Cowboys and Indians

When I was about three or four, my older brother and I were playing with our plastic Cowboys and Indians in the sandbox.

“Wawawawawawa!” I cried as I held the rigid body of an Indian to his horse, threateningly aiming his arrow at the kneeling cowboy in my other hand.

“Bang, bang!” I shouted as a response from the crouching Cowboy as his otherwise stiff figure shook from the backfire of his weapon.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” I gasped from the equestrian native, who began sliding off his mount in defeat.

Suddenly my older, wiser brother interrupted my reenactment. “Em, what are you doing?!” he scolded me in alarm. “Do you realize what really happened in the New World? The Indians didn’t do anything wrong, and then the cowboys came and took away their land!”

Confused, I looked at the plastic toys in sadness, trying to allow this new information from my six-year-old elder to sort itself out in my shaken worldview. Their rigid figures had become strangely complex, and an afternoon adventure in the sandbox had been robbed of all its simplicity.

Suddenly, in a burst of inspiration, I put the cowboy on the horse, repeating the same scene in inverse.

“Hahahahaha!” shouted the evil settler as he charged toward the innocent native, and “Twang, twang!” fired the arrow of his foe. A potentially confusing afternoon was saved.

All that to say, I remember when the world was simpler, when there were clear-cut good guys and bad guys, and all a kid had to do was figure out which were which. I remember being able to talk about political issues without ever knowing anyone on the other side, or being able to talk about theology when I had only ever been in one kind of church. Like I had been that afternoon in the sandbox, I was as confident about evil as I was of good, and confident that I knew how to identify both.

On the other hand, I also remember developing some kind of a Christian agnosticism in which one could never know anything for sure beyond God, Jesus, and the Bible (the interpretation thereof, of course, was anyone’s guess), and I would not suggest that position either, at least not to anyone with a similar propensity to despair.

But I do need to keep reminding myself, as I slowly gain the courage to believe God has not left us to muddle through moral and theological ambiguity alone, that confidence divorced from humility creates travesty as monstrous as the one I enacted in the sandbox. May I learn the courage to believe in knowable truth, but never lose the humility to imagine I might be mistaken about it.

Feast of St. Guasact

Since I've done a bad job posting during the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity but have intended to do so in order to encourage my readers to pray, as Christ prayed in John 17, that we may be one as he and the Father are one, I thought I'd at least repost something here at the end. Today is the feast of the good St. Guasacht, part of the throng of Irish saints for whom there is almost no historical evidence, as happens on an island with little recorded history and much oppression. Please use this post as a reminder to pray for forgiveness and reconciliation in all the many factions that have divided our family over the millenia.

* * *

Today is the feast day of St. Guasact. As the story goes, unreliable and erratic as all the best Irish tales are, after Patrick was kidnapped from his home in Great Britain and sold to Maelchu (or Miluic, if you prefer) in northern Ireland where he spent years in slavery tending sheep, he grew up beside Maelchu’s children, St. Guasacht and the two Sts. Emers (feast day December 11). Why history remembers only one name for the two women I do not know, but since it barely remembers anything more I suppose we should be grateful. Beggars can’t be choosy, after all.

Patrick, as we all know, receives a vision while tending sheep on Mt. Slemish, miraculously escapes Ireland, reunites with his homeland, hears the Irish people calling him in his dreams, and returns to the land of his captivity where he proceeds (from what I can tell) to found churches in virtually every town and to convert personally nearly every fourth- and fifth-century Irish saint (and believe you me, there are many!).

But the first priority is the very family who had enslaved him, and, while Maelchu burns himself alive in his home rather than see Patrick again (evidently those are his only two options?), his three children receive the faith, dedicate themselves to mission of bringing the gospel to the druidic people, and became some of the first bishop/nuns. As Patrick puts the veil on his two foster sisters, their feet sink into the stone beneath them, and the marks are visible to this day.

So today from a less fantastical land of parking lots and laborious rearranging of 1s and 0s where nevertheless the scars of bitterness run just as deep and the power of grace trumps them just as conclusively, I thought I would venerate Patrick’s slave-owners-turned-sisters. Pray for us slave-owners, St. Guasact; pray for us slaves.

With both lungs

I learned once that Billy Graham and Martin Luther King Jr. had been good friends, and that they had originally thought of going into ministry together. For whatever reason, whether for disagreements or mere differences in vocational leanings, they did not. “You stay in the stadiums, Billy,” King (or “Mike,” as Billy called him) wrote to Graham, “because you will have far more impact on the white establishment there than you would if you marched in the streets.” Perhaps he did. Perhaps.

But their divergence was not only strategic; it was certainly somewhat ideological. Graham was unsure of King’s methods of civil disobedience, saying that “No matter what the law may be—it may be an unjust law—I believe we have a Christian responsibility to obey it. Otherwise you have anarchy.” King responded with the words of St. Augustine: “an unjust law is no law at all.” Over time as King began to speak out against the Vietnam war and poverty in a time when Communism was a looming threat, the divergence between him and his old friend became more pronounced.

Nevertheless, their friendship remained intact, and Graham took some radical stances for desegregation at his crusades. He invited King to join him on the pulpit and paid his bail to have him released from jail, and King’s famous declaration that “Eleven o’clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America” is actually a quotation from an article of Graham’s.

Years later Graham confided to some Civil Rights leaders that he wondered what would have happened if he had taken to the streets with his friend, and I suppose we cannot know the answers to questions like that. What indeed might have happened if the iconic figures of liberal and conservative Christianity, figures whom both sides respect even if they disagree, had found a way to share their ministry? What kind of ministry would it have been? It might of course have been a loss to the great good that both of their ministries accomplished, but I cannot help but wonder if it might have muddled some of the sharp distinctions between liberal and conservative Christianity that I have grown up among.

Pope John Paul II, when calling for reconciliation between the eastern and western divisions of Christianity, spoke of the need for the Church to “breathe with both lungs.” Here in America, I am reminded of our lop-sided breathing in every walk from my poor neighborhood to my rich university, every transition from conversations with my Mennonite friends to my Catholic, every Sunday morning stroll by a white church to a black.

I’ve been told many times that Church unity is something we will not see “until heaven” (as if “heaven” were so ephemeral as to be identified by a time rather than a physical place). Today on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which happens to come the day before the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity begins, it seems as good a time as any to remember that our Lord has taught us to pray that his Kingdom come and his will be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” Amen. Come Lord Jesus!

The Intersection of Peril

The day after a record-breaking snowfall, I asked a friend if I could make socio-economic assumptions for why the city had not even begun plowing the roads in my neighborhood. After another day had passed, he said I could consider those assumptions to be conclusions. By the fourth day, I had ceased to care.

“Do you think she’ll make it?” I asked my friend as he slowed his car as we approached the intersection before my house. A car was swimming in the snow in front of us, thick and gelatinous after the three feet of snow we received four days earlier which the city had still not gotten around to clearing from my neighborhood.

“Well, she’s still moving...” he observed, wavering between his choices to stop his car or veer around her. “No, her tires are just spinning now,” he finally concluded. “Do wanna help her?”

“Yeah, let’s do it.” My friend stopped his car in the middle of the road before the slushy intersection and we got out.

After a few unsuccessful attempts to push her car either backwards or forwards, I volunteered to run home and grab my shovel, and my friend moved his car away from the chaos.

By the time we started shoveling under her tires, another stranger approached on foot and joined our rescue attempts. The three of us shoved, pushed, slid, sunk, and shushed for several humorous minutes, and eventually the hapless car was free.

Of course, by that time, another vehicle was stranded in the same intersection, and our makeshift rescue team turned to investigate. “You have four-wheel drive!” a man in a van behind her laughed. “How can you get stuck?”

“I don’t know how, but I sure am suck!” she retorted. Before we could help her, the fellow in the van behind her offered to bump her with his vehicle, and we watched the heroic effort. While he did manage to free her, our cheers turned to laughter when his tires spun to reveal that he was now stranded in the intersection of peril.

“Are you gonna help me too?” he laughed.

That afternoon, after I had said goodbye to my friend and my collection of rescuers and rescuees and was nestled on my couch getting reading done, I learned to identify the sound of spinning tires out my window. Each time another car got stuck, I looked out the window to see a collection of passers-by helping the victim. I remembered my experiences of Irish hospitality and Southern hospitality, and was warmed to find that it had followed me out to the cold Midwest.

The city did get around to plowing my neighborhood that night, though by that point I had learned that good neighbors are more reliable than public service. I am grateful to live where people are simple enough to have time to be good neighbors.

'Tis better to give than to give

In my last year of undergrad I spent a lot of time with the homeless people near my campus. I knew many people’s names and alleged stories, had given many rides to church or doctors or grocery stores, and had even been a guest in one woman’s tent. I bordered near despair in those days, knowing that my greatest service to these new friends of mine was hardly more than a drop in the ocean, but began to imagine that the sanctification of my own soul was on the line as much as theirs, and that culturing a giving spirit was only Christian way I could think to respond to poverty.

On Valentine’s Day as I was on my way to my coffee shop to get some studying done, Barbara heralded me. “I want to ask you for something,” she said, and my heart sank (as it always did) as I prepared myself for another of her elaborate expensive tragedies. “It’s Valentine’s Day,” she said; “I was wondering if I could have some money for some candy.”

Without going into any detail about the host of mixed emotions and conflicting values that went into my interactions with Barbara, I will say that I was straining to come up with a way to be generous when candy was a luxury I didn’t even buy myself in those days. Fortunately, I didn’t have to strain for long; I remembered that my parents had sent me a box of chocolates that I happened to have with me, and I gave it to her without another thought.

It’s probably all for the best anyway, I consoled myself as I walked away, bereft of my little luxury. Now she will get to feel special on Valentine’s Day, and I will not fill my empty stomach with chocolate.

But then I saw Benedict standing at his usual corner, and my heart rose (as it always did) to see him. After our usual joyful greeting in which I asked him if he had had anything to eat and he insisted he was fine even though I knew he wasn’t, he announced that he had something for me.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Here,” he said, handing me a small bag of healthy treats—granola bar, apple, raisins, nuts—along with a homemade Valentine’s card apparently made by a school child. I assumed it came from the homeless shelter. A homeless man was offering me food.

“Benedict, I can’t take this!” I protested. “This is for you.”

“I want you to have it,” he insisted.

“How ‘bout I just take one thing,” I compromised desperately, reaching instinctively for the raisins because they were my least favorite item.

“No, I want to give it to you,” he insisted. “Please take it.”

I did take it. All these years later, I remember that as the day that I learned that, because it is indeed better to give than to receive, part of compassion involves giving others the chance to give. Benedict did not want my money or my things (as indeed Barbara did); Benedict wanted friendship, which for him in particular required an opportunity to give to me. The only loving thing I could provide him that day was to receive from him.

In the six years since that day, I have tried to culture a receiving spirit to match the giving spirit I’ve always been urged to have. I allow the generous friend to cover the meal without immediately planning a way to pay her back. I accept whatever odd gift my grandmother finds for me at a garage sale. I proudly display the doll my poor neighbors give me because it reminds them of me even if it was not what I would have chosen for my dining room. True friendship, after all, cannot be one-way, and the only gift I really know how to give anymore is friendship.

It is indeed better to give than (then?) to receive. Let me not be greedy with that gift.

Leading out

I stumbled accidentally into academia a few years ago (much to no one’s surprise but my own, as it turned out). After a year of living in an intercity commune, I listened to the wise counsel of some of my housemates who suggested, after living beside me for a year, that I may find the logistics of a public school teacher (the vocation I had been pursuing actively for seven years) to be stifling to my flexible lifestyle. They suggested I consider teaching community college instead, and, after a teary conversation, they encouraged me to leave the commune to pursue my master’s in a nearby city, assuring me that the doors were open to me should I decide to move back after my quick M.A.

It was a confusing time for me (incidentally, the time I started this blog), a time when I was slowly realizing that I had no place for Grace in my worldview, that I related to God like a slave to her tyrant, that I didn't know how to think of myself when I wasn't trying to single-handedly save the world, that I was motivated more from a hero complex than from love, that I didn’t know how to distinguish my voice from his or the million other voices clamoring around me. In that time, oddly enough, academia became a place of refuge for me, a place where I felt the closest thing to healthy I had felt in quite a while. Part of that reason may be because it was the right fit, certainly, but I had an inkling that the primary reason was quite simpler:

Academia gave me something to analyze other than my own mind.

This comment must not be interpreted as a criticism of self-examination or psychology or other forms of understanding oneself. On the contrary, I assume I still have a life full of inner probing in front of me. What I needed for a time, however, was time; I needed to learn to leave my unanswered questions unanswered for a while, to gain perspective that was outside myself, to listen to voices other than my own.

At any rate, I remembered all that as I read the closing chapter of At War With the Word, a book about liberal education by a scholar who has meant quite a bit to me over the past three years, R. V. Young. For any of my readers interested in scholarship or education (from either the producing or receiving end), I am including it.

The Latin educare means to “rear or bring up (children or young animals),” and it in turn derives from educere, “to lead forth” or “to lead out of.” Implicit in the term is the idea that education consists in leading the young out of something, and the something out of which everyone must be led is the peculiar, self-interested ego; for to be self-centered is the common predicament—that narrow, stifling subjectivism that is the universal prison of all human beings. A great work of literature is, then, a book that extends our horizons, that alters our perspective, that makes us take notice of something beyond our immediate needs and desires.
-R. V. Young

May I never leave the journey of knowing myself, and may I never lack for people to lead me out of myself!

Three stages

A few years ago when my nephew was four, he pontificated to my brother from the backseat of the car:

There are three stages to life, Daddy. The first stage is when you are kid and you do what your parents tell you to do. The second stage is when you are an adult and you have to do the things adults have to do. The third stage is when you get thrusters on your feet and can fly.

The little fella had quite a sophisticated eschatology, I must say. I can't say much about the third stage yet, so I have no room to correct him. But now is as good a season as any to rejoice that the God who has seemingly entered all three of my nephew's stages of human development is preparing the way for us who are caught up in the second to enter the third. I'm looking forward to my thrusters.

God speed the day, Little One.

The woman I am

In order to guard against the graduate student tendency to write scathing, sophomoric criticism of other scholars, one of my professors gave us a rule of thumb for writing literary reviews: “Always pretend the author is sitting beside you as you write it,” she told us, “and that he is in a wheel chair.” A good rule of thumb.

For Christmas this year, my family (the few of us who are not in China, at least) are hosting my two elderly grandmothers: the frail Southern lady in her late 80s who could talk the ears off of an elephant and the short Polish woman in her early 90s who could keep Armageddon a secret. It’s been one of the strangest Christmases I’ve ever had.

And somewhere in-between the occasional “yes’um”s I inserted to punctuate the stream-of-consciousness tales that went from her father’s scandalous affairs that were ironic considering he had initially joined the KKK because he thought it existed to beat up men who walked out on their wives when he was a cruel man anyway and forced her to drop out of high school so she could work at his firm and make money for him to pocket while he told her that all she would ever have going for her was her good looks, which she used to the best of her abilities anyway at least four times over beginning with the blond teenager whom she married because she was getting a little too old to be single and whom she convinced to joined the marines because she liked their uniforms the best until she sent him a “Dear John” letter when he got shipped away during the War because she had never been all that crazy about him anyway, not anymore than the man whose marriage produced her first daughter right before it was annulled, not like my grandfather who nevertheless wouldn’t initially sell his car to buy the particular ring she wanted which almost cost him her hand in marriage because she determined he didn’t value her enough to show her off as the high class person she was, the high class of person she declared us all to be which my brother’s nice car and new job demonstrated.... somewhere in-between these stories and the lite suggestions for selective breeding of humans that ironically harkened to the eugenics that I associated with the Nazis her various husbands had been fighting.... somewhere in-between all this I realized two things:

One: that my grandmother is not unlike the various girls who had made my life miserable when I was in high school and who I strove tirelessly to avoid becoming.

Two: that in her withered frailty I could not criticize her the way I had spent my adult life criticizing those women.

It made me reflect that every one of those cheerleaders who hurt me in high school will all be old frail women like my grandmother one day, unable to see the make-up they still put on their face every day and the wig that covers their bald heads, unable to color coordinate their clothing that is still important even if they can’t see it anymore than they can control their bowels or taste their food. We are called to forgive our enemies because the eugenics that Hitler organized is not unlike my frail grandmother’s suggestions for selective breeding at the dinner table, because the arrogance of the prom queen is not unlike my grandmother’s haggard dignity.

Then I reflected that I will be like my withered grandmother one day as well.

Then I reflected that I already am. In contrast to the woman I was created to be, I am that frail woman trying to maintain a dignified poise while wearing Poise panty-liners. In contrast to who we have it in us to be, we are walking on brittle bones and can hardly make it up the stairs. We are called to forgive demented autocrats because we ourselves suffer with dementia. Sin is an ailment we all suffer through together, like old folks at a nursing home sharing the latest news of our recent medical disorders.

Rejoice, Christmas reminds us: Christ has taken on our osteoporosis. He is sharing our dementia and our irritable bowel syndrome, our blindness and deafness and shriveled skin. Rejoice; if he could cross from radiance into dung, there is hope that we may cross from our dung into his radiance.

Any hope I have to be reborn into that radiance is the same hope my grandmother has, and that those cheerleaders have, and that my great-grandfather who may have been a Klansman had. What is there to do but to forgive?

The Nativitie of Christ

A Christmas-Eve word from Robert Southwell, the sixteenth-century English poet, Jesuit priest, and martyr under Queen Elizabeth I:

Beholde the father, is his daughters sonne:
The bird that built the nest, is hatched therein:
The olde of yeares, an houre hath not out runne:
Eternall life, to live doth now beginne.
The word is dunne: the mirth of heaven doth weepe:
Might feeble is: and force doth faintly creepe.

O dying soules, beholde your living spring:
O dasled eyes, behold your sonne of grace:
Dull eares, attend what word this word doth bring:
Up heavie hartes: with joye your joye embrace.
From death, from darke, from deafenesse, from dispaires:
This life, this light, this word, this joy repaires.

Gift better then himselfe, God doth not know:
Gift better then his God, no man can see:
This gift doth here the gever geven bestow:
Gift to this gift let each receiver bee.
God is my gift, himselfe he freely gave me:
Gods gift am I, and none but God shall have me.

Man altered was by sinne from man to beast:
Beastes foode is haye, haye is all mortall flesh:
Now God is flesh, and lies in Manger prest:
As haye, the brutest sinner to refresh.
O happie fielde wherein this fodder grew,
Whose tast, doth us from beasts to men renew.

-Robert Southwell

Chosen to Choose

In the first conversation I had with my Irish priest in Cork, Father Padraic mentioned some of the disputes between various parties during the Protestant Reformation dealing with predestination and free will.

“The Catholic Church has never found that a divisive issue,” he told me, “because we have always looked at Mary as the example of what happens to us all when Christ enters us. She was chosen and she said ‘Yes.’ She was predestined and she freely obeyed. The same happens when Christ enters any of us.”

This is not intended to be a Marian post in particular, not one that goes from her being “highly favored” to the Immaculate Conception or from all generations calling her blessed to the role of Mother of the Church. But since the readings from the Book of Common Prayer for today depict her meeting with Elizabeth and her song of rejoicing afterwards, I remembered Father Padraic’s words over two years ago, and found comfort in the paradoxes of the Incarnation: the Creator is created in creation, we are chosen to choose.

Rejoice, my friends: as the Word has been made flesh in the womb of a virgin, he has entered the womb of creation, sanctifying the ground he treads. The Creator is in the womb, and creation will be reborn. As with her, so with us; he enters the world through his people, and we await his bursting forth from us. Blessed are we whom he has chosen; blessed are we who have chosen him.

Sonnet XXVI of Advent

My soul declares his greatness, for he’ll do
What he has done before: yea, he will stir
His might just as he stirs the barren womb,
And look upon the sojourner like her
Who served in lowliness. The Mighty One
Has done his wonders while our hearts were far
Away: He gives the rain and hides the sun,
He spreads abundance as he spread the stars.
Soon Lebanon will be a fruitful field
And fields be forests; we who dwell in night
Will live in light; the nations will be healed,
The hungry fed, the blind receive their sight.
And blessed is the chosen for her choice
To bear the ripened word and to rejoice.

Psalm 80, 147, 148
Isaiah 29:13-24
Revelation 21:22-22:5
Luke 1:39-56