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Con – spiracyMay 1, 2004
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By now we ought to have become a denomination of Alice Walkers – a church of poets... |
If you ever listen to “A Prairie Home Companion” on the radio, then you know that on any dark night in a city that knows how to keep its secrets, a single light is likely to be burning high up on the twelfth floor of the Acme Building - where Guy Noir, Private Eye, is still trying to find the answers to life’s persistent questions. By now at least one thing about him is clear: he’s not a Presbyterian. His hard-bitten attitude makes it clear that he hasn’t heard the “Tough Week? We’re Open on Sunday” slogan. And one of the secrets the city must have been keeping is the address of the local First Presbyterian where, if he were ever awake on Sunday morning, he’d surely discover that we memorize the answers to life’s persistent questions. Alice Walker may not be a Presbyterian either, but she might as well have sat through a lot of our children’s sermons: “Who made you?” is always at least one of the questions - and the answer is always “God”. What is the chief end of human existence? the Westminster Catechism asks - and the answer is always, “To glorify and enjoy God forever.” My U.C.C. and Episcopalian friends always marvel at the audacity of the
final trial we Presbyterians put our candidates for ordination to the
ministry through: we dare them to improve upon the Apostles’ Creed.
We put one blank sheet of paper before them, and ask for an original statement
of faith that is both as utterly fresh and unique as we hope each of them
is, and yet that is also recognizably orthodox and comfortably congruent
with the theology that bears our stamp. Some of those persistent questions
are always about scripture: what is it, how does it do what it does, and
what’s your relationship to it? By now we ought to have become a
denomination of Alice Walkers – a church of poets – because
we expect them to distill an answer into a few lines that both put us
deeply at ease in the embrace of familiar truths and also startle us awake
to the breathtaking new things that God is doing. That’s the work
of poets. |
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Harold Bloom, I think it was, said that “religion is the spilling of poetry” |
So is the Bible, of course, the work of poets. Even the Deuteronomist, the sing-song voice that reiterates the ten commandments and the rest of the law of Moses in case we didn’t get it the first time, even the Deuteronomist has moments of prose levitation - like Surely this commandment that I command you this day is not too hard for you, or too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say “who will go up to heaven for us and get it so that we may hear and do it?” - nor is it beyond the sea, that you should say “Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us and get it so that we may hear and do it?” - No, the word is very near to you: in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it.” ...and... We do not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord. Harold Bloom, I think it was, said that “religion is the spilling of poetry” [which is a definition that works a bit better on my “very spiritual” student friends than anything about “the chief end of man”]. And maybe even the decent and orderly Presbyterians manage to spill a little poetry now and then – for this Word that is always so much at the heart of all our persistent questions is our work and our bread and our breath, as close to us as the heart and soul and mind that ponder it, as ordinary as our lying down and our rising, as essential as the teaching of our children, as startling as the words “I will never turn away” or “Peace I leave with you” or “Blessed are you poor”. This is the Word we spill, splashing it as a sign on the doorposts of our house and on our gates. So if the question of the moment is “Whose Word is this, anyway?”
– then of course there are two answers we’ll insist on up front.
It’s God’s Word; that’s its source. And it’s our Word;
that’s its destination. It belongs to us, not in the sense of ownership
but in the sense of stewardship – in the sense that it has come to
be the familiar embrace and the startling challenge in which we know who
we are. And if, as Walter Brueggemann has written, justice is figuring
out who things really belong to, and returning them – then it would
seem that the central project of doing justice (not to mention loving
kindness, and walking humbly) should be figuring out that this Word that
is very near us really belongs to God – and trying to return it.
Trying to give it back in ways of doing and ways of being; trying to carry
this Word through the length of our lives to our chief end and finally
to lay it down there with joy and gratitude. |
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As much as we seem to have gotten into the habit of breathing, for example, sometimes it takes being present at a birth, or a death – it takes seeing a breath that has no-breath on the other side of it – to begin to understand what breathing is. |
But I think we wouldn’t have to have conferences about whose Bible it is anyway, or maybe for that matter put our candidates for ministry through trial by poetry, if it weren’t for the fear of what happens to Word during the time that it spends lodged in the soft tissues of our hearts and souls and minds. Does this Word acquire far too much spice while it marinates in there? Do its meaning and mandate get distorted as they refract through the lens of our ordinary days, our rising (and especially our lying down)? Do we mistake the voice of this Word for the voice of the cries of joy and anguish and hope and outrage in the cacaphony of our time? The Word is very near you, the Deuteronomist says. Sometimes things are so near that we need help to recognize them for what they are. As much as we seem to have gotten into the habit of breathing, for example, sometimes it takes being present at a birth, or a death – it takes seeing a breath that has no-breath on the other side of it – to begin to understand what breathing is. So it was, for me, with learning: for all the years I spent getting educated in my life, I had to go to Nicaragua to figure out what education is. Among the poor farmers of Nicaragua, in churches scattered like seed by the wind of liberation theology, education is what happens when people discover what they know. Faith has actually managed to sneak education through the barriers of ignorance by which the Powers that Be have tried to keep the poor powerless. And the Bible is actually the loaf of bread in which the file is hidden that starts the escape from that prison. In the church of the poor in Nicaragua, the Bible belongs to everybody, and nobody needs to wait for anybody else to tell them what it means or how to apply it to their lives. When they worship they call it a Celebration of the Word, and when the Bible is read, after a moment of rich silence while it settles again in the soft tissues, everybody tells the truth it summons forth from them. The Bible becomes an instrument for discovering what you know – about justice, about compassion, about suffering, about hope. It leads the truth out of you, out into the light where it can start the irreversible process of opening doors. I had to go to Nicaragua to learn that education, in the truest sense of the word, has not much to do with being fed a diet of information, or being hit over the head with the insights of others, or retracing on command the trains of thought of other people. There are other names for those parts of the process, and they have their times and places. But to be educated – as a matter of the Latin roots of the word – is to have led out of you (e-ducere) that which is within you. Which brings us, along with a group of Pharisees and scribes, to gather
around Jesus, to see who gets the last word about Word. We’re wondering
who’s allowed to use this freedom, and how, once the Word has unleashed
it. We come looking for Jesus to tell us what to think – and instead
he will educate us – which is to say, he will lead out of us what
we already know. |
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Good people, he says, are more likely to be tempted by what is best about them than by what is worst. |
We come in in the middle of a dispute about washing your hands before a meal – which sounds pretty trivial until you remember that in Jesus’s time issues of table manners and table fellowship were, quite literally, what issues of sexuality (and maybe even war) are in ours. The idea of eating with the wrong people, or eating in anything but the customary way, was scandalous and horrifying – a matter of “it isn’t done” and “it’s dead wrong” being more or less the same thing. Isn’t it wrong, we want to know, to let your heart lead you to doing something that we just don’t do? Isn’t it more honorable, more consistent – isn’t it better, isn’t it more correct – to do what is done? Aren’t the time-honored ways of living we’ve inherited more trustworthy the than new and perhaps untested ways our hearts and even our minds might be leading us to live? Jesus’s teaching is both comforting and startling. The things that put us in the greatest danger, he says, are not the things imposed on us from the outside – not the trends or the traditions, not even the influences and manipulations. The gravest danger, he says, lies in what comes from within us. There may be wars and rumors of wars raging all around us – war may be what we’ve always done – but when war comes from the heart, then is the warrior truly defiled. There may be degradation and abuse and idolatry on every screen – but when they seep into the heart and displace the upwelling there of Godly love, then the disease can be life-threatening. What is led out of us – what is e-ducere from the heart and soul and mind – has the greatest power to distort our lives, or to redeem them A friend of mine, a Dominican priest, puts a finer point on it. Good
people, he says, are more likely to be tempted by what is best about them
than by what is worst. In a world that badly needs change, how many times
have we good people let the warm glow of our acts of charity shield us
from the disturbing risk of the change we need to make? In a church that
badly needs to demonstrate its integrity, how many times have we good
people wounded each aother with the opinions and judgements we wield?
In the wilderness, Jesus had to struggle for the strength to resist Satan’s
invitation to make himself comfortable by an act of generosity: turning
stones into bread. But we don’t live for the satisfaction of our
own appetites or the wielding of our own self-righteousness, Jesus said.
We live for the invitation of the Word to go beyond our own gratification.
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That’s the Word that is very near you, the poet says – in your mouth, in your heart |
That’s the Word that is very near you, the poet says – in your mouth, in your heart. Like breathing – so ordinary as to have become almost invisible. Word floats on the breath; the rhythm of in and out, so unconscious as it keeps us alive, is the rhythm of re-inspiration. We breathe in the violence around us – and in the infinitesimal miracle of respiration, the soft tissues of our faith split it open and extract the purity of what we need to live – so that we breathe out peace. We breathe in the despair around us – and the Word that resides in our deepest places works the transformation of faith – so that we breathe out hope. We breathe in the idolatry and lust around us – and we breathe out the integrity, the majesty, the sanctity of love. We are breathing with God – in, out, in, out. How does the Bible do what it dows? By breathing with us the breath of God, in a con-spiracy of love and justice that is this poor, warring, wanton world’s best hope of healing. Alice Walker says that now, after years of e-ducere, she no longer recalls the Catechism or broods on the Genesis of life. No. She ponders the exchange itself – in, out, in, out – and salvages mostly the leaning. “You are what you eat,” so the saying goes – which, spiritually
speaking, I take to mean that it matters very much indeed how we choose
to nourish our inner lives. If we feed on the overt violence of national
hubris and ecclesiastical apartheid, and on the covert violence of materialism
and self-righteousness, we can hardly expect the soft tissues of our heart
and soul and mind to give us the strength for doing justice, loving kindness,
walking humbly. It’s not so much that these things defile us as that
they diminish our capacity for respiration. When we live on the bread
of Word – when we practice breathing in anger and breathing out reconciliation,
breathing in despair and breathing out hope – then the old conspiracy
is at work again, the with-breathing of God. Then we take up again the
work of poets, spilling the poetry of peace across a landscape of war,
splashing the poetry of love across the doorposts and gates of our houses.
And when we ponder the exchange itself – in, out, in, out –
then our true education begins, in glorifying and enjoying God forever.
And our best antidote to the dark night, our best hope in a world that
knows too well how to keep secrets, is the leaning upon each other that
we salvage from life’s persistent questions. |
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