Ideas
What if we were to assume that we were coming to this country for the first time?
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When former President Jimmy Carter recently addressed the Christian Booksellers Association meeting in Atlanta, he was asked how Christians should respond to the non-Christian culture in which we live today. The questioner seemed to suggest that, though America was once a Christian country, it has now become not only secular but is hostile toward Christian faith.
In response, Carter told a story from his tenure in the White House. Idi Amin, the tyrant then in power in Uganda, took 52 American missionaries hostage, threatening to kill them, one by one. With anguish, Carter appealed to other African leaders to lean on Amin in order to get the missionaries freed. The strategy worked: Amin backed down and released those American expatriates.
Carter then informed the missionaries that he would immediately send a plane to transport them to their homeland. But to Carter's surprise, everyone said, "We aren't leaving Uganda. Even though our lives have been threatened, this is where God has called us, these are the people we are to serve, and here is where we are staying."
Carter never did answer his CBA questioner directly. Perhaps he didn't agree with the interrogator's assumptions. Or he might have been trying to put the concern in a different perspective, just as Jesus did by telling parables. Was Carter saying that the opposition Christians experience in this country pales in relation to the persecution so many Christians face around the world? Or was he saying that we have to rethink our stance in relation to our cultural context, seeing ourselves as missionaries in service to it, rather than power brokers who try to control it?
A missionary strategyWhatever Carter was trying to convey, the person asking the question was right about the shift that has come about in the influence of Christianity on our culture. Truth telling, promise keeping, sexual purity, and marital fidelity were all assumed in the environment in which I was reared. Only "worldly" folk worked on Sundays. But there are few such enclaves anymore like the one in which I was reared. And we cannot look to the culture at large to support our values.
But should this shift away from an explicitly Christian environment be viewed purely as a threat? Or should it be seized as an opportunity to recover a New Testament sense of being a missionary community in a "foreign" world?
I sometimes wonder what we would come up with if the church would do something like "zero-based" missionary planning for American society—that is, drop all our assumptions and current strategies about how we live in and carry out the missionary mandate of the gospel. What if we were to assume that we were coming to this country for the first time? How then would we live? Proclaim the gospel?
For one thing, our stance in relation to our society should be one of compassion, like Jesus' when he wept over Jerusalem because it didn't know what made for peace. For another, it could mean recognizing we are in the peculiar position of being guests in a "host culture."
Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf recently shared that, after he became a naturalized American citizen, he received a note from his in-laws, including this quotation from the second-century Christian letter to Diognetus: "As citizens, Christians share all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. … "
Said Volf, "The words put in a memorable way the dialectic of distance and belonging, of strangeness and domesticity" that is characteristic of Christians living in this world. We find a home here, yet we are not totally at home here. This is the stance of the Christian people, whether we happen to live in the land of our birth or some other land.
Copyright © 1997 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
- Atlanta, GA
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- Jimmy Carter
- Missions
Cover Story
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With this issue of CT we begin a new tradition: an annual section devoted to Christian fiction. By “Christian fiction” we mean fiction that is informed by a Christian world-view. That includes, but is not limited to, fiction that is issued by evangelical publishers and sold primarily in Christian bookstores. It includes writers as various as Georges Bernanos, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Madeleine L’Engle, C. S. Lewis, Janette Oke, Walker Percy, Brock and Bodie Thoene, and Walter Wangerin, Jr.
The territory is vast, and we should be suspicious of any sentence beginning “Christian fiction is … ,” whether the tone is boosterish or dismissive. We’re on safer ground simply noting how strange it is—from the commonsensical materialist’s point of view—that human beings invest so much energy and passion in creating alternative worlds. In doing so, J. R. R. Tolkien said, we are “sub-creators,” imitating the supreme imaginative act of the God in whose image we are made.
The geography of the Christian imagination encompasses the windswept plains of Larry Woiwode’s Beyond the Bedroom Wall (just reissued in a handsome paperback edition in Graywolf Press’s Rediscovery series) and the slightly rundown postwar English parishes of Barbara Pym. So in this issue we range from Jan Karon’s Mitford, a small town in the South where everyone knows everyone else’s business, to the apocalyptic visions of a trio of end-times novelists. And because part of our purpose is to encourage excellence in Christian fiction, we’re publishing a new short story by James Calvin Schaap.
Let us know what you think of this special section, and what you would like to see in the future. We look forward to hearing from you.
John Wilson, Book Review Editor
QuizListed below are the first sentences of ten novels, representative of the spectrum of Christian fiction. Name the author and title of each book.
1. It was a dark and stormy night.*
2. I am a sick man … I am a spiteful man.
3.“Love?”
4. Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young trees and the question came to me: has it happened at last?
5. Five friends I had, and two of them snakes.
6. A dozen students are present around the long white table, four men, eight women.
7. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
8. “Damaris!”
9. One hot spring evening, just as the sun was going down, two men appeared at Patriarch’s Ponds.
10. A confused impression of English tourists shuffling round a church in Ravenna, peering at mosaics, came to Catherine Oliphant as she sat brooding over her pot of tea.
*No, not Bulwer-Lytton—or Snoopy.
All entries (one per person) must be clearly written or typed on a postcard and mailed to Christianity Today Fiction Quiz, 465 Gundersen Dr., Carol Stream, IL 60188, and must include complete return address. Entries must be received no later than September 15, 1997. Employees of CT and their families are not eligible to enter. The winning entry will be the first correct answer drawn at random. The winner will receive a box of books.
Copyright © 1997 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
- Stories and Storytelling
Betty Smartt Carter
Readers are finding a home in Jan Karon’s novels.
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On a sultry day in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, the customers at a local grill swap wisecracks with the young women behind the counter. “What do you usually eat here?” one newcomer asks the teenage cook.
“Nothing,” she says, waving a greasy spatula. Actually, the hamburgers are fine, but the real appeal of this place is the decor. “Don’t talk about yourself,” a poster declares, “we’ll talk about you when you leave.” Other wall literature addresses concerns of politics, religion, and male-female relations with about equal seriousness.
But amid the clamor of words, hanging near a window that looks out on Main Street is a little group of photographs. Look closer and you’ll see snapshots of the restaurant employees with a local writer who has gradually become a celebrity—Jan Karon, author of the Mitford novels: At Home in Mitford, A Light in the Window, These High, Green Hills, and, this summer thirteenth on the hardback besteller list, Out to Canaan. All four books follow the ups and downs of a likable Episcopal priest named Fr. Timothy Kavanaugh. But the main character of the Mitford series is the mythical town of Mitford itself. Over a million readers have visited it in print and on audiotape, and many of those readers have gone on to become pseudocitizens, following local news in a Mitford newsletter, keeping up with its characters like real friends and neighbors.
Some people think that Blowing Rock is Mitford. With its maple-shaded back streets, its mossy rock walls and bursting rhododendrons, this North Carolina resort town could pass for the place Jan Karon describes in At Home in Mitford:
“Mitford,” observed a travel feature by a prominent newspaper, “is a village delightfully out of step with contemporary America. Here, where streets are named for flowers, and villagers can seek the shade of a dozen fragrant rose arbors, spring finds most of the citizenry, including merchants, making gardens.”
Whether the resemblance goes deeper than the scenery, though, I may never know. Walking to the restaurant where I have arranged to meet the author, I hear a multitude of Yankee voices. Downtown Blowing Rock is thriving; shop doors open and close, people fill the sidewalks. This is a tourist town, and I’m a tourist.
I enter the Village Cafe from a damp alley. “I’m meeting Jan Karon here,” I tell the hostess. “Could I have that table?” I point to one beside the garden, outdoors but under an awning.
“That’s exactly the one she’s reserved for you.”
“Oh, really?” I crouch behind my menu, waiting for a woman I’ve never met, studying every female face that passes me through the garden. Finally, just when I’ve leaned over to check the batteries in my tape recorder, I hear the hostess say, “Hello, Miss Jan!”
A beautiful, golden-haired woman stands a few feet away on the flagstone walkway, wearing a pale linen suit and sandals. I glimpse a gracious, forthright, maybe a little sad (or just tired after a long book tour) author. She chats with the restaurant staff, then a few visitors. She knows them all; she’s a part of this place. I get up to introduce myself, but I am quickly drowned out by several more friends who come by.
“I’ve been telling everybody about your books, Jan!”
“I wanted to watch you on CBS, but the TV wasn’t working.”
“Somebody asked me if I knew ‘Jan Kar-ON’ and I said, ‘Oh you must mean my friend Jan KAR-on!'”
Big laugh, all around. The friends leave. I take a deep breath, and Karon and I sit down together with a few opening pleasantries. Did I have a good trip? Yes, the mountains are lovely. Do I like the hotel? Yes, it has a heated swimming pool. We open our menus. “The crab cakes,” she says in a gentle but precise Carolina accent, “are delicious. And the Greek salad is wonderful. Do you like feta cheese?”
“You know, I believe I’ll just have french toast.” I switch on my tape recorder. It might be important to record Jan Karon discussing food. After all, the Mitford books are full of it. Father Tim often visits the Sweet Stuff Bakery to chat with Winnie Ivey; he’s a regular patron at the Main Street Grill and a frequenter of uncounted teas, barbecues, dinner parties, and glad suppers at home with his wife, Cynthia. Such is the life of a fictional clergyman.
While we’re waiting to eat, I ask her to tell me a little bit about her upbringing—whom she played with as a child, where she learned to mimic the Appalachian dialect that fills her books.
“My younger sister and I were reared by my grandmother and grandfather in the country on a farm. My sister became the charge of my grandmother, and I somehow became the charge of my grandfather. I was very fortunate. Instead of staying in the kitchen and learning how to cook, I went with my grandfather to swap mules and horses, to buy bird dogs, to buy nails for roofing and seed corn for planting. I got to be around a lot of different people. The world opened up to me. I developed, without even knowing it, an ear for dialect. The dialect you read in my books comes from the Scottish-Irish people in this part of the world. They speak in a very colorful way, and I try to reproduce that as authentically as possible. Never do I do it to embarrass or make fun of anyone, because that’s what I was reared with. I love and honor and respect the way these people talk.”
No need to convince me; I’m from rural Alabama. As politely as possible, I mention all the Yankees around Blowing Rock. “Do you still hear Appalachian dialect here?”
She tells me that Blowing Rock has many natives, but that to hear the strongest accents, you have to go back in the mountain coves. “And believe me,” she says, “I’ve been back in many a cove, not to hear the dialect, but to hear the music.”
Too bad there is no time for “coving” today. I’d like to hear some dulcimer, some mountain fiddle. I consider asking Karon if she knows the words to “Froggie Went A’Courtin’ ” (maybe we could harmonize), but instead I ask her about her formal education. It turns out that she had just eight years of schooling before she entered the work force: “I have had exactly as much public school,” she says with a smile, “as George Bernard Shaw.” As for her religious background, she was reared Methodist but didn’t make a commitment to Christ until the age of 42, in her bed at home one night. “What precipitated that?” I ask cautiously.
She takes a deep breath. “What precipitated that? Being driven to the wall by the circumstances and tragedy of life, being driven to the wall so that, at the end of myself, I could then cry out outside my ego, outside my own self-confidence and self-doing.”
I smile nervously. This is the moment when any self-respecting interviewer ought to circle and pounce; I should discover and define what central, awesome tragedies have shaped this woman’s life and books and precipitated her embrace of Christ. But I resist the temptation. Her suffering will have to go unclassified.
What I do learn is that Jan Karon actually felt a call to be a writer at the age of ten. “For 40 years,” she says, “I ignored the call.” At 18, she found a job as a receptionist in an advertising agency but didn’t limit herself to dictation. For every new ad campaign, she wrote her own copy and pushed it at her boss.
“Wasn’t that sort of forward for a young lady in the midfifties?”
She nods. “I’ve always been forward. My family crest reads, ‘Forward, Brave Heart.’ “
I believe it. With time and toil, Karon worked her way from receptionist to vice president. She moved back and forth across the country during her advertising years, from New York to San Francisco to Raleigh, somehow raising a daughter in the middle of it all.
“During those years,” she says, “I was fighting my calling. I didn’t know how to be an author; I was in advertising. At the age of 49 I began to pray that, if God wanted me to write books, he would open doors and show me how.” After two years of prayer, she stepped out on faith and moved to Blowing Rock. She quotes Goethe: ” ‘Whatever you would do, begin it. Boldness has courage, genius, and magic in it.’ “
I sigh. Genius, courage, magic? I don’t know if I’m up to Goethe so soon after french toast.
“Would you like dessert?” the waitress asks me, looking at my plate still brimming with butter and syrup.
“I think I just had it.”
Rain pours down hard, bending the irises half to the ground, spraying up from the path in a shallow, silver mist. We have to speak in bold voices now just to be heard over the downpour, and certainly Karon’s voice is bolder than mine. She has an obvious confidence about her. I figure the confidence is part of her personality, but it is grounded in her strong faith, too, and a hard-gained knowledge. She is aware of her achievements but counts them as part of a divine plan; God has ordained her to write.
“Why do so many people get addicted to your books?” I ask. “What makes their appeal so strong?”
“Several things,” she says firmly. “First of all, when people pick up a Mitford book, they discover themselves, their value system. Where else can people find their value system represented in today’s world —can you find it in Vogue magazine, on Roseanne, watching Geraldo? No. What do you find on the bestseller list? Murder and mayhem. But when people go to Mitford, they go home. It’s familiar, and it is consoling. And that’s what I work to give my readers, the sense of consolation and hope.”
“Do you think that many people these days have really experienced the happiness and coziness of Mitford, or do they just want it?”
“Some of both. There are many people who’ve grown up in small towns—I get thousands of letters from my fans—they say, ‘Mitford is exactly how I grew up, I know these people, they’re like family.’ I also get letters from city people in very sophisticated places who say, ‘I’ve never lived in a small town, but I’ve always wanted to. Mitford has become my town.’ “
I think about Blowing Rock, about the back streets I had seen that morning on a long walk with my daughter: cats perched on porches, stone steps climbing a hill from one neighbor’s house to another. I think about my hometown, too, where you never go to the grocery store without meeting a friend. Apparently a lot of people long for places like these. Maybe that helps explain the popularity of other fictional “worlds”—Avonlea, for instance, or Miss Read’s English countryside, or even Mayberry, North Carolina.
“What would you say,” I ask, “to someone who longs to belong to a place like Mitford and wonders how to get the real thing—can you find small-town life just by moving to the country?”
“No!” she says emphatically. “And I’ll tell you why. Mitford is not there waiting. You have to help make it. If you will read a Mitford book carefully, you will see that everybody is helping Mitford happen. Mitford isn’t free. You’ve got to reach out if you want Mitford. You do not wait for somebody to bring a pie and leave it on your doorstep. You do not wait to be invited to join the country club or the Friends of the Library. You immediately get out into the community. If you’re in a new home and you have hardware needs, you go to the hardware store and you start there. You start loving at the hardware store!”
That sounds faintly like an ad slogan: “Start loving at your hardware store.” But I know it’s true, because I’m actually very fond of my local hardware salesmen. About 20 of them sit all day in a crowded little building with a wooden Indian, and when you need a pipe soldered, they’ll practically come to your house and do it for you.
“Ms. Karon, what about the church? What role does it play in creating community?”
“The church is the heart of the community. There’s where you go to find Jesus Christ in the flesh in other Christians, there’s where you realize that all Christians are not perfect, that all Christians have evil, wicked thoughts just like you have, and they’re flawed, they’re mortal. But you never say, ‘I don’t go to church because it’s full of hypocrites.’ You keep your eyes on Christ, and then you’re not so absorbed in the faults and mistakes of other Christians.”
“I guess you find your sense of community in Blowing Rock.”
“Absolutely. I get it right here, or I wouldn’t have it. There’s pain everywhere you go; life is a vale of tears in the city, in a small town, in the countryside. God is going to allow some things to happen to us that we didn’t pray for and don’t want, no matter where we live. Something that people forget is that hard things happen to people in Mitford: there’s a heart transplant, there are abused children, there’s a thrown-away boy named Dooley; even Father Tim himself had an unholy conflict with his earthly father. Mitford never pretends to be perfect; it’s other people who see it as some idyllic setting.”
She’s right. Though the Mitford books never gloss over or trivialize the sorrows of life, it’s hard to carry sorrow away from them; the reader feels, as she herself said earlier, consoled. Part of this is owing to the writing itself. There is nothing gothic about Jan Karon. Though she writes about the rural South, she doesn’t linger on slop jars or snake handlers.
More significant, though, is her choice of a hero. Father Tim is a “man of balance,” as Karon says, “a Christ figure.” He sees human suffering and ministers to the sufferers. If the Mitford stories were told through the eyes of Pauline Barlowe, for instance, a character beaten down hard by addiction and loss, the consolation would come much more slowly.
A writer of faith can only describe the corner of life God has allowed him to see. Not every story can be about a place like Mitford or a man like Fr. Tim Kavanaugh. Like the Bible itself, good Christian writing must include many voices: voices sometimes raised in praise and thanksgiving, sometimes in the record of salvation, and sometimes in sorrow at the horrors of this world.
But Jan Karon, by moving out of exclusively religious bookstores onto national bookseller racks, has shown that the world still pines for the consolation of a Christian world-view. People long for a village with a church at its heart. What remains to be seen is how many of us, with all the demands of modern life upon us, are willing to do more than read about community life and work to make it happen.
Maybe I’ll go home and make my neighbor a casserole or take the folks down the road some squash from my garden. In the meantime, my waitress is back.
“Well,” she says, “how about that dessert?”
“Hmmm,” I say, and glance at Jan Karon. I wonder what Father Tim would recommend.
Betty Smartt Carter is the author of two novels: I Read It in the Wordless Book (Baker Book House) and The Tower, the Mask, and the Grave, a mystery, just published by Harold Shaw.
Copyright © 1997 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
- More fromBetty Smartt Carter
James Calvin Schaap
Carol wanted the boy alive only to spite her own husband.
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The woman on the television was grotesquely overweight, her hair a thatchof gray and what looked on the screen to be some flat, amberlike coloring.A huge T-shirt printed with a bundle of multicolored balloons lay like atent over her chest. Her face was a mess—she was crying, had been for sometime. That was clear.
“You can get help here, Rory,” she told the camera, sobbing. “Please comehome. We love you. You don’t have your insulin. You don’t have none of yourmedicine.” She poked at her eyes with a big red handkerchief. “Please,” shesaid again, shaking her head, “we want to help you, and we’re the only oneswho can.”
The girl Rory had shot five times was still alive. The news report said shewas 19. He was 26.
They interviewed a preacher in his clerical collar, the girl’s neighbor,who said no one in Stockbridge would ever have thought that something likethis could happen in a small town. “In a city, sure—but things like thisare not supposed to happen here.”
But they do, Carol thought. The six o’clock news verified that the unthinkablehad occurred last night about two in the morning in Stockbridge, a smalltown just 30 minutes down the river from where she and Lloyd were watchingthe news while finishing their vegetable soup. The search for Rory Meliushad already begun. That morning, his Dodge Ram had been found on a gravelroad that dead-ended on a bluff overlooking the Big Sioux.
“Poor guy’ll be dead,” Lloyd told her. “You watch. He probably used thatgun on himself.” Carol looked up at him angrily, but he was busy watching.
On TV the reporter spoke to the anchor. “Walt, the policearen’t saying much about Rory Melius. From all reports here—and Stockbridgeis a little town—few people would have guessed he could do what police aresaying it appears he did. The police have issued no warnings, really. They’renot saying that he’s armed and dangerous.”
“That’s because they think he’s already gone,” Lloyd told Carol. “He’s notdangerous. His gun is empty. He put five into her and had one left.”
“How can you say that?” she said.
“Well, count ’em yourself,” he said.
“That’s not what I mean,” Carol told him. “This isn’t a movie, Lloyd—theseare real people.”
He turned toward her. “It’s domestic, honey. It doesn’t matter that theyweren’t married. It’s passion gone, shot to heck—love to hate to despair.”He shook his head. “He’s gone, Carol—you know that. Why do you think they’renot putting out an APB?”
“I just wish you weren’t so sure of yourself,” she said. “Do you get somecomfort out of that?—is that it?”
“Comfort?” he said.
“Yes, comfort,” she told him, picking up his dish, the milk, their silverware,then getting up to take it to the kitchen. “Does it build you up or somethingto think you know exactly how all of this is going to turn out?” She couldfeel his eyes on her.
“Are you angry?” he said.
“I’m not angry,” she told him, her back to him. “I’m just not as sure asyou are that you’re clairvoyant, and I wish you wouldn’t do that—tell mewhat the outcome of this horrible, sinful mess is, as if you knew, as ifit were written in stone.”
“It’s a plain old lovers’ triangle,” he said.
“It isn’t just a ‘lovers’ triangle,’ Lloyd—my goodness.” She opened thedishwasher. It was still full from last night. “That’s a real woman on thescreen—somebody’s aching. There’s a young girl shot. Can’t you see that?”
“Is what I said wrong?” he asked her, picking up the crackers and jelly.“To me, it just looked open and shut, honey. There’s too many things here—”
“I don’t want to hear any more, okay?” she said. “Let’s just drop the wholething.”
When she heard him open the newspaper, she was still turned away from him.
One silent hour later, she lied to him, told him she was going to Wal-Martwhen she was going to River Hills, a park five miles west of town where themeandering Big Sioux River cut jagged sides from the yellow clay of a seriesof sharp bluffs. There were no police at the entrance—not that she expectedthem really, but the park wasn’t more than a half-hour away from the spotwhere they’d found the boy’s truck.
It was May, late May, and from the top of the bluffs, where she first stoppedthe car and stood outside for just a moment, the whited path of the rivershowed how high it had been carrying snow melt and heavy spring rains. Allthe way along, maples and cottonwoods had been brought low by the high water,dumped neatly as if kneeling for a drink.
They’d had a wonderful marriage—28 good years. But lately she wascapable of taking so very little of him.
From the very beginning of their awful heartache, she and Lloyd had beentogether on everything, worked together ever since the day their son-in-law,Burt, had called to tell them Paige had walked away, left him and their preciouslittle Hannah for some teacher in that school she taught at in Joliet. Sheand Lloyd had never disagreed, not really. Not once. They’d sat togetherbefore the fireplace they’d just had built that fall—the idea was a sweetplace to spend cold winter evenings, just the two of them. They’d talk andtalk and talk about what could or couldn’t be done; and not once in all thosenights had they really disagreed. She knew very well that her daughter hadno right, no horrific grievance against her husband. Burt had treated bothof them well, their daughter and granddaughter. She and Lloyd had agreedthat it was their own Paige who was at fault here, and they’d told Burt asmuch, time and time again when they’d call him or when they’d talk to hisfolks.
Maybe Lloyd had been more angry than she. It was Lloyd who had done mostof the talking—and the yelling. It was Lloyd who’d laid down the law. Itwas Lloyd who’d cut Paige off—told her that he and her mom had to play hardballwith the outright sin she’d done, that neither they nor the Lord God Almightywould buy her excuse about never really loving Burt—and the baby, my goodness,the baby. From the very beginning, three months ago—from Burt’s first call—notonce had she and Lloyd really disagreed about how to handle what their daughterhad done.
She got back in the car and slowly followed the winding road down to theriver bottom, where grass was just beginning to grow from the mat of graymud that caked the banks after the spring floods. She pulled up to the bankof the river on freshly laid gravel, looked around to see if anyone elsewas there—the boy named Rory had tried to murder the girl, after all. “Plainold lovers’ triangle,” Lloyd had said. And why was she calling him a boy?At 26, he was a man.
I don’t want to find him, she told herself—that’s not the point. I don’twant to see a boy who tried to murder a girl. I just don’t want Lloyd tobe right. Lord, she said, don’t let him be right.
She didn’t really know the problem. For years she’d lived with his noisyeating—soup, for instance. It seemed that he had to make noise when he sipped.But lately it was so irritating she couldn’t take it. And why? Because ofPaige? His laughing at a tv show could turn her inside out. Watching himcorrect his students’ papers. Just knowing he was working at something inhis office. Having to hear his strong bass voice in church made her almostnauseated—was it a virus she’d picked up from her daughter? They’d had awonderful marriage—28 good years. But lately she was capable of taking sovery little of him.
She left the Buick behind and followed the uneven path of freshly laid gravelas it skirted the banks of the river. Across the water, beaver dens gapedlike black moons from the banks beneath four scraggly cottonwoods splayedin four different directions like pencils in a cup. Midstream, a sculptureof bleached limbs, one of the river’s earlier victims, stood like a monumentto the torrent of water that now seemed wide and slow and safe, nowhere nearto dangerous. What she wanted, of course, was for the boy to give himselfup, not do himself in. But did the boy mean anything to her really? She wantedhim alive only to spite her own husband.
What she hated was Lloyd’s nonchalance—and maybe that wasn’t the right word,either. What she hated was the fact that this horror of Paige’s flooded everylast part of her, and had, for three months, swept everything alive and growinginto its channel, everything at work and at home and at church—wherever.She couldn’t sleep, and hearing his breathing relax into that heavy patternshe’d heard for years only aggravated her more. She had to force herselfto eat, but he didn’t seem to be suffering at all. Twice in three monthsthey’d made love, and both times she tried to fake her enjoyment.
Maybe she should simply go to Joliet herself, alone, she thought. Maybe ifshe would take Paige into her arms—maybe, maybe, maybe.
The park was empty, the river quiet, bedded down calmly. And then she feltit. It came into her like something cool and refreshing, even though sherecognized it for what it was the second it entered her: despair. Why wouldn’tthe kid kill himself? Lloyd was right. Why should he go on living? What singlegood reason could he give to come home to insulin and prison? There was abullet left in that gun. Why not just quit?
She stopped and looked down at the water, silent and constant like eternity,and her own sadness, like the boy’s, fed the flow of despair that came upsuddenly and refreshingly from her soul. It would end things, she thought.It would end suffering. It would end horror. It would end aggravation thatshe lacked the strength and courage to fight anymore. It would end nausea.It would allow her rest. Despair as relief.
Across the water, a huge, scruffy owl swooped out of a tree but stayed inthe woods, flying between thick branches like a circus performer. It waswrong, she knew—despair was the lack of hope, and hope was hers, always,eternally. Why was she feeling it? How was it that despair even felt so goodto her soul?
She looked around. They were here in the winter, she and Lloyd, when thesnowbanks lay along the unsheltered paths like bread dough, and the deerleft broken chains of darkened prints down the bluffs. They’d come here severaltimes in the last year—before Paige had left Burt—because now, with thehouse empty, they’d been trying to come up with some new ways of being together:cross-country skiing, photography. They’d been right there where she wasstanding, the two of them leaning on their ski poles, sweaty, trying to catchtheir breath, when a half-dozen deer walked right across the river in a singleline. Life was good, a miracle. That was before their daughter had done somethingunthinkable. That was before Paige shattered God’s law—an adulterer. Paige,adulterer. Lord, give me strength, she prayed, her eyes on the dark riverbeside her.
Through the trees on the bluff, the sound of the car coming down the roadstartled her, sent something she recognized as fear through her like a chill.She looked back at her own car, parked by itself at the river’s edge, andfelt a kind of embarrassment when a brown squad car from the county sheriff’soffice emerged from the trees at the bottom of the hill. A quarter-mile away,she watched as the squad car pulled up and an officer stepped out, a woman,who walked around the Buick as if it were a suspect, then followed what werelikely Carol’s own footprints in the gravel, and looked down the path towardthe woods, where she stood.
The young woman, her blond hair pulled back tightly, removed her sunglassesand held a hand up over her eyes, then stared into the trees. In a gesturethat seemed instinctive, she checked for the gun on her belt before tossingher hat in the car and locking it. Then she started walking, looking forthe driver.
Poor thing thinks maybe there’s another suicide, Carol thought. So she steppedout of the trees, stood there motionless for a moment, just to be seen, andthen waved politely, happily, as if there were nothing amiss. The policewomanstopped, thought for a moment about going back, then kept coming closer.
Maybe the wave wasn’t enough, she thought. Maybe the woman read the waveas someone putting her off. Carol looked down at her watch and realized thatshe’d been gone far too long, so she put her hands in the pockets of hercoat and started walking back. “I’m okay,” she said, quite loud, once theofficer approached. The woman smiled.
“I came down to have a look at the river,” Carol told her. “It’s somethingI do a lot.”
“You too?” the woman said.
Carol shrugged her shoulders. “You mean you weren’t worried?”
“I’m always worried. It comes with the territory.” She stopped, ten feetaway, just far enough that Carol couldn’t quite read the name on the plateon her chest. “Sometimes—middle of the shift—I come down and take a littlehike,” she said. “It’s my region anyway—it’s not like I’m slacking.”
“There’s something about water,” Carol said.
The woman nodded. “You’re not scared?”
“Scared?”
“I figure you don’t know,” she told her. “Stockbridge—you’re not scaredof the kid who shot his girlfriend?”
“Don’t know what?” Carol said.
“He turned himself in,” the woman told her, smiling. “We pretty much knewhe would. Might have been his mother on the TV, though,” shetold her. “I thought you might have heard the story—”
“I heard,” Carol said. She looked away at the river.
The woman followed her gaze. “Sometimes when I’m down here alone, there’sbeaver running around on the banks across the river, making a big mess.”She pointed to the other side. “You think all those uprooted trees come fromthe spring floods, but you’re wrong. Beavers massacre ’em over there—heretoo.” She pointed at trees not more than 20 feet away, already half-gnawed.“People think they’re smart, but they aren’t—that’s what I’m told. Theyjust do it for the heck of it—maybe to keep their teeth sharp, who knows?”
“Nature’s engineers,” Carol said. “I always thought of them as nature’sengineers, dam builders.”
“Ask the guy up the hill.” The woman nodded toward the park ranger’s office.“He wishes he could get rid of the whole lot of them. All they do is makea mess. But there isn’t much call for beaver hats anymore.” And then, forthe first time, she looked directly at Carol in a way that dropped any bitof profession and pretense. She smiled. “I’m glad you’re all right. I’vehad a big day.”
“At least the boy is alive,” Carol said.
“He’s not really a boy—he’s as old as I am.” The woman shook her head, lookedaround aimlessly. “I was with his mother last night for a while,” she said,a begrudging smile. “Women officers, you know—we’re supposed to be betterat that sort of thing.” She shook her head. “That woman—her heart is gone.It’s like it’s not even there. That kid shot his girl, but he killed hismother.”
“I saw her,” Carol said.
“She was worse off-camera,” the cop said.
“No kidding.” Carol felt as if the woman had already said enough. “So thisis your beat?”
The woman smiled. “There’s a place down the river—the other way,” she said.She was Paige’s age, a little older, maybe. “If you’d walked the oppositedirection, you would have seen it.” She half turned. “You want to see? It’sa place I go when—” she shrugged her shoulders, “—when I just like, haveto, you know?” Once again, she looked at Carol in a way that seemed childlikein its pleading. “I suppose it’s unprofessional, but this job—it isn’t whatI thought it was going to be. It’s not glamorous and it’s not at all easyon a woman.”
“I’m sorry,” Carol said.
“I don’t want pity,” the cop said. “And it’s not that I don’t like what Ido. There’s just some times I have to stop down here and go see this upturnedtree—in the river.” She pulled her hands out of her pockets and drew a circlein the air. “It’s huge. Some beaver probably dumped it a dozen years ago,and the branches are all bleached like old bones—like that.” She pointedat a flattened cottonwood just 50 yards away in the river. “It’s like that,but it’s bigger, much bigger.” Again, her hands rounded out huge branches.“But this spring—you know, when the water was high?—the river grabbed thiswhole other tree and laid it in those branches so that the whole thing looksalmost like a big—” she bit her lip, searching for words, “—well, likea big cross, I guess.” She seemed embarrassed. “I used to believe in God,”she said. “Sometimes I look at that tree, you know—at the way it makes ahuge cross in the middle of the river, right in the middle of all that mud,and it just gets me—I mean, something weird like that. It’s huge.” Her facefell. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s been a tough one the last couple days—thatmother and the girl.”
“It’s okay,” Carol said. “Show me. I’d love to see.”
“Maybe it won’t mean anything to you—I don’t know,” the woman said. “Butit’s huge, and it sits right out there like something God stuck in the middleof everything, you know? It’s just not something you’d expect to find—youknow what I mean? It’s like a shock or something.” She stuck her hands inher pockets, kicked at the gravel. “It’s just something I like to look at,I guess. It’s dumb, I know. A couple of dead trees. I’m sorry—”
“What do you mean you ‘used to be a believer’?” Carol said, laughing. “Yousound like you still are.”
“If I am, it’s because of that tree.” And she laughed, hard, in big heavesof breath that could have, in a moment, evolved into tears. “That’s stupid,isn’t it?” she said. “And I’m sorry—here I am an officer of the law andall of that, and I’m spilling my guts over this river bank. I should be tougherthan that.”
“We all should be better than we are,” Carol told her, and she walked upto her, then waited for the offer of a shoulder. When it came, she put herarm around her. “Show me,” she said. “I don’t believe it. I want to see thishuge tree. I need it too.”
“Somebody your age got problems?” the woman said.
“You know better than to ask that,” Carol said. “You’re a cop.”
“You know,” the woman said, “you got your life, and you got your job, butI guess that’s not really everything.” She pulled away. “Let me show you.That’s why I came.”
When she got home, Lloyd was standing outside the back door, waiting, hisjacket on. “You must have done some serious shopping,” he said.
“I didn’t go,” she told him. When she came up the walk, he grabbed her inhis arms. “Carol, that kid—the guy who shot his girl—he came home. He’snot dead. It was on TV. He came back.”
“I know,” she said. “I heard.” She put an arm around him, tucked her handin the pocket of his jacket. “I went down to the river—”
“You did?”
“I went down to the river, and you can’t believe what I saw,” she told him.“It’s incredible.”
“We haven’t been there for a long time,” he said.
She pinched his side. “I’ll take you, tomorrow.”
James Calvin Schaap is professor of English at Dordt College. Among hisbooks of fiction are In Silence There Are Ghosts (Baker Book House),a novel, and The Secrets of Barneveld Calvary (Baker Book House),a cycle of stories published earlier this year.
Copyright © 1997 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
- More fromJames Calvin Schaap
Only when my daughter’s life was threatened did I appreciate the price God pays for peace.
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The phone rang one evening in our house in San Jose, Costa Rica. Iwas lying in bed reading a book to Angie, who was at that time three yearsold. At the other end of the line was the familiar voice of a key Miskitoleader in the armed resistance that had been fighting against the Nicaraguangovernment, a person who had become a close friend in the previous year.
“John Paul,” he said. “I have some difficult news. I have been informed bya very good source that there is a plan to kidnap your daughter. They wantyou out of the country.”
Even now, I can still feel the shiver, the blood draining from my face, andthe pounding of my heart.
“What are you talking about?” I responded, my drying mouth struggling tostammer intelligent words.
“I cannot give you details on the phone,” he said. “We can talk tomorrow.But listen, it is very serious and it includes the three-letter boys,” areference to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). “You haveto tell your wife to break all her routines. Don’t let her go to school tomorrow.Don’t open your doors. Watch carefully.”
The words seemed unreal, like a dream. I knew we couldn’t talk, but I couldnot let him go.
“Come on,” I heard myself saying, “how serious is this?”
I will never forget his last words. “John Paul,” he responded, “You are oneof us now.”
I hung up the phone and went back to Angie, who seemed never to go to sleep.My mind was racing, and a nagging question kept cropping up: “What in theworld have I gotten us into?”
What I had gotten us into was peacemaking. I was part of a team of churchleaders who were working intensely to bring together the leaders of theNicaraguan government and the East Coast resistance for negotiations aimedat ending the nearly eight-year-old war. While other, more key mediatorswere located inside the country, they had difficulty traveling because ofthe tense relationship between Nicaragua and the rest of the region. In themonths prior to this phone call, I had become a communication link, oftenshuttling messages between opposition leaders located in Costa Rica andSandinista officials in Managua, Nicaragua.
The day after that chilling phone call, with even more frightening information,we shuttled the family out of the house and the country. In the next weeksand months I returned on my own to continue the work. Eventually, negotiationswere arranged and a cease-fire was put in place, but in the process, thosewho did not want a separate Indian negotiation increased their threats andviolence. During that restless night—and many times since—I have oftenbeen haunted by a nagging thought: “Peace is a noble pursuit, but at whatprice?”
Since those years in Nicaragua, I have had many opportunities to work insettings of protracted conflict and wars. Wars emerge for complex reasonswith many levels of activity and consequence—from the histories of animosityand strife between peoples that date back generations to the interactionsof nations and their powerful but complicated interests.
In the name of God, whoin their right mind wouldthreaten a three-year-oldchild as a means of pursuing aninsignificant political objective?
Those who, like myself, operate in an Anabaptist framework often talk ofpeace; yet, in real-life international conciliation, peace-building representsan enormously complex task. In the midst of war, to understand the feelingsand perceptions of people involved is already difficult. To help create thespace needed for reconciliation seems remote at best and, most of the time,a hopelessly utopian dream. Consistently, I find myself faced with perplexingquestions: How do we move from the words about peace to the practice ofreconciliation? How can we promote a concern for human life and justice insettings of devastating violence and oppression?
Much of my time is spent working with and between enemies. Time andagain—whether in Nicaragua, Somalia, or the Philippines—I am with peoplewho threaten, and feel threatened by, each other, who have both experiencedand engaged in the taking of life, who are suspicious and suspected, whoknow hate and have hated. As a peacemaker I have, perhaps ironically, becomeincreasingly wrapped up in the question of enemies. How can I ever understandtheir intense level of fear and animosity?
From these experiences and questions, I have struggled with the challengeof understanding the varied images of enemies in the Bible. This very personaljourney began with that crazy phone call, because it represented the firsttime in my life that I had come face to face with an enemy that truly wantedto harm me and those I loved. The events of that night and my work sincethen have led me to reconsider two seemingly contradictory biblical imagesof enemies found in the Bible—the cry to crush them and the call to lovethem.
CRUSH MY ENEMIESFor many years my convictions about peace did not push me to engage the OldTestament stories of crushing the enemy. It was not until I “became one ofthem” and entered that terrible world of paranoia and fear that I connectedin a personal and vicarious way to the sentiment of crushing enemies foundin the Old Testament.
While it was foreign to my experience to truly feel both threat and hatred,after the phone call those emotions became real. At various points, I couldhear my inner community of little voices crying out, “Lord, who are thesepeople? In the name of God, who in their right mind would threaten athree-year-old child as a means of pursuing an insignificant political objective?What kind of people would do this?”
My sense of anger and injustice only increased with the knowledge that behindit all were nameless, faceless entities. I had become the enemy of peoplewho could hide, who could ruin lives, who for a few dollars could have mekilled. At the same time, these were people who would never become known,much less held accountable. For the first time, I experienced the presenceof true evil in a personal way. It was through these events that my heartbypassed my peace-loving mind and connected to the crying voice of the psalmistand the powerful message, “Lord, deliver me and crush my enemies.”
Listen carefully to the psalmist’s words:
I am distraught by the noise of the enemy,
because of the clamor of the wicked.
For they bring trouble upon me,
and in anger they cherish enmity against me . …
Confuse, O Lord, confound their speech;
for I see violence and strife in the city . …
Let death come upon them;
let them go down alive to Sheol;
for evil is in their homes and in their hearts.
(Ps. 55:2b-3, 9, 15, NRSV)
The wicked go astray from the womb;
they err from their birth, speaking lies.
They have venom like the venom of a serpent, …
O God, break the teeth in their mouths;
tear out the fangs of the young lions, O LORD!
Let them vanish like water that runs away;
like grass let them be trodden down and wither.
Let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime;
like the untimely birth that never sees the sun . …
The righteous will rejoice when they see vengeance done;
they will bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked.
People will say, “Surely there is a reward for the righteous;
surely there is a God who judges on earth.”
(Ps. 58:3-4a, 6-8, 10-11)
I would venture a guess that these texts are rarely preached from pulpits,certainly not in churches from my tradition. During the time I worked inCentral America I had been close to and known the violence of war and allthat it brings. I knew families that had lost their parents, children, brothers,and sisters. I had friends who lost limbs and even their lives. No matterhow much I knew, it was only after the experiences of direct manipulationand the threat of violence against me that I began to understand the deepanger that accompanies fear, the frustration of helplessness, and the bittertaste of enmity. To be “one of them” was to experience, in ever so smalla dose, the deep cry for a just God and the absolute dependence on God fordeliverance.
GOING DOWN THE RIVER OF HATEIn the months that followed, in spite of initial pressures and threats, weachieved a measure of success by helping to bring leaders of the two sidesin the Miskito-Sandinista conflict to negotiations. As part of their initialaccords, they agreed to a trip into the East Coast of Nicaragua, the hometerritory of the indigenous leaders. For many of the exiled leaders, thiswas the first time in years they had returned to their homeland. For everyone of them, it was the first time they had returned in the open presenceof former enemies.
This was a time of both expectation and vulnerability. What was accomplishedformally at the negotiating table in the capital cities was not easilyimplemented nor even shared in the villages where the war itself had raged.Our conciliation team was asked to accompany the returning leaders to meettheir communities and talk about the peace process. It was an invitationto walk into the heart of reconciliation and all its challenges.
As one can imagine, it seemed a logical proposal, but it was not an easytask. People on both sides had questions and suspicions. The protocol andformality of negotiations in Managua hotels were gone. In the villages, itwas an organic process where people stood face to face with the very enemiesthey had sought to control, enemies who, in many instances, had killed membersof their own immediate families. We traveled by riverways days and long hoursinto the remote areas of the country.
For the first time, in some of the villages, people came forward to speakabout local difficulties dealing with leaders on both sides of the conflict.In one particular village, people talked at length, detailing the atrocitiescommitted by a particular local Sandinista military leader who was presentat the meeting.
In situations where great pain and emotion are expressed it is difficult,if not impossible, to control what emerges from every event. That night,this Sandinista leader and several of his men were attacked and very seriouslywounded. The word about this outbreak of violence spread ahead of us rapidly;by the time we reached the main city in the northeast, the Sandinistasympathizers were up in arms against what they saw as inflammatory speechesby the returning indigenous leaders. Demands were made that no further speechesbe made since they created the conditions for violence.
Puerto Cabezas was the largest of the Miskito centers. The indigenous leaderswere adamant about holding the public meeting to talk of the peace processin accordance with the agreements reached in the capital with the top-levelSandinistas. However, the local Sandinista leaders were of a different mind.In some instances they orchestrated open and violent responses to the returningIndians. As the day approached for the main event, an impasse set in: Miskitoleaders said they would hold the public meeting; Sandinista leaders saidthey could not guarantee anyone’s safety if they did.
The conciliation team literally worked day and night to stave off the violence,but inevitably the relationship deteriorated. The open meeting was set fornoon. The afternoon and evening before, we had separate meals with both sideswhere we once again pleaded for restraint. We decided that, in accordancewith our role as reconcilers, we would accompany Indian leaders throughoutthe day in the hopes that our presence might lower the likelihood of violence.In the morning, before we left the house where we were staying, we gatheredto pray as a team. We prayed by name for the leaders and key persons on allsides, for those who were friends, and for those who we knew were angry andvolatile.
Soon it became clear that a worst-case scenario was developing. The meetingwas to be held in the baseball stadium. During the morning, people gatheredin the stadium, but soon mobs appeared, particularly Sandinista youth armedwith clubs, chains, and machetes. The public meeting could barely be heardover the din of angry voices. As one of the Moravian pastors opened withprayer, machine guns crackled behind us, mostly as a disruption, creatingconfusion. When the speeches finally ended, some members of our team accompaniedthe Indian leaders to their houses. I remained behind with Carlitos, a fellowmember of the conciliation team, to drive out the pick-up that had been usedas a podium for the speeches. In the streets around the stadium, hand-to-handfighting and rioting broke out. Just as we were about to leave the stadium,a large mob rushed inside. They entered the only exit we had for leavingthe grounds, and out of the chaos, a young Sandinista recruit pointed atme and shouted, “There’s the gringo. Get him! Get him!”
I had become the enemy ofpeople who could hide, whocould run lives, who for a fewdollars could have me killed.
At the sound of that voice there is a picture that has remained frozen inmy memory. In this picture I can look out into that crowd and see the facesof young people, some whom I knew. There was a certain frenzy in their facesas their eyes turned and riveted on me. I was the enemy. Only this time,I represented the enemy they could never touch. What had for years been thesource of their economic hardships, the source of the weapons for their enemies,the source of their oppression was now within their grasp. I representedAmerica and all the suffering they could never alleviate. In their eyes Icould see the years of frustration, of lost loved ones, of a pain that festersinto resentment and boils over into an uncontrolled anger.
The rest is a blur of a few seconds. We leaped for the truck and startedthe 15 yards through the mob toward the only exit. The first thing that hitus was a logging chain that shattered the windshield, sending glass intoour arms and faces. By the time we had gone a few feet, there was not a windowleft in the truck. I can still feel the blows of stones, a two-by-four landingon my shoulder, and the splatter of Carlitos’s warm blood that hit my cheekfrom a blow he received in the back of the head. Miraculously, he did notpass out as he drove slowly through the stoning gauntlet.
Minutes later, we were in the local hospital, where we were cleaned and stitchedup by a Cuban doctor. I remember sitting in that hospital waiting room, myeyes and head jerking at the sound of shouts or gunshots. My mind was racingwith one thought, “Just take me to a safe place.” I felt a fear that crossedover into paranoia.
In less than a year, I had been accused of being a Sandinista spy, my daughter’slife had been threatened, I had received multiple assassination threats,I had been called a dog of the CIA, and I had been stoned.
I no longer question the suspicious, paranoid attitudes of those in war,for I know the craziness of a fearful mind that looks behind every personfor a threat. I no longer wonder how it is possible that one group couldsee another as a real threat to their existence, for I know what it feelslike to be falsely accused, arrested, and interrogated. I no longer doubtthe reality of an anger that flows into hate, for I have experienced suchan anger within my own heart, and I have been the object of such hatred.
When I hear those powerful, almost embittered words from the psalmist, Ino longer have a need to dismiss them. Instead, in so many of the conflictsI see today around our globe, I am drawn to the cry that flows from the angryheart. I have come to believe much more deeply in the proper place of righteousindignation. In too many places around the world I have felt and seen watersrunning down a river of pain, echoing the psalmist’s cry. I am convincedthat reconciliation has a home in that river that seeks deliverance and justice.
A PARENT’S ULTIMATE SACRIFICEBuried within these experiences with real enemies I have also heard anothervoice. It was the voice of God’s search for reconciliation, a call to lovethose who do you harm. As I write these lines, I am working with Angie’sSunday-school class some six years after the events just described. Thisweek their assignment is to memorize John 3:16: “For God so loved the worldthat he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perishbut have eternal life.”
Since our time in Central America, having worked these past years in thecontext of wars, this most popular verse has taken on a whole new meaning.We have traditionally understood John 3:16 as a creedal formula. We tendto place the emphasis on the “whoever believes in him shall be saved” portion.What counts, in terms of faith, is the belief.
But look again. Embedded in the verse is a story of a parent who gave upa child. As a parent who has had my only child threatened, this story ofGod’s loss of a son is all too real. In all my life I have never experiencedanything so precious as the gift of Angie and Joshua. Even with all thechallenges, all the energy expended, all the sleepless nights and the siblingfights, nothing matches the gift of a life placed in our hands for nurture,love, and growth. This is why the phone call shook me awake and made me seethings differently, for I was faced with the reality of an ultimate sacrifice.
Is there anything you feelis so important that you wouldgive up your child to achieve it?
When I said that I could feel the blood drain from my face as I listenedto the words on the phone that night, I meant it literally. I felt an immenseinternal sense of my heart being crushed. I could face a threat against me.But how could I face a threat to my only child? What activity could everbe worth losing my daughter? Was pursuing peace in Nicaragua worth the lifeof my child? Think about it: Is there anything you feel is so important thatyou would give up your child to achieve it?
Looking again at John 3:16, we find this is the very choice at the heartof God’s search for reconciliation. What I find incomprehensible is thatGod, as a parent, gave up this most precious gift in order to be reconciledwith erring, belligerent enemies. I can understand sacrifice for family orfriends. I would not hesitate to give a risky blood transfusion if it meantsaving the life of my child. But to do this for enemies is beyond understanding.
I can no longer take John 3:16 as simply a short formula for salvation. Italso embodies a foundational ethic of reconciliation, an ethic based on awillingness to make the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of an enemy. It is anethic undergirded and made possible only through the immeasurable love andgrace of God. As the hymn states it, “O love of God, how rich and pure! /How measureless and strong! / It shall forevermore endure— / The saints’and angels’ song.” It is a love like that described by the apostle Paul,who suggested that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, northings present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, noranything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the loveof God.”
I have experienced that love in many ways, from the protection of our familyin Central America to the grace that covers a multitude of shortcomings.Yet, while I aspire to bring this love to the world, I recognize that I barelyunderstand its real height and depth, much less am I fully able to practiceand live by it. I only know that this love ultimately sustains life and isthe essence of the very nature of God, who sought reconciliation with theenemy through the sacrifice of his only child.
SEEING THE FACE OF GOD IN THE ENEMYSeveral points have been important in my own understanding that may contributeto developing a practical theology of the enemy.
First, the obvious: enemies are present throughout the faith story. In fact,without enemies, the story of faith itself, of reconciliation with God, cannotbe told.
As Christians, we do ourselves little favor by developing theologies of easypeace accomplished through promises of humanistic love. Quite frankly, thereis nothing human about loving your enemy. To live faithfully in the faceof enemies is possible only with a deep spiritual connection to God’s loveand a willingness to live as vulnerably as Jesus.
I am struck with the story of Jacob and Esau’s reconciliation (Gen. 32-33).As the story develops, we find Jacob fearful of his brother’s rage. His brotherhad become his worst enemy. In the midst of the journey toward his brother,Jacob fights all night with God in person, whom he claims to have “seen faceto face.” Then, rising in the morning, Jacob humbles himself before his fearedenemy, only to discover the emotional release of reconciliation, at whichpoint he then exclaims to his brother, the former enemy, “To see your faceis like seeing the face of God.”
This is the journey of reconciliation, a journey where we struggle directlywith God and ultimately seek the face of God in the enemy.
Second, a theology of the enemy must integrate the cry for deliverance withthe acknowledgment and rightful place of anger. Ironic as it may sound, Ihave come to the conclusion that the only really good peacemakers are angrypacifists who have touched the river of human pain.
Yet, facing the enemy is only possible to the degree that we are rooted inGod’s sustaining love and struggle with the seemingly impossible sacrificeGod’s love for us represents. To pursue reconciliation, we ourselves mustembrace the long, sleepless night of fighting with God in ourselves beforewe can journey toward God and seek his face in our enemy.
This is the paradox and challenge of the enemy: to acknowledge the rightfulplace of anger in the cry for deliverance and simultaneously to move towardGod’s sacrificial, unending love. In the end, the journey of reconciliationinevitably takes us toward the enemy, and it seeks the face of God.
John Paul Lederach is director of the conflict analysis and transformationprogram, Eastern Mennonite University, Harrisonburg, Virginia. This articleis from a forthcoming book to be published by Herald Press.
Copyright © 1997 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
Theology
Dorothy C. Bass
The Sabbath is the most challenging—and necessary—spiritual discipline for contemporary Christians.
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How often people today cry out in exasperation or despair, “I just don’thave enough time!” There is so much to do: earn a living, fulfill a vocation,nurture relationships, care for dependents, exercise, clean the house. Moreover,we hope to maintain sanity while doing all this, and to keep growing as faithfuland loving people at the same time. We are finite, and the demands seem toogreat, the time too short.
Those of us who feel pressed for time have lots of company. In a surprisebestseller of 1991, The Overworked American, economist Juliet Schorreported that work hours and stress are up, and sleep and family time aredown for all classes of employed Americans. Wives working outside the homereturn to find a “second shift” of housework awaiting them. Husbands addovertime or second jobs to their schedules. Single parents stretch in somany directions that they sometimes feel they can’t manage. Simultaneously,all are bombarded by messages that urge them to spend more (and so, ultimately,work more), to keep their homes cleaner (standards keep rising), and to improvethemselves as lovers, investors, parents, or athletes. Supposedly to makeall this possible, grocery stores stay open all night long, and entertainmentoptions are available around the clock. We live, says Schor, in “an economyand society that are demanding too much from people.”
What’s a person to do? U.S. culture has some answers ready. “Quality timewith your kids” is the answer for parents. An exercise machine that reducesstress and burns off fat in only 20 minutes, three times a week, is the answerfor the overwrought and the overweight. “What you need is a good night’ssleep or a vacation” is the answer one friend offers to another. Each ofthese answers has value. Yet our circumstances require a stronger response,and we are too caught up in the swirl of our lives to devise one.
In this situation, the historic practice of setting aside one day a weekfor rest and worship promises peace to those who embrace it. Whether we knowthe term Sabbath or not, we the harried citizens of late modernity yearnfor the reality. We need Sabbath, even though we doubt that we have timefor it.
As the new century dawns, the practice of Sabbath keeping may be a gift waitingto be unwrapped, a confirmation that we are not without help in shaping therenewing ways of life for which we long. This practice stands at the heartof Judaism, but it is also available to Christians. For many of us, receivingthis gift will require first discarding our image of Sabbath as a time ofnegative rules and restrictions, as a day of obligation (for Catholics) ora day without play (in memories of strict Protestant childhoods). Relocatingour understanding of this day in the biblical stories of Creation, Exodus,and Resurrection will be essential if we are to discover the gifts it offers.
To act as if the worldcannot get along withoutour work for one dayin seven is a startlingdisplay of pride thatdenies the sufficiency ofour generous Maker.
Unwrapping this gift also requires supporting underworked Americansas they wonder what Sabbath keeping might mean for them. One of the cruelestfeatures of the American economy, which asks too much of many people, isthat it casts numerous others aside, leaving them without sufficient work.A Sabbath-keeping community would be a community in which this injusticewould not occur. When Sabbath comes, commerce halts, feasts are served, andall God’s children play. The equal reliance of all people on the bounty andgrace of God is gratefully acknowledged, and the goodness of weekday workis affirmed. Relationships that persist throughout the week are changed inthe process. As the great Jewish scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “TheSabbath cannot survive in exile, a lonely stranger among days of profanity.”
THE SABBATH RHYTHMThe way in which time is organized is a fundamental building block of anycommunity. So basic is this that most of us take the pattern we are usedto for granted, as if it were self-evident that time must be arranged inthis way. For all the spiritual descendants of Abraham—Jews, Christians,Muslims—time flows in seven-day cycles. Other cultures move through timein different cycles, however. In most ancient societies, rest days followedlunar phases or rotated on some number other than seven. During the FrenchRevolution, anti-Christian leaders tried to weaken popular religious traditionsby abolishing the seven-day week. The rhythms of the week subtly patternthe days and years of our lives, and they are filled with meaning.
The Sabbatarian pattern—six days of work, followed by one of rest—is wovendeep into the fabric of the Bible. The very first story of Hebrew and ChristianScriptures climaxes on the seventh day, the very first time there was a seventhday. Having created everything, God rests, blesses this day, and makes itholy. In this way, Karl Barth has suggested, God declares as fully as possiblejust how very good creation is. Resting, God takes pleasure in what has beenmade; God has no regrets, no need to go on to create a still better worldor a creature more wonderful than the man and woman. In the day of rest,God’s free love toward humanity takes form as time shared with them.
Later, God teaches the people of Israel to share in the blessing of thisday (Exod. 16). After bringing them out of Egyptian slavery into the wilderness,God sends them manna, commanding them to gather enough each morning for thatday’s food alone. Mistrusting, they gather more than they need, but it rots.On the sixth day, however, they are told to gather enough to last for twodays. Miraculously, the extra does not rot, and those mistrustful ones whogo out on the seventh morning to get more find none. God is teaching them,through their own hunger and nature’s provisions, to keep the Sabbath, evenbefore Moses receives the commandments on Sinai.
When those commandments come, the Sabbath commandment is the longest andin some ways the most puzzling. Unlike any of the others, it takes quitedifferent forms in the two passages where the Ten Commandments appear. Bothversions require the same behavior—work on six days, rest on one—but eachgives a different reason. What is wonderful is that each reason arises froma fundamental truth about God’s relationship to humanity.
The Exodus commandment to “remember” the Sabbath day is grounded in the storyof Creation. The human pattern of six days of work and one of rest followsGod’s pattern as Creator; God’s people are to rest on one day because Goddid. In both work and rest, human beings are in the image of God. At thesame time, they are not God but God’s creatures, who must honor God by obeyingthis commandment.
In Deuteronomy, the commandment to “observe” the Sabbath day is tied to theexperience of a people newly released from bondage. Slaves cannot take aday off; free people can. When they stop work every seventh day, the peoplewill remember that the Lord brought them out of slavery, and they will seeto it that no one within their own dominion, not even animals, will workwithout respite. Sabbath rest is a recurring testimony against the drudgeryof slavery.
Together, these two renderings of the Sabbath commandment summarize the mostfundamental stories and beliefs of the Hebrew Scriptures: Creation and Exodus,humanity in God’s image, and a people liberated from captivity. One emphasizesholiness, the other social justice. Sabbath crystallizes Torah’s portraitof who God is and what human beings are most fully meant to be.
LETTING NATURE BEAs Sabbath crystallizes Torah, so Sabbath—Shabbat—is the heart ofJudaism. When Jews who have become inattentive to their religion wish todeepen their observance, rabbis tell them with one voice: You must beginby keeping Shabbat. But what does it mean to keep a day holy, to refrainfrom work, to honor God’s creativity and imitate God’s rest, to experiencethe end of bondage? This question has been on the minds of observant Jews,and in their hearts and actions, for millennia. Following Exodus 31, in whichGod makes the Sabbath the sign of an irrevocable covenant with the peopleof Israel, Jewish leaders have emphasized its special place in Jewish lifeand heard in its rhythm the structure that has kept Jewish identity aliveamid terrible adversity. A saying affirms that “more than the Jews have keptShabbat, Shabbat has kept the Jews.”
Many centuries of debate and cultural change have shaped the law and liturgyof contemporary Shabbat observance, which varies considerably fromone branch of Judaism to another. Infusing the practice as a whole, however,is a theology of Creation and Exodus, of holiness and liberation.
In observant Jewish homes, Shabbat begins each Friday night at sundownas a woman lights the Sabbath candles. It is a festive time; people dressup, the best tableware and food are presented, guests are welcomed. In somefamilies, everyone turns toward the door, singing to greet Shabbat,which Jewish hymns personify as a loving bride who brings inner delight andas a beautiful queen who gives order and peace. Traditional prayers are prayersof thanks; indeed, mourning is suspended in Shabbat liturgies. Manyfamilies sing or read together after the meal. They will gather again thenext evening for another meal at which they will bid farewell to the holyday. Finally, parents will bless their children and give them a bit of sweetspice so that the taste of Sabbath peace will linger on their tongues.
Jewish liturgy and law say both what should be done on Shabbat andwhat should not. What should not be done is “work.” Defining exactly whatthat means is a long and continuing argument, but one classic answer is thatwork is whatever requires changing the natural, material world. All weeklong, human beings wrestle with the natural world, tilling and hammeringand carrying and burning. On the Sabbath, however, Jews let it be. They celebrateit as it is and live in it in peace and gratitude. Humans are created too,after all, and in gratefully receiving the gift of the world, they learnto remember that it is not, finally, human effort that grows the grain andforges the steel. By extension, all activities associated with work or commerceare also prohibited. You are not even supposed to think about them.
What should be done? Specific religious duties do exist, includingworship at synagogue and reading of the Torah. But the holiness of the Sabbathis also made manifest in the joy people expect to experience on that day.It is a good deed for married couples to have sexual intercourse onShabbat. Taking a walk, resting, talking with loved ones, reading—theseare good, too.
To the eyes of outsiders, Jewish observance of the Sabbath can seem likea dreary set of restrictions, a set of laws that don’t bear any good news.According to those who live each week shaped by Shabbat, however,it is a practice that powerfully alters their relationships to nature, work,God, and others. Shabbat is not just law and liturgy; it is also ashared way of life, a set of activities that becomes second nature, a roundof custom and prayer that the youngest child or the oldest person can enter,a piece of time that opens space for God. Over and over, Jewish authors sayof Shabbat what those who enter deeply into other religious practicesalso say: to experience its goodness, you must enter its activities. To findSabbath peace, you must keep the Sabbath holy. “The real and the spiritualare one, like body and soul in a living person,” writes Heschel. “It is forthe law to clear the path; it is for the soul to sense the spirit.”
SABBATH KEEPING IN A CHRISTIAN KEYChristians are fortunate when Jewish friends invite us to come to a mealon a Friday evening, to keep Sabbath with them. On our own, however, Christianscannot keep Sabbath as Jews do. We know God most fully not through the perpetualcovenant God made with the Israelites at Sinai but through Jesus Christ.Yet we also honor the Mosaic Commandments, and we stand in spiritual andhistorical kinship with the Jewish people, of whom Jesus was one. In anauthentically Christian form of Sabbath keeping, we may affirm the gratefulrelationship to the Creator that Jews celebrate each Sabbath, and we mayshare the joyful liberation from drudgery first experienced by the slaveswho left Egypt. But we add to these celebrations our weekly festival forthe source of our greatest joy: Christ’s victory over the powers of death.For Christians, this victory makes of each weekly day of rest and worshipa celebration of Easter.
The first day of the week was special to Christians as an Easter day fromthe earliest days of their community. Sunday, the day on which the discipleshad first encountered the risen Lord, became a day to gather, eat together,and rejoice. It was not in those years a day of rest, however; these gatheringshappened after the workday was over, and for several decades, Jews who becameChristians continued to observe Shabbat as well.
But these were years when Sabbath observance was changing for Jews as wellas for Christians. After the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romansin the year 70, the rabbis who reformulated Jewish practice for the new situationplaced great emphasis on the Sabbath as a lasting sign of God’s unique covenantwith Israel. So Jewish observance was becoming more strict during this period.At the same time, Christianity was developing a separate identity from Judaism,and many people who were not Jewish were joining the church. Gradually,Christians of Jewish background stopped attending synagogue and observingJewish law. Over the years, Sunday became their one-day-in-seven for bothrest and worship.
The Gospels say that Jesus observed the Jewish Sabbath, though he ignoredsome laws that other teachers thought should restrict healing or eating inspecific situations of need. “It is lawful to do good on the Sabbath,” Jesussays (Matt. 12:12). Later, Christians continued to treasure the Sabbathcommandment, along with the other nine commandments from Sinai. They alsocame to believe, however, that its meaning had changed within the new creationGod began with Christ’s death and resurrection. The holy day from now on,therefore, was not the seventh but the “eighth,” the day on which the futureburst into the present. The appropriate response was to celebrate each Sundaywith a feast of Communion, looking back to Jesus’ passion and resurrectionand forward to the great banquet that would occur at the end of time. Theresult has been centuries of Sunday worship, usually crowned by the celebrationof the Lord’s Supper.
Building on this shared heritage, different groups of Christians have shapedSabbath keeping in different ways. The strict Sabbath observance of the NewEngland Puritans, which gave rise to “blue laws” in many American citiesand towns, influenced the structure of time for many groups in this society.Reformed churches of Dutch origin have anchored an American subculture withinwhich Sundays are still filled with family visits and theological debate.
On the other hand, some groups have been suspicious of Sabbatarianism sostrict that it might seem legalistic (“If anywhere the day is made holy forthe mere day’s sake, then I order you to work on it, to ride on it, to feaston it, to do anything to remove this reproach from Christian liberty,” MartinLuther declared) or have emphasized, like the Quakers, that all time is holywith God. Sunday mass has been and continues to be central to Roman Catholics.A few groups, including the Seventh-day Adventists, have made Saturday observancecentral to their identity.
CLEARING THE ROADBLOCKSEven while the Bible, history, and the example of Judaism stir up a yearningfor Sabbath within us, we are aware that taking on a Sabbath rhythm wouldnot be easy—and pressures to work and spend are only part of the problem.Some other obstacles also make it difficult to retrieve this practice.
One is figuring out how to make Sunday special when it is no longer protectedby legislation and custom. The arrangement of time by society as a wholeis political, of course: how time is structured makes someone’s life easierand someone’s harder. Sunday first received special governmental recognitionin 321, when the emperor Constantine decreed it a day of rest throughoutthe Roman Empire. This spawned centuries of government-sponsored Sabbathkeeping. In recent decades, however, the setting aside of Sunday as a specialday has been losing force within American culture’s politics of time. Onereason is increasing sensitivity to religious diversity—a sensitivity pioneeredby the Supreme Court in decisions that forced employers to respect the Sabbathpractices of Jews and Adventists. Today, not only the laws but also the customsthat once shielded Sunday from most commerce are disappearing, and Christians’day of worship and rest is not automatically “free” for church and family.Claiming its freedom will take effort and perhaps even sacrifice.
A second roadblock is the bad reputation many devout Christians have givento the day of rest and worship. In the centuries after Constantine, churchattendance came to be required and profane activity to be banned on Sundays,though in fact these rules were often ignored. When religious reform sweptthrough Europe in the sixteenth century, improving the people’s use of theirday of rest was a concern of Protestant and Catholic leaders alike. In theensuing centuries, some Protestants worldwide not only required many hoursof worship services each Sunday, but also made it virtually impossible forabsentees to have any fun. Sabbath keepers were killjoys, it seemed. Littlewonder that gloom still hangs over the Sunday memories of some from morestringent times.
Good Sabbaths makegood Christians byregularly remindingus of God’s creative,liberating, and redeemingpresence, not only inwords but also througha practice we do togetherin response to that presence.
Today, economic forces are also nibbling away at the freedom of the day.In a vicious circle, people who spend more hours at weekday jobs need theother days for shopping, which prompts businesses to hire more Sunday workers,who join the growing percentage of the workforce who toil long, irregularhours, some trying desperately to make ends meet, others for the sake ofmore shopping. For millions of workers, long Sunday hours for rest and worshipmay be impossible within the current system. People who know the Sabbathpattern of creation, liberation, and resurrection nurture a dissatisfactionwith this system, however, and can work for change. Keeping Sabbath, we growin our longing for a system where all people have work at a living wage,and time for rest and worship too.
Will it be possible for twenty-first-century Christians who need Sabbathbut also respect diversity, who need Sabbath but also yearn for joy, whoneed Sabbath but also struggle to make ends meet to enter the practice ofSabbath keeping? Perhaps. But this can only happen as we help one anotherdevelop new forms rooted in the enduring truths of Creation, liberation,and Resurrection.
UNWRAPPING THE GIFT OF SABBATHIn our situation, Sabbath keeping will require a good deal of inventiveness.Tilden Edwards, an Episcopal priest who has explored this practice in reallife and in a book, urges contemporary Christians to be flexible, embracingnot a renewed Sabbatarianism as much as a pattern of “Sabbath time.” Herecommends a combination of Sunday worship and play with a regular rhythmof disciplined spiritual renewal during the week. Eugene Peterson, a Presbyterianminister, describes the “Sabbaths” he and his wife observed every Monday,after their busiest day was over: a drive to the country, a psalm, a silenthike for several hours, a quiet evening at home. Pastors are not the onlyones who must work on Sundays; others, too, sometimes need to find ways ofkeeping Sabbath on other days. Yet none of us should think that we can sustainSabbath keeping, whenever it happens, all by ourselves. We need mutualityin this practice, which resists our ordinary patterns in so many ways. Weneed to help one another discover this gift.
Most often, Sundays will make the best Sabbaths, and not only because ourschedules are relatively open on that day. Joining the assembly of Christiansfor the celebration of Word and sacrament will remind us that Sabbath keepingis not about taking a day off but about being recalled to our knowledge ofand gratitude for God’s activity in creating the world, giving liberty tocaptives, and overcoming the powers of death. In addition, the friends withwhom we worship can help us learn to rest and rejoice once the service isover.
What, besides churchgoing, is Christian Sabbath keeping? The answer mustbe tailored to specific circumstances and will vary considerably in differentcultures and stages of life. It will be helpful in each circumstance to reflecton what is good and what is not. What is not good on Sabbath, or in Sabbathtime? We would do well to heed three millennia of Jewish reflection on theSabbath commandment. Not good are work and commerce and worry. To act asif the world cannot get along without our work for one day in seven is astartling display of pride that denies the sufficiency of our generous Maker.To refrain from working—not every day, but one in seven—opens the temporalspace within which glad and grateful relationship with God and peaceful andappreciative relationship with nature and other people can grow. Refrainingfrom work on a regular basis should also teach us not to demand excessivework from others.
What about commerce? Buying and spending are closely related to working toomuch; they depend on work, create the conditions for more work, and oftenare work. We could refrain from shopping on Sundays, making a choice thatmight complicate the weekly schedule at first but should soon become a refreshinghabit. And worry? It may be difficult to banish cares from our minds altogether,but we can refrain from activities that we know will summon worry—activitieslike paying bills, preparing tax returns, and making lists of things to doin the coming week.
And what is good on a Christian Sabbath? Most important is joyful worshipthat restores us to communion with the risen Christ and our fellow membersof his body, the church. For Christians, every Sunday is Easter Sunday, atime to gather together with song and prayer, to hear the Word proclaimed,and to recognize Christ in the breaking of the bread. It is a festival, aspring of souls, a day of freedom not only from work but also from condemnation.At times, worshiping communities lose sight of this: hymns drag, elders judge,children fidget, fancy clothes constrain, and the minutes tick slowly by.In other congregations, joyful prayer and song burst through the seams ofthe worship service, and hours pass before anyone is ready to leave. Thecontrast suggests that we all need to remember that Sunday worship is notjust about “going to church”; it is about taking part in the activity bywhich God is shaping a new creation. It is a foretaste of the feast to come.
After worship, what many of us need most is time with loved ones—not usefultime for planning next week’s schedules—but time “wasted” on the pleasureof being together, perhaps while sharing our enjoyment of art, nature, orathletics. For others, and for all of us at certain points in our lives,hours of solitude beckon, hours for sleep, reading, reflection, walking,and prayer. In addition, we might explore the long tradition of visitingthe homebound or inviting lonely ones to our table on the Christian Sabbathwhen the joy these occasions bring can be experienced apart from the pressuresof other appointments.
Churches must be careful, however, not to devour Sabbath freedom with “religious”or charitable obligations. Filling Sunday afternoons with church committeemeetings, for example, is a terrible violation of this freedom. And it isa violation that unfortunately seems to be increasing, precisely becauseof the pressures that Sabbath freedom specifically opposes. Of course, itis difficult to find time to meet during the week, but part of the pointof Sabbath keeping is to cause shifts in weekday priorities. In many churches,it is the people on the committees who most need to be reminded to keep Sabbath!Resisting the temptation to meet on Sunday would help them to say to oneanother, “God intends rest and liberation for you during at least one seventhof your time.” Eating, playing, and taking delight in nature and one anotherin the hours after worship would be wonderful ways for congregations or groupswithin them to keep Sabbath.
SABBATH FOR THE GOOD OF ALLPuritan Sabbath keepers agreed that “good Sabbaths make good Christians.”They meant that regular, disciplined attention to the spiritual life wasthe foundation of faithfulness. Another dimension of the saying opens upif we imagine a worshiping community helping one another to step off thetreadmill of work-and-spend and into the circle of glad gratitude for thegifts of God. Taken this way, good Sabbaths make good Christians by regularlyreminding us of God’s creative, liberating, and redeeming presence, not onlyin words but also through a practice we do together in response to that presence.But even beyond this, there are other benefits of Sabbath keeping, and thesecould spill over to bless the whole world. With a change, the saying acquiresan applicability that reaches beyond the spiritual life alone, and beyondthe Sabbath practices of Jews or Christians. Imagine this: “Good Sabbathsmake good societies.”
The practice of keeping Sabbath bears much wisdom for people seeking waysthrough the crises of these times and the stresses of contemporary life.“The solution of mankind’s most vexing problems will not be found in renouncingtechnical civilization, but in attaining some degree of independence fromit,” writes Heschel. Sabbath keeping teaches that independence. Refrainingfrom work on a regular basis is a way of setting limits on behavior thatis perilous for both human welfare and the welfare of Earth itself. OverworkedAmericans need rest, and they need to be reminded that they do not causethe grain to grow and that their greatest fulfillment does not come throughthe acquisition of material things. Moreover, the planet needs a rest fromhuman plucking and burning and buying and selling. Perhaps, as Sabbath keepers,we will come to live and know these truths more fully, and thus to bringtheir wisdom to the common solution of humanity’s problems.
A good Sabbath would also make a good society by balancing the claims ofwork and celebration, for workers and celebrants of all sorts. In prayersat the beginning and end of Shabbat, Jews thank God for the blessingof work. Not working on one day is tied to working on the other six; Sabbathaffirms the value of work and interprets it as an important dimension ofhuman identity. Sabbath keeping bears a longing that all human beings willhave good work, as well as a longing that no one will be required to toilwithout respite.
Rest and worship. One day a week—not much, in a sense, but a good beginning.One day to resist the tyranny of too much or too little work and to celebratewith God and others, remembering thereby who we really are and what is reallyimportant. One day that, week after week, anchors a way of life that makesa difference every day.
Dorothy C. Bass directs the Project on the Education and Formation ofPeople in Faith at Valparaiso (Ind.) University. This article is excerptedwith permission from Practicing Our Faith, by Dorothy Bass, and publishedby Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco; (800) 956-7739.
Copyright © 1997 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
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Congressman Tony Hall, the plain-spoken Democrat from Dayton, Ohio, is notflashy. There is no mane of flowing white hair, no sonorous voice utteringbenign inanities, no wall of toothy photos with the powerful and chic. Thereare a few snapshots displayed in his waiting room beside a citation froma mayors’ prayer breakfast and a tiny TV. One shows Hall ladling a servingof beans into a bowl for a child, apparently in Africa. Another shows himstanding next to a camel, and both of them face the camera head-on for theirportrait. The resemblance between the two is striking: sandy-brown hair,appraising eyes, and a cautious smile. For both man and beast, the wide-seteyes dip down at the outward corners, suggesting sobriety, perhaps a tingeof melancholy. Neither one is likely to be persuaded to buy a bridge; neitheris likely to try to sell you one.
Tony Hall is not a typical denizen of Capitol Hill. Compared to the othershining lights, he presents a modest display: practical, industrious, anddetermined. Hall brings to mind the turtle, that single-minded, thick-shelledcreature who, as the saying goes, gets nowhere without sticking his neckout. Stylish he’s not, but that was never an essential component of success.
Yet this unpretentious man could represent a model for a new way of doingpolitics, offering hope to Christians weary of the clumsy fit offered bycurrent partisan alignments. For some Christians, the Democratic party hasput itself beyond the pale due to its support of abortion and and its lackof support for a traditional sexual morality. But the Republican party ison shaky ground as well. So-called country club Republicans were desertedin the last two presidential elections as Christians suspected them of merelypandering to a Christian agenda while their real interests were strictlyeconomic.
What’s more, while most Christians agreed that the welfare system wasdysfunctional and in need of an overhaul, many were jarred by some Republicanrhetoric that focused on resentment over waste and a relish for kickingfreeloaders off the wagon. This antiwelfare rhetoric seemed incompatiblewith a Christian interest in compassionate welfare reform or with biblicalcommands to defend and care for the poor. This conviction is so much a partof the faith that churchgoers are the nation’s highest contributors of volunteertime.
So, where to turn? Why not to a pro-life, pro-family, born-again,poverty-fighting Democrat?
“Tony Hall is the perfect example of what we want,” says Ron Sider, presidentof Evangelicals for Social Action. “He supports the family, opposes abortionand gay marriage, but combines that with a conviction that the poor matter,as do racial justice and environmental concerns.” Sider hopes for a realignmentof loyalties, uniting Catholics, evangelicals, and black and Latino churchesbehind four significant issues: “pro-life, pro-poor, pro-family, and pro-racialjustice.”
Hall’s appeal is that his positions cut across party lines, and that maybe what Christians need most. Such a combination only looks unlikely whenthe assumptions are set by prevailing political stereotypes; andstereotype-busting is most likely to be accomplished by a guileless individuallike Hall.
Campaigning for ChristHall’s inner directedness clearly comes from his Christian faith. On a warmand rainy day in his comfortable office on Capitol Hill, Hall recalled theevent that precipitated him into a faith he had not sought. He rocks backin his chair as a gust sends the scent of wet streets and city bustle throughthe open window. He is in shirtsleeves, with a loosened tie; an untouched,iceless glass of cola sits on his desk.
The event that began to awaken him spiritually was a prayer breakfast backin his hometown of Dayton, Ohio, in 1980. Hall had been invited to attendbut didn’t particularly want to go. Chuck Colson would be the featured speaker,and Hall recalls thinking, What can Chuck Colson tell me? But he reasonedthat it would be a good place to be seen and to shake voters’ hands, andso worth a morning’s time.
What he heard that day, he says, “stunned” him. What brought Hall up shortthat morning was not so much the content of Colson’s speech (“I know it hada lot to do with God”) as the witness of his life; what got through to him,Hall recalls, was “his sincerity. Here was a guy who’d had wonderful success,been a counselor to the President, and he was saying that it wasn’t enough.I knew that was true. I had success and was doing well, but I began to think,Is this it? Is it just my ambitions, my selfishness? Is that all thereis?”
“I remember that day,” Chuck Colson says. “It was an enormous crowd. Youalways wonder if an event like that does any good, if it really changes lives;so to see Tony is a real thrill.” In his estimation, “Tony is a real evangelicalgem, the perfect profile of a committed Christian. He’s not afraid to goagainst his party when that’s where his faith leads him,” for example, indefending the unborn, just as Christians opposed the slave trade two hundredyears ago.
Where Hall admired Colson’s sincerity, Colson perceives the same in Hall.“I know how he lives his life, and he’s the same guy off stage as on stage.I’ve been around politics since I was 26, and that’s the highest complimentI could give. I rejoice that Tony is my brother.”
Does Colson think Hall provides the kind of pattern Christian politiciansshould follow? Could they succeed by uniting around issues as focused byHall? “Yes, on both counts,” says Colson.
The experience at the prayer breakfast when Colson spoke kicked off a year-longspiritual search for Hall, during which he rose early Sundays to visit churchesall over Washington, while his wife, Janet, asked anxiously if anything waswrong. Eventually Hall attended a small gathering where he heard Campus Crusade’sBill Bright speak, and all the pieces fell into place. “It was exactly whatI was looking for and, boom! I went for it.”
But his turtlelike determination led him to tackle the task of spreadingthe faith in blunt and less-than-effective ways. “Every night for six monthsI would say to my wife, ‘Now, did you receive Jesus tonight?’ ” He pausesto chuckle. “Well, you know how far that went: not very far. She would getmad and really give it to me.”
He did not do any better with evangelizing his friends. “Friends would say,‘What’s new?’ and I’d say, ‘You’re not gonna believe this. You gotta believein Jesus.’ The eyeballs would go up to the ceiling and they’d go, ‘Oh, no.’My wife would be kicking me under the table. ‘You’re not gonna have any friends!’” she’d admonish him.
The curious thing aboutHall’s persona is the lack ofwhat most experts would sayis essential to public appeal:HE IS THOROUGHLY ORDINARY.
Hall says that this was the first lesson he learned after his conversion:you can’t shove God down people’s throats. When Janet came to faith a yearafter her husband, it was not due to his badgering but due to the witnessof his life. “I was changing toward her, toward the children, and towardlife overall.” Growing in Christ had given Hall a consistent, centered witness;he was acquiring the quality of persuasive sincerity that had first impressedhim in Chuck Colson and had launched his search for God.
Scored for taking a standWhile personal integrity and consistency are central to Hall, they causehim to cross political expectations regularly. “I believe the way Democratsdo about helping hurting people; to me, they are more of a compassionateparty.” Yet he sometimes votes against his party, particularly if the issueis abortion or homosexuality.
“Congressional Scorecard” figures put out by groups that track voting patternsreveal a perplexing profile: Hall gets a 100 percent positive rating fromthe National Right to Life Committee, and a zero from the National RifleAssociation (“Mr. Hall voted against us every time,” an NRAspokesman says.) He rates only a 23 percent approval from the ChristianCoalition, mostly due to his reluctance to support the welfare-reform bill,which, he concluded somewhat reluctantly, was too flawed.
“I have lots of respect for Tony,” says Brian Lopina of the Christian Coalition.“He is one of the most principled people on Capitol Hill, and his personalcommitment to hunger, his travels and fasting for that issue, bear witnessto that. I wish he’d vote with us more often.”
Hall’s pro-life stand has been a mark of distinction, but it was not easychanging his position on that issue. He had begun as a pro-choice advocateand had always been infuriated by pro-lifers who would yell at him withouttaking the time to understand his position. Although he now admits that hedid not really have a coherent basis for his position, “I always felt uneasy,though I didn’t know why I was uneasy,” he says. But as he began to spendtime reading Scripture every morning, he realized, “All these years I waswrong. It was the Spirit through the Word saying, ‘You’ve got to change.’“
He told his supporters the blunt truth: that he had become a believer, hadchanged his stance on the issue, and would henceforth have to vote hisconscience. As a result, he lost a lot of support; he still sometimes encounterspeople in his district who refuse to speak to him. But because he was honestand forthright about his change and the reasons for it, people soon gaveup trying to reverse his stand.
Hall has become the leader of a stalwart group of about 40 pro-life Democratsin the House of Representatives. On July 12, 1996, the front page of theWashington Post trumpeted his success at persuading the Democraticplatform committee to include a “conscience clause” recognizing the pro-lifestand of some party members. At the Democratic National Convention a monthlater, Hall spoke in reference to the new clause and reminded the party:“We will be judged on how we treat the ‘least of these’ among us. So we renewour pledge to be a voice for the voiceless.”
In the same speech, Hall touched on another of his constant themes: helpfor the poor. “More than 2,500 verses in the Bible address the pain of thehurting and afflicted,” he reminded his hearers. In light of this, he praisedthe Democratic fight for food stamps and school lunches, and the local Democraticparty of Dayton, Ohio, for opening its building as a homeless shelter.
Putting hunger on the tableHall’s interest in hunger goes back before his political career, beginningwith a stint in Thailand soon after he graduated from college (hisresume notes that he is fluent in Thai). During two years teachingEnglish as a Peace Corps volunteer, Hall saw a level of poverty beyond anythinghe had encountered in the U.S. He was able to turn his concern into actionsoon after arriving in Congress by promoting legislation that increased foreignaid to the needy and domestic funds to children’s nutrition.
Clippings from the course of a 20-year career show Hall traversing the worldto expose and challenge hunger: Ethiopia, Haiti, Bangladesh, Sierra Leone,Panama, and most recently North Korea. He has fought to bring humanitarianaid to Kurdish refugees and immunizations to Bosnian children. He has notbeen afraid to move beyond hunger relief to broader human-rights concernsand to be bold in his criticism when the powerful block attempts at aid.“Everybody in the world agrees that Sudan is a basket case,” he said duringthe 1991 famine, “and that [Premier Omar] Bashir is an animal and a criminal.”
In 1984 Hall succeeded in a significant goal, seeing the establishment ofthe House Select Committee on Hunger. This committee was established as afocal point for hunger concerns after Hall noted that more than a third ofthe House’s standing committees had some jurisdiction over the issue. Hallserved as chairman of the committee, and in that capacity he visited Ethiopiaduring the terrible famine of the early eighties. There he saw 25 childrendie in one morning, an experience he found devastating—and radicalizing.
While his interest in relieving poverty overseas was rising, some back homewere questioning it. He realized that hunger programs could not neglect problemson American soil, and he began trying to unify people on the issue. In 1985he organized a 40-hour fast, for which volunteers solicited sponsors whowould make per-hour donations. Thousands participated in the fast, whichnetted $350,000 for hunger relief in the U.S. and abroad.
Hall chaired the Committee on Hunger until it was abolished by Congress inearly 1993 as a budget-cutting move. This dramatic event elicited an evenmore dramatic response. In April 1993, Hall fasted for three weeks as a responseto dissolution of the committee. It was not a hunger strike; there were nodemands attached to this action. It was a fast of prayer.
“It was very clear from the first staff meeting when he was considering thefast what the political ramifications would be,” says past Hall staffer,friend, and neighbor Max Finberg. “Tony realized that this would be the endof his political career. He would be seen as a religious kook. But he felthe had to step out and do what God was calling him to do.”
Hall’s fast brought plenty of ink, demonstrating as it did a more deep-rootedcommitment to convictions than usually appears on Capitol Hill. It also broughtresults. Congress established both the Hunger Caucus and the CongressionalHunger Center to continue the work Hall thought so vital. Finberg is nowthe director of the Mickey Leland Hunger Fellows Program at the CongressionalHunger Center and is pleased still to be working under a person he deeplyadmires.
“I’m biased because I think he’s the greatest guy out there,” Finberg says.“He is the embodiment of the gospel in the political realm. People couldcoalesce around this agenda.”
Champion of breakfasts—and human rightsThe curious thing about Hall’s persona is the lack of what most experts wouldsay is essential to public appeal: in appearance and personal presence, heis thoroughly ordinary, breaking the rules that require rhetorical poiseand tv hair to succeed. “It’s mindboggling how humble he is,” Finberg continues.“He knows he’s not charismatic, he’s not the greatest public speaker, notthe smartest member of Congress. But it doesn’t matter. When he talks fromthe heart, you can’t help but be touched, and that happens all over the world.”
Hall may not be charismatic, but he has an elfin humor and a way with wordsand images that linger in the mind. When he saw a solitary flake fall outof a cafeteria-serving-size Wheaties box, he wrote General Mills a playfullychallenging letter about those who go without breakfast every day. Thecorporation immediately dispatched seven tons of cereal to a Red Cross foodbank in Ohio, then followed up with more. They topped off the incident instyle, putting out a special Wheaties box with a photo of Hall on the front.He stands pictured with his fists in the air, wearing a white button-downshirt and striped tie, under the heading “Breakfast of Champions.” A newsstory at the time hailed Hall in return as the “champion of breakfasts.”
Similar creativity marks other examples of Hall’s hunger activism. He hosteda “Dumpster Luncheon” to show his colleagues how much edible food is thrownaway by stores and suppliers every day in Washington. He persuaded Ohio farmersto allow volunteers to gather left-behind produce from their fields, citingthe admonition in Leviticus, “Do not reap to the very edges of your field . …Leave them for the poor and alien” (19:9-10, NIV). (Acopy of Millet’s The Gleaners appropriately adorns his office wall.)
Convictions like these contribute to voting decisions that undermine Hall’sstanding with some conservatives. The bills he voted “wrong” on, in theestimation of the Christian Coalition, are those having to do with taxes,welfare, and funding. He likes to quote Mark Shields to the effect that,no matter how much he searches the Scriptures, he just can’t find what Jesussaid about the capital gains tax. With many issues, Hall says, it’s justnot possible to state definitively, “This is the Christian position.”
Hall ended up voting against the welfare-reform bill passed in March of 1995.It was not an easy decision; he describes the bill as a 1,000-page documentthat had much he could support, but too much he could not. In his opinion,the bottom line was that “it would throw 1.1 million children into poverty,and 2.6 million people overall.” This cost, he decided, was too high. Hevoted against it knowing that it had won much popular support. “I know Iwill hear from my constituents about this in the election.”
Hall is not afraid to goagainst his party when that’swhere HIS FAITH LEADS HIM.
Hall’s interest in hunger and poverty conforms naturally with an interestin human rights around the globe. In 1983 he founded the Congressional Friendsof Human Rights Monitors, which includes in its membership a fourth to athird of both House and Senate. In those cases where human-rights workersare threatened or attacked overseas, the size of this group enables it tosend a swift letter of protest, indicating the United States’ support forlocal human-rights workers.
The latest letter notes the pressing nature of these abuses; on February5, 1997, five members of the UN Human Rights team were murdered near Cyangugu,Rwanda. In the last few years, the group considered cases in Algeria, Colombia,Croatia, Guatemala, India, Israel, Mexico, Nigeria, the Palestinian Authority,Tunisia, and Uzbekistan.
An arena of human-rights abuses that is currently gaining more attentionis the persecution and martyrdom of Christians in other lands. Hall has touredseveral Middle Eastern countries with Reps. Chris Smith of New Jersey andFrank Wolf of Virginia, and the trio has demanded action from the Clintonadministration, while continuing to help bring the issue to public awareness.Hall has twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize someone who tends a flockin a persecuted land, Roman Catholic Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo ofEast Timor.
A bipartisan friendshipThinking about the issues that animate him the most—hunger and humanrights—reminds Hall of the activity that holds it all together: prayer.For years he has convened a group that meets at 7:00 Wednesday mornings ina Washington public library. The group is open to the public and is attendedby clergy and politicians, homemakers and homeless people. The purpose ofthe group is to pray for the leadership of the country and the city, “likeit says in Timothy,” Hall says. “This is the capital city. There is so muchstrength and power and potential here that if it could ever become what itought to be, that would really be something.”
Hall also draws strength from his friendship with Rep. Frank Wolf, the VirginiaRepublican who has become a close friend. They meet on Tuesday afternoonsand have made some trips together, an experience that Hall finds particularlyfruitful. “One of the best ways you can learn is to travel together, likePaul and Silas and Timothy did. There’s something about people travelingtogether, studying the Scriptures, and talking to people about Christ,” hesays. “Not only do they grow, but the power goes with them. Like Paul says,they go in the Spirit and power.”
Wolf thinks highly of his friend. “Tony is the conscience of Congress,” hesays. “Everyone on both sides listens to him, and he’s someone I look tofor leadership. These trips he goes on, like to North Korea, they’re notjunkets. They’re very tough. Tony stays with it.” Such a close friendshipacross the aisle is not typical of Congress.
As Hall returns to the ideals that drive him, he runs once again into thedilemma that dogs him. “People want leaders to make moral decisions and saywhat they think is right and wrong. It doesn’t mean they agree with them,but they respect people who have a direction.”
Yet, because he is “solid on the issues” that he can find in Scripture—hecites abortion, pornography, guns, homosexuality, and the poor—but not sopredictable on the tax and welfare issues he doesn’t find there, people aren’talways willing to give him respect merely for having a direction. “I havepeople say, ‘He can’t be a Christian, look at how he votes.’ “
For the first time in this conversation, Hall shows evident emotion, rockingforward in his chair and speaking emphatically. “How can they say that? Whywould they say that? It’s so frustrating. It’s so judgmental, and it justabsolutely drives me nuts.
“The Scripture says that they will know you are my disciples by the lovethat you have for one another,” he goes on. “Most people would walk intoa room full of Christians and listen to them argue and fight, and say, ‘Thesepeople don’t like each other very much.’ “
For those who say, “You can’t be a Democrat and be a Christian,” Hall hasa playful comeback: “When Jesus came into Jerusalem, he came on a donkey,not an elephant.”
A loss of his ownPart of Hall’s work within the Democratic party is to insist on recognitionand fair treatment for pro-lifers. That’s the work he was doing when thefront-page story came out in July 1996 in the Washington Post concerninghis successful case for adding a “conscience clause” amendment to the partyplatform. What not everyone reading the newspaper story knew was that daywas significant to Hall for more reasons than that victory. It was the dayhis son died.
Matthew Hall, 15, had been fighting leukemia for four years when he finallysuccumbed on that hot summer day. His dad rushed to Capitol Hill to do anhour’s indispensable work, then back to the hospital. Recalling his son’slife, and death, now moves Hall to lower his head.
“I kept asking, ‘Why does this have to happen to such a perfect kid?’ Becausehe was just the most wonderful young man in the world. He suffered greatly,and my wife and I and our daughter suffered greatly and still grieve.” But,Hall says, he never felt abandoned, perhaps due to the outpouring of prayeron the family’s behalf by Christians, even strangers, across the country.“Through all that time God’s grace surrounded us. I felt like I was walkingaround in a bubble, he was so close. He never left us, or my son.”
Not too long ago a group of Christian teens asked Hall what advice he wouldgive them as they prepared for the future. “I told them the story of my sondying, and how difficult it was. I told them that ten years ago I would havehad a pat answer for them, almost bordering on arrogance.” Hall’s voice ishusky now. “I learned from my son just to love God and to love others. Totake it day by day, and do some good. And that’s the direction I try to go.”
It’s a direction the world may not understand. It doesn’t fit the categories.That won’t stop Tony Hall.
Frederica Mathewes-Green, a commentator on National Public Radio, is theauthor of Facing East: a Pilgrim’s Journey into the Mysteries of Orthodoxy,published by Harper San Francisco.
Copyright © 1997 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
- More fromFrederica Mathewes-Green
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Baroness Caroline Cox offers aid and advocacy to persecuted Christians.
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Picture this: A young female student nurse works the midnight shift in a London hospital annex when she meets a young male “house officer” (intern) during a medical emergency. It is summer in England. The young nurse and young doctor slip away during their break to meet outside in the rhubarb patch, illuminated by the moonlight, to read aloud to one another the poetry of Yeats, Browning, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
And this: A mother of three young children pursues master’s degrees in economics and sociology (at night, so as not to be away from the children during the day); later assumes a teaching position at a local university; writes a book in which she upbraids the “physiognomy of hatred” propagated by hard-line Marxist/Leninist esprit breeding at the school. Her book is covered by a leading columnist for the London Times in three consecutive issues; these columns (so she’s told) influence both politicians and academics.
And this: A grandmother “lives the life of a truck driver,” eating and sleeping out of a 32-ton truck for a week in Poland, having traveled there because her name appeared in the letterhead of a relief organization as a “patron” and she didn’t like the idea of “just being a name on the writing paper.” She went in the truck convoy to “assess the situation” and to “meet the people.”
And this: As nurse, crusader, mother, grandmother, and Christian, she leads a delegation of lawyers, professors, and human-rights workers, on foot, through the line of fire, up the brow of a hill waving a white tablecloth attached to a branch, across the border of Azerbaijan (a former Soviet republic) to “talk to” the Azeris. She had been visiting Christian Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh (part of historic Armenia relocated by Stalin as an isolated enclave in Azerbaijan) who had been under heavy attack by the Azeris—including ransacking and torching homes, forcibly driving residents off their land, beheading citizens. She wanted to meet the Azeris face to face so they would take her “seriously.”
Meet Baroness Caroline Cox, of Queensbury—Lady Caroline to some, and Caroline to her friends, who are just about everyone she meets. (“The title shows God’s sense of humor,” she says.) While Michael Horowitz was rousing the slumbering conscience of the American evangelical community to the plight of persecuted believers in faraway lands, Caroline Cox was in those lands, crossing borders, riding in jeeps and trucks, delivering medicines to the dying and maimed, buying back children who had been commandeered as slaves; in short, extending a hand of Christian solidarity to those who—in her words—are bereft of aid and advocacy; who are among the most isolated, outcast, and deprived in the world. The ones who told her “we thought the world had forgotten us.”
“As indeed it had,” she hastens to add.
WHO IS THIS LADY?Caroline Cox—a deputy speaker in the British House of Lords and (among other things) president of the uk branch of Christian Solidarity International—has found herself in the frontlines of advocacy for persecuted Christians almost serendipitously. It started in the 1980s with the truck trips to Poland (“the truck drivers were gentlemen,” she adds) on behalf of the Medical Aid for Poland Fund. This introduced her to the members of the Polish Solidarity movement (and earned her Poland’s highest award for a foreigner, the Commander Cross of the Order of Merit). “I was so humbled and inspired by the Polish people’s courage and humor and generosity,” she says. “They had nothing, but would give everything.”
This evolved into her being asked to help organize a human-rights conference in Russia in 1990, which, in turn, aroused the attention of the widow of Andrei Sakharov. Mrs. Sakharov invited her to help organize a human-rights congress in Moscow to commemorate what would have been the seventieth birthday of her deceased husband. At this conference, Lady Caroline chaired a committee looking into human-rights abuses in the ussr, which is when she took a group on a fact-finding mission and how she ended up ascending a hill, crossing the border, waving a white flag. “I thought I’d look up Nagorno-Karabakh on a route map,” she says. “But there wasn’t a route map. I arrived not knowing where I was going. I had no idea what I was getting into.”
What she was “into” amounted to nothing less than helping and comforting those—most of them Christians—who face the worst kind of misery and brutality that could be visited upon the human community. During one of her visits to Karabakh, in a village that had been overrun by Azeri troops, she met a nurse who had lost 14 relatives in the assault and who, hours before, had witnessed the beheading of her son. “I want to say thank you,” this nurse said to Lady Caroline. “[The supplies] you brought eased much suffering. Thank you to all [who have] not forgotten us in dark and difficult days.” She also met a farmer from the village who had escaped into the mountains during another attack. “Devastated by what he had just witnessed, he saw an apricot tree in blossom and went to it for comfort, as it was so beautiful,” she recounts. “Then, to his horror, he saw hanging from a branch the body of a five-year-old Armenian girl, cut in two.” The farmer vowed revenge, and later wept, admitting to the baroness that when he had had the chance, he could not keep his vow. “He could not bring himself to harm a child,” she said. The farmer told her: “Dignity is a crown of thorns.”
Lady Caroline has borne her own crown of thorns more than once. She lost her only sibling, a brother to whom she was very close, to a virulent form of Hodgkin’s disease when he was 22 (she was 19). “He was very, very brave throughout his illness and died with tremendous courage. I still miss him,” she says. Later, as a nurse, she contracted tuberculosis and became a patient in a London hospital for six months. (“I would have been a much nicer nurse if I had had that experience before I’d ever touched a patient.”) And this July, her husband of nearly 40 years—the one with whom she shared poetry in the rhubarb patch—died unexpectedly during bypass surgery.
The book she wrote while at Polytechnic of North London (now University of North London), called The Rape of Reason, caught the attention of famed columnist Bernard Levin, who said it was “the most important book [he’s] read for many years.” Lady Caroline said she wrote the book because “what I saw happening to students was a violation of their spiritual potential.”
SALVATION OF THE WESTBaroness Cox has traveled extensively all over the world since that first truck trip to Poland, having been seized by a sense of kinship and devotion to the suffering brothers and sisters she has grown to love. Since 1992 she has made 15 trips to Sudan (four in 1997 alone), one of which included a crew from Dateline NBC covering the slave trade. Her advocacy on behalf of the Armenian Christians in Karabakh has managed to focus world attention on their plight. More than once she has come within a hair of losing her life in these situations. While in the open country of Nagorno-Karabakh a few years ago, the jeep she was riding in came under fire from rocket-propelled antitank missiles. One hit just two feet behind them, lifting the rear of the jeep into the air.
“Only where there is great danger can there flourish that which saves,” her husband told Caroline once when she was discouraged. “I’ve hung onto it when I have been distressed,” she says. And before each trip she wrestles with intense fear and doubt: “Very often I have shrunk from the prospect of going, thinking Do I really want to get my guts blown out in the deserts of Sudan?”
She finds courage in a verse she was given at her Anglican confirmation: “Have I not commanded you to be strong, of good courage, be not afraid, neither be dismayed, for I, the Lord your God, am with you wherever you may go” (Josh. 1:9). “I hold onto that text in some of the slightly more hairy places I’ve been.”
She says the persecuted church is going to be the “spiritual salvation” of the West, in all its secularism and materialism. “The persecuted are at the core of the ultimate spiritual experiences. They are enduring their Gethsemane. They have found a faith stripped of all the distraction of this world and have found God present with them in the wilderness.”
When she was visiting a refugee camp for the displaced in southern Sudan, tens of thousands who had been driven off their land were arriving. It was the rainy season, so they were covered with mud; they hadn’t had time to plant their plots of land, so they had no food; they had no shelter; no medicines; many were naked. Nine people trying to get water out of the river that day were eaten by crocodiles.
“Suddenly,” she recalls, “we heard the sound of singing from three different directions simultaneously. It was the wonderful sound of joyful singing of psalms and hymns. Three branches of the church were coming in three processions—Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Catholics. They had taken time out, running from the enemy, to go into their churches to bring precious things. They had their crosses, their banners. And some had crosses made of African reeds. They came from three directions and made a huge circle, and we worshiped together. They have nothing, and yet there was radiance in their faces.”
A PLEAShe joined Christian Solidarity International (CSI) in 1990. CSI is an interdenominational and international human-rights organization that provides both aid and advocacy for persecuted Christians (and others, including Muslims, suffering repression). Her role as the British president has enabled her to travel and assess volatile situations throughout the world, extensively and intimately. Her courage and resolve in aiding the suffering church has earned her the affection of the American evangelical community. In 1995 Charles Colson’s Prison Fellowship presented her the prestigious William Wilberforce Award for humanitarianism, and Wheaton College invited her to deliver the commencement address this past spring.
When she brings word from suffering brothers and sisters to the churches in the West, on an individual level, she says, “the great majority respond overwhelmingly with tremendous generosity of spirit.” But the response of the “church” as an institution, however, has been “patchy.” “I sometimes think that there’s been such preoccupation with issues at home that people have failed to look out,” she says, “and in doing so have denied themselves an incredible spiritual resource—the testimony of the living faith and the joy of the persecuted church.
“One of the things that always humbles those of us who are with the persecuted church is that they may be dying of disease and have no medicine, they may be hungry and have no food, but their first request is always for prayer. Surely all of us can give that. That cannot be too much to ask.”
She makes a plea to Western Christians to complement prayer with a commitment. Most people can’t go, like she does, but, she says, “Some can! Share your heart and make yourself available.” As the Sudanese bishop said in his “cathedral” under a tamarind tree while visiting his people at their real points of suffering (“slavery and nakedness and so on”): “I came. I saw. I heard. I touched. I am enriched.”
For others, she suggests that Christians and churches designate a portion of their tithe for the persecuted church, giving to organizations like CSI or others (see box below), which do go and deliver. “I know our churches at home have needs. But we all have electricity. We have heating. We have clothes. We have roofs over our heads. There are those among the persecuted who have nothing; they are dying of starvation, disease, with no medicines, no Bibles. So it is a relative need.”
A commander in the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement who, as a practicing Catholic, does not want to fight the war, said to Lady Caroline, “Before battle the Islamic fundamentalists shout and chant, ‘We will force you to become Muslims whether you want to or not.’ The Muslim fundamentalists cannot defeat us. We are firm as Christians, and we will die for our faith. … It is discouraging to see the Islamic fundamentalist government in Khartoum receive material and moral support from other Islamic countries while we receive no support from the Christian world. We will continue in our struggle for freedom even if we are forsaken by Christendom. We will die for our faith, and we will die Christians.”
“We’re touched by the strength in their faces. The radiance in their love. The purity of their faith,” says Lady Caroline. “Only where there is great danger can there flourish that which saves. It’s only where these people are suffering in these extreme situations that you actually find that ultimate joy, that peace which passes all understanding, that radiance.”
CT will be running “Dispatches from Lady Caroline”—messages from the suffering church—in future issues.
ADDRESSES OF SOME ORGANIZATIONS THAT AID PERSECUTED CHRISTIANS:
Christian Solidarity International, USA1101 17th Street NW, Suite 607Washington, D.C. 20036(540) 636-8907E-mail: csiusa@rma.edu
Advocates International9691 D MainFairfax, VA 22031(703) 764-0011/fax (703) 764-0077E-mail: Advonet2@aol.com
Iranian Christians InternationalP.O. Box 25607Colorado Springs, CO 80936(719) 596-0010fax (719) 574-1141
Open Doors with Brother AndrewP.O. Box 27000Santa Ana, CA 92799(714) 752-6600
Copyright © 1997 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
Douglas Groothuis on the virtues and vices of virtual reality.
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Promise Keepers has a Web site, but so does Penthouse. A New Jersey pastor evangelizes a young man in Finland by E-mail exchanges, but one of the 39 Heaven’s Gate suicides turns out to be a Cincinnati postal worker recruited online. The Internet is cause for both joy and concern. How should Christians view the Internet—as today’s Roman roads that promise immense potential for spreading the gospel? Or as a Vanity Fair that must be bypassed?
Douglas Groothuis, assistant professor of religion and ethics at Denver Seminary, offers compelling answers and cautions in his new book, The Soul in Cyberspace (Baker, 1997). He talked with Mark A. Kellner, editor of PC Portables magazine.
In your book, you warn about the danger of Internet involvement, yet you have a Web site for your work. Are you a compromised Luddite?I set up two extremes in the book. One extreme is a digitopian—a Bill Gates who believes that machines will only enhance the economy and society. The other is the Luddite who wants to destroy machines. While machines can dehumanize us and destabilize good patterns of life, to say the answer is to destroy the technology is wrong.
At the same time, technologies are not neutral. Machines are created by humans who bear the image of God but who also live “east of Eden.” As “deposed royalty” (as Pascal put it), our technologies will bear the marks of both our greatness and our sinfulness. Christians should determine how the Internet shapes the messages it conveys, where it serves us well, where it doesn’t, and how to tell the difference. We must always ask if the medium is appropriate for our Christian message. How much truth can be communicated in a chat room?
How does the Internet dehumanize us?Through lack of personal presence. An important theological question is: How disembodied should our communication be?
The Internet distributes information widely and quickly, but in a merely electronic form, which lacks the personal presence at the heart of biblical discipleship, fellowship, and worship. When cyberspace begins to replace embodied interactions, we fail to honor the incarnational nature of Christianity. We may be “connected” to people around the world through the Internet while we neglect our spouses, neighbors, and churches. This is wrong.
You write of cyberspace’s “ecological effect.” What do you mean by that?This is a concept from Neil Postman, who writes that major technological innovations don’t just add something new to an environment, but change the whole environment ecologically or structurally. For instance, the printing press didn’t just add more books to European culture, it transformed how people acquired knowledge, how they thought, how they viewed authority, and so on.
Similarly, cyberspace technologies are having an ecological effect on the culture as a whole. When everyone gets “wired,” nothing remains the same. The sensibilities that tend to be created or reinforced by cyberspace interactions—a desire for more and more immediate information, a superficial surfing mentality, an impatience with ambiguity, and so forth—will spill over into other areas of life.
One of your concerns is the way we conceive of God’s Word.I am afraid hypertext technologies—which give us the ability to rearrange texts and connect with other texts almost effortlessly—may corrode our sense of authorial intent, fixed meaning, and intellectual coherence. Some postmodernist thinkers revel in this. They claim that the intrusive authority of the author is being overthrown through these hypertext technologies. We are all authors and have the right to create our own meanings and truths. This kind of cyber-relativism re-fuses to admit any determinative and authoritative meaning—either in Scripture or anywhere else. It is really high-tech nihilism and poison to the soul.
Christians may innocently fall into this error by using Bible software in a manner that divorces Scripture from its literary genre and contextual meaning. I can run a program that gives me a host of texts on, say, “righteousness,” but the program cannot present the meaning of each text in its context, nor can it give me a theology of righteousness. The ability to move around biblical texts at will and find references instantly may end up lessening our understanding of what God has communicated in the Bible. Nevertheless, if we remain rooted to God’s Word as it was originally given, we may use these technologies wisely.
In what ways does the Internet challenge the Christian perspective of the person and the physical world?Some contemporary thinkers, such as Sherry Turkle, believe that cyberspace is the perfect medium to illustrate the postmodernist view that the self is entirely constructed—that there is no given human nature and no normative self. Given the anonymity of much online communication, and the artificial environments that can be created, one can experiment with various identities, even crossing genders or assuming mythical personae in online fantasy role-playing games.
Yet, from a biblical point of view, this is deception and is unhealthy for the soul. Although Christians each express the grace of Christ individually and uniquely, there is a basic pattern of godliness laid out in Scripture and made real through the Holy Spirit. Endless experimentation with identities in cyberspace is not the way of edification or sanctification. It may well be the way of madness. We are already fragmented enough as individuals and as a culture. Cyberspace may only make this worse.
How much of a problem do you see cybersex posing for Christians?If there’s already a significant problem mostly with pornography with Christian men—as I hear from counselors and pastors—then the temptations will multiply in cyberspace because of the potential for anonymity and easier access. You’re only a few points and clicks away from very hard-core pornography on the Internet. You don’t have to go to the seedy side of town to buy a magazine or risk being discovered at a video store. We have to exercise a lot of self-control to avoid temptation.
I was doing research on Heaven’s Gate, and I went to a newsmagazine’s home page. It contained a solicitation for pornography: “Photos of women” and “Click here for a full body shot.” I didn’t click, but this is an example. You also receive unsolicited E-mail for pornographic photos and promiscuous chat rooms. You just have to resolve that you’re not going to take the first step, and you have be careful that your kids don’t get hooked into it.
In protecting our children, are you simply saying parents should be parents, or is there more that needs to be done?I do think there’s a role for the state here to criminalize the distribution of pornography, especially to minors. It may be asking too much to ask parents to control completely what is on their end. The ultimate issue, however, is not governmental restrictions or blocking programs, but instilling our children with the proper principles and a Christian world-view so kids have a biblically informed conscience. They have to learn how to say no for themselves and say yes to what’s holy and what’s wholesome.
Is the church as aware and savvy about cyberspace as it needs to be?It’s not even close. I think people in the church tend to slip into three categories, all of which are unacceptable. The first is just oblivion; they don’t know anything about it. The second is the digitopian temptation, seeing the Internet as an unmitigated good, a way to communicate the gospel broadly without seeing the dark side. The other extreme is the Christian Luddite. I talked with a man on a call-in radio show who said the Internet is so dangerous we should have nothing to do with it.
What are practical ways Christians can make use of the Internet—would you as a professor welcome cyber-space seminaries?There are a variety of useful Web pages—Christian and non-Christian. My wife and I have a Web page (www.gospelcom.net/ ivpress/groothuis), and I use E-mail to keep in touch with people I could not otherwise easily contact. I have profitably used the Internet to research treatments for certain rare health problems.
I would, however, fear putting seminary education entirely online, because this eliminates the uniquely and irreducibly personal element of teaching and learning. The spontaneity and serendipity of the classroom cannot be replaced by any online forum or CD-ROM technology. To think otherwise is to fall for the digitopian deception that learning is no more than information acquisition. People learn best in supportive educational communities, not sitting alone before computer screens.
By Mark A. Kellner, editor of PC Portables magazine, author of God on the Internet (IDG), and computer columnist for the Washington Times.
Copyright © 1997 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
The state of pastors’ finances
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The following report by David L. Goetz, senior associate editor for Christianity Today‘s companion publication Leadership journal, summarizes a recent national survey the journal conducted (using Scanland Research, Inc.) of pastors and their finances. The report was published in the Spring 1997 issue of Leadership.
You were young then. While your friends applied to law, medical, or business school, you applied to theological school. Now, years later, your friends drive Eddie Bauer edition Ford Explorers; you drive used, four-door sedans. Your friends take winter vacations in Colorado; you take road trips to your in-laws. Your friends sock away money for their children’s college tuition and for retirement; you can do neither adequately.
Just to confirm the obvious, here are several average or median salaries of professionals in 1996: director of engineering: $100,000; school superintendent: $96,229; manufacturing vice-president: $97,000; top executive officer (nonprofit administration): $160,000.
According to the LEADERSHIP survey, while 3 percent of pastors in the survey indicated their salary equaled $75,000 or more, the majority of pastors—60 percent—make between $25,000 and $49,999 a year. The median salary of pastors is about $33,000. That figure includes money pastors are given to spend: base salary, housing and utilities allowances, and an allowance for social security/self-employment tax. It does not include the cost to a church to provide health insurance or other benefits.
Though pastors are weakly paid compared to other professionals, they tend to be generous with their money. They’re also in debt. Here are the facts the survey revealed:
—While almost half of pastors say they do not feel financially content, 70 percent of pastors indicated they rarely or never feel resentful.
—According to the study, 13 percent of full-time pastors are moonlighting to handle their bills.
—Of pastors who have a spouse working full-time, 29 percent say their median household income is almost $60,000.
—While 55 percent of pastors pay off their credit-card balance each month, the median balance of those who carry one is about $3,000 (about half of the average American’s, which Money magazine recently listed as $5,800).
—Most pastors in our survey—90 percent—believe it is appropriate for a pastor to ask for a raise, but of those who felt discontented financially, 63 percent have never done so. Those who asked, received: Only 13 percent of those who asked for a raise said they didn’t get one.
—Thirty-eight percent of pastors said their churches do not have a policy for raises—not even for a cost-of-living raise.
—Pastors are givers. Almost two-thirds of pastors—63 percent—say their family practices a 10 percent, pretax tithe. If you add those who say they give away 10 percent after taxes, the total practicing some form of the tithe jumps to 76 percent.
—Oddly, while pastors tithe, they don’t tell their congregations to. The study revealed that 35 percent of pastors don’t preach what they practice.
Pastors, of all people, realize that more money does not mean more happiness. Most would just like to get out of debt, help pay for their children’s education, and set a little aside for retirement. Yet, in one sense, money is at least a distant cousin to happiness. In our research, pastors in the top quartile of salary were more likely to own their homes, feel less resentful about their salary, be more likely to have a spouse employed because she or he wants to be, get raises when they ask for them, and have more money socked away for retirement.
To subscribe to Leadership: A Practical Journal for Church Leaders, call 1-800-777-3136.
Click here to view table comparing pastor’s base salaries from 1991 to 1996 (based on Sunday morning attendance).
Copyright © 1997 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.