Oh, Mother

I am sitting here waiting for someone’s Mom to die. This is the sickness of being polite. Being Pastor. Maybe if I am polite. Maybe if I accumulate enough polite moments in a person’s memory, despite their tacit embarrassment to avoid talking to me about religious things, maybe when something bad happens, maybe when their mother dies they will think that I might have thought something about this before, that I might know an ancient tribe of primitive aboriginals that has spent millennia peering into tombs and wailing prayers for the living. Maybe I might know where to look or where to go when they realize that at the grave we all lose confidence in what we thought we knew or knew we thought. I imagine a late night phone call, quiet sobs breaking like dirty waves at T-Street in San Clemente on the other line, Dave? Yes? I’m so sad.

But the true truth is I have known and loved two different girls who began to turn toward the Lord when their mom’s were dying of cancer. But when these moms, these beautiful women, these radiant beings, finally fell to the idiot hideousness of death, the thought that their mothers might not be entering into eternal beatitude with Jesus Christ our Lord, the thought they might be somewhere else, was sufficiently and understandably terrifying enough to crush all faith. Their dead mothers became their faith through a transaction of grief. Platitudes or the memory shawl of the beauty of peculiar humanity. Mother’s eyes. To these casts they fell and grieved and washed the stone with their tears and hair and fled from the sight of Him and the possibility that history might end. The poet, she was another. She read poems about her mother dying and they were beautiful poems, a beautiful temple and oblation, the same faith in the memory of the dead. And we clapped when she was done reading. And she smiled—smallish, polite, and graceful. Just like a Pastor.

Oh, Mother

I am sitting here waiting for someone’s Mom to die. This is the sickness of being polite. Being Pastor. Maybe if I am polite. Maybe if I accumulate enough polite moments in a person’s memory, despite their tacit embarrassment to avoid talking to me about religious things, maybe when something bad happens, maybe when their mother dies they will remember that I might have thought something about this before, that I might be acquainted with an ancient tribe of primitive aboriginals that has spent millennia peering into tombs and shouting prayer. Maybe I might know where to look or go when they realize that at the grave we all lose confidence in what we thought we knew or knew we thought. I imagine a late night phone call, quiet sobs breaking like dirty waves at T-Street in San Clemente on the other line, Dave? Yes? I’m so sad.

But the true truth is I have known and loved two different girls who began to turn toward the Lord when their mom’s were dying of cancer. But when these moms, these beautiful women, these radiant beings, finally fell to the idiot hideousness of death, the thought that their mothers might not be entering into eternal beatitude with Jesus Christ our Lord, the thought they might be somewhere else, was sufficiently and understandably terrifying enough to crush all faith. Their dead mothers became their faith through a transaction of grief. Platitudes or the memory shawl of the beauty of peculiar humanity. Mother’s eyes. To these casts they fell and grieved and washed the stone with their tears and hair and fled from the sight of Him and the possibility that history might end. The poet, she was another. She read poems about her mother dying and they were beautiful poems, a beautiful temple and oblation, the same faith in the memory of the dead. And we clapped when she was done reading. And she smiled—smallish, polite, and graceful. Just like a Pastor.

Stan the Man

Religion and Violence from CPX on Vimeo.

Reflections on Death from CPX on Vimeo.

Friendship and Community from CPX on Vimeo.

Christianity and the University from CPX on Vimeo.

The Birth of Personhood and Universal Dignity

I can't resist posting this passage from Hart, but will return to Hauerwas subsequently.

"The ultimate power and meaning of the Christian movement within the ancient world cannot be measured simply by the richness of later Christian culture's art or architecture. the relative humanity or inhumanity of its societies and laws, the creativity of its economic or scientific institutions, or the perdurability of its religious institutions through the ages. "Christendom" was only the outward, sometimes majestic, but always defective form of the interaction between the gospel and the intractable stuff of human habit. The more vital and essential victory of Christianity lay in the strange, impractical, altogether unworldly tenderness of the moral intuitions it succeeded in sowing in human consciences. If we find ourselves occasionally shocked by how casually ancient men and women destroyed or ignored lives we would think ineffably precious, we would do well to reflect that theirs was--in purely pragmatic terms--a more "natural" disposition toward reality. It required an extraordinary moment of awakening in a few privileged souls, and then centuries of the relentless and total immersion of culture in the Christian story, to make even the best of us conscious of (or at least able to believe in) the moral claim of all other persons upon us, the splendor and irreducible dignity of the divine humanity within them, that depth within each of them that potentially touches upon the eternal.

In the light of Christianity's absolute law of charity, we came to see what formerly we could not: the autistic or Down syndrome or otherwise disabled child, for instance, for whom the world can remain a perpetual perplexity, which can too often cause pain but perhaps only vaguely and fleetingly charm or delight; the derelict or wretched or broken man or woman who has wasted his or her life away; the homeless, the utterly impoverished, the diseased, the mentally ill, the physically disabled; the exiles, refugees, fugitives; even criminals and reprobates. To reject, turn away from, or kill any or all of them would be, in a very real sense, the most purely practical of impulses. To be able, however, to see in them not only something of worth but indeed something potentially godlike, to be cherished and adored, is the rarest and most ennoblingly unrealistic capacity ever bred within human souls. To look on the child whom our ancient ancestors would have abandoned to fate, and to see in him or her instead a person worthy of all affection--resplendent with divine glory, ominous with an absolute demand upon our consciences, evoking our love and our reverence--is to be set free from mere elemental existence, and from those natural limitations that pre-Christian persons took to be the very definition of reality. And only someone profoundly ignorant of history and of native human inclinations could doubt that it is only as a consequence of the revolutionary force of Christianity within our history, within the very heart of our shared nature, that any of us can experience this freedom."

--David Bentley Hart

Hannah's Child

I'm going to be posting bits and pieces from Stanley Hauerwas' recently released memoir over the next couple weeks as I work through it. I hope to start writing again more regularly myself, but I have been on a personal sabbatical as I read and think in new directions in preparation for my new calling to the secular academy.

This excerpt seems to capture the heart of why I think I am heading into the academy, as a Christian preacher (which is to say a "practicing theologian"), to do theological work in an English department...

"I think Christian 'ethics' depends on developing the eye of the novelist. If my work is compelling, I suspect it is so to the degree I am able to write like a novelist. If I have a novelist's eye, it is not accidental. I have, after all, spent many years reading novels. Reading novels will not necessarily make one better able to see without illusion, but it can help. My ability to see, moreover, depends on how I have come to understand what it means to be a Christian. I fear that much of the Christianity that surrounds us assumes our task is to save appearances by protecting God from Job-like anguish. But if God is the God of Jesus Christ, then God does not need our protection. What God demands is not protection, but truth."