Wendell Berry's Inquiries into Whiteness and It's Inherent Wounds

I'm going to analyze some thoughts from Wendell Berry's reflections on race.  It is a complicated book, and as he admits, not finally very satisfying to him or to the reader.  But before I get started, I want to comment on some of the impetus that led me to pull out the book and finish it.  I had started reading it over a decade ago, but put it away after a few sittings because the framing of the issues was too painful for me.  But with many years passed, I have worked through some of those hard questions and realities.  I found myself this time more ready to push through his process.  But first, why did I pick it up?

A few days ago I was thinking through some of the burdens that have weighed on me in my middle adult years.  Some of them go back to a church crisis when my family and other white people entered into conflict over the relevance of race for congregational life, and particularly whether it was appropriate for a traditionally all-white church to assume, even to prefer, that blacks not be part of their church if their presence means changes in the programs, worship, and habits of the congregation.  Some other burdens go back to workplace struggles and experiences of betrayal as colleagues set their faces against one another.  I did not come out of any of these experiences unscathed.  And I don't mean to say that I was a passive recipient of the conflicts.  I was in the middle of them, and certainly I deserve some blame for the way that things went.

It occurred to me that in my more recent struggle of grief, I have been very public and open about the wounds I have suffered through the illness, death, and loss of Everly.  My friend Willie Jennings, who listened and walked beside me in all of these struggles, has often urged me to write the story of my church's conflict over race.  It was two decades ago now.  I have told a version of the story in face-to-face gatherings, leaving out names to avoid demonizing people.  Sometimes, after this many years, I can tell the story without breaking down in tears, but not always. 

At Willie's insistence, I have tried a couple of times to sit down and write about it.  But I get bogged down in minute details or I get anxious about coming across as self-congratulatory while condemning others.  The anger and the disappointment remain, and there lingers also a level of confusion in those emotions and details that make it hard to tell a story I can believe in.  By comparison to my pain of living without Everly, these wounds remain hidden.  To those who know me, fragments of these watershed events exist in their image of who I am.  But much of it they would have little reason to know.

The sideways movements of thought are unpredictable, and that thought of my hidden wounds brought a mental leap to the title of a book by Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound.  It is a pair of essays, written approximately two decades apart, analyzing his personal story of growing up in white supremacist America (not the official Klan type, but the generic US white folk type).  He brings his memories of relationships into dialogue with poetry and other literature, looking for angles from which to gain greater insight into the significance of race in US culture.  He is intentionally trying to think outside the frames in which race is conventionally analyzed. 

Would any of his reflections on the hiddenness of the wound of white supremacy and black slavery breed insight into my own hidden wounds, interlinked as they are with race?  I'm not sure that I got a good answer to that question, but let's try to parse out what he believes the hidden wound or wounds to be.  I say wounds because it is an exploratory book.  By its nature, it arrives at partial conclusions, then turns another angle on the problem to see what has been missed or what else might appear.  Ultimately, by taking up the topic again after two decades, he again puts himself in the position of reframing the issues, renaming the wound:

once you begin to awaken to the realities of what you know, you are subject to staggering recognitions of your complicity in history and in the events of your own life. The truth keeps leaping on you from behind (6).

Berry initially focuses on the contrast between the myth of benevolence, which sees whites as looking out for their inferiors (the blacks), and the violence inherent in slavery.  He says that this violence might remain hidden from the believers of the myth most of the time.  But their complicity in the violence and dehumanization of slavery became clear if they ever came to sell or buy a slave.  This commercialization of a human being rips away the veil and shows the slaveholder for what she or he is--a purveyor in flesh, a user of persons, a profiteer on misery.  To sell a slave was to allow some other owner, perhaps one who does not believe the myth of benevolence, to do whatever he will with that person.  It was to hand the slave over to hell.  There could be no more blissful denial of the violence.


So one angle on the hidden wound goes back to the harm done to slaveowners' conscience as they came to face, and perhaps to adjust, to their willing terrorizing of blacks simply because of their racialized identity.  Here, perhaps, he foreshadows a theme taken up by contemporary black studies scholar Anthony Pinn.  In Terror and Triumph, Pinn argues that the quintessential moment of terror in the slave system was the auction block.  There, naked, displayed, handled, on the market for use and disposal by one's enemies, the slave faces the blank abyss of terror.  Pinn picks up themes here shared with existential philosophy, and follows them to similar conclusions about the necessity of building anthropocentric and humane systems of meaning to ward off and rise to the challenge of this terror of existence. 

So from the other side of the market exchange, Berry also finds the slave market, the auction block, as the quintessential signifier of the wound, a wound that remains and still fails to be healed.  He analyzes a certain type of literature which seeks to mask the horrors of slavery by side-stepping them, almost ignoring them, in order to elevate the heroic nature of Southern patriotism on the model of medieval chivalry and knightly virtue.  There are many strategies by which to keep the wounds hidden, and Berry is convinced that they do harm rather than heal.

I have already said enough, I think, to make clear the profound moral discomfort potential in a society ostensibly Christian and democratic and genteel, but based upon the institutionalized violence of slavery (14).

Berry links the hidden wound of slavery to the philosophical/political/social/theological/cultural conviction of the split between mind and body.  Of course, contemporary philosophy is filled with arguments about the origin of this dogma of modernity, with various figures, historical precedents, and movements contributing to it.  Mind-body dualism becomes a critical move of conscience, according to Berry, for slaveowners who profess to be Christian and to believe in democracy:

consider the moral predicament of the master who sat in church with his slaves, thus attesting his belief in the immortality of the souls of people whose bodies he owned and used. He thus placed his body, if not his mind, at the very crux of the deepest contradiction of his life. How could he presume to own the body of a man whose soul he considered as worthy of salvation as his own? To keep this question from articulating itself in his thoughts and demanding an answer, he had to perfect an empty space in his mind, a silence, between heavenly concerns and earthly concerns, between body and spirit (15-16).

Here in this empty space Berry locates the wound.  It is a wound he finds to be born from the contradictions of a slaveholding society.

Yet their wound from the era of slavery is not fully descriptive or explanatory of the continuing hidden wound of a culture.  It is generative of the wound that continues, but it does not encompass all that the wound has become in our times.  This wound of personal conscience, manifest and multiplied across congregations and a nation, exists as a structural feature of culture.  It takes form and gains momentum, reshaping Christianity, democracy, morality, law, and whatever aspects of society and culture in which its implications spin out to their conclusions.

If there is such a duality of mind and body, it is more than an inward analysis of the white man, a theory of human nature applied to each atomistic person.  Ultimately, Berry says that whiteness comes to be identified with mind or spirit.  And by dyadic reasoning, blacks are the body of society.  Mind rules over body, rises above body.  Body serves mind, does the hard, necessary work, so that mind can flourish.

Such a dualistic structuring of culture leads to another way of understanding the hidden wound.  Whiteness separates itself from the material necessities of existence.  Thus, even though in the nineteenth century, almost all people were engaged in farming, it was coming to be looked upon as n----- work, work to be avoided by the people at the top.  White culture shifts its understanding of a good life toward monetary success, measured by competition to have the most, be the richest with the best things, the greatest status.  The dirty, sweaty, exhausting side of farming life can't be good life.  This judgment carries over to all hard and dirty work, from cleaning and scrubbing to disposal of garbage to any necessary but difficult labor.

Berry says that this transition was underway during his formative years (65ff).  As a child, his generation was groomed to leave the farm in order to achieve and succeed.  His grandfather still had some memory of the goodness of work on a farm, of knowing the land, of observing each plant, insect, bird, and animal. 

He kept the farmer’s passion that sees beyond the market values into the intricacy and beauty of the lives of things, and that hungers to preserve and enrich the land. To him crops and animals were not only to be sold, but to be studied, understood, admired for their own sakes (70-71).

But probably better than his grandfather, their hired black farm worker Nick knew that good came from provision, and provision came from daily hard work.  As a boy, Wendell found himself linked to Nick, and to an older black woman, Aunt Georgie, in ways that gave him a glimpse of a different world in which success was not the rat race.  It was a view of reality that did not require the denial of dependence upon the earth.

As for this world, there were two heavy facts that Nick accepted and lived with: life is hard, full of work and pain and weariness, and at the end of it a man has got to go farther than he can imagine from any place he knows. And yet within the confines of those acknowledged facts, he was a man rich in pleasures. They were not large pleasures, they cost little or nothing, often they could not be anticipated, and yet they surrounded him; they were possible at almost any time, or at odd times, or at off times. They were pleasures to which a man had to be acutely and intricately attentive, or he could not have them at all. There were the elemental pleasures of eating and drinking and resting, of being dry while it is raining, of getting dry after getting wet, of getting warm again after getting cold, of cooling off after getting hot. There was pleasure to be taken in good work animals, as long as you remembered the bother and irritation of using the other kind. There was pleasure in the appetites and in the well-being of good animals. There was pleasure in quitting work. There were certain pleasures in the work itself. There was pleasure in hunting and in going to town, and in visiting and in having company. There was pleasure in observing and remembering the behavior of things, and in telling about it. There was pleasure in knowing where a fox lived, and in planning to run it, and in running it. And as I have already made clear, Nick knew how to use his mind for pleasure; he remembered and thought and pondered and imagined. He was a master of what William Carlos Williams called the customs of necessity (72-74).

Again, the wound of racism on whiteness takes a more complex form.  Unlike the standard frame of saying that racism is simplistically white oppression and black misery, Berry believes that he finds in the memories of Nick and Aunt Georgie another account of reality.  Yes, they suffered from racial oppression.  They were denied opportunities.  They lacked what others had capacity to acquire.  None of their misery or oppressions should be denied or diminished.

They also were part of a community of people who had found a path to goodness in life that was linked to their closeness to the soil and to the land.  They understood the way that life is not fully under our personal control.  They recognized that they had the skills and desire to make a life no matter what others might hatefully seek to deny to them.

Whites, separated from the land, from the knowledge that comes from living with the land, from doing hard work and producing basic necessities, lost all sense of their dependence.  They were the captains of their fate, the shapers of their destinies.  Yet they had forgotten and abandoned the basic knowledge of how to live in the world, demanding that others deemed less valuable provide for them.  Whites have, by Berry's judgment, lost key elements of their humanity by creating for themselves an artificial environment of monetary transactions and technologies of power, a mechanized world which devalues people and celebrates accumulation.  Berry describes here numerous sociological insights one might find in Anthony Giddens's account of the modern nation-state.

That I have thought to ponder at such length over the lives and the influence of two black people is due largely to my growing sense that, in the effort to live meaningfully and decently in America, a white man simply cannot learn all that he needs to know from other American white men. That is because the white man’s experience of this continent has so far been incomplete, partly, perhaps mostly, because he has assigned certain critical aspects of the American experience to people he has considered his racial or social inferiors (77-78).

This division of people takes theological form through the doctrine of salvation.  As J. Kameron Carter has recently demonstrated, a certain kind of soteriology emerges as Christianity accommodates itself to white supremacy.  It is a version of Gnosticism, by which salvation becomes an elevation into the spiritual and intellectual being of whiteness, and the bodily aspects of humanity become relegated to the lower races, be they Jews, blacks, or others.  Scot McKnight has called the Evangelical theological version of this turn "the soterian gospel."  Berry points toward this problem as well, describing the turn to "believing" as the essence of salvation, by which the churches set aside the transformation of a whole person and focus on the mind.

Far from curing the wound of racism, the white man’s Christianity has been its soothing bandage—a bandage masquerading as Sunday clothes, for the wearing of which one expects a certain moral credit (18-19).

Having restructured social goods around abstractions of success, stocks, bureaucracies, paper empires, bank accounts, and such, salvation would seem to be to take joy in not being tied to such material concerns as soil, crops, care of animals, rain and sunshine, drought and flood, famine and plenty.  The wound remains hidden and the wounded do not even know what they have lost.  Not caring whose lesser bodies do the hard work, the model of the executive moves production from this town to a far country, replaces human workers with machines, and produces thousands upon millions of items for consumption without ever having to put hands to the task of making anything.  The achievement comes at the cost of a great, gaping emptiness, a wound that is hidden, that separates people from the beauty, the power, the joy of creation and knowing our place in it.

Berry's agrarian themes emerge as an essential aspect of his arguments.  He draws upon literary works which bring a powerful and distant successful person into relationship with the peasant, the worker, the lowly person.  In all of these works by Thoreau, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Homer, Mark Twain, and Dostoevsky, he examines the way that the person of elevated class gains insight into goodness and joy through conversation, sharing meals, and living alongside those who are deemed inferior.

Trying to understand whiteness from the inside, one faces the challenges and limitations of one's own perspective and formation.  Berry acknowledges that blacks generally know "harsher truths about the whites than the whites have ever admitted to themselves--and the whites know it" (92).  Thus he knows it is dangerous and questionable for him to try to interpret his memories of the life of Nick as a key to understanding what is lost to whites through their assumptions of whiteness (75).

This confession, at the heart of his methodology for the first essay, points toward what emerges as a key idea in his overall analysis.  That is, in the language of Willie Jennings, the appearance of a racialized world and the rise of white supremacy represents a fundamental "disordering of desire" in humanity.  Misdirected, distorted, perverted desire comes to be accepted as the natural desire of human existence.  As Berry often states, the wound is in part the inability to recognize our common humanity.  Jennings says that we have deserted, even lost, the God-given desire to know one another in the beauty of all our differences.  This does not go away simply by acknowledging that blacks and whites can be equals.  The structures of culture and society, that have formed as scar tissue around the hidden wound of white supremacy and black slavery, reach much farther. 

It remains that the understanding of reality and of success means to have the most stuff, to live in abstract relation to the land, and to take care of the hard work and necessities of life by "sending a n-----" to do it (106-07).  Whether it is killing in war, cleaning up trash, monitoring machines that produce, or simply dispossessing the unnecessary people and putting them aside to waste away, the class/race divisions still demand that those at the top "send a n-----" to do it.

These kinds of divisions undermine the possibility of recovering the kind of joy and love intended for human social existence.  They still rank people by false measures and ignore the common need for food, clean air, worthwhile work, shelter, and friendship.  This wound also means that the land and its intricate web of life, unknown to the ones who are at the top and making the decisions that move the lesser beings around the chessboard, is being used up, abused, and thrown away. 

The human link to place, to soil, to everyday needs, to hard work, has been broken.  All momentum is away from those things, which are the very things that give life.  Desiring to be separate from those with whom we are made to share the bounty of creation, and desiring to be unimpeded by the limits of sustaining the land on which we thrive--this is the disordering of desire.  And the wound will not be healed until we learn to desire to know and love one another as persons, and to know our land, our home, and rejoice in its intricate beauty and power to provide for us.

So through several transformations, the inquiry into the nature of the hidden wound of slavery, of white supremacy, entails a longer narrative linked to modernity, to colonialism, to European world domination, to the destruction of the natural world, and to the alienation from creation in humanity, in the land, and in all other existing things.  Berry's inquisitive journey sheds valuable light on the legacy of racism and its continued emanations and productions, the ongoing woundedness that wounds the world.

As for the relevance of the book to my recognition of "hidden wounds" in my history, there certainly are some insights for me to draw from Berry's work in these essays.  First, I have not always recognized the expansive character of the construction of white supremacy that through its creation of an inferior blackness extends to the entirety of creation.  Willie Jennings's work on colonialism in Peru also makes this sort of argument, and the links between race and species extinction and environmental degradation are demonstrable.  My own occupational and self-imposed confinement to an abstracted world shows me to be swept along by this torrent.  Remembering my past fascination and engagement with the details of the world around me, my previous participation in the hard labor of daily existence, pulls me toward a different way of organizing my days.  That's a bigger set of issues that I will not pretend to quickly solve in a paragraph.

Second, observing the complicated and adventurous intellectual work Berry did in these essays speaks to me about the intricacy of the task before me as I seek to understand, describe, and find healing for wounds I have allowed to remain hidden from myself and the world.  The road of progress is itself difficult to find.  It may depend on memories, previously considered irrelevant and even trivial, that must be brought to the foreground and examined in new light.  It may require study of comparable narratives through which to shed light on my own story.  It demands willingness to think outside of the standard ways of telling the past, of my way vs. your way, of simplistic dyads, of comfortable cover stories.  And it probably only happens as I risk to tell and retell the stories in which I live.

Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church Sesquicentennial

Our church in Durham is celebrating its Sesquicentennial this Sunday.  Between the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War, former slaves, some at least from the Stagville Plantation, organized a congregation in the boundary area of Durham County and Granville County.  When in 1933 their land was appropriated to build a military base, Camp Butner, these families moved south into Durham County, taking their congregation and their church building with them.

Some settled in the Mill Grove community, north of the main city but still in the central part of the county where the Eno River flows past Roxboro Road and Old Oxford Highway.  Many continued sharecropping and farming.  Some developed commerce in trades such as home construction and furniture making and repair.  Ultimately descendents of these settlers struggled for education and advancement, scattered to all parts of the county and beyond, and they have influenced this region in many ways.  I'm proud to be adopted into their family.  Here is a write-up from the local paper.

MOUNT LEVEL MISSIONARY BAPTIST CHURCH TURNS 150
April 30, 2014
Dawn Baumgartner Vaughn

An Outpouring of Thanks for My Last Post: Here's What I Think It Means

When I posted last Friday about dealing with my emotional/intellectual/spiritual/material struggles with professorial and professional work, I kept hearing in the back of my head some advice about preaching and teaching I received long ago.  I believe it is good advice, which is why I keep it close in mind.  I was warned not to let my sermons and teaching presentations get too focused around my own experiences.  First, it betrays a kind of egocentrism (even egotism) that seems to think of oneself as the prime example of whatever topic is at hand.  Second, it presumptuously asserts that one's own experiences are the same as those who are hearing what one says.  I do agree that these are dangers and temptations.

Yet there is another side of this question about whether to use one's own experiences in teaching and preaching.  That side is the one that recognizes preaching and teaching is in part about building a relationship of teaching-learning between the teacher and the people in the classroom or other setting.  That relationship itself becomes a powerful part of a teaching-learning process.

In the past few days, some of the most encouraging words of appreciation I received were from fellow academics, people who find themselves in a similar functional role as I do.  Although I did not get too heavily into details of my own struggle, I tried to reveal enough to make some sense of it to readers.  Apparently it did make some sense, and there have been a wide range of responses.

Through the past two years, one of the most common responses to my writing about Everly, cancer, struggle, death, loss, and faith, have been those from people who told how my writing honestly about the struggle helped them to think about and deal with struggles in their own lives.  Over and over people have encouraged me to keep on writing, as many of you did this past weekend.

One colleague who wrote some beautiful encouragement to me sparked me to think about how dealing with this struggle has affected my teaching.  So I'm going to post here a response I sent to him about what I think it means that students are finding blessing in my current teaching.  Again, for all who teach and preach, I hope this will give some insight into why a certain kind of telling one's own story and reflecting on one's own faith can make a great difference in teaching and learning.

Thanks.  It has emerged through these two years since Everly's diagnosis in April of 2012 that my lived theological reflection is among the most important parts of my teaching.  As you indicated during your presentation last week, a personal story is powerful for impact and memory.  Add to that my sometimes raw emotions, and the students find this part of my reflection to serve their learning in many ways. 

At perhaps the first level, my up-to-date reflections as I "go through" are an example of how theology operates in a lived context with real questions people are asking.  So I will keep writing and bringing my reflections to the classroom as I make this pilgrimage that will not end until I end.

At another level, my reflections become a mirror to them.  While they are not going through the same thing (although sometimes it is very close with a terminally ill spouse or other family member), they are finding analogies to my story in their story.  Sometimes this has led to powerful testimony or confession on the part of a student in class who becomes willing to let her or his struggle become part of our conversation.  I have to say that they get a bit less "respect" from their peers, in that classmates feel more permission to comment on one another didactically than they do to comment in that way on my stories.  But that gives me a chance to talk about how we listen and do not rush to offer easy answers. 

Maybe it's a third level at which they find themselves in a new relation with me, walking along as a fellow struggler.  There is no small amount of recurring reference to Claypool's sermons in my ongoing reflections, as you may have noted in my refrain about walking one step at a time.  I don't doubt that this third element is significant in my being asked to preach by one of our students for the first time in fourteen years of teaching at the seminary.  Over the years, there have always been a small cadre of students who saw in me a colleague or mentor, someone whose overall faith and walk they might hope to emulate.  But they have been few, and it has much to do with my personality and background.  That seems to have changed as I have changed during this crisis.  Many more see in me an example of faith from whom they would hope to learn, not just a guy who knows about so many things and so many words and so many people. 

So I will, as best I can, try to let this season reshape me as a teacher.  It's strange that some of my most effective classroom teaching may be going on when I am by habits and performance so far from what I ought to be as a professor.  Bringing some of those good habits back into my daily life can perhaps give me a decade or so of teaching that will be the best of my career.

Do You Want to Be Healed? Conversating Down by the Pool of Bethesda

Scholars classify the sayings of Jesus in various ways:  parables, aphorisms, dialogues, etc.  Some who have studied them have focused on conversations or "interviews" Jesus has with various people.  Preachers in our individualistic age particularly love these sorts of sayings.  In such conversations, a sermon can leverage Jesus' compassion, wisdom, or straightforward (even harsh) truthfulness into an assumed conversation between the Lord and the person in the pew.  Probably most who read this have heard a sermon on this text.

Sometimes these Gospel stories portray Jesus asking a question of someone.  One favorite such question appears in the encounter between Jesus and a paralytic man by the Pool of Bethesda.  In this conversation, Jesus asks the man, "Do you want to be made well?"  The man had lay by the pool, reputed to have intermittent healing powers, for a very long time.  Read superficially, the question almost seems like small talk:  "Hi, there.  How's it going?  Are you hanging out here to be healed?  Good seeing you today!" 

But when we let the question soak in a bit, it becomes a kind of probing, even intense question.  It pushes past superficiality and goes to the heart.  Having been there so long, waiting ostensibly to be healed, was this man finally resigned to stay as he was, content with things as they are?  Certainly, even in hard situations, we often find some level of satisfaction, some reward even in our disappointment, some ease in having settled for things as they are.

It's a harsh question; perhaps, even rude.  The man answered defensively by saying that no one would help him get to the water when the healing powers were present.  One might imagine his answering in our age by saying, "You don't know me!  You can't judge me!  Who do you think you are?"   It was that kind of hard question, forcing the issue, pressing past the excuses.  If listened to carefully, it was a disorienting question.

I have thought a lot about this passage during the past month.  I have started meeting with a counselor for help in facing my life without Everly.  It is a reorienting process.  I am living in a season of uncertainty, trying to imagine a different life than continuing to serve God as Everly and I grow old together.  The rest of my growing old will be without her.  What will that be like? 

I probably "put too much of my business out in the street," but the writing itself is a very powerful process for my self-understanding.  So here I go again.

Even before Everly was diagnosed with cancer, I was dealing with some problems.  Relationships at work had gone sour in several cases.  Some colleagues were eager to see me gone from the faculty, and there was a corresponding trend of vocal disapproval by some students that was eating at me.  At my annual physical, my physician said I was showing signs of depression.  I found it hard to go to the office, and when there I found it hard to concentrate and get my work done. 

As most of us would, I came up with various plans by which I would get my life back on track.  I made regular commitments to myself to set up a schedule, to segregate my activities, to improve my habits.  Nothing that I was trying was making much difference.  Everly was concerned, but at a loss on how to help me.  Moreover, her own stressful job was enough for her to handle.  She could not carry my load, too. 

So for several years, I floundered, trying to recover the productivity of my earlier years.  I accomplished some big things during that time.  I helped lead some statewide organizing work among theologians and IAF groups dealing with the economy.  I became involved in the same work on a national basis, even chaired some major national meetings among PICO, IAF, and other local organizing groups.  I received honors for this work.  I wrote and delivered theological papers which received praise from many scholars.  I helped rebuild a robust faculty senate at the university. 

But in between the big events, I often found it nearly impossible to make progress on daily work.  It became my new mode of life.  I got used to it.  I was not sure things would ever be different.  I wondered why I was staying in my profession.

The first big question I needed to face in counseling was this:  "What are the rewards I get by avoiding my daily tasks and putting off work that I need to do?"  It was a surprising question, a way of looking at the problem from a different angle.  Anxiety, regret, guilt, disappointment in myself, little hope for change--these were the ways that I would have described my situation.  They are not what one would normally call rewards.  But it seemed a worthy question, and I mulled it over for days. 

What began to emerge was a sense of the way that occasional anxiety and guilt mixed with longer periods of ignoring and denying other things I needed to do was a kind of reward.  I could avoid the more intense anxieties that came up when I pressed into my work--the philosophical struggle with the validity of grades, the disappointment of occasional plagiarized work, the marginalization within the office politics.  These rewards had become the minimal compensation that came from not dealing with the harder matters in my life.

So it is no surprise that my life did not make a sudden upturn when we discovered Everly had cancer, and we struggled through those fifteen months of fear and hope and loss.  Our focus shifted toward supporting her through pain and treatments.  We had to think about the possibilities of her death and its effect on the children and me.  We had our ups and downs, and we had even begun to think that she might be able to live with the cancer for several more years.  But all of that gave me very justifiable reasons not to deal with my own problems at work. 

The grief of losing Everly has been immeasurable.  I have spent much of my energy working on grief, writing about grief and faith, telling the story of what Everly meant to us and to the world, and trying to keep taking one step after another.  Recently, however, a pastor friend told me, with some insistence, that it was time for me to seek some counseling help.  I had made good headway in dealing with grief, but the enormity of the loss and the complexity of my other problems would probably greatly benefit from someone who could help guide me through the process.  Since I had asked for his opinion, I thought it right that I would follow his suggestion.  And so far it has meant trying to unravel the knots in which I have gotten myself over many years. 

Having started working on that first question about what rewards I might find in continuing the way I have been living, we pretty quickly moved on to a second question:  "Can you imagine a situation in which you do your daily work without dread, without it causing you so much anxiety?"  And there again I was with another door to open, another knot to untie.  Knowing how things are and what gives me an overwhelming sense of dread, could I see a way to face those things with creativity and energy to see the possibilities for good, not just for more pain? 

Ultimately, I realized I was being asked the question Jesus asked the man at the Pool of Bethesda.  "Mike, do you want to be healed?"  Or was I satisfied that nothing I do would make things better, that the mess I was in was inescapable, that I was destined to be a diminished version of what I once was.  In recent months, I had been talking to close friends about a similar question I was posing to myself.  "Somewhere under the layers of disappointment and frustration, avoidance and waning hope, was the person still in there who once was known always to take initiative, to press through problems, to bear the load when needed, to lead when others faltered?" 

I remember being a different sort of person at home, at work, at church.  But the memory was fading.  I could not untie the knots that bound my energy.  I could not find and assemble the pieces that could that happen again.  I knew that Everly had admired that person.  I feared I had disappointed her as I shrank into a smaller person.  And I no longer had her beside me to hold me up and believe in me when it was hard to believe in myself.  Could those virtues I once displayed ever return?  Could new virtues take seed and grow?

So I don't think I am just parroting "positivity" or "visualizing a better life" when I say that I realized there can be a situation in which my work does not cause me pain and anxiety.  The joy has never left some parts of the work.  It has even grown and flourished as I taught this year, forced by my grief to be more publicly "real" as a person and not just a professorial persona.  Seeking out the comfort and guidance of friends has helped me feel less alone in the world.  Drawing near to my children has reminded me of much of my purpose for living and the fruit that my life already has borne.  Taking on myself the task of continuing a beautiful life that I lived with Everly has inspired me to get serious about how I spend the remainder of my years.

Yes.  I do want to be healed.  Even though the sociality of existence means that others have played a role in my frustrations, I can't continue to leave my destiny in the hands of people who have gone on to other things.  There is a door that has opened, and some strings hanging from the knots have been pulled loose and are longer than they used to be.  Small steps, small accomplishments, small satisfactions--this is the path I am on. 

Good people have agreed to support me with regular conversation and prayer.  I'm not walking alone.  Another crowd of witnesses, a communion of saints, encompasses me.  Loved ones and friends are pulling for me.  My students are a great well of refreshing as they also learn about holding their faith in struggle and about understanding the depths of pain and grief through my teaching.  I cannot help but be aware of the work of the Holy Spirit to guide my feet, order my steps, and make a way out of no way. 

Jesus asked the man a question that got to the heart of the matter.  In this season, I've once again taken up that inquiry. 

Would You Know Something Good If You Saw It?

This sermon was first preached at Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church on March 30, 2014.

Lectionary Gospel Text:  John 9:1-41

Today I want to reflect with you on a question raised by this story.  The question is, “Would you know something good if you saw it?  Would you recognize good news if you heard it?”  On this fourth Sunday of Lent, we continue in our journey of self-examination, of repentance, of seeking to turn in the path of following Jesus.  We have a story from the time of Jesus’ ministry that was filled with conflicts.  It is a story of how people were not ready to receive what Jesus brought to them.  It is their story and our story too.  Would you know something good if you saw it?  Would I?  Would I recognize the good news if I heard it?  Would you?

What a crazy, mixed up story this is!  People are looking at one another, whom they have known for a long time, trying to figure out if they recognize each other.  People are asking the same people the same questions over and over.  It’s almost as mixed up as the famous Abbott and Costello routine about “Who’s on first?”  Yes, he is.  Who is?  The first baseman.  That’s who I’m asking about.  That’s who it is?  What?  He’s on second base? etc., etc., etc.  These people could not stop asking questions long enough to think and figure out what was going on.  Religious people, the teachers and preachers, were arguing with one another about whether what they were seeing can really be happening.  They were arguing about their doctrines and ignoring what they saw and heard right there in the streets of Jerusalem.  Some people were afraid to say what they thought.  One man in the middle of it all was flabbergasted at how everyone was acting toward him.

When you and I look at this story, we tend to be drawn to a key aspect of it.  A man who had been born blind received his sight because of Jesus.  We might even tend to ignore the rest of all these goings on.  On the other hand, if something like this happened in our neighborhoods, there would probably be a commotion.  People would wonder how it happened.  And if we understand the situation in which this story occurs, maybe we can also get the picture of why all the arguing came about.

John’s gospel is full of stories of what happened when Jesus was in Jerusalem.  Unlike the other three gospels, which tell Jesus’ story in a familiar and similar way about his ministry that is focused in Galilee, this fourth gospel is different.  It has mostly stories the others do not include.  And at this point in the middle of the gospel of John, Jesus has been in Jerusalem long enough to have become a major topic of conversation and controversy in the city. 

If you look back through several chapters, you will see how some people, especially the religious and political leaders, are trying to do battle with him.  They want to discredit him, prove him wrong.  They want to try to show him up in front of the crowds.  But every time they try, Jesus comes out looking great in the eyes of the people.  His popularity grows.  He outsmarts them, makes them look foolish, makes them look selfish and greedy and arrogant.  He shows he understands God and theology better than they do.  He keeps urging people to care about one another and not so much about who is in charge or who tries to appear perfect before the law.  Jesus is winning the battle of public opinion, and his opponents are becoming his enemies.  They get madder with each encounter. 

If you look at the chapters which follow, it continues to intensify.  Eventually, he has to leave the city and go to the outlying villages.  He knows that he is in danger.  He recognizes that people are plotting to kill him.  Seeing it coming, he is trying to make the most of his last days.  He is designing a plan to bring the crisis to a head in a way that will make it clear what God was doing through him.  So when his disciples ask him an important theological question, he offers an multilayered answer in hopes they will come to see better who he is and what God sent him to do.

They ask him a question that comes from what we might call pop theology or the folk tradition.  They see a man who has been blind from birth.  They wonder aloud to him about why the man is blind.  They assume it is a punishment from God, either upon him or upon his parents for sin.  How they would think a man born blind could have sinned before birth and been punished, I have no idea.  But I suspect their puzzlement had to do with fairness or justice.  If it was because of his parents’ sin, why would God bring the punishment on their child?  So in order to try to make it seem more fair, they tried to imagine that it was the man’s own sin.

It’s a strange question as we analyze it.  But it’s not so far from the pop theology and folk religion of our own time.  We see something happen to someone in our community or neighborhood, and we imagine that God did it to the person because of some sin they have committed.  We tell ourselves that people who get sick or don’t get well must be being punished by God.  Or we say they did not have enough faith, another way of calling them sinners.  We act like it’s a simple cause and effect rule, an input-output machine.  Do something bad, God gets you.  Be good, God blesses you. 

Well how is it, then, that people who risked the savings and retirement funds, the mortgages and jobs of millions and billions of people in the world, lost all that money and put people out of their homes and jobs—these very same people got bonuses and raises and continue to be the richest people in the world?  Did all those people who lost their jobs get punished for their sins, but the crooks who caused the companies to fail and the economy to go into recession get blessed for being good?  Of course not.  All we have to do is read the book of Job carefully to see that this kind of thinking is bad theology.  Evil that occurs in the world is not by God’s design or cause.  It’s not a simple input and output.  Sometimes the unrighteous and evil prosper.  We see that way too often.

So Jesus first answers them by saying that they have it all wrong.  The man is not born blind as punishment on anyone.  Sometimes blindness or other hardships or disabilities happen in the process of fetal development.  Children are born with challenges.  Yet we also find that people with challenges can flourish.  Those who cannot see may find as much joy in life as those who can see.  The many variations in human gifts and abilities allow many variations in the form of a joyful life.  I would not belittle the hardships that people may face who find their abilities significantly different from most people.  But we don’t make sense of their struggles by trying to blame them or their families and tell them God is punishing them.

Then Jesus goes into a deeper theological truth.  He begins to talk about the specific meaning of his coming into the world.  He tells the disciples that he has a unique task and a limited time to accomplish it.  As we have already mentioned, this story appears in the Gospel of John.  This is one of four writings in our New Testament that we call “Gospels.”  The Gospels are the writings that tell us the story of Jesus.  They convey to us what he did, why he did it, and what it all means.  And if we remember our Sunday school training well, we remember that the word “gospel” means “good news.”  They are stories of good news.

It is an interesting time in churches and in theological studies to be thinking about this word gospel.  What does Gospel mean?  What constitutes “good news?”  When I was growing up, we were trained to “share the gospel.”  The people who came up with this training believed that gospel was about individuals getting right with God, and that was all that it was.  It could be fit into a small paper tract, a leaflet smaller than my hand.  So if people could read that tract and learn that their sins could be forgiven, and if they would ask for that forgiveness from Jesus, who made it possible, then they could be right with God.  Well of course that training was true, as far as it went.  Jesus did make it possible for us to be forgiven.  We do need to be right with God.  And many of us find ourselves longing for forgiveness, under a weight of sin.  Thanks be to God for the forgiveness of sins we receive because of Jesus Christ!

But the reason I needed more than that training offered is that when we read our Bibles and find the word gospel, there is a lot more going on than this message of inward peace through forgiveness.  The Gospel is grander, deeper, richer, and all around “gooder” news that touches everything about our lives and about the history of the world.  One New Testament scholar has referred to that version of the gospel as the “soterian” gospel.  He’s showing off his knowledge of New Testament Greek by using the Greek word “soter,” which means savior.  This is a version of the gospel that is narrowly focused on sin and forgiveness as an individual’s problem.  I got sin, you got sin, all God’s children got sin.  One by one, this soterian gospel says, we get right with God.  And God is satisfied with individuals being sorry for sin and asking for forgiveness. 

When John Perkins was converted in evangelical churches in Southern California, he began to participate in this kind of sharing of the gospel.  But the longer he ministered, the more he realized that the message of the gospel was bigger than just a simple sinner’s prayer.  It was for the whole person.  Not just the heart, the gospel was for the mind, the body, the entire life.  And it was not just for a person, it was for social life, for communities.  He became the great advocate for a wholistic view of the gospel.  Jesus brought us the whole gospel for the whole person and the whole community.

This scholar I mentioned, Scot McKnight, is an evangelical himself.  He is not denying this soterian message is an element of the gospel.  But in his thick book, The King Jesus Gospel, he says that this aspect of the gospel is a reduction, a minimizing, of a much richer meaning of the word.  The Good News is the whole story of what Jesus did, from coming into the world, living and loving, teaching and preaching, challenging the powers and lifting up the lowly, and finally being executed for his words and deeds.  God raised him from the dead and vindicated all that he had done.  What does McKnight say that Jesus had done?  Jesus had come to bring an end to the exile.  He had come to restore God’s promises.  He had come to fulfill the true purpose of God’s calling of Israel.  He was the announcer of the Kingdom of God, and he was even the Kingdom of God in himself.  That story, that life, that person, those words and actions, all of that is the Good News.  It’s not just about me, myself, and I, all alone, getting right with God.  It’s about all of us, all of the world, being called together by God to be a new kind of people, a loving, caring, forgiving, reconciling, sharing, righteous, humble, peaceable people.

If we think about it, whenever Jesus taught us about asking for forgiveness, he also had another thing he liked to say.  He said, “Forgive, and you will be forgiven.”  Asking forgiveness from God for myself, if that is all I do, starts to look a bit selfish, especially if I cannot be changed by Jesus to become a forgiving person.  Jesus says not to expect to be forgiven if we don’t become forgivers.  The good news definitely includes your forgiveness and my forgiveness from God.  But it also includes that we don’t have to keep holding grudges and counting demerits and merits toward others.  We can be free to forgive, and that is the kind of person Jesus wants to turn us into.

So Jesus explains to the disciples that neither the parents’ sins nor this man’s sins caused the blindness.  But now that they have seen this man on this glorious day, it is an opportunity for Jesus to show the man, his family, the neighbors, the disciples, and anyone who wants to see it, that Jesus came to bring the light of God into the world.  He is restoring Israel to the purpose to which they were originally called.  He is turning things around and upside down.  As long as they have not killed him yet, he has some more light to shine.

Maybe some of you already have been thinking about a theological matter that I have puzzled over concerning the good news.  Quite a few years ago, I first talked publicly about this matter at a Wednesday night Bible study here at Mt. Level.  I’ve been thinking about it off and on ever since.  I recently gave a presentation to a group of baptist professors in Atlanta about it.  That matter I continue to think about is much like the one that Scot McKnight has been thinking about.  But it may be even more specific than his discussion of the gospel.  I keep wondering about this word gospel in a specific context: when Jesus himself says the word “gospel” or “good news,” there are some very specific things he means by it.  Now I’m not going to go into a boring lecture about all the different times Jesus says the word gospel.  Actually, it might not be boring at all for those of us who love the Bible.  But I’m not going to do that today.  Today I want to point out one central, very important time when Jesus says the word “good news.”

It was recorded in Luke chapter 4.  He was preaching in the synagogue in Nazareth.  He was announcing to the people there why he had become a preacher and teacher, and what God had sent him to do.  He quoted from the prophet Isaiah.  He quoted texts about the restoration of Israel, the fulfillment of God’s promises and purposes.  And he said he came to bring good news to poor people.  That’s right, he specifically singled out poor people.  And to drive the point home, he named all kinds of people who are poor and need some good news:  oppressed, imprisoned, and yes, blind people.  When we meet blind people in the New Testament, they are usually beggars.  To be blind meant that it was hard to learn a skill and earn a living.  To be blind meant that folk religion and pop theology made you out to be a sinner.  Lots of people were not very friendly to the blind.  And that’s exactly what we found out in this story from John 9.  This man born blind was a beggar.  He is one of the ones Jesus announced that he came to give good news.

What is that good news?  If it is the news of the Jubilee and the Sabbath year, it is that the poor don’t have to stay poor.  It is that the beggars can get a fresh start.  It is that slaves can be free again and debtors can have their debts forgiven.  It is the good news that among God’s people, there must be no need among us.  For anyone who is in need, God has a provision—the open hand of those who can share from God’s bountiful blessings.  That is good news.

But if you are among the rich and powerful, it might not seem to be good news immediately.  You might resent the idea that you should part with some of your wealth so that others can eat.  You might not like the idea that your second or third home could be a home for the people who have been set out and homeless because of the loss of income or foreclosure.  You might not think it’s to your advantage for the blind to no longer be viewed a sinners who caused their own hardship.  Since you aren’t blind, and you have some money, you have been claiming that God is blessing you for being righteous.  Now this rogue preacher says the good news is this man does not have to be poor, and he will shed some light in this moment of time by giving the blind man sight.

And now we get to the serious issue that causes this text to turn into a circus.  The issue is that when some people hear or see good news, they don’t recognize it.  They don’t understand it.  They call good, evil, and evil, good. 

As we noted earlier, some of the people seem confused at first.  They probably never really got to know the blind man.  He was just there all the time, begging.  They hardly looked at him.  He probably looked down at the ground or off in the distance.  So they did not recognize his face very well.  They kept talking to one another about him, as if he were not there himself.  They asked one another whether he was the same beggar who hung around the neighborhood.  Some were sure he was, others not.  He kept telling them, “Hello!  I’m right here!  Yes, I’m the same guy.  I was blind.  I was a beggar.  Jesus made me able to see.  I am that man.”

As if they had not been rude enough already, some went off to find the preachers, I mean the deacons, I mean the Pharisees.  They brought them in to offer an expert opinion.  So they started quizzing the man and the witnesses.  But before long, they were back to their usual ways, arguing with one another, trying to prove who was the most clever in understanding theology and the scriptures.  One is focused on the Sabbath laws, a favorite topic of theological dispute.  Another is trying to understand how such a transformation as ending blindness could occur at all, unless it was from God.  They can’t get it settled among themselves.  So they keep quizzing the man, almost as if he were on trial.  They want to quiz Jesus, although many have already decided that Jesus is a no good liar, a blasphemer, a sinner of the worst kind.  Of course Jesus could not have done this because he is such a sorry sinner.

They ask the formerly blind man questions, but they really don’t listen to his opinion.  They are sure they are the ones who know it all.  They get everyone upset.  Then they call for the man’s parents to be brought.  They get them so worried that they won’t even offer an opinion.  They are afraid they are going to get in trouble.  The man who got his eyesight gets so flabbergasted that he starts being sarcastic with the Pharisees.  He asks why they want to hear the same thing again.  He asks if they are trying to become Jesus’ disciples.

That made the Pharisees blow their tops.  Now they could be united.  They had a common enemy.  Jesus and anyone who might seem to like Jesus.  They accuse the formerly blind man of being Jesus’ disciple.  They brag that they are disciples of Moses.  They follow the law.  They don’t know what foolishness Jesus is up to, and they want nothing to do with him.

After all this outburst, the formerly blind man lays it on the line.  He says, “Man, I thought you guys were supposed to know something about God.  Listen to the junk y’all are saying.  Something amazing happened here.  I’ve been blind from birth.  But Jesus came along and made a way for me to see.  Now I can see.  How else could something like that happen except from God?  And you so-called teachers of God’s ways can’t even see the good that God is doing.  This is good news, folks.  Why can’t you hear and understand that?”

They can’t take his uppity words.  They try to cut him down to size.  They start preaching that folk religion.  They say he is a sinner, or else he would not have been blind.  They are not blind, so they must not be sinners.  Lord, they are full of themselves.  They are full of pride and self-satisfaction.  They can’t stand this kind of talk, so they chase the poor man away.  Once he was gone, they stood there shaking their heads.  Can you believe that guy?  Acting like he knows more about God than we do?  We are the ones who know how things are done.  We are the ones who can teach and live right.  Who does he think he is?

I suspect the man who ran off was shaking his head, too.  The so-called wise and religious ones sure came across ignorant that day.  Right before their eyes, a great thing had happened.  He figured most people would be overjoyed to get to see such a thing in their lifetime.  But these jerks just wanted to make it another reason to fight and argue and try to prove their superiority. 

What a blessing that Jesus was still nearby.  He got a report on what had happened, so he went looking for the man.  He found him and encouraged him.  He made sure the formerly blind man understood that he, Jesus, was sent from God.  And he put the crazy events into the right context.  He told the formerly blind man about why God sent him into the world.  He says that by bringing good news, he also brings judgment.  For people who refuse to receive the good news, the message becomes a judgment.  And it turns out that the ones who thought they could see are the ones who are really blind.  The Pharisees got mad all over again, but Jesus says they are bringing this judgment on themselves.  He has brought good news.  Why can’t they see it?  Open your eyes.  You have all the opportunities of studying God’s word.  Look. Listen.  There’s good news.  Receive it.  God has a way for us that is justice, its mercy, its walking humbly with God.  That’s what God requires.  That’s what God asks.  That’s what God made us for.  It’s good news for all of us.  The blind man sees it.  The poor can hear it.  You religious, law studying people, you privileged people—you all can hear it too.

The summary of all the law is to Love God with all that you are, and to love your neighbor.  Love this man.  Love that he can see.  Love that God makes a way for all of us to have what we need.  Love that God forgives, and that God can make us into forgiving people.  Love the grace that personal sin in your life can be forgiven, and that God can break down the walls and structures of sin that oppress and impoverish and imprison our sisters and brother.  God knows our needs and our struggles, our failures and our troubles.  God comes to find us where we are, and God brings good news.  Wherever we are, God has good news for us.  

 For those of us who are sick, the good news is that Jesus is the Great Physician.  For those who feel marked and stained by the crowd they are running with, the good news is that Jesus can sanctify us to God.  For those who feel the weight of sin, the good news is that Jesus forgives the sinner.  For those who are alone, the good news is that Jesus is a friend.  For those who feel abandoned, the good news is that Jesus embraces us and makes us part of the family.  For those who are in neighborhoods where trouble abounds, the good news is that Jesus came to restore streets to live in.  Wherever we are and whatever our condition, Jesus is bringing us good news.  Thanks be to God for this good news.  Let us hear and receive it, all of it, leaving none of it out.  Jesus saves us from our failures, our oppressive ways, our sins, our blindness, our lostness.  Thanks be to God.  Thanks for good news.  Thanks for Jesus’ coming to bring it to us.  Amen and amen.

Old Woman Everly, Whom We Did Not Get to See

Today as I read someone's tribute to an elderly woman who had passed away, I began to muse about Everly.  In our church, Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church in Durham, NC, Everly eventually found and settled into her own specific roles.  It is important to remember that when we arrived at Mt. Level, we did so having left a white baptist church, where our family had to face a temporary failure in the ongoing struggle to overcome a long heritage of racial prejudice and division.

By God's grace, we had enough wisdom to know that we could not go into a black baptist church and operate on the assumptions that "we know how churches should operate."  In other words, we could not try to import our "white ways" into Mt. Level on the assumption that white baptists know more than black baptists about being a church.  So we agreed together and admitted to our new fellow church members that we were novices, learners.  Part of our own struggle had made us realize that whatever gifts we had to serve in church had been inadequate to find a path to unity in the church we had previously served.  We definitely could not claim the expertise of success.

Everly tried using her gifts at church in a number of ways.  We all know that part of her divine calling meant that she worked long hours in complex leadership and negotiation about the future of mathematics education and its availability to children of all races, ethnicities, class distinctions, and regions.  That was God's work, too.  So her  work at Mt. Level needed to complement and not conflict with her high professional calling.  Some things just did not fit.  Others did not match her abilities.  She could not get the hang of how the choir learned and sang its music.  (Insert your own joke about white people, clapping, etc., here.)  She loved the music, but clapping and moving her feet and singing--the lack of training for so many decades made this seem too much to her. 

She taught classes at several levels.  One place she landed for a few years was teaching pre-teens and middle-schoolers in Sunday School.  She helped them think about the questions they brought to the Bible and their faith.  She helped them learn to pray and care about people.  She let them know that she loved them and had high expectations for them.  For this reason, Everly always had some young people around at church who called her, or at least thought of her as "Mom."  Of course, she was a loving mom to her own progeny as well.  One of David's most important encouragements since Everly's death has been to find and look at and post the many, many pictures of himself being hugged by his mom.  That little girl who played teacher for the neighborhood kids grew to be a teacher and a mother who loved the children God gave her.

One thing she taught and encouraged these children to do was draw handmade encouragement cards for the older members of the church, the "sick and shut-in list."  They would draw flowers, landscapes, churches, and such.  They would copy or adapt pictures from their Sunday School books that had Bible scenes or Christian symbols.  They would write, "God Loves You," or "Get Well Soon," or copy words from hymns or Bible verses.  Everly would gather these colorful notes and put them in the mail to bless the lives of people who were struggling or alone.

These cards from the children were part of a bigger role Everly had taken for herself.  The group of adult women to which she officially belonged was the Adult Missionaries.  It is not strictly for women, but that was the de facto participation.  The problem with participating was it did not suit her work schedule and home duties.  So she rarely attended their regular meetings, though she participated in many of their occasional events.  But the regular task she took for herself was sending cards to the sick and shut-in.  She would buy boxes of cards with Bible verses, Christian sentiments, and various messages for birthdays, illness, sympathy, and friendship.  It was not every week, but regularly she would write notes to these people. 

Demographically, we understand that most of the older people in our society are women, whose life expectancy continues to exceed men's by about a decade.  So most of the cards were sent to women.  Although I am a minister at Mt. Level, my personality and patterns of conversation are very different from Everly's.  I often did not know the names on the sick and shut-in list.  I might have befriended some of the older adults, but I am not so good at keeping up with people.  Everly knew these women, and men, by name.  She knew their health conditions.  She knew their family members.  She knew how long since they had been able to attend church.  And she wrote them loving notes to make sure that they understood how much they mean to our church.

Probably as much as any reason that I am loved at Mt. Level is that Everly is associated with me, and that she showed so much love to these older members and their families.  If it were just Mike, few of them would ever have heard from the Broadways.  My mind does not work that way, I regret to say.  But because of Everly, the Broadways were busy caring for families and for older folks who appreciated receiving a child's drawing, a kind word, a remembrance from their church.

Everly also joined the Prayer Team, a ministry of the Missionaries.  She helped them organize their retreats and events.  At the resident mathematician, she handled the bookkeeping and received funds from people to pay for retreat expenses and such.  She learned who could afford to participate and who could not, and she made sure through her own donations and the donations she solicited from others that no one would be left out.  People came to appreciate her compassion, knowing that she would look out for those who struggled financially.

So today I read about the passing of a woman from another church.  I thought about the tribute that pastor made toward her elderly member who had died.  And I thought about what kind of "old lady" Everly would have been.  She had such sympathy and kindness toward older women.  She saw their strengths and wisdom, and she sought them out.  She learned about their adult children and the joys and struggles of being a mother across an entire life.  She met their children and learned of their love for their mothers.

When we were a very young couple, living in California where I attended seminary, Everly was befriended by Bobbi Pinson, the wife of the seminary president.  The Pinsons had known my parents when they were a young married couple, before I was born.  That friendship continued over the years, and Bill Pinson invited me to be his research assistant at the seminary.  Bobbi and Everly were a good match, even with their age difference.  One of the favorite conversations Everly had with Bobbi involved thinking about growing old.  Bobbi had been dealing with an aging relative whose struggles in life seem to have pushed her over into only seeing the bad side of things.  Having tried so hard to help this woman find some good in life, Bobbi was very frustrated.  She told Everly, "We need to practice being pleasant and not complaining now, so that when we get older, we won't be always looking at the bad side of things."  Everly often came back to that conversation and laughed about it.  She knew too well she could easily drift over into letting her fears or struggles take over her view of the world.  But she also learned to avoid falling in that pit.  And when she got tripped up, she learned to work her way out of it.

Everly demonstrated her capacity to deal with pain and struggle with grace during her time with cancer.  She rose above the consciousness of pain to think about others whom she loved.  She made sure that to the extent that she had any power to do so, her children and husband would be provided for even after she was gone.  As her friend Marsha reported, even when she was feeling so bad, she was writing Marsha a note on the anniversary of her dad's death. 

I don't mean she never talked about her pain.  Of course she did, and necessarily so.  But even though her fight against cancer became her primary work for her final year, she continued to look out for others and organize to make their lives better.  When Lydia went back to college last fall, after Everly's death, one of the things she realized that she had to face was that even when she was very sick, Everly had hopped in the car to drive to Waco to help Lydia set up her dorm or apartment and make sure she was at ease and ready for school.  We have cute pictures of Everly in her cancer cap, crashed on Lydia's bed, worn out from getting things in order to make sure her baby was set for school.  So we know that in her old age, she would have still been doing what she could to make other people's lives better and show her love to the ones God had given her.

Everly was drawn to relationships with the Mt. Level older women for various reasons.  One common remark I would hear from her is that so-and-so "is feisty" or "is spunky."  I think all of us who know Everly understand why this was attractive to her.  Everly was the definition of feisty or spunky.  She almost could not help saying what she thought, even if it might seem impolitic.  Everly believed in telling the truth and in speaking one's mind.  That is definitely the kind of old lady she would have been.

She also was drawn to women whose devotion to God had helped them make it through very painful and even devastating life events.  Although to us she was very strong, Everly often feared that she was too weak to face harsh turns of events.  She was encouraged to learn of women who had endured abuse or hardship, painful losses or betrayals, and come out able to keep on walking, keep on trusting God, keep on following Jesus.  This was her life's ambition, "I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own" (Gal. 3:12).  Everly would have shown this same strength of character in her old age.  She would have been an old lady whose strength emanated and flowed into the lives of those around her.  Naomi has often said that she is thankful that her mother was a strong woman who surrounded her daughters with strong women.  This would not have changed with age, and her strength would have given a backbone to many a struggling soul.

Everly also loved to retell the funny stories and remarks she heard from the mouths of her older sisters.  She loved humor, and should I say she especially loved sarcastic humor?  Older women who found something to laugh about in their lives, even in the ways that age imposed its limits on them, were the ones she wanted to be around.  Everly, like these women, was proud and deserving of respect.  But she, like them, could still laugh about the way that life is going, poke fun at the powerful and self-important, and in general have a good time.  So for all of you blessed to hear Everly laugh so hard that she shed tears, and even snorted out loud, you know she would have been fun to be around as an old lady.

Further, Everly enjoyed listening to the wisdom of experience that came with knowing older women.  They were models of her future.  They had learned things she could not learn on her own.  Moreover, being a white woman among black women, there was another whole realm of wisdom she might not have learned in the ivory towers of power or among her own family.  These women had struggled with matters unheard of in the white suburbs.  So she listened and learned.  She wrote down things that were said to her and pigeon-holed them away in her ever-present sticky notes, whether hard copy or electronic. 

Senior adult Everly would have words of wisdom.  We know it is true because as the months and weeks drew her nearer to death, she started what she called "leaving messages."  Our friend Barbara Martin reminded me recently of the day last summer, July 4, when Barbara, her daughter Marsha, and her grandson Timothy all visited with Everly in Austin.  We did not know, but it was just two weeks before she would die.  Some of you realize that our three children, David, Naomi, and Lydia, are each separated in age by three years (one more result of sharing life with someone who is always planning with mathematics in mind).  It was three years after Lydia's birth that Marsha and Paul Lewis had their first and only child, Timothy.  So we always considered him the fourth in a series.  Everly's heart embraced him as hers too, and on that day she sat him down to say to him in her best way that he must know who he is and whose he is.  He must believe in the plans God has for him and pursue all the good that God has for him.  I don't know all of what she said, but she was practicing up for being a wise old woman. 

I wish, of course, that I could have known that wise, funny, feisty, strong, loving old woman.  It is not to be.  The cancer kept her from living that possible life.  But then again, I think I do know that woman.  The signs and pieces were there already for me to remember.  The examples she planned to follow were all around us.  And since she is still in us in many ways, I guess I'll get to grow old with her in one way.  She'll always be a voice in my thoughts, an embrace in my heart, a snide remark in my conversations, and a friend who would never leave me.

How Far Gone

As I experience it, grief is a consuming state of existence.  I would say "state of mind," but it is not merely mental.  It fills the body and more.  In its moments of intensity, it expands to fill the griever's universe.  That intense state, however, is not sustainable.  Sometimes it lasts a few seconds, sometimes much longer, with an aching that erupts physically.  The tears, sobs, body movements, catching of breath, moaning sounds--these usually bring a measure of relief.  They may also leave behind a residue of cloudiness, of fatigue, and of distraction.

What I read in books, and what I hear from friends who have lost spouses or children or other beloved ones, is that grief can make a kind of progress.  My friends bob and mj patterson-watt are insistent that it is not what some people want to call "moving on," which implies that their daughter or my wife becomes less relevant or central to who we are.  Rather, I think it is that the freshness of the would can begin to heal as one adjusts to the new situation.  My relation to my beloved has entered a new season, dominated by memory and memorial rather than by touching, seeing, smelling, hearing bodily presence.  This does not say that Everly is not still in my life, even in me, speaking in my thoughts, singing and dancing through my imagination, pointing me in the right direction as my partner and guide.  But admittedly, this presence is now muted and even more thoroughly mediated through my perspective on who she is.

Sometimes disturbing, and sometimes to my relief, is that this progress seems to include longer periods of coasting along within my day-to-day affairs.  Frankly, I need to be more consistent in carrying out my responsibilities and duties at work or in family business.  People are very gracious on this matter, respecting what I have given in the past and honoring my current inability to focus as well.  What I am trying to explain here, and simply to understand for myself, is the slow evening out of my emotional road through sloughs and valleys and potholes and pit-traps.  At first, every day was a struggle.  Then there were more level days mixed with sad days several times a week; then, maybe once a week.  I'm not saying that every day does not bring its moments of tears, but over time they have become less likely to dominate the days.

If we call it progress, it is worth noting that it is not exactly inevitable.  The leveling out of emotions may not always be a sign of improvement.  It can also be a superficial dampening, a deadening of the loves that drive humans toward the good.  Our language is filled with imagery about what keeps people going, what urges people to action.  There are the motion words:  motive, motivation, what moves someone, e-motion.  Words like passions and drives speak of what stirs a person and draws a person forward.

Augustine sometimes employed the word "loves" to convey this idea.  The "loves" for Augustine are about our desires, our longings, what we want, what we need.  Rightly directed, they draw humans toward, or push toward, the good for which human life is intended.  Most famously, he speaks of this in the opening lines of Confessions, saying, "Lord, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts find no rest until they rest in you." 

Thus, to have dulled emotions, lessened hopes and aspirations, diminished joys and sorrows, may not indicate progress.  It can sometimes be a diminishing of desire and love for what is good.  It can be a forgetfulness that hides the beauty for which one rightly grieves.  Forgetfulness is a dangerous pattern of life in many ways, covering over good and evil from the past and how they should shape our living now.  Forgetfulness is a favored stance in a culture such as ours, whose wealth is founded on slavery and sustained through oppressive neo-colonial economic systems.  We don't want to remember those things.  They create too much dissonance in the midst of prosperity. 

Personal forgetfulness allows a person to think, "I am self-made.  Look what I have achieved, all on my own!"  But no one is self-made.  Anyone's success emerges from a network of relationships and help from others.  Forgetfulness is the opposite of what I want from grief's progress.  It is in remembering well that I believe progress will come.  Remembering the blessings poured into my life from knowing and living with Everly--this is what I hope will continually grow and take the foreground in my mind and body so that the memories of losing her, though present, take their place in the background.

This wordy prologue is my way of trying to say that it seems to me that I have been coasting for some weeks now.  In one way, it is a kind of drifting that means I have reached a point in grieving where the next steps will be a challenge.  In conversations with friends, I have been wondering how to discern the path God has for me in the remainder of my years.  Up until now, I have believed that the path of my life was united to the path of Everly's life.  God's leading of Everly and God's leading of Mike were one and the same leading, and our discernment was worked out in an unending conversation about our faith, hope, and love.  More than thirty-three years of that process leaves me unprepared to go on with her now present but muted voice.  She remains in and with me.  Her words and deeds are etched upon my life.  Our joint destiny is embedded in the genes, faces, and hearts of three extraordinary, marvelous young adults.  But the conversation is harder.  I'm trying to circle around to its echoes by talking with friends who have known us and share many of the convictions Everly and I have lived by.  Some are telling me it's time to go deeper with grief counseling, and I think that is right.  I am not above seeking help where it can be found.  So one part of the leveling out can be seen as drifting as I consider how to keep going.

Probably another aspect of coasting is my pulling back.  Sometimes, pressing into a struggle is too daunting.  So I've tried to put my energy into work as I can, although that's not yet up to what it should be.  I've had some spells of working on a couple of research projects.  I've been trying to carry water on some things my Dean needs done and for which I am well-suited.  I think this also means that I have pressed into the grief struggle a little less.  That may be a kind of self-preservation.  My emotional energy capacity has never been very high.  In graduate school, I remember confessing to a colleague that I was feeling a lot of anxiety.  His incredulous response was, "Mike, what would it look like for you to be anxious about something?"  Part of the reason for being even-keeled is that I quickly get worn out by intense social interaction and emotional investment.  So I tamp down the emotion to keep myself going.  That may meant that I'm probably dealing with some grief fatigue.

I hope, however, that some of the difference is also that I am making some progress.  I am too inexperienced to know what progress in grieving should look like, but I suspect it includes a kind of wound healing that allows a person to experience the loss of a beloved without becoming constantly or steadily overwhelmed.  What once manifested as days and hours of deep sorrowful longing seems to come over time to reappear as sharp moments of poignant grief, a few tears, a mixed memory of loss and blessing, amidst more usual day-to-day experiences.

I am describing the process of my own experiences.  My three children are in the same time capsule in which I live, under the shadow of death cast by a powerful, enchanting, winsome, loving personality whose manifold tendriled threads append themselves to, even invade, every moment and space we inhabit.  How they find this process unfolding, whether they see progress or stasis, differs in each life.  It is clear that we are not all on the same schedule, that our setbacks are different, and that our sense of progress, or lack of it, varies with our times and places.  One of the heartaches of being their dad is wishing for them to have the gifts of their mother in their life, gifts that I cannot replace.  Everly and I were drawn together by our common loves and our fascinating differences, and in her absence I am left offering the loves we shared, my differences without hers, my brokenness and learning to mingle with theirs.

This week was the week in which the 18th of the month came and went.  That marked eight months since Everly died.  There was a heaviness around me for days.  Moments of painful grief kept cropping up.  So Friday morning I made a point of doing something that often helps me focus and uncover thoughts and feelings just below the surface.  I turned on some music.

This time it was an album by Kyle Matthews, See for Yourself.  One song began with lines that hit me hard.  It is written from the point of view of Lazarus, the friend of Jesus who died and whose life was given back when Jesus went to his grave.  It begins by referring to his sister's grief.

Mary's anger could not be denied,
'If you'd been here, he would not have died.'

While anger has not been a dominant emotion of my grief, I don't deny that it has cropped up at times.  But rather than anger, the response I have to such an image of this sister's grief for her brother is more like that of a child who feels helplessly deprived and wishes intently for any way to recover the loss.  The words awakened this helplessness buried just below the surface.  The song goes on to describe Lazarus's thirst to know the stories of God's deliverance, coming to the statement, "Guess I never knew just how far gone I was."  Whatever it means in the framework of this song, it struck me as describing the depth of my sense of helplessness, my aimless drifting, my intensity of sorrow.  The awakened emotion began to stir as a storm in my chest and throat.

How deep is the loss?  There is no clear answer.  It goes as deep as I have existence.  It's not like losing an object or a possession, something that is not part of oneself.  So reflecting on "how far gone" I am points to the absence of the one who was united to me, in whose life my life participated.  "How far gone I was" reminds me that it is not only Everly who is gone, but it is the "us" that is gone, or at least demolished so thoroughly that it requires a rebuilding under new conditions of existence.

The other song that touched me most deeply is one of Kyle's most well-known compositions, a reflection on baptism called "Been Through the Water."  It links three episodes in the life of a man, from his youth, his young adulthood, and his old age, and examines the significance of baptism across the long narrative.  The final stanza depicts the man with his grandson, gone fishing, and commenting on his old-age pains, "Soon I'll be free from these pains."  Now this is, of course, an aspect of Everly's death that is very present to me.  She spent the last years of her life struggling with a great deal of pain.  The last two months seem to have intensified her pain even more.  The words reminded me that she has been set free from her pain, the pain in her stomach, her back, her arm, her hip, her leg, and just about any part of her anatomy.  For this, I have tried to rejoice.  I would not have her back with me only to again suffer great pain.  She deserves to be free of it.  Yet it seems I would have her back at any cost.  So this thought both reminds me of the price she paid to continue loving us, and the reason I ought to be happy for her not to endure any longer in this world.  It's a joy mixed with hurt, a mournful joy.

The refrain of the first song again spoke to me in those moments.  It has Lazarus telling what it is like to have life flow back into his body.

'Cause I feel my heart start to beat again
'Cause your word is life.
Your word is life.
Your word is life to me.
And I feel my chest start to breathe again
'Cause your word is life.
Your word is life.
Your word can breathe the life back into me.

Now a narrow baptist reading might take "word" to strictly mean the Bible, but that is not the primary use of the term theologically.  It is a way of describing the movement of revelation from God to humanity, whether in creation, in prophetic proclamation, in the Spirit's quickening, or in the incarnation.  It is a way of saying that God has come to humanity with good news.  James Evans argues that the doctrine of revelation and the doctrine of liberation are united, for to begin to know who God is, is already to be liberated from the false gods and ideologies that justify domination systems and enslave human beings.  This word of hope rang true to my sense of helplessness.  However far gone I was, God's word brings light, life, liberation, and restoration to my predicament.  Because Everly now rests in the loving presence of God, I also may receive the grace of being in the presence of God with her.  For God, the Hound of Hell, pursues me to whatever depth I might dig for myself or fall helplessly into.

So Friday morning was a day to find myself immersed in the work of grief.  Rather than coasting along, I was pulled back into the intensity of loss that is Everly's death.  But the very way that it happened is a reminder that I am not alone in it.  It was the words of a song, shared by many people, written by a friend, and infused with life by the Spirit, that stirred me to this important work.  I can't say for sure if it is progress or stasis.  But I do know that as I grappled with these matters, the same Spirit stirred another friend to invite me to get out of the house, take a walk, and converse.  That crisp morning among the trees and hills of north central Durham helped me frame my inner life in the larger realm of creation and redemption.

I am wounded, perhaps broken.  Healing is possible, and in fact seems to be happening in tiny steps.  And I am not alone.  Somewhere in there may be some progress.