“Blameless people are always the most exasperating.”– Mary Ann Evans [pen name, George Eliot], Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life, 1871.
Blamelessness and exasperation have characterized both sides of a recent conversation on Views from the Edge. Not blamelessness exactly, but certainty, positions that seem to each party to be apparent and true beyond a doubt. Each of us has become exasperated with the other.
Jesus’ word to the harsh critic of others – “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye”- is forgotten or ignored. Claims to righteousness and suspicion of the other replace self-criticism and magnanimity.
We live increasingly trapped in separate bubbles of survival in the war of ideas, convictions, platforms, moralities, religions, and ideologies in the search for security.
Instead of bubbles, Dennis Aubrey’s A Patron for Prisoners uses the metaphor of prison, quoting a sage from the 5th Century C.E., Saint Léonard of Noblat, the patron saint of prisoners, whose “Song” (based on Psalm 107) describes a hope for liberation from the prison cell whose doors we have locked from the inside.
“A Patron for Prisoners” opens with The Song of Saint Léonard of Noblat (5th Century):
He has liberated those sitting in darkness and shadow of death and chained in beggary and irons,
Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he saved them out of their distresses,
He brought them out of the path of iniquity,
For he hath broken the gates of brass, and cut the bars of iron in sunder,
He hath liberated those in bindings and many nobles in iron manacles.
– Song of Saint Léonard, quoted by Aymeri Picaud, translated by Richard Hogarth
Saint Léonard’s Song ends with the release of the nobles, the only class of people named among the liberated throng. It is no mistake that he includes them among those to be blessed by release from iron manacles. We are all bound in the prison cells of logs and specks, blameless and exasperated, fearful of our survival on the other side of the release.
Though we Americans disagree profoundly on many profound matters, we are often united by a deeper conviction regarding good and evil.
Today in America we’re taking sides. Left-Right. Democrat-Republican. Christian-non-christian. Religious-nonreligious. good-evil. All of the splits have something to do with perceptions of the dichotomy of good and evil, the good guys and the bad guys.
Wisdom is always the victim. Wisdom is crucified by the race to goodness. It sits in the middle of dichotomous thinking, a way of life that Danish Philosopher-theologian Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1838), who was anything but a joiner, called double-mindedness.
In the Bible wisdom is personified as female. In the Book of Proverbs Wisdom is like a concerned mother calling to her children who prefer simpleness to insight:
“You that are simple, turn in here!” To those without sense she says,
“Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed.
“Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight.” Provers 9:4-6
Wisdom is maternal. Wisdom calls her wayward children – the simple ones — to “turn in here” to her house. “Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Wisdom’ children are mature.
Could it be that the beatitude of Jesus “blessed are the pure in heart” is a call to return to Wisdom’s house of insight where the unity of all things is unbroken, instead of a call to simpleness? Simplicity of heart, then, is not simplicity of mind but rather to will one thing only: the goodness of wisdom (unity), as described by D. Anthony Storm‘s comments on Kierkegaard’s Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing Only:
God is presented as “simple”. I use this term in the same sense as Aquinas. God is singular of nature, and is not divided or contrary in any way. By this, I do not refer to unitarian versus trinitarian theology, but simply that Kierkegaard sees God as a unity of thought, will, and being. The nature of God is changeless (see The Changelessness of God). Man, on the other hand, is divided by nature. [Italics edited for purposes of emphasis]
Wisdom holds all things together, honoring the unity already present in the nature of reality itself. It seeks the simpleness or singleness with is God, not the simple-mindedness of the warring children of light and darkness, joining the right “side” in a battle of good versus evil. The heart of Wisdom recognizes and celebrates goodness, justice, and truth in whatever venue they appear.
“You that are simple – those without sense, you that are immature – turn in here!”
I’m going to speak very clearly now Gordon, in the form of a single question.
How in the name of God can you claim to be a Christian and a Democrat in the same breath?
I don’t know the person who put the question. We’re complete strangers. We’ve never met. We live in different worlds. Our understandings are foreign to each other, so strange that suspicion and name-calling, or the fear that the other is calling the other “a nut job”, undermines the possibility of real discussion.
I … read a few of your other posts, needless to say; everything I read merely confirmed my original “understanding” of who you are. In other words Gordon, (and I say this with both respect and disdain) You do not fool me, I knew you from your first words, your Credentials simply confirmed what was obvious from the start. Take that as you will.
At this point, I’m pretty sure that you are convinced that I am some sort of zealot or just another “right-wing nut job”, but in truth I am just another American. A Christian American.
I’m going to speak very clearly now Gordon, in the form of a single question.
How in the name of God can you claim to be a Christian and a Democrat in the same breath?
The writer was responding to Views from the Edge‘s post of Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama’s speech on Hiroshima Day, 2006. Nothing in that post would lead a reader to assume, or to conclude, knowledge of my political party affiliation.
I asked myself how to respond. I pondered not replying at all. I chose to respond in writing as best I could, assuring the writer that I don’t call people right-wing nut jobs, and addressing other sections of the comment. After an exchange of blog comments and an email inviting a phone conversation, we shared some of the milk of human kindness over the phone long distance.
In further reflection I realized that the writer’s question articulates a point of view that rarely speaks so clearly. It assumes that Christian faith and the Democratic Party are polar opposites. Others on the left assume a Christian cannot be a Republican. Parts of America we are living in two separate worlds – on two different sides without much clear speaking. It’s not surprising that the “Nones” – those who now declare no religious affiliation in national polls – are growing in America.
The writer’s comments repeatedly refer to “the real war” in heaven and on earth, spiritual warfare between Satan and God. Until “the real war” is over, the argument goes, there will be cruelty and wars because of the fallenness of human nature, and there’s nothing we can do to change. In the midst of time we must chose which “side” we are on.
Views from the Edge’s first Hiroshima Day piece and the one that followed it had called attention to the hubris of all claims (Japanese or American) to national exceptionalism.
The writer therefore, as best I can tell, concluded I must be a Democrat, i.e. someone who doesn’t love his country, someone who thinks that America is not a Christian nation. Someone who might be a …. “You don’t fool me.”
The commenter was right that I’m a Christian but mistaken in assuming I’m a Democrat. The Democratic Party and the Republican Party are, in my view, the left wing and the right wing of a single American party. Both wings belong to Wall Street. They march in parades on Main Street at election time, but the parades are funded by Wall Street and America’s wealthiest 1%. We do not live in a democratic republic. We are living under an oligarchy.
Jesus has a few things to say about that. J.J. Von Allmen (A Companion to the Bible, Oxford University Press, 1958) makes a powerful case that Jesus’s teaching about money is original to him. He is the first to call money “Mammon”: “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and Mammon” (Matthew 6:24). Jesus choice to personify wealth stands out as an exception to his normal way of speaking. Mammon and its distribution are at the heart of Jesus’s preaching and teaching. There is the Kingdom of God and there is the Kingdom of Mammon. One cannot serve both.
Had the commenter’s question been “How can you be a Christian and a socialist?” the answer would have been easy.
Our home for four weeks is 14 miles west of Anaconda, Montana. Last Friday evening we go to Barclay II for dinner (the restaurant, not the dog).
Like lots of things in these parts, exterior facades count for little. Barclay II doesn’t look like much from the outside but it has a great reputation for steak and seafood. Behind the scruffy door is an upscale restaurant.
The proprietor, Tammy, comes to the table to greet us. We ask what they’re known for. “The tenderloin is the most popular,” she says. “I see from the menu it comes with crab legs. Are they Snow Crab or King Crab?” I’m not so big on Snow Crab; I love King Crab. She answers, “King Crab.”
When the wait person comes to take our orders, I order the tenderloin “between medium-rare and medium”. The waitress notes exactly what I say. When she returns, the tenderloin is precisely as requested. In downtown Minneapolis, Murray’s Steak House is famous for its Silver Butter Knife Steak, so named because you can cut it with a butter knife. Murray’s is good. Barclay’s, in downtown Anaconda, is better. The tender-est, most flavor-ful steak I’ve every eaten anywhere in the world.
THE WORST-HAIRCUT EVER
The next morning we’re again in downtown Anaconda in The Coffee Corral coffee shop when Kay reminds me I need a haircut before stepping into the pulpit the next morning at St. Timothy’s Memorial Chapel where I’m privileged to preach the next three weeks. It’s Saturday.
I leave Kay in search of the barber shop. The barber pole is not spinning; the sign on the door posts the hours: Monday-Friday. It’s closed. Next door is a beauty salon. I really need a haircut. I go in to the scene of six women seated in a semicircle having their nails done.
“Good morning,” I say, “Do you do men?” Several of the woman roar with laughter. “I mean…do you cut men’s hair?” Again they laugh. “My wife says I need a haircut; wadda ya all think?” Three of them nod Yes; three nod No. The stylist answers Yes and says she can do me at 1:00.
I return at 1:00. The stylist and I exchange a few pleasantries, ignoring the young bridesmaid who’s all dressed for an afternoon wedding, waiting to have her hair done. I take a seat in the stylist’s chair. She asks me what I want. I answer, just “a trim,” meaning leave it the way it is but take maybe a quarter of an inch, at most. I tell her that once I take out my hearing aids I won’t be able to hear a thing. She smiles, laughs, and says, “No problem. That’s great!” I take it she’s not a big talker, or maybe, God for bid, she doesn’t like men.
I set the hearing aids on the counter. She asks a question I can’t hear. As hearing-impaired people often do when we can’t hear something, I smile and nod my head. I should have reached for the hearing aids.
Within seconds I’m back in Vince’s Barber Shop in Broomall, Pennsylvania at the age of five. Vince’s old electric clippers are shearing the sides of my head like a sheep shearer shears wool from a sheep. At age 72 I don’t have much left, but I’m told I have beautiful hair, even if it’s white. The clippers are clipping; the hair is flying in one-inch clumps. This is not a trim! I’m being led to the slaughter. I close my eyes, as though in prayer, pretending it’s not as bad as I expect.
I should have prayed!
Mortimer Snerd and Edgar Bergen
She finishes “the trim” with scissors and holds up the mirror to show me her handiwork. I pretend I’m an actor, looking at the unrecognizable head staring back at me. It’s Mortimer Snerd, ventriloquest Edgar Bergen’s dummy who made me laugh as a kid, and, as Mortimer often did, I smile a stupid smile, and say, “Yup”. There is nothing else to do.
ALWAYS CARRY CASH
“How much do I owe you?” “Ten dollars,” she says. “Do you take American Express?” “No,” she says, “we only take cash.”
Oops! I take out my wallet. No cash. I go into my pockets and find three one crumpled dollar bills. She agrees to let me go up the street to the coffee shop where Kay is using the internet. “I’ll be back,” I say, assuring her I’m not skipping town. I don’t tell her that her haircut is only worth three dollars.
Kay also has no cash. But she remembers the cylinder of quarters she keeps in the Prius. We count them out, 38 quarters, just enough with my three ones to cover the cost and leave a $1.50 tip, and return to the Beauty Salon.
She’s doing the hair of the teenage girl dressed in her bridesmaid uniform. I think of bridesmaids’ dresses as uniforms ‘cause, like Army recruits, the poor bridesmaids have to wear what their recruiter makes them wear. There is no freedom on wedding day. I just hope the poor soul sitting in the stylist’s chair doesn’t open her eyes to see Mortimer staring back from her bridesmaid uniform.
LESSONS FOR LIFE
Thirteen (13) little hours offered the best and the worst, the joys and, as the old hymn “Beneath the Cross of Jesus” puts it, “the burdens of the day.”
I’ll take back to Minneapolis three life lessons learned in Anaconda:
Pay no attention to the exterior appearance of anything, especially a restaurant. It may hide the best tenderloin steak you’ve ever tasted anywhere.
Carry cash!
If you’re a guy who ventures into a beauty salon next door to the closed barber shop and some women laugh loudly when you ask if they do men, run for your life. You may turn into Mortimer Snerd!
“Yup!” Life is like that. I smile and remember the tenderloin. Kay tells me my hair will grow out again.
How do you know you’re a writer? Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Virginia Wolff might have “known” because other writers, publishers, and Broadway and Hollywood producers heaped praise on their writings. But the operative word is might. Existential knowing is a different sort of knowing.
Like great athletes, composers, and musicians, great writers are rarely satisfied with their work. They are always reaching beyond themselves. Often they operate from the depths of depression, despair, obsessed with death, the dark depths of the human psyche and the world’s instinct toward self-destruction. Some of the greatest – Hemingway, Wolff, Sylvia Plath, and Edgar Allan Poe – do themselves in.
How do you know you’re a writer? Some would say you “know” it existentially by the ebb and flow between times of creativity and nothingness. When I feel down and the well runs dry as a bone, I know existentially…I might be a writer.
– Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN Feb. 28, 2015, inspired by tour of Ernest Hemingway’s home in Key West, Florida.
He knows who he is! He is not ignorant; he’s smart. He knows the visiting rabbi is both “the Holy One of God” and the one who has “come to destroy us”.
It is because he knows this that he ends up shrieking. He knows better than those around him, all the others who have come at sundown to observe the Friday Shabbat and Torah study.
He takes his customary place among his neighbors in the Capernaum synogogue. He does not expect much to happen. Everyone, including he, knows that he’s a little strange. Off balance, as the kinder of them say. Not the norm. Both they and he know his place. None of them yet knows Annie Dillard’s advice that worshipers “should wear crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.” [Teaching a Stone to Talk, Harper and Row, 1982, quoted here from Wikiquote.]
They have no need for crash helmets, life preservers, or signal flares. Like the ones who are better balanced, he likes his safety. He is safe in his customary place among the customary people expecting a customary teaching from a customary teacher who teaches like a copy-editor (a scribe). He expects to leave the same way he has come: bored and boring in the daily-ness of it all.
They look at him. He looks at them. They all yawn. Until the guest rabbi takes his seat to teach and says nothing. Jesus just looks at them, reading their faces, reading their minds, looking into their hearts. They are uncomfortable with the long silence. He is reading them like a book he’s read too many times.
When finally the rabbi speaks, he astounds them. He reads the Torah and the prophets as living texts, not history. He is alive and expectant. He is not bored or boring. He teaches with authority. He commands the attention of everyone in the room. They want him, but do not want him. They haven’t brought crash helmets. They’ve come for safety.
He catches the eye of the man who’s a little off balance whose frequent uninvited outbursts long ago placed him in the back row of the assigned seating. Although the rabbi’s eyes are working the room from left to right and back again, seeing all the faces there, it is as though he is staring at him alone. They are all a bit on edge now, drawn to his voice and the content of his teaching, his unparalleled authority, but they are also becoming nervous that he is messing with them in ways they had not expected.
The man in the back senses this. He knows this, and he begins to twitch and make strange sounds. He is agitated, disturbed, out of his comfort zone, like everyone else.
His face twitching with the familiar tic, he struggles to his feet from his back row seat, shoving from his shoulders the hands of the ushers stationed on either side of him to prevent the man with Tourettes Syndrome from disturbing them and making a fool of himself.
He points at the rabbi and shrieks at him: “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.”
Jesus moves from the center to the back row. He tells the body guards to leave him alone. He stands eye-to-eye with him. “Be silent,” he says, “Come out of him” as though speaking not to the man himself but to others who torment him from the inside.
The whole synagogue is on their feet watching. They know that the Tourettes man with the tic and uncontrollable speech has spoken for all of the normal ones as well. “Have you come to destroy us?”
The man screams and convulses, but it is not the man who is convulsing; it is the hostage-takers whose powers are being broken that are convulsing: the fear of losing one’s assigned place, the customary despair and despairing comfort that robs him and all of them of the joy of the extraordinary in ordinary life.
Perhaps the story of “the man with the evil spirit” comes so early in the Gospel of Mark because it is the story of us all. The Holy One of God does come to destroy us as well as heal us. The next time you go to the synagogue for Sabbath rest or to church on a Sunday morning, take a crash helmet and expect something great to happen!
A contemplative reflection on Psalm 62 at Saint Augustine Beach, Saint Augustine, FL.
For God alone my soul waits in silence, for my hope is from him. I wait in silence. [Psalm 62:5 NRSV]
I wait in silence.
Withdrawing from the noisy men next door in Saint Augustine, I am like the Hermit Crab crawling into the borrowed snail shell on Saint Augustine Beach.
This is the same beach brave souls dared to integrate in 1964, a place where then there was no place to hide, the public white beach where the Hermit Crabs refused to hide when the billy clubs swing to drive them from the white man’s beach. There are no billy clubs on the beach today but the shouting of the world we call civilized still hurts by ears.
How long will you assail a person,
will you batter your victim, all of you,
as you would a leaning wall, a tottering fence? [Ps. 62:3 NRSV]
The world is noisy. Loud. Cacophonous. Bellowing blasts, bewailing, and bedlam in Beirut, Baghdad, and Boston hurt my ears. Hoping to leave it, I come to the beach where the tides know nothing of the color of my skin, my income, my worries or fears.
For God alone my soul waits in silence,
for my hope is from him.
He alone is my rock and my salvation,
my fortress; I shall not be shaken.
On God rests my deliverance and my honour;
my mighty rock, my refuge is in God. [Ps. 62: 5-7 NRSV]
Hermit Crab crawling into abaondoned snail shell
At low tide I crawl inside the borrowed shell looking for a respite from the noonday heat, my deliverance, my refuge, my fortress. But, even here, the noise follows me.
The blasts, buzzes, and bellowing echo inside the shell. Silence eludes me. Even here, I am a poor man, a mere breath, walking among the vendors and hawkers, resentful, angry, beset, a man of low estate.
Those of low estate are but a breath,
those of high estate are a delusion;
in the balances they go up;
they are together lighter than a breath.
Put no confidence in extortion,
and set no vain hopes on robbery;
if riches increase, do not set your heart on them. [Ps. 62:9-10 NRSV]
Here I am a breath stripped from the delusions of high estates indulged on the other side of the sand dunes that separate the beach from the street.
I wait in silence.
I ponder the speed outside the Hermit Crab’s temporary home, the abandoned snail shell, the speed that is itself an illusion, a flight of hubris washed away by the tides of time. I remember the race to nowhere, the myths of ownership, invulnerability, control, and superiority that race through the minds of low and high estates alike.
I hear the distant shouts and screams from the integration of Saint Augustine Beach that still plunge the despondent men next door into the oblivion of cheap booze, dope, and, maybe, crack. But the longer I wait and listen, my heart grows strangely calmer. Quieter. More at peace.
I come into the deeper Silence of the Breath once heard by the psalmist.
Once God has spoken;
twice have I heard this:
that power belongs to God,
and steadfast love belongs to you, O Lord.
For you repay to all
according to their work. [Ps. 62: 11-12 NRSV]
In the wordless silence I hear the Word I’ve come to the beach to hear:
“Be still, and know that I am God.” [Ps. 46:10 NRSV]
– Gordon C. Stewart, Saint Augustine, Florida, January 31, 2015
Marcus Borg‘s answer to the question “How do you know you’re right?” is spot on.
“I don’t. I don’t know that I ‘m right.”
Barkley Thompson reports the exchange in yesterday’s posting on God in the Midst of the City following Dr. Borg’s death, re-posted today on Views from the Edge as “Tribute to Marcus Borg (1942-2015)”.
I never met Marcus Borg. I wish I had. We were born in 1942 within a few months of each other. You might say we grew up next door to each other in different towns. There’s something about time that situates people in the same location, asking the same or similar questions, searching the same search, vexed, in our case, by the early horrors of World War II, German concentration camps, the Holocaust, and the American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As children of faith we grew up asking how we could square a loving God with the stacked bodies of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the economic disparities of poverty and injustice of racial segregation. As happened to a lesser extent with some of his peers, Marcus developed a theology and Christology that rose out of these compelling questions about the real world that had shaped him, and the irrepressable hope for something better that drove him deeper and wider as he grew older and wiser.
Marcus’s humble response to the questioner who asked how he knew he was right -“I don’t know. I don’t know that I’m right” – is one for the ages. If only we could clone it to create a humbler humanity of neighborliness across all the terror our world is making, we might fetch the blessing from the curse of absolute religious certainty.
“God’s dream for us is not simply peace of mind, but peace on earth.”- Marcus J.Borg & John Dominic Crossan, The First Christmas, 2007, HarperOne.
Be where you are. If you stay there, really LIVE there, dig into the place, listen to the voices, watch the faces and people movements, you’re likely to discover the deeper streams of courage and frailty that make a place what it is.
Take yesterday, for example. Kay and I attend the “Hands Up!” educational event at St. Paul’s African Methodist Episcopal Church, around the corner from where we’re living this January. Mr. James Jackson, who seems to know a great deal about the law, citizens’ rights, and how to deal with law enforcement, sits behind us. There’s something different about him, a weathered face and voice that come with experience.
Dr. Robert B. Hayling and Mr. James Jackson
When the opportunity presents itself, we step outside for conversation. James Jackson was a Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) Field Officer in St. Augustine with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I listen to what he tells me about the tumultuous time in St. Augustine that led to the passage of U.S. Civil Rights Act. “The bill was sitting on Johnson’s desk,” he says, “but he didn’t want to move forward with it. What happened here in St. Augustine [referring to the acts of civil disobedience to de-segregate the public beaches] drew national attention and put pressure on Washington.”
After the “Hands Up!” workshop a google search for James Jackson leads to more information about him, Dr. Robert B. Hayling, a dentist, and another who were kidnapped by the Ku Klux Klan. Gwendolyn Duncan tells the story.
For [Dr. Hayling’s] continued fight to right the injustices perpetrated upon him and his fellow Black Citizens, his home was shot into, barely missing his wife and killing his dog which was within the home. His wife and children escaped without injury. On another occasion, Dr. Hayling, along with Mr. Clyde Jenkins, Mr. James Hauser, Mr. James Jackson were kidnapped by the Klu Klux Klan.
All of the men, except Mr. James Jackson were beaten unmercifully and left semi-conscious. If not for the compassion of a white minister, Reverend Irvin Cheney, who slipped from the rally and called the State Highway Patrol in Tallahassee, Dr. Hayling and his fellow activists, who were stacked like firewood, would have been burned alive with gasoline. Dr. Hayling received the most serious injuries, suffering hospitalization for fourteen days, losing eleven teeth, and several broken ribs. Scars he is known to have said, “I’ll take to my grave.” He and the others were charged with assault but charges were dropped because the Klan never showed up to court. The Klan was never prosecuted in this case.
Dr. Hayling’s house is three blocks from where Kay and I are staying. Before meeting Mr. Jackson yesterday, we read the Freedom Trail plaque walking by the house around the corner here in Lincolnville.
Be where yo are. If you stay there, really LIVE there, dig into the place, listen to the voices, watch the faces and the people movements, you’re likely to discover the deeper streams of courage and frailty that make a place what it is.
Views from the Edge 