emphasis while making sure to get all the words correct.  Others put on a "church voice" or "preacher voice" and read with a different tone than conversational speech.  It may include certain efforts at emphasis, although as a whole it offers little insight into the particular text, and in a way makes all texts sound the same, each verse and sentence and paragraph adopting the same "officious" or "elevated" tone of voice.  Some readers adopt a sing-song phrasing that gets to be very predictable and at times causes the mind to relax and drift away.  A few readers show evidence of trying to read with contextual understanding, yet most such reading either takes on idiosyncratic interpretive emphasis (such as highlighting a transitional word like "but" or "therefore"), reading excessively slowly, or singling out one or two phrases in a passage for emphasis.

While in California, I was blessed to become part of a congregation that was unusually populated by people who gave serious attention to how scripture should be read publicly.  Among many with gifts, some who stood out were Jerene Broadway, Kyle Smith, and Jane Medema.  One thing I learned from these and others was to look at a text for its particularities:  conversational speech, story-telling, poetic phrasing, and musicality.  I listened as readers varied the speed of their speech cadence, stretched out particular words, raised and lowered the pitch or tone of phrases in unexpected ways rather than in the same way with each line.  I saw that scripture gives clues about the emotive character of its words, so that fear, excitement, anger, or sarcasm may need expression.  Some words may need to be shouted and others whispered.

From that point on, I came to see that worship planners should engage two concerns when calling on people to lead through public reading of scripture.  First, I retain my baptist egalitarianism that tells me everyone who wishes to have opportunity to read scripture publicly should get to do so.  Reading scripture is a practice of all of our lives in discipleship, and no one has to be a professional to share in that practice.  Whether it is read with a more mumbling monotone, a stumbling cadence, or articulated in all its detail, the people of God do the work of God by reading scripture publicly.  Second, churches should identify those with gifts to read with expression and convey the depths of the text and have them read regularly and often.  Moreover, those who understand how to study a text and draw out an oral interpretation of it should offer training to others so that more members of the congregation can offer gifted leadership in public reading of scripture.

I also learned at seminary that many traditions of Christian worship read multiple texts in worship.  I grew up hearing the scripture read as a preparation for the sermon.  Whatever text the preacher planned to use was the one we heard.  Then I found out that some churches read an Old Testament Lesson, a Psalm, a New Testament Lesson (or Epistle), and a Gospel Lesson every Sunday.  Of course, in our small-town Texas Baptist self-assurance, we were not aware of the Lectionary and such things.  I remember my fellow-seminarian Dan Ratliff saying to me that for all of our baptist talk about being Bible-based, we mostly let people say their own words in worship.  He helped me see that in this multiple-text liturgical approach, we could give God's Word a chance to speak more often, more diversely, and more extensively than our anti-liturgical pattern had led us into.

All of which leads me to say that I was overjoyed to get to read from Acts 8:26-39 today and try to make the text come alive.  I always know the English teachers and speech teachers out in the congregation because of the way their eyes light up.  One woman greeted me after the service to say, "You read that scripture just like I would have told you to read it!"  So I knew I was talking to someone who thinks about how to interpret texts orally.  If this is the text we claim can tell us the story of our lives and guide us in the way we should go, then there is a value in letting the words operate in our mouths and ears with the same liveliness of the conversations we carry on with one another.  They are sacred texts, but that does not mean they must sound like drudgery.

So anytime you want to ask me to read the scripture publicly, don't be surprised that I say, "Yes."

Why Myrtle Trees?

On Monday night of the Shaw University Minister's Conference, the conference preacher, Rev. Dr. William H. Curtis of Mt. Ararat Baptist Church, Pittsburgh, PA, chose as his text the first vision of Zechariah, chapter 1, verses 7-17.  In particular, he focused on the first part of verse 8:

I saw at night, and behold, a man was riding on a red horse, and he was standing among the myrtle trees which were in the ravine (NASB).

Curtis took note that the description of the vision included only a few details before an extensive interpretation.  At the heart of the vision is a rider on a horse, and there are other riders on horses in the background.  Most of what follows pertains to the message, including questions and answers to the other riders and to God, delivered by the primary rider to Zechariah.

But Curtis said that his homiletician's imagination was drawn to the details given in verse 8.  The riders and horses were in a ravine.  It was a valley, a low place.  In it was a clump of myrtle trees.  Curtis could not stop wondering, "Why myrtle trees, and why in a valley?"

His message went on to say that myrtle trees grow especially well in valleys or ravines.  Unlike our ambitions to be on the mountain heights, this detail of the story represented for him a message about those common experiences of being in a low place, in a "valley."

Curtis demonstrated a kind of "spiritual" or "allegorical" interpretation of the text.  Such visionary passages often already have an allegorical meaning deeply embedded in the texts themselves.  As Curtis developed the allegory, he linked it to the interpretation of the vision that became Zechariah's prophetic oracle.

The people of God had endured great hardship.  Their enemies had treated them far more harshly than someone might say they deserved.  In the pilgrimage of the history of Israel, they were certainly living in a valley.  They had been in exile for decades.  A few had been able to return to their homeland, and they were scrambling to build a temple and reestablish their center of faith in Jerusalem.

They might look upon their situation as hopeless.  They might think that things have been just too hard, and no one should expect much of them.  But Curtis points out that even in valleys, there are trees that grow especially well.  These myrtle trees signify that the hard times the Israelites have faced can still be a time for growth.  They can still find the water and nourishment they need.  In fact, the valley may be the only setting in which some people can grow.

When they are on the mountaintop, God's work seems small from up so high.  They begin to imagine they are the the reason for their own success.  But in the valley, we can come to see how great God's work in our lives may be.  We become eager to find those things we need to rise from our struggles.

I give a very brief and weak synopsis of the message.  As you might imagine, in this valley of my life, wondering how to move on after Everly's death, it was a message that spoke to me.  For even in the valley of the shadow of death (and that is the shadow in which I walk), God is with me.  It was an encouraging word.  Even in my deep valley, there is growth that can and must happen.  I shed tears, but they were tears of hope.  So I am relieved to be standing among the myrtle trees.

On Chitchat

For much of the past few weeks, with snow and cold weather around NC, I have kept to myself.  The solitude has been comfortable. I have been able to concentrate on some reading when I can settle down to do it.  I have followed through on some of the assignments I need to do at work.  I've stayed up with my classes and made appropriate reminders to keep students on pace.  I've come up with new ways to teach subject matter for my standard courses.  I've thought about and tried to keep up with family matters.  I've missed my Everly and teared up as the moments demand.

But I must admit that I have felt guilty a few times about the self-imposed solitude.  I have many friends who would be glad to sit down at coffee or lunch to visit, and I don't mean to be unappreciative of their friendliness.  I've never been very good at chitchat, and in the past few weeks I think I have been avoiding it.

I don't mean that I have not conversed with people--friends and coworkers alike.  But most of those talks have been pretty intense, and several have gone on for a couple of hours and more.  The thoughts that are on my mind tend to spin powerfully toward big questions.  Some of it is about how I will discern the next steps in my life now that Everly's work and comfort are no longer part of how I think about the shape of my life.  Some of it is about grieving Everly and the everyday pain that missing her brings. 

I think that one reason chitchat is not very easy for me right now is that for so many years it was something I did with Everly.  She learned quickly that I was not a great casual conversationalist.  On her own, she was often the life of the party, talking, joking, teasing, and acting silly for everyone's entertainment.  With me, she was gifted in bringing out my words and good humor.  She could get me started talking.  She could help me find the people in the group who might be interested in whatever obscure or heavy topics I had on my mind at the time.  And around the house, we would deal with our everyday chitchat topics intermingled with long bouts of listening to serious and intense matters we were thinking about in our work and vocations.  In consequence, easing into a friendly chitchat at this time in my life is also opening a window on my grief over losing those daily conversations.  I know that is not a very good reason to avoid my friends, and now that I'm thinking this through, maybe I can be more ready to face it.

I also don't want to diminish the significance and good that comes from chitchat.  There are many ways of smoothing the path of getting along with people, of greasing the rails toward building relationships.  Friendly chitchat is one very important one.  Laughing together is another.  For those of you who follow research on human behavior, it is not news to find out that about 90% of our laughter has little or nothing to do with humor.  It is a communicative behavior that breaks psychological barriers between people.  It smooths the edges of getting to know people.  We laugh when nervous and it dispels some of the anxiety.  We laugh simply to fill space when we are not sure what to say, and everyone gets a little emotional relief. 

Unlike the nonverbal communication of laughter, friendly chitchat shares intellectual content that helps people to become aware of who we are and to gain a sense of our assessment of them.  The verbal is mingled with body language that may convey a great deal.  Do we seem to like them?  Do our stories convey that we feel superior or inferior to them?  Much is transacted in chitchat that verbally and non-verbally shapes how people will understand their relationships.

Aristotle's list of virtues in The Nichomachean Ethics includes one that is often translated "wittiness."  It is the virtue of being able to carry on pleasant conversation, to speak tactfully, to tell proper humorous stories in a proper manner.  It is contrasted with boorishness and buffoonery as its deficiency and excess.  To be able to make others comfortable in conversation, to treat them well, even to entertain them, is a virtue for Aristotle's well-heeled Athenian male.  I think it is not hard for us to see the value of excellence in chitchat. 

We all have observed those persons in a group around which others gather to listen intently, giggle and laugh, and generally enjoy themselves.  Maybe others of you, as I have at times, have jealously wished to be that person.  That feeling itself may help us recognize the good in having ready wit.  It may not be, as some would criticize, one of the most important virtues of a moral life.  Yet it does not, on the other hand, appear to be a vice, nor even something not worth the trouble of developing as a habit.

I have probably become more habituated in "wittiness" over the years, largely because of knowing Everly.  She might not have thought of herself as having this virtue because Everly sometimes underestimated her strengths as a person.  But I do think she would agree that our partnership had benefited me a great deal in this aspect of living.  From her I learned to be more aware of the people with whom I am conversing rather than tightly closed up in my head with the matters on my mind.  From her I learned to be a better listener and not use others' words as a jumping off point for what I wanted to say anyway.  From her I learned to enjoy people for the good they are bringing to my life and the lives of others.  I don't mean that I've learned to be as she was, but I have loved who she was and embraced the glimpse of seeing the world as she saw it.

My mix of intellectual overconfidence and social shyness found a fascinating and intriguing partner in Everly's gregarious way of making friends, her quick intellect, and her impatience with abstraction.  We also found in one another traits we shared and valued: devotion to God, moral intensity, and a drive to make a difference in the world.  Hanging out with that person:  that's my chitchat heritage.  I miss it.  But I look forward to many more coffee and kitchen and hallway conversations with the rest of you.  Y'all all know you are not Everly, and you were not trying to be her.  Now I need to pay attention to who you are, listen to what you have to say, and offer the wit I can bring to the moments we have to find some joy together in this life.

Beatitude--It's Probably Not What You Think

Among contemporary church folks, maybe especially those in the "small 'b' baptist" or "small 'p' pentecostal" camp, the word "beatitude" has a very specific and technical meaning.  It refers to sayings of Jesus at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew 5.  It means the list of "bless-eds," pronounced in two syllables, not in the usual one syllable way that someone might say, "Haven't we been blessed this year!"  Or for those of us who were around for the extremely popular launch of the Good News Translation, the beatitudes may be the list of "happy" things Jesus told the disciples. 

Happy are those who know they are spiritually poor;
the Kingdom of heaven belongs to them!

I'm certainly overgeneralizing, but the rank and file of these churches are not likely to be reading ancient and medieval theological and philosophical writings which use the Latin term that becomes "beatitude" in English.  Beatitude, sort of like the English "blessedness," describes a condition of well-being.  Unlike the idea of "well-being" in popular psychology, it is not talking about merely "feeling good about oneself."  It is not an inwardly achieved and uncontextual "self-esteem."  This sort of well-being, defined by a different set of assumptions than those of our individualistic age, encompasses a state or location within one's intended purpose.  Blessedness in a theological setting entails a proper relation to God and God's creation, including the people around us whom God has created. 

Beatitude, used this way in theological texts, points the church and believers toward the goal or telos of existence, including human existence in the larger whole of created existence.  It is where we strive to be, where we aim to be, what we are made to be.  Some theologians frame the notion by writing of the "beatific vision."  The beatific vision means to look upon the goodness of God, or in more familiar language, to fix our eyes upon Jesus.  In this use, looking upon is a way of receiving and absorbing into oneself the One who is looked upon.  It is focused attention toward being reformed in God's image.

There is a way of talking about the beatific vision that leaves me a bit uncomfortable, when it seems that the ancient writer has tried to Christianize some kinds of Greek and European thought without enough of the material scandal of Jesus, seeming to import Neo-Platonic "contemplation of the pure form," rather than following Jesus, as the ultimate calling of God. 

But we don't have to use the term that way.  To look upon the goodness of God, to fix our eyes on Jesus, to see now, through a glass darkly (but with intimations of face-to-face), what the Lord, the Spirit, is doing, is powerful language.  It can help us in the day-to-day to recognize God's presence and power, and it can motivate us and draw us onward toward the goal of the high calling of Christ Jesus.

One of the more recent theologians (from the 1700s in the American colonies) who made much good of this sort of language was Jonathan Edwards.  His phrases "consent to being" and "beneficence to being-in-general" are rooted in the notion of looking upon the goodness of God both in creation and uncreated being.  We consent to God when we acknowledge the goodness of God that surrounds and sustains us.  As Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians, "there is a new creation....All this is from God."  In our churches, we sing a contemporary song that captures well Edwards' thought: 

I'll say, "Yes, Lord. Yes,"
To your will and to your way.
I'll say, "Yes, Lord. Yes,"
I will trust You and obey.
When Your Spirit speaks to me,
With my whole heart I'll agree,
And my answer will be,
"Yes, Lord. Yes."

To behold the goodness of God, become immersed in God's good ways, participate in God's providential care--that is what beatitude is.  To know God better moves us to be able to love God better, and to love God better forms us to be able to love one another and all of creation better.  So the beatific vision, beatitude, is a telos that draws us ever toward the reason that we exist at all.  And as the Shaker's song says,

When we find ourselves in the place just right,
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

Having now chased down the historical and deeper meaning of the term beatitude, I'll get back to what got me started on this post anyway.  The beatitudes as we know them in Matthew are a kind of virtue ethics teaching.  They describe character traits, admirable qualities, that a community of Christians should exhibit in order to live well.  To have these characteristics is to be on the path of being blessed, of becoming happy, of finding ourselves in the place just right. 

It's certainly not original to me to point out that there are two Gospels which report on similar sayings, beatitudes, from Jesus.  It is probably in part because baptists tend to like the feeling that all the scriptures are easily harmonized that they tend to ignore the beatitudes from Luke and memorize the beatitudes from Matthew.  Matthew's list is longer and more comprehensive.  Matthew's list is also more easily interpreted individually and inwardly.  And although Matthew's list is certainly not without challenging and controversial language, Luke's beatitudes will really shake things up.

When John Howard Yoder sought in The Politics of Jesus to demonstrate the political and economic significance of Jesus' ministry, he pointed to Luke's beatitudes for contrast to the usual reading strategy of twentieth-century United States church people who watered things down by trying to make Matthew's beatitudes be about mere personal piety.  Barry Harvey states this argument well as he encourages better and more faithful reading of Scripture in Can These Bones Live? 

Alerted by Yoder, taught by Harvey, awakened by John Perkins and the CCDA, reshaped by Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church and affiliate congregations of Durham CAN, I am at this moment inclined to say this should be a year for Luke's beatitudes.  They challenge the complacency of United States church folks who have believed too long that things will keep getting better for most of us if we keep doing the things we have always done.  They upend the assumptions that when we look upon the prosperity of the extremely wealthy we are seeing what beatitude must be.  They put the axe to the root of the idea that those who have large houses, magnificent churches, exhorbitant expense accounts, luxurious cars, exclusive addresses, and posh clothes, that they are the blessed.  It's probably time to take a look at Luke's text, chapter 6, verses 20-26.

Then he looked up at his disciples and said:
‘Blessed are you who are poor,
   for yours is the kingdom of God.
‘Blessed are you who are hungry now,
   for you will be filled.
‘Blessed are you who weep now,
   for you will laugh.
‘Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you,
   and defame you on account of the Son of Man.
 'Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven;
   for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.
‘But woe to you who are rich,
   for you have received your consolation.
‘Woe to you who are full now,
   for you will be hungry.
‘Woe to you who are laughing now,
   for you will mourn and weep.
‘Woe to you when all speak well of you,
   for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets. 

The first thing we notice is that Jesus paired these "blesseds" with a set of "woes."  The longer context of Matthew's Sermon on the Mount has many similarities with Luke's Sermon on the Plain.*
Both use moral contrasts as a rhetorical device.  The contrasts come later in Matthew's version.  In Luke's, they find their way into the beatitude/woe section.  Both gospels dictate challenging economic revisions, but in Luke those find their way into the opening beatitude/woe section.  It is not surprising that many of the radical movements in Christian history have drawn upon the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew, so we have to acknowledge that Luke is not offering a more revolutionary gospel than Matthew.  But when it comes to the limited section of the beatitudes and how we read them, turning to Luke's beatitudes and woes shakes things up.

The thought that struck me and led to my writing this post has to do with what pastors and church people think of when they think of a "blessed church."  What do pastors of small, struggling churches have in mind when they imagine to what a successful ministry career might lead?  What do church people who find TV preaching attractive think about the comparison between their own congregations and the opulence and exhorbitance of TV churches?  I find that quite often, the unstated (and occasionally stated) understanding of what a church could become if it were blessed and successful, what a ministry career could lead to if it were blessed and successful, is massive material wealth. 

Even people who deny the official line of the "prosperity gospel" still are tempted to idolize pastors who are bringing in massive amounts of cash.  They look with admiration upon conspicuous opulence.  Those who give in to the temptation of this false beatific vision are likely to believe that those who become wealthy through ministry "deserve" the material blessings they receive.  They are getting rich because God is proud of how faithful they have been.

I don't know what Bible these people read.  Well, I do.  It is the one I read, but they read it very differently.  And they don't read the Sermon on the Mount or the Sermon on the Plain very intently.  They don't let Jesus' words guide whatever else they read.  They prefer the Prayer of Jabez to the Prayer of Jesus. 

What are Jesus' words to that TV preacher who has people swipe their credit cards and go into debt to make him or her rich?  What does Jesus think about preachers getting folks to put money on the dais so that they can run their feet through it and kick it around and in the air?  "Woe! You have received your consolation!"  You thought money could solve your problems.  You thought money would make you happy.  And whatever happiness, whatever solutions you have found in it, that's all you're going to get.  That's the only love you have.  And when you are hungry, who in hell is going to care?  Not you or the people of the hellish world you are building for yourself.  And when you are weeping, let your swiped cards and foot-kicking cash wipe away your tears.  Woe unto you!  That is not how I taught you to live.

If church people could read the Bible better, could let the Sermon on the Mount and Sermon on the Plain speak with more authority than Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Armani, Jared's, Lexus, and the many other powers, authorities, principalities, and powers that organize our lives, then we could begin to break through to beatitude.  We might start to see the beatific vision.  We might realize that the material wealth we have is to be shared among all God's people, not denied to the masses.  We would see that any blessing we receive is not merely for us but for us to share with others in need.  We would see, as did Basil, Chrysostom, Augustine, and so many others, that to have surplus goods when others are in need makes us into thieves.  And that should make us open our tight-fisted hands and share with people in need.  For the sake of Jesus' calling, for the sake of being the body of Christ here and now, it is critical that we do so.

The world in which we live is ever more structured around maintaining the poverty of most of its inhabitants.  Even in the wealthiest of nations, the masses become poorer each year while a tiny percentage grow richer and richer.  The gap between rich and poor is as wide as ever, both in this country and in most lands of the world.  Slave labor, child labor, debilitating labor conditions, pittance wages--these are the primary tools of wealth-building in this age.  Financial maneuvering to create schemes that transfer masses of wealth from the middle class to the elite are the standard for Wall Street.  Profiteering from mortgage scandals, foreclosing on houses, shipping jobs overseas, ignoring the human costs of financial advantages--this is the world in which we live.

It is a world to which the church needs to say a clear and powerful, "Woe to you!"  There is a better way.  It may cost us, because the wealthy will not easily change their ways.  Just think how hard it is for any of us to give up the luxuries and pleasures and material things we enjoy.  The prophets always had a tough road, and Jesus says we should realize we are blessed when the powers and dominions start to fight back against our challenge to their ways.  And he also warns us, that if everyone likes us, we are probably just like all the false prophets who figured out how to get the status quo powers to butter their bread on both sides.

I hope that every preacher, every teacher, every Bible lover, will make this year a year to preach, teach, and converse about Luke's beatitudes and woes.  Beatitude may not be what we have been thinking that it was.  What we thought it was--that may actually be woe.  So let's get ourselves on the path to beatitude.  Speak a word.

*(People resolve the similarity and difference in various ways. Some would say that they are two different lengthy sermons that Jesus delivered in different places and at different times, but with similar thoughts and purposes, returning in each case to topics and phrases he regularly spoke about, and in each case also taking up different topics.  Others would say that the Gospel writers collected sayings and grouped them together into a "typical" or summary sermon, and each had access to different sayings and chose to use some identical and some different sayings.  Both sound pretty reasonable to me.)

Reflecting on Liturgy

It's not an insight unique to me that baptists have depended on their hymnals to learn theology and formalize at least some parts of their worship liturgy.  Having said this dozens of times, or maybe it is hundreds, it occurred to me during worship today to do some reflections on our liturgical texts.  Moreover, after my last post, an expositional look at some poetic texts, literature professor Jane Childress gave me high marks for an excellent set of reading notes on the poems.  Having again experienced the thrill of making an "A" on a paper, I'm encouraged to do a bit more expositional note-taking in this post.

The first text of interest comes from a hymn I once knew by heart during my youth in Southern Baptist churches of Texas, "Jesus Saves!"  It has been so long since I've sung it, however, that I had to open the hymnal and read the lyrics in order to keep up.  Although I made it fairly well through the first stanza, "We have heard the joyful sound...," I was a bit more stumped by "Waft it on the rolling tide...."  And probably because third stanzas were for some strange reason considered anathema when I was growing up--"Let's sing the first, second, and last stanzas"-- I was completely lost on "Sing above the battle cry...."  The final stanza, beginning with, "Give the winds a mighty voice," was completely familiar again.

But it was in the third stanza that the liturgy rose up to overtake me.  Halfway through, the following three lines of text built toward the struggling place in my faith.

Shout it brightly through the gloom,
When the heart for mercy craves;
Sing in triumph o’er the tomb.

They "snuck up on me" because of their third-stanza unfamiliarity.  On the other hand, they were lyrics like I have sung many times before, echoing sentiments I would consider basic to my faith formation.   First, I was caught by the word "gloom," which describes where I find myself so often in this season of life.  I am one of the millions and billions of people who have lost a beloved one, my darling Everly, and find making sense of my life hard in the wake of her death.  Gloom is a good word for that mood.  So that first line alerted me that the liturgy was addressing my existential situation.

The next line dug in deeper.  Yes, that is what my heart craves:  mercy.  The overwhelming pain that appears repeatedly each day, even if only for a few seconds most times, can wear me down.  I know my problems are not so vast as the many people who live among constant violence, who lack for food and shelter, whose water is poisoning them.  Their situations are more deserving of the term gloom, their need for mercy, including mercy from people like me who prosper, is greater.  So I know that to have had Everly in my life for so many years is cause for thanks and praise.  Yet I cannot make the gloom and craving for mercy go away, for to have loved and lost, though better than not to have loved, is still a difficult road to walk.

Then in full force, the liturgy drove home its intent with language that we learn so early in our Christian training: that Jesus has won victory over death, that we need not fear death, that even the dying thief can rejoice to hear, "This day you will be with me in Paradise."  At that point I found myself encased in the liturgical moment.  My hope in God is one that can strengthen me to shout in the gloom, even when I contemplate the grave where Everly's remains are laid.  This tomb, this earthly symbol of her life, well-lived, well-loved, is not a final defeat.  There, where we mark the dates of her life sojourn's beginning and end, we also acknowledge the triumph of knowing God who is the author of life, who is greater than death.  So even through the tears, the thickness in the chest, the lump and tightening of the throat, there is a song of triumph to sing.  She lives in peace, and we await a reunion.

Perhaps this liturgical moment took on such momentum because of another text from last week.  As Naomi, Lydia, and I drove across the Southland toward North Carolina, we spent a good part of one day celebrating Everly's and our own love of Kate Campbell's music.  One song I had not spent much time listening to before that day is "Sorrowfree."

On the banks of the Alabama,
Autumn falls into spring,
And a day is always longer than it seems.
White camellias, winter blooms--
When summer comes I will think of you.

There will be a shining river
There for you and there for me.
There will be a sweet forever.
There we will meet, and we will sing,
Glory! Hallelujah!s.
Golden bells will ring.
There all will be forgiven
In that land called "Sorrowfree."

There are three more stanzas of this song, but I think its impact on me is focused in this stanza and refrain.  As I've written recently, I have been planting and thinking about flowers.  We planted wildflowers on Everly's gravesite, and more wildflowers and iris bulbs at our house in Salado.  I think often of the germination, the establishment of roots, and the eventual blooming of these flowers.  They seem to function in my consciousness as a parallel material operation to the hidden work of grieving. 

Grief work has been studied and analyzed, but it remains somewhat mysterious.  For those of us who are in the midst of it, we don't really know how to predict or comprehend how it emerges from our depths to stir us or shake us.  Since each member of our family has our own idiosyncracies, we regularly find ourselves at different places in grieving.  What may seem to me a good moment for conversation may only make David or Lydia or Naomi want to retreat to solitude.  Grief work is at least as much subterranean as public and visible.  And that's like the seeds and bulbs are now, in the ground.  So I think I am hoping and wondering what they will do, in part as a way of hoping and wondering what is happening to me.  What will I be, what will I find myself doing, in Spring and Summer, when flowers may, or may not, bloom?  Thus my thoughts turn often to the potential for germination and root growth in the ground, where I cannot see it happening.  When summer comes, I will think of you.

The refrain of Kate's song goes directly into my heart, again as a way of rehearsing what I have been taught from earliest faith.  I have preached about the River of Life, and received great appreciation for those words and testaments of hope.  I have known the stories, and they have formed me.  But now, I find myself fully embedded in this part of the narrative.  That river, along which strong trees grow, bearing leaves for the healing of the nations, is a river where I long to stand together with Everly.  It is a river for the nations, and it is for her and for me.  And this pain of separation will one day be gone in a sweet forever.

That hope is why I posted on Facebook last week that I was practicing my "Glory! Hallelujah!" so that when I get the chance I can sing it with Everly with all the gusto in me.  She will probably roll her eyes at my singing so loud.  I will enjoy seeing that again.  Naomi probably rolled her eyes a few times today with all the shouting "Glory!" that I was doing in church.  (By the way, trying to figure out how to punctuate Kate's line about singing glory hallelujahs remains a real puzzle to me--I settled on the weird placement of the plural s after an exclamation point.)

Dr. Turner preached from Ephesians 3:14-21 today, focusing on prayer for one another's strength, that we would be upheld by sharing our lives in the pattern of shared love and dance of the Trinity.  He took an aside at one point to say something very important, something to which Everly would have offered a loud "Amen!"  He said that we have to stop this thing of telling people to smile and be happy.  He said that the amount of smiling a person does may have nothing to do with being Christian.  There are hard times, struggles, and tribulations that we face that are not times for smiling.  In those times, we don't need knee-jerk reminders that things will get better.  We don't need to be chastised and exhorted to "cheer up."  We need to pray one another's strength in the Lord.  There are seasons for weeping, for seriousness, for facing the real effects of the rulers, authorities, powers, and principalities.  Hope does not dissipate or disappear in serious and solemn and challenging times.  And smiles will return in due season.  But it is no one's job to enforce smiling at church.

Finally, I want to mention another bit of our liturgy from a gospel anthem, "Order My Steps."  A line that has often been for me a "throw away" or "space holding" line took center stage as I listened and sang along.  In the refrain, the song says, "The world is ever-changing/But You are still the same."  The first part, that the world is ever-changing, had always been for me a simple acknowledgement of the flux, the flow, the vicissitudes, the emergent, the passage and fruition of the world.  But in this liturgical performance it spoke to the vast change in my life that losing Everly has been.  Yes, there have been many changes.  I have lived in Texas, California, North Carolina, and now in two states at once.  I was a child, and later I became a husband and father.  I was a novice, and I became Rev. Dr. 

There have been many changes, and up to now they seemed to drive onward toward a destiny I had glimpsed.  But this change was not in the plans.  This change was unthought, undesired, unimagined.  This change shook the foundations.  Can it be true that when the foundations are shaken, God remains faithful?  Such is the claim of today's liturgy.  The God who has ordered my steps can continue to do so.  I don't mean God planned Everly's death from cancer.  That is the absurd intrusion on the path of destiny, the as-yet-unfulfilled promise of welfare and not calamity, of a future and a hope.  But God held us through that struggle, guided our feet while we ran that race.  And today I reached once more for the hope that God will continue to order my steps.

Stumbling on Holy Ground

On a day of many tears, a day in which I found it hard to leave my bed, a day when time passed ploddingly, two friends shared poems to greet me as I retired for rest and respite.

Energy to greet the day was slow to come.  I awoke at a reasonable hour, but listening to the rain beat on the roof and thinking of the tasks I ought to get started on, I stayed put through the morning.  Apparently it was a condition that had struck the whole household, for I ventured forth to find Mom and Dad eating a very late brunch of eggs and bacon.  We slowly stirred ourselves toward the day.  Mom made her project the addressing and stuffing of Christmas letters to friends and family.  She put Dad to writing personal notes on some of the letters.  I decided to make my task keeping Mom settled rather than restless as she deals with the slow healing of her foot.

Nevertheless, I was grappling with restlessness, too.  Today, four days from Christmas Day, a season that for thirty-three years I have spent with Everly, and for all the years since their births, with three children, I am spending with none of them.  I'm not begrudging the children's absence, having agreed that they should do what they are doing.  Still, the absence of all four is palpable.  So I bugged the kids to text me a report on their days, which they lovingly and faithfully did, warming my heart.

I made a couple of laps, at different times of day, walking around in the yard, inspecting the results of the rain that is watering my seeds and bulbs.  The mail came.  It included a Christmas card from the Relay for Life organization that raises money for cancer research.  Last April, Naomi led the organizing of a Relay for Life Team, and our whole family, along with Ruth and Emily, walked, danced, and sat vigil for most of the evening, with a few staying the entire night, raising lots of money and supporting Everly in the fight against cancer.  Of course, the organization did not know of Everly's death, and yet opening the card addressed to her, a card intended to offer her encouragement in her struggle, was tough to bear.  It follows on a couple of Christmas cards from friends, arriving at the end of the week addressed to Mike and Everly, because they had not heard the news of her death.  Just the thought of telling them the news was an emotional challenge.

So it was a moping kind of day.  I got up with some energy and made a tasty and nutritious dinner which we all enjoyed.  Then it was back to biding time with the television on.  So when I found these poems this evening, they surprised me by casting a new perspective on the day.  I found new thoughts arising to frame the season.  Philip Thompson posted a poem by W.H. Auden.

If the muscle can feel repugnance, there is still a false move to be made;
If the mind can imagine tomorrow, there is still a defeat to remember;
As long as the self can say "I," it is impossible not to rebel;
As long as there is an accidental virtue, there is a necessary vice:
And the garden cannot exist, the miracle cannot occur.

For the garden is the only place there is, but you will not find it
Until you have looked for it everywhere and found nowhere that is not a desert;
The miracle is the only thing that happens, but to you it will not be apparent,
Until all events have been studied and nothing happens that you cannot explain;
And life is the destiny you are bound to refuse until you have consented to die.

Therefore, see without looking, hear without listening, breathe without asking:
The Inevitable is what will seem to happen to you purely by chance;
The Real is what will strike you as really absurd;
Unless you are certain you are dreaming, it is certainly a dream of your own;
Unless you exclaim -- "There must be some mistake" -- you must be mistaken.

W.H. Auden, For the Time Being

I found myself in that looking everywhere for the garden and finding only desert, yet clinging to the assurance that "the garden is the only place there is."  Studying the events of a life, the fragments remembered, the wishing for what was--all these dovetail into not being able to imagine tomorrow.  To what have I consented?  Certainly not her death and not today as destiny!  That I might live without her is of all things most absurd, a dream, one from which I cannot escape, feeling it must be mistaken.  And why not rebel, doubting that the garden can exist? 

It was a day of being between things, when nothing seemed quite present:  living as though it were 39 years ago, my sister having moved away from our household, and Mom, Dad, and I sharing a house.  A dream of lost time, of a reversal, of passage that dissolves at the edge of being, of a memory banging away at that edge, more real than what is seen, yet itself invisible. 

Well, so much for gobbledygook language that comes of trying to analyze my inwardness.  Auden had much more to say here than what I have drawn out of it.  He speaks of alienation of the human condition from many angles.  I'll stop there for now.  Thanks to Philip Thompson for posting the poem.

The disorientation that is at the heart of Auden's poem is a theme of the other verse, by Wendell Berry, shared by LeDayne Polaski.

Remembering that it happened once,
We cannot turn away the thought,
As we go out, cold, to our barns
Toward the long night’s end, that we
Ourselves are living in the world
It happened in when it first happened,
That we ourselves, opening a stall
(A latch thrown open countless times
Before), might find them breathing there,
Foreknown: the Child bedded in straw,
The mother kneeling over Him,
The husband standing in belief
He scarcely can believe, in light
That lights them from no source we see,
An April morning’s light, the air
Around them joyful as a choir.
We stand with one hand on the door,
Looking into another world
That is this world, the pale daylight
Coming just as before, our chores
To do, the cattle all awake,
Our own frozen breath hanging
In front of us; and we are here
As we have never been before,
Sighted as not before, our place
Holy, although we knew it not.

It is a Christmas poem, focused on Christmas eve's birth of Jesus in a barn.  Berry frames it as a working farmer on a working farm, making a regular trek to check out something in the barn.  As he sees the story unfold in Luke 2, he realizes that it could have been his barn.  He could have had the same surprise as the shepherds, finding the Holy Family where no one would expect, in an animal stall.  Looking into another world, yet this same world.  Seeing in a brand new way, challenged by the moment even to breathe, he, and now we, stand on holy ground that we thought until now was just plain ground.

What a realization, a decentering and recentering, a disorientation and reorientation, a demoralization and remoralization!  Seeing what I have seen over and over again, but seeing something completely new in it.  What a gift to be able to see that in my own old barn!  What a gift to see it in my house, in my yard, on my street, in my beaten-down 55-year-old body, my cataract-growing eyes!

And what it brought to mind was the holiness of Everly's last morning.  On July 18, I awoke to a day that I knew must come, but did not want to come.  I started out to try and keep the routines going as they had been.  Eventually, I sat beside the bed and watched as Everly persevered a holy struggle.  She clung to her life, breathing heavily and rapidly, each rhythm of oxygen and carbon dioxide a word of love for her children, for her loved ones, for me.  She lay on the bed, eyes closed, seeing what was, and perhaps what was to be, her thoughts and feelings somewhere between holding on to us and being set free.  She knew, and she had told us many times, it was time to go.  She was ready.  And now, no longer able to speak, only to breathe, to suffer a beating heart full of love, she was being transformed from one glory to a greater degree of glory.

It was the same room as every day before.  The guest bedroom in Salado that had become our interim home, our very home.  Everly's things arrayed in all their organizational glory surrounded us.  A rented hospital bed and recliner arranged for her comfort were the prominent fixtures.  I have walked into this same room hundreds or thousands of times.  Wearing clothes I wear every week, seeing clocks showing time as they do every day, touching objects as I do at any time, I was with Everly in the room.

And on that day it was holy ground.

So today, reading Wendell Berry, I realize that I "cannot turn away the thought . . . that we / Ourselves are living in the world / It happened in when it first happened."  Shepherds stumbled on a baby in a manger in a stable.  Berry had second sight one late night in his barn.  I get it, too.  It was "a night like any other night," and Darrell Adams's poem now comes to mind.

A night like any other night,

The census time at hand,

A weary couple, a child near born,

A place called Bethlehem,

A wooden stable where cattle sleep,

A bed of straw for the lamb…

Refrain:

Sing hush-a-bye loo-low-loo-low-lan.

Sing hush-a-bye loo-low-loo.

Sing hush-a-bye loo-low-loo-low-lan.

Sing hush-a-bye loo-low-loo.

A time like any other time,

The rulers called it peace.

A subject nation groaning for

Someone to set them free,

A leader, a soldier, a mighty king--

A star or a stable they see.

Refrain

A child like any other child

Of poor and humble birth,

Lowly shepherds see where the great are blind:

The humble savior’s worth.

May we see with their eyes this low-born babe,

A sign of peace to earth.

Refrain

A night like any other night,

But a hush is on the land.

A weary couple, a child just born,

A place called Bethlehem,

A wooden stable where cattle sleep,

A bed of straw for the lamb…

Refrain

A night in which the unexpected lurks amid the expected, when glory astounds the humble while the rulers and teachers can't see "light / That lights them from no source we see," was a night like any other.  Some lady had a baby in a barn.  Heaven and earth met in a cow stall.  Dirt, straw, manure--all that seared-bleared-smeared-smudged-smelly place is charged with God's grandeur.  It's holy ground.

And by the analogy of being, on a street corner in Salado, in a bedroom where a family gathered, earth and heaven met.  Everly held our hands and her Faithful Friend's hand.  An old piece of carpet, a mechanical bed, cotton sheets--all these jammed-in, jumbled, familiar artifacts of our lives became holy ground.  And if we can see like shepherds, with gratitude for the grace of God that in Everly showed forth in all its glory, we can grasp that on that day we glimpsed two worlds, finding that our own place was also holy, "although we knew it not."  And continuing with Gerard Manley Hopkins, our doubled vision, our holy-in-ordinary day, invaded that room

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Advent, Christmas, and Everly

Yesterday, December 18, was one week until Christmas Day, and five months since Everly breathed her last, calm breath.  David started the day by getting on the road to NC.  His wonderful friend Lila will be married this week in NC.  I am praying she can have even more than the 33 years of partnership that Everly and I shared. 

Hugh Delle woke up yesterday with discomfort and swelling in her toe.  She contacted her doctors, and before mid-afternoon she had been in two clinics. By noon one doctor had her taking antibiotics, and by 4 pm she had had another surgery to remove the tips of two toes, hoping to head off another long bout of struggling with infection.  Many of you remember her battles in the first part of 2013 fighting infection in her foot.  The prescribed antibiotics ultimately put her into severe danger and hospitalization in June and July, delaying her return from NC at the time of Everly's death.  So with close medical supervision, we are reevaluating our Broadway family Christmas plans, hoping there will be a turnaround that could let her travel to see Jerene and Jim after Christmas Day.

Lydia and I drove to Waco for the Baylor Basketball doubleheader yesterday.  Everly got our family going to Baylor women's basketball games, buying season tickets last year, that she and I mostly used.  Lydia, of course, attended with her student ID.  This year, without Brittney Griner, the playing style is different, and the attendance is down.  The kids have not been as enthusiastic about attending.  David, Naomi, Lydia, and I all attended one game together early in the season, but the prominent of absence of Everly made it hard for all of us. 

Most games have been on weeknights, so the Austin to Waco drive is a bit much before work or classes.  And Lydia's work load was so intense this semester, with all kinds of group projects and lab activities plus business and social enterprise work that she often could not get away. They also are probably a bit tentative because of missing their mom.  By the way, both Baylor teams won yesterday, in two close games.

As people keep telling me, we all grieve differently. I've attended all the games I could so far, in part because it keeps me doing something that I used to do with Everly.  She loved going to Baylor and watching the women's team play, as do I.  With attendance so low this year, I have not actually sat in my assigned seats yet.  I usually find friends like Katie Cook, Sharon Rollins, or Barry Harvey to sit with.  The drive, through the perpetual I-35 NAFTA Highway construction zone, is tedious, but it keeps me close to her.

That was yesterday.  As Christmas draws closer, we are feeling our way forward, wondering how things will be.  We have planned to spend time on Christmas Day with the Estes family in Austin.  David, who has Lila's wedding and another wedding in Philadelphia later, has to miss that family gathering.  But we all agreed he needs to be with Lila on this special day. 

After Christmas, we will drive together to Black Mountain, NC, to see Jerene and Jim.  David will join us there.  WD and HD are expecting to go, although I have my doubts at this point.  She will have several doctor visits between now and Christmas, so I hope we can make the best decision.  I know Mom will be very sad if she has to stay in Texas, but no one wants hospitalization in Asheville again.

After some time with the Broadways in Black Mountain, our four Broadways will take a couple days retreat to a mountain cabin for some family time.  Several people said we should plan something completely different as part of this first Christmas season, so that is what we came up with.  We'll take some board games, swimsuits for getting in the hot tub, books for reading, maybe a couple of movies, and boots to hike if it's not too cold.  It should be a good time for just comfortably moving into and out of conversations about Everly while being able to support one another.  That's what we are hoping. 

Naomi helped us get the Christmas season started by buying a Groupon to take the four of us to dinner at a fancy fondue restaurant called The Melting Pot.  Without the 50% discount, probably none of us would ever have gone there.  Fondue during the holidays has been a Broadway family tradition, but we've always done it at home. 

The thing about fondue is that it takes time for cooking each bite, so there is plenty of time for visiting, as compared to the usual rushed meal times of day to day.  We had a great time just talking and laughing and thinking about our lives together.  After it was over, I had to agree with Lydia's comment as the two of us walked toward the restaurant, "Naomi's doing the Mommy job and getting us organized to be together."  Each of the kids has wonderful characteristics passed to them by their mother.

Everly was our big-time Christmas planner.  She arranged everyone's schedules.  She went out with the kids to help them shop and to find the things they needed or wanted for Christmas.  She unpacked and repacked the ornaments for the tree.  She made sure all the gifts were in place with bows on them.  She enjoyed and promoted the big events of gift-giving and opening.  She instructed me on what to cook.  She took care of lots of the cleanup.

This year Hugh Delle was not feeling up to setting up a Christmas tree, especially since we will be gone during the Christmas season.  Lydia put one up in her apartment in Waco.  Hugh Delle had me help her get out wreaths and some other Christmas decorations which she has put around the house. 

It's a different sort of Christmas without Everly in charge.  We decided to tone down the Christmas gift buying this year.  But that turned out to be harder for me than I expected.  I felt an inner drive to try to live up to, at least in some way, Everly's caring gift-giving to our children.  My gifts will probably seem less personal, more practical, and more oddball than hers.  But at last count I had hit double digits in the number of packages I had for each of the kids.  Oh, well, I thought I would cut back.  Naomi has been loving the chance, with her first job providing a real paycheck, to buy gifts this year.  Overall, we're feeling our way into a new era.

Advent, as a season of waiting, is different from last year for us.  Last year we were waiting to see how progress was coming with a new chemotherapy plan.  It turned out, by February, that it had not worked well for Everly.  But we had been very hopeful in December, when reports said that one last persistent tumor might be reduced to the point of clearing out all of the visible cancer from her liver.

This year we wait in part for the celebratory season to pass.  We wait to see if we can make it through.  We wait to share some very painful joys of enacting our traditions with Everly's absence. 

I think it might be like what some have said about the long silent periods in the history of Israel.  The trajectory of life and nationhood they had anticipated was interrupted and took a very different turn.  So they waited to see what might come next.  Sometimes they held onto the faith that God's mercies would continue to be new every morning and that springs might come forth in the desert.  Other times they felt that God had lost interest in them and cared little whether they were righteous or unrighteous.  I suspect other times they just went through motions and felt numb, only to be surprised by pains on some days and joys on others.  I think that's how we are waiting this year.  What will the coming of the Christ Child mean?

Everly had a certificate describing the meaning of her name, a gift that someone had given her.  "Everly" as a first name was a kind of "coined" name.  But its first three letters, Eve, is a very ancient name.  The certificate said it means "full of life."  It can also mean "mother of life," or simply "living one."  Whether or not her parents had ever thought through those historical meanings for her name, it certainly came to be true of her.  She was the life of the party.  She was the life in our partnership.  And she was the mother of life in our family.  So this Advent, we wait for that life to rise in us, the seeds she planted and nurtured.

I planted more wildflowers today, in 72 degree weather at our Chisholm Trail home:  purple shamrock oxalis, Tahoka daisies, and three types of coreopsis--dwarf red plains, golden wave, and plains.  Lydia helped me plant 100 tall Dutch iris bulbs, mostly purple with a few yellows mixed in.  A couple of days ago I put out Red Drummond Phlox. 

On our honeymoon, on a couple of days we drove out around Caddo Lake and Lake o' the Pines in northeast Texas to look at wildflowers.  I had a new guidebook on wildflowers of Texas, so we stopped now and then for me to get out and try to identify something.  I remember wearing an orange shirt that summery day.  I must have looked like the Great Wildflower of Destiny to the bees, and they decided to gather around me to get a taste.  So we had to quit getting out of the car. 

Our two temperaments were obvious on that day.  Everly enjoys flowers and fresh air, but she quickly draws the line when she starts feeling uncomfortable, hot, sweaty, itchy, etc.  My single-tracked mind was pulling me toward exhaustive knowledge of wildflowers on that day.  Everly lost enthusiasm for the project sooner than I did, with the pollen, the hot sun, and the bugs.  Thanks to the bees, we got on the same page pretty quickly.  That would be one of the earliest memories of our marriage.

Here we are today waiting. Hugh Delle is struggling with pain and medications, waiting to get better.  David is driving the long trek to Durham, waiting to reunite with friends.  Lila is awaiting a ceremony to mark off a new path and new hopes.  Lydia has gone to stay with Naomi as they wait for the intensity of the season to begin.  I could not post this journal entry for four hours while we waited for a power outage to end and restore our online access. 

And now bulbs and seeds are in the ground, both at the cemetery and in our yard on Chisholm Trail.  The irises and wildflowers are another sign of waiting, seeds waiting to grow, bulbs waiting to shoot forth, colors and life that will emerge in spring and summer to remind us of our very own Mother of Life who will never leave us.

Facing My Shortcomings

I had a conversation with my son earlier this week.  He was commenting about preparing for guests in his apartment, and somewhat amused that he was trying to make sure that they did not make fun of his housekeeping after they leave.  He said that he was trying to think about what people who visit other people might deem to be important.

As is often the case with my children, I take something they say to me and begin to associate it with various theoretical understandings of ethics or theology or history or whatever pops into my mind.  This is often accepted with interest if I don't push it too far.  What I usually do, however, is drone on too long until they are wishing they had never started the conversation.  I did that again, comparing the development of conscience, that shared (con-) knowledge (science) that is held in communities, growing out of the way we come to understand and internalize what others believe is important.  Blah blah blah blah blabitty blah blah.

Yet I have had to relive that conversation over and over again as the week had dragged on.  It is grading week.  I am the worst of grading procrastinators.  And each day as I have struggled to get on with my duty, I have realized that getting my work done has depended to a great deal on having Everly in my life.  I know I have to be honest and face her if I am profligate.  This is the first grading period I have had since she died.  And the tendency toward being what Aristotle called the "weak-willed" person is stronger than ever.  Here and now, facing my shortcomings, I am reminded again of how Everly made me stronger than I am alone.