Welcome to the Buechner Blog, offering occasional thoughts on contemporary issues of faith and culture, reports on happenings at the Buechner Institute, and much more. Contributors will include W. Dale Brown (Buechner Institute director), members of the national advisory and governing boards, King College faculty and students, and many more. If you'd like to add your voice, email Dale for more information.
Only 700 Left
By Dale Brown, Buechner Institute Director
We Buechner folk have no secret handshake. But we tend to find one-another somehow. We share a sentiment: "Frederick Buechner saved my life." I am always grateful to meet fans of "Saint Freddie of Rupert." At one of my stops last month, a man asked if I'd heard of Thin Blue Smoke. I hadn't. "I think you might like that book," he said. He was right.
Doug Worgul's 2010 novel, which pays homage to Frederick Buechner in the acknowledgements, revolves around a Kansas City barbeque joint and strays into subjects like food, baseball, forgiveness, tragedy, racism, community, religion, and more.
LaVerne Williams is the proprietor of LaVerne Williams' Genuine BBQ and City Grocery Store, which folks in Kansas City know as Smoke Meat. LaVerne is a former baseball player who played one year for Charlie Finley's Oakland Athletics before being sidelined with a shoulder injury. LaVerne is also an ex-con. He turns to barbeque to "save his life." Of Smoke Meat, he says, "This place is about making something good out of something bad." The novel, like the rib joint, is not about barbeque, but I guarantee you'll know more about barbeque after reading LaVerne's story.
But it isn't just LaVerne's story, of course. There's his wife Angela and the memory of their son, Raymond. There's A.B. Clayton who minds the store, battles with hiccups, and falls in love before it is over. There's Father Ferguson Glen, an Episcopal Priest with a drinking problem. There's a rich guy, Bob Dunleavy, whose son, Warren, is obsessed with rabbits. We get characters named Periwinkle, Pug and Junebug; a villain, Sammie; and a blues singer, Mother Mary Weaver.
They meet up at Smoke Meat, but remember, "It's not about the barbeque." What it is about, you can guess. It is about talk, stories, communion, sadness, and gladness. Thin Blue Smoke is all about living richly and dying well. As they talk about one of the dark places in the story, A.B wonders why God let it happen. Angela tells him "Dying isn't a bad thing." She adds, "The way we die is sometimes sad or painful, and sometimes it is unjust or tragic. But the dying itself isn't bad. And God knows that. He sees this life of ours here on earth and our life in heaven as one life. Now we're living in one house and later we're going to live in another house. We just can't see that next house from here."
Maybe that gives you a taste of the sort of Buechnarian tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale that laces this novel. The novel has been compared to Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It. It reminded me of a couple of my favorite books: David James Duncan's The Brother's K and Anne Tyler's Saint Maybe. The characters of Thin Blue Smoke, as they move in and around LaVerne's hole-in-the-wall diner, are not unlike most of us-sidetracked and puzzled, reaching for something they can't quite name. I thought you might like this book.
When I called Doug Worgul at Oklahoma Joe's BBQ in Kansas City last week, he told me only 700 copies of Thin Blue Smoke remain. You can get one for under $5.00 on Amazon. Doug has agreed to come to the Buechner Institute to talk about Fred and barbeque. That, like his book, will be tasty. In the meantime, see what you think. And I will think a bit more about the secret handshake.
In anticipation of Lauren Winner's visit to King on November 7, folks from the King community will be blogging weekly on chapters in Winner's memoir.
Elizabeth Patrick, Final Thoughts
Two things I admire about Lauren Winner's spiritual journey are her commitment to self-examination and her willingness to admit her mistakes and change her mind. Not everyone appreciates these traits. I remember in high school when my boyfriend asked me with some measure of exasperation in his voice, "Do you have to analyze everything?" I don't remember what the issue was that I had been analyzing so annoyingly, but I do remember my response was something like, "What's the matter with that?!" I've always considered it a sign of thoughtful living to evaluate and even scrutinize ideas and actions, both mine and others'. After all, didn't Socrates say "the unexamined life is not worth living"? Winner certainly seems to agree. She admits she had hoped to find in Christendom people who, like her, were "thinking rigorously about everything all the time" (94). Winner finds great delight in investigating and evaluating basic theological questions like whether Jesus is who Christians claim, as well as tedious and even arcane questions of daily religious practice in 18th century America and everyday decisions of faith and practice like how to explain the Ash Wednesday cross on her forehead. It does seem she analyzes everything. While I admit I admire her commitment to this way of life, I was also reminded while reading her spiritual autobiography that rigorous investigation of ideas and situations, and even a commitment to searching self-examination, will not keep us from making mistakes. We'll still fail our friends and disappoint our family. Very often, we'll still be confused and wish we'd done things differently.
The second thing I admire about Winner's spiritual journey is her willingness to admit her mistakes and change her mind. For example, she's not sure what exactly she should have said or done, but she knows she could have been a better Christian friend to Hannah when she was flirting with infidelity (115). Winner is willing to make major changes in her own life as her views and values change, as seen in her conversion to Judaism and then her conversion to Christianity. It requires not only self-examination but also courage to change one's mind and one's life.
I fear that admitting one's need to change is not always encouraged in public life, especially in the political arena, and that increasingly it may not be appreciated in our personal lives either. It is very dangerous for a politician to admit a mistake, a failure. Confession is the last resort and usually only comes with a resignation from public life. And God forbid if a politician were to say she changed her mind about an important issue, that after careful examination, he thinks a different course is better than the course he previously advocated. Changing one's position is called waffling, a sign of weakness not wisdom. We fault them for changing their minds or simply don't believe they have. We've learned from them the art of spin, excuse, and deflection. Winner's story of faith reminds us that, at least in our own lives, we can change our minds, we can change our daily lives and practices, we can admit our mistakes and move forward with faith and joy and peace. We can do that, not because we are wise and good, but because the One who created, sustains, and saves us is. May our good and wise God help us to examine our lives and to change them when we ought.
Reflection Questions:
Dale Brown, Final Thoughts 2
In her chapter on "Palm Sunday," Lauren Winner runs into the problem of Biblical literalism, an issue that continues to resonate. Just how are we to approach Scripture? This question circles in many of our culture war disputes. It even shows up on bumper stickers: "God said it; I believe it; that settles it." Or how about this one available on the Darwin Bumper Stickers website: "On which day did God make fossils?" Almost every day now, we hear debates about the historicity of Adam and Eve, Young Earth Theory, and Biblical reliability. Even right here at King College.
Winner runs into this issue when she stumbles over the verse in John about the culpability of the Jews in Christ's crucifixion-a charge of "deicide" she calls it. "I don't know what to do with this text," she says. Throughout her book, as she makes something of her memories and pours over the meaning of her personal journey, she bumps up against the problem of the text. She wonders about Christians who think the Bible begins with Matthew. She thinks of God as "a novelist." She ponders the Jewish notion of "learn" as an act of studying texts and worries about being labeled a "fundamentalist Bible-thumper."
In her chapter on "Epiphany," she draws a distinction between evangelicals and fundamentalists that has to do primarily with their divergent approaches to Scripture, the former tending toward a metaphorical approach to the Bible, the latter firmly committed to "biblical inerrancy." Her conclusion seems to be that she wants to engage the text not to judge it but to "be judged by" it. She opts for a lively faith where "the Gospel would come to shape even the smallest details of my life." Toward the end of the book, she articulates the critical question: "How does one read Hebrew scripture as a Christian? How does one read the entire Bible, Old Testament and New Testament, as a coherent, God-made, literary work?"
For me, Girl Meets God, reaches a crescendo when Winner tries to reclaim the Old English notion of "believe" in her chapter "Credo." She dislikes the way "believe has been tied to what Diana Eck calls "the language of uncertainty" and seems to prefer a notion of faith grounded in "a promise to believe even when you don't." The long homily on how to read the Bible seems to come down to allowing the claims of the text to become personal without worrying too much about the many places in the text over which we falter.
Winner is very good at admitting her tough struggle to work past seeing Scripture as a jumble of propositions to an acceptance of the overwhelming principle truths of the Bible. I much appreciate her honesty.
"Great Expectations"
The liturgical year in Lauren Winner's book has come full circle; and we return to another chapter, the final one, entitled "Advent." In that earlier chapter, Winner recounted her two conversion stories, first to Orthodox Judaism and second to Christianity. We have since followed her in her quest for a religious identity. But here at the end we read that instead of severing herself from her Jewish roots completely, she attends two services, one Jewish and one Christian. Was Pastor Mike, in those earlier days, correct? Has she not been able to divorce herself from Judaism? Is she simply picking the best (or, perhaps, the most convenient and the most comfortable) from both faiths as a way of not making a choice? Can we, like some of her friends mentioned in the previous chapter (p. 270), imagine a time in the future when she might add some other religion to the mix?
Winner argues that she's not going anywhere, that she wants to "stay in Christ." But why, after this long journey does she go to both services?
I think the answer lies in something Professor Hudson said the other week. At the Jewish shul Winner hears a reading from the prophet Obadiah, who condemns those who have fallen away from the faith. Obadiah, as you perhaps remember (p. 49), had converted to Judaism; and many converts in later generations actually took on his name. Now Winner is hearing curses that might be applied to her as one who has abandoned the faith. The moment, it seems to me, has a triple significance. First, it reminds her of her roots. The first followers of Jesus were, of course, Jews; and theologians such as N. T. Wright (and Professor Hudson) remind us how crucial that fact is to our understanding of the Gospel. At the same time, she realizes that she has lost something, too. In a real sense, she has become alienated from this community that she had been so close to. Finally, she is reminded of what she has found in Christ.
Winner's journey is certainly not tidy; and the book is filled with stories of relationships discovered, broken or lost altogether, and, in some cases, healed and restored. No wonder she cries, "for the loss of it all and for how good God is." Lament and praise-these two responses arising from the core of her life draw me to agree that the story is not over, in her life or mine. The work is not complete. So it is appropriate that the book ends with a beginning. Like our Jewish friends, we are still in a season of waiting and expectation for Messiah, with the possibility each day that we might meet Him in a friend or stranger, and with the certainty that He will return to establish His Kingdom.
Questions to consider:
In this section, Winner meditates on the meaning of Pentecost. Like Lauren Winner, I too, have been stumped by the Holy Spirit. I share Winner's trouble in defining the third person of the Trinity who is never really embodied or seen or heard. Growing up in church I would often hear older church members talk about "feeling the spirit" during the service. I wasn't sure exactly what that felt like, but I knew I didn't feel it. As a young Christian the Holy Spirit, whoever he was, seemed enigmatic and not easily understood. In fact, I was pretty sure the Holy Spirit was something wild and untamable that I could never really pin down and did not really want to understand for fear of what he might make me do.
Like Winner too, though, I've started to understand the Holy Spirit as I've learned to listen to the quiet nudges inside that gives me sentences to put in my mouth when someone asks me questions about life or God that I don't know how to answer. Instead of being mystical or unknowable what I've found is that the Holy Spirit is the very person of the Trinity that gives revelation and discernment. In Winner's words, "The Spirit is how we unfold God's will this side of eternity. The Spirit is the reason we can build a church and have confidence that we will get it at least a little bit right."
One of the things I have come to appreciate most about Winner as I have read Girl Meets God is that she takes "churchy" words and puts them in terms I can understand and relate to. When Winner describes the Holy Spirit as the person who "silences the voices in our head so we can hear God," then I move a little closer to understanding how the Spirit works in my own life. Instead of being some mystical, unknowable force out there in the universe, the Holy Spirit instead becomes my teacher and guide helping me to understand God's will for my life or show compassion to a friend who doesn't really deserve compassion in my estimation, or make sense of a verse of scripture whose meaning has eluded me.
Later on this section, Winner addresses another churchy word, "sanctification." Sanctification is one of the words where I hear a pipe organ in the background after someone says it. It's too lofty and high for me to ever be much less understand what it is or how it works. Winner describes her feelings about her friend Hannah's pregnancy. "I look at my icons," she says. "I am so jealous I can't stand up straight....If you want me to somehow look on during this pregnancy, You are going to have to give me the eyes to do it with." Lauren's sanctification school is learning how to be genuinely happy for her friend's pregnancy in the middle of Winner's own jealousy. This scene in particular resonated with me because of the number of times I've celebrated other people's happiness over a wedding or baby while asking the hard, pathetic questions of why them and not me as Winner does. Again, Winner puts a churchy word in terms that I can understand. Sanctification isn't something that angels sing or only the highest of saints become. It's the rubber meets the road kind of faith that she expresses when she says "I have known God long enough now to know that He will give me enough respite from my jealousy to go to Baby Gap." It's the work that the Trinity does in our hearts to make us into the person that God wants us to be.
Discussion Questions:
Reading Ms. Winner's book has been a particular joy to me for various reasons--perhaps primarily being her mediation of the Jewish and Christian worldviews. It still amazes me to this day how many Christians forget that Paul and Jesus were devout Jews and that Christianity is the child of Judaism (Romans 9). Ms. Winner not only takes Judaism and the Hebrew Bible seriously, but she wrestles God and holds on as she departs one worldview into another. If we remember that Judaism is orthopraxy (proper practice) and Christianity is orthodoxy (proper doctrine) then we understand how dramatic and heart-rending it must have been for Ms. Winner to leave her faith--for a Jew to no longer practice as a Jew is to lose her identity. Period. A somewhat similar analogy would be if a Christian were to leave Christmas and Easter. And it's not that we would just miss the festivities--the Christmas gifts and Easter eggs and all that goes with it--we would lose the significance of those moments in the Christian faith and calendar also. Who are we if these are no longer our holidays? So for this young Jewish woman to turn her back on Hanukah and stumble toward Christmas is costly, shattering and yet thrilling to watch. She, however, enjoys the ride and allows herself the freedom of fits and starts, questions and setbacks.
This brings me to my point of confusion in this section of "Eastertide". She makes the great connection between Judaism and Christianity that both eagerly anticipate the Messiah. Yes, one to come and one who has come, but both Jew and Christian live in the ruins while yearning for a glory yet to be glimpsed. "Both Jews and Christians live in a world that is not yet redeemed, and both of us await ultimate redemption." Indeed. Then what do we do in the meantime? Do we wait so impatiently for the coming that we "leave" this world and stare at the future? I don't think so. This is a place where Nietzsche was so brilliant. To him, the Christians who depart this world in the sole hope of the future life are nihilists--they only find meaning in the future. Salvation must wait while I slog through another day here on earth. The Resurrection is a drug. But there is another tendency--one that Ms. Winner explores in her chapter--the tendency to focus on sin and forgiveness and confession. As I was reading I had to ask at one point--"How did Father Pete get in here?" Now to throw my cards down here--yes, I am a Protestant and perhaps I have too much protest in my Protestant, but I am not questioning the practice of confessing to a priest or rector. Adversely, I am questioning the obsession with confession and all the sins that go with it.
I have to confess that I really don't spend much time confessing. And it's not that I am perfect--just ask anyone who knows me. I don't really focus on my sin or the need for confession because I think it is one more way to "leave" this world and ironically focus on myself in ways that are not good. This is the tyranny of all fundamentalisms--we are constantly being watched and we are incessantly failing--shame and guilt are our taskmasters. I cannot help but recall Michel Foucault's "Panopticon"--life is a prison and there is someone in a tower who watches our every move and will count every strike. "Faith" subtly moves into the oppression of totalitarianism, and the crucifixion becomes a fixation. Not for me. And I think I can back this up theologically. Ms. Winner says that "on Yom Kippur Jews confess their sins, both privately and corporately. Before the holiday begins, they go around asking the forgiveness of everyone they have wronged; the Talmud teaches that God forgives the sins we've done against Him freely, but he will not forgive the sins we've done against our neighbor until they have forgiven us first." Sounds like the teaching of Jesus doesn't it? Yes, I am constantly changing and growing, but I am most concerned about the way I live out the gospel with the people in my life. Do I love and care and respect and honor and speak well of and speak well to? If not, then I need to go to that person. I didn't do anything against Father Pete so I won't be confessing anytime soon. But my students, my colleagues, my beautiful family, the woman behind the counter...do I live out the beauty of the gospel? If not, then get to it. And when I sin against God I'll ask him to forgive me too, but then I'm done with it because there's work to do, good food to eat, great trips to take, widows, orphans and strangers to take care of--there is life now. I am human and that is the beauty of the whole thing to me. And while I pace the room awaiting the resurrection I would prefer to work on repairing the world closest to me rather than obsessing with my sins.
And lest one thinks I've stumbled into the abyss of heresy let us remember the words of the Apostle Paul. Jesus is the second Adam who became sin for us and the crucifixion--that awful Friday of sin and death--the few moments when God left the scene--brings death to death. One of the most beautiful elements of Christianity is that sin is done and so death is conquered. According to Paul and Augustine and Luther and Calvin and Barth the human condition is hopeless, but Christ is all hope. The crucifixion is over, and the resurrection has occurred--but not yet, not completely. We as Christians are left to live between the death of Friday and the Sunday resurrection. George Steiner comes to mind here: "But ours is the long day's journey of the Saturday. Between suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste on the one hand and the dream of liberation, of rebirth on the other. In the face of the torture of a child, or the death of love which is Friday, even the greatest art and poetry are almost hopeless. The apprehensions and figurations in the play of metaphysical imagining, in the poem and the music, which tell of pain and hope...are always Sabbatarian. They have risen out of an immensity of waiting which is that of man (Real Presences, p. 232, italics mine). To live and love between Friday and Sunday is to revel in hope and freedom and yes--anticipation of what is yet to come. As I have said repeatedly in the classroom, "Christianity is about redemption, not perfection." So get over yourself. Return to God which in the Hebrew means to bring your face back (tashuv) and then guard your life with tender mercy (hesed) and right justice (mishpat) while waiting (havah) patiently, eagerly on the Lord (Hosea 12:7).
Lauren Winner's book has been a gift to me in many ways, but the biggest gift is the "suture" of her Jewish heritage and her Christianity. I know Jesus was an observant Jew, but I had never taken time to learn very much about the Jewish Passover celebration - what it meant to the Jews and to Jesus, who transforms it.
I never knew that three matzah are held up in the fifth part of the seder. Lauren sees these matzah as representing God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. I never knew that the middle matzah is broken in two. The larger half is then wrapped in a linen napkin and hidden somewhere in the house for the children to find later. For a Christian there is no problem seeing Jesus' body in this ritual, broken on the cross, wrapped in linen burial clothes, and hidden in a tomb. When the hidden matzah is "discovered" by the children, they are given a gift; we remember Jesus' words, that we cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven, our gift, unless we enter as little children. How perfectly God prepared His people in the Passover celebration to receive His new message!
The most moving part of the chapter for me is Lauren's discovery of her family in Christ. She has lost her Jewish "family" and she tells us that her Jewish "mother," who had even offered her own home to Lauren as her own, will no longer speak to her. Her biological family is fractured. Her true family, she says, are those who promised to support her in her life in Christ at her confirmation, and those with whom she shares the Eucharistic meal. She is even able on Palm Sunday, to be a fool for Christ. Lauren explores the various theologies of the Eucharist and finds one called "transsignification," which "confirmed the real presence of the Lord in the Eucharist, but focused on the symbolic....change" that happens at the altar. I am charmed by her six year old Sunday school student whose theology is that the priest is "pouring God into a cup for us to drink."
This broken body, the Viaticum, our provision for our journey through this pilgrim land - it is all we need and binds us together as Christ's body on earth. The chorus of a hymn we often sing after the Eucharist runs through my head:One bread, one body, One Lord of all,One cup of blessing which we bless;And we, though many, throughout the earth,We are one body in this one Lord.
Not unlike Lauren Winner, I sometimes have issues with praying. Not that I don't do it; Lord knows I try every day. It's just that now and again, I feel as if it is unproductive or insincere. At the height of my own fears and insecurities, I feel that I am not worthy enough-even to approach God in words of praise or supplication. I grew up Baptist, so the words liturgical and Lent weren't in my vocabulary until my early twenties. It wasn't until I started going to an Episcopal church that I realized there was a completely other form of prayer. Prayers spoken together. Liturgy literally means work of the people. Now, as I am a bit older, I find it very comforting when I don't know what or how to pray that there are words to guide me, or as Winner puts it, "God's hand guiding me." Sometimes I need the words of others to help drown out the busyness and clutter in my head. Pardon the analogy, but I find that Winner effectively describes liturgy much like ADHD medication for the restless soul: "Work is being done whether I feel it or not. Sediment is being laid. Words of praise to God are becoming the most basic words in my head. They are becoming the fallback words, drowning out advertising jingles and professors' lectures and sometimes even my own interior monologue" (p. 144).
I often shudder in church at the moment when I hear hundreds of voices say together the words in which our Savior taught us, "Our father, who art in heaven...." That's liturgy. When I have no voice or prayer of my own, I can still find solace and continue to practice prayer discipline through the words of the ancient church and of the faithful who have gone before me. The whole point of prayer, in my opinion, is to get into the habit of it. The platitudes on church signs still do ring true for me: "Prayer doesn't change God, it changes you." Though we might be tempted to define an athlete through success, an athlete is not defined by her wins or losses, but the lifestyle in which she lives and trains. It is in the structure and focus of your discipline that makes you who you are, not whether you win every race or competition. Is this not what we mean when we say "it's not the destination, but the journey that counts"? Similarly, many of my graduate students often worry that their thesis will be a failure if they don't somehow "prove" their hypothesis correct. I remind them it is in the process of the research, reading, and writing that makes them budding scholars-not whether they achieved some self- proclaimed final destination of research. Heaven help the young scholar who stops researching because he thinks he found the holy grail in his first paper of substance.
And so it is with prayer. It is in the discipline and habit of talking to God that brings you closer to him- not whether you judge your prayer to be successful or one day you find your prayers suddenly eloquent beyond your capability. Perhaps this could be one reason that Winner was so drawn to orthodox Judaism. She found value in the everyday doings and dedications of prayer discipline associated with the faith. Perhaps she rediscovered that again in Christianity through her exploration of the Book of Common Prayer in her encounters with Episcopalianism.
Speaking of discipline...
Lent, the liturgical portion of the church calendar leading up to Easter, is a season of penitence and self- denial-both of which require much discipline. People often associate Lent with "giving up" on self andmaterial needs (at least for the 40 days prior to Easter) so that one can practice "returning" to God. As crazy as it may sound to some of our target audience, Winner actually had to give up reading books to quiet her mind, as she looked forward "to the space it clears out in my brain."
I think that is an apt metaphor since I often associate the Lenten season with silence. I've actually been known to do most of my church hopping during Lent. I like the flavor of the different services during this season. Perhaps I am just focused more on my spiritual development during this time than any other, but I also hunger to see how other people and congregations reflect the seriousness and gravity of Lent. In my Lenten journeys, I have found that there are plenty of churches that create an intentionally quieter and more subdued worship environment. It isn't that we liturgical types are an unhappy, brooding people. I think it is about the powerful juxtaposition that is created when we ponder both the crucified Christ and the resurrected Christ. Think about the contrast and the completely different assumptions of hope the disciples had on bleak Good Friday versus the revelation of Easter morning.
In my practice of seeking out prayer discipline, silence, and Lent, I have discovered each has done its part to strip away the noise and distractions of the daily grind. Ultimately, these practices bring me to a place where I must wrestle with the fact, like Winner, that I am left starkly alone with my life (and my spirituality). Then I am able to be quiet and "ponder anew what the Almighty can do."
Discussion questions:
Lauren struggles with failure in this section. Her failures as a daughter, as a convert to Judaism, as a friend stand in marked contrast to God's ultimate affirmation of Christ, when the embodiment of the Holy Spirit came from Heaven and a voice declares: "You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased." The season of Epiphany celebrates the transformation we all experience as adopted children of God through Jesus, of Jesus' relationship to the Father, and of his Embodiment of God in the flesh. In other words, Epiphany is a celebration of recognition and of triumph.
[I was baptized in a full-immersion Southern Baptist Church at the age of twelve.]
Lauren's Jewish father, who is not a devout practitioner of his faith, is nonetheless devastated by her conversion to Christianity. He cannot even speak to her about it face-to-face. There are no paternal words of affirmation, of love, of pride, for Lauren. It is an aspect of herself she hides from her father, and thus she becomes a mere caricature of herself for him; no true revelations are shared. Her motivations are shrouded from her father. Her lived daily experience of God is a taboo subject, separating her from her father's love and presence, much like the divorce physically separated them when Lauren was on the cusp of adolescence.
[I thought there would be a victory narrative when my father suddenly and inexplicably became ill from a rare disease.... However, I was deeply disappointed when he died and I realized there will be no more words of affirmation from my father on this plane of existence.]
Lauren frames her disaffection from Judaism in the terms of a divorce. She indicts herself and the community that surrounded her when she practiced Judaism. She broke her covenant with her Jewish community, but her community also broke her faith. The Tu B'Shevat muffins represented her (and her friend's) failure to be more imaginative in celebrating Tu B'Shevat, which honors the promise of fruit-bearing trees. For Lauren, her divorce with Judaism represented a failure of the fruits of the spirit; she was not ministered to, she did not seek help, she was lazy, she allowed her attention to be diverted. Lauren fails her friends, Beth and Hannah. Beth and Hannah have also failed her.
[My fumbled and impatient attempts to find love in graduate school led me to become a single mother, struggling to get through comprehensive exams and pay the lowly grad student housing fee. I broke my covenants and failed in securing a stable relationship in which to raise my little baby girl.]
In the Jewish community, Lauren often remained an outsider. She was perceived as a fake, a poseur. She was rejected in painful ways. As Lauren insightfully points out, the relationship we hold with our faith community reflects our relationship with God. Lauren struggles with her many-layered identity and with fitting into a faith community. She struggles with the identities imposed by others upon her when she converts to Christianity. Stereotypes and labels haunt her, make her feel like an outsider again.
[I often fail at integrating the different pieces of my life, of my identity. I transgress, I disappoint, I forget, I feel nothing but cold stone silence in my heart at times when I apply logic to my faith. I stand naked and lonely, staring at the glass darkly, unable to recognize myself.]
But beyond all the failures stands the telos, the alternative narrative. Lauren is covered by an act of sacrifice. Her failures, the failures of our communities, of our hearts have been forgiven by our God who has become the embodiment of love, of forgiveness. She did not divorce Judaism, instead she finally discovered the epiphany at the core of all covenants, all loves, all wisdom: Jesus.
Some things upon which to reflect in the text:
"My Icons and Me"
Imagine being disconnected from all the traditions that have defined every Christmas of your life. As Winner experiences Christmas without her family and familiar rituals, loneliness drips from her reflections. Recalling the first Christmas after her parents' divorce, she remembers that her mother, 'a tough cookie who didn't crumble,' maintained tree-trimming and other anchors of the season, even though life was significantly changed for her as a divorced mother. Certainly, I admire those who can and do soldier on through all manner of emotional upheaval!
For Winner, this Christmas is dramatically different too, but minus the reliable markers of the season. Buying Lucky Charms, an ironic choice of cereal, and encountering a 'sexy, blonde" professor, the object of Winner's embarrassing drunken affection at a departmental party, only amplify Winner's lonely separation from the warm and cozy feeling that Christmas brings most to most of us. Her sense of unworthiness next to this professor and his upscale groceries is painful to read about. Haven't we all felt this sense of discomfort for one reason or another?
Aside from the warm and cozy traditions that Winner obviously misses, her thoughts turn to the heart of Christianity, the reason for celebrating Christmas in the first place-'[the] Incarnation, that God took flesh." She states that this fact "is the whole reason I am not an Orthodox Jew." The idea of incarnation, Winner realizes, is the very act of faith that intellectuals like her undergrad professor find impossible to embrace. In fact, the prof finds it mystifying that someone like Winner "believes that God took human form and walked around Palestine." This leap of faith is problematic for many in the age of science.
Winner's real "lucky charms" are the icons of Jesus that line the wall of her bedroom. These images of Jesus' face conveying a range of emotion remind her of how some Christians, like Eastern Orthodox Christians, imagine the icons to be portals through which they see Him. To her, the icons are less complicated; they are friends and provide the tangible proof that Jesus is not imaginary. She studies the facial expressions to connect with the message that Jesus seems to project through his countenance and to find comfort for her current uncomfortable state of mind.
Winner's loneliness and longing for human companionship eventually overcome her. Winner contemplates her former boyfriend's Christmas with his new girlfriend; she also thinks about her friend Hannah's Christmas morning with Jim. All of these significant people in her life have companionship, and she doesn't. These jealous thoughts cloud Winner's Christmas morning. The Christian holiday that should hold the most meaning for her has become a dismal day, filled with self-pity. Embracing Christianity and the incarnation of God as a fact isn't all she needs at this moment. In fact, the unspoken question lingers at the conclusion of the chapter: Should faith be all we need in Christian life to satisfy our spiritual needs?
Questions
"Advent" is Lauren Winner's label for this chapter of Girl Meets God. The dictionary defines advent as: 1. a coming into place, view, or being; arrival: the advent of the holiday season. And 2. the period beginning four Sundays before Christmas, observed in commemoration of the coming of Christ into the world.
In the Christian calendar, Advent is designated as a time of anticipation and expectation. If you attended a more liturgical style of church growing up, Advent was the period when candles of various colors were lit around a wreath, a new candle was added each week leading up to Christmas Eve. I can remember my childhood anticipation and watched that wreath become ever brighter as the weeks progressed after Thanksgiving. Finally the large white candle in the center of the wreath was lit on Christmas Eve, representing the arrival of the Christ child. Was my childhood excitement solely the anticipation of gifts on Christmas? I don't believe so. The season has always been something magical and mystical: something about the quietness of the Christmas Eve service as if the Christ child was in the room sleeping and we daren't wake him. Something about the darkness and then the light of the candle being passed throughout the room from person to person until the whole room glowed with the warm light of what seemed to be an infinite number of handheld candles.
I have this same sense from Lauren in this chapter. She allows us a glimpse of her thoughts as she wrestles with the Christian faith. She says in fact that the incarnation (God coming as the man Jesus), that one bright light penetrating the darkness and being passed from person to person, is the aspect of Christianity that first attracted her. The uncertainty of it's meaning for her rings true in my own heart as I continue to discover the impact of His coming into my life.
Bruce Cockburn says; "like a stone on the surface of a still river, driving the ripples on forever, redemption rips through the surface of time in the cry of a tiny babe." Maybe that's the sense I had as a child and Winner experiences in this book. Inexplicable, but somehow all of life changed when that child came. Sometimes I think we are too busy, surrounded by too much noise, to even recognize that now.
Discussion Questions:
When I opened Lauren Winner's book, Girl Meets God, and read the first chapter, I had two entry points: I took Hebrew in seminary, so I probably should know what sukkot means, and I've been to Oxford, Mississippi more than once. The last time I was there was about ten years ago on a grad school pilgrimage, where I paid homage to Faulkner at his ancestral home and found a roach in my bed at the Motel 6.
But sukkot? I had to read to the end of the chapter to remember what it means: Feast of Tabernacles. During this holiday, Jews celebrate their deliverance from Egyptian slavery in booths, or little shacks. Winner breaks the book down into seasons according to the Christian church calendar; only the introduction is a Jewish holiday. This is fitting, because the book is all about leaving (being delivered from?) Judaism, and entering Christianity.
Leaving, however, doesn't imply an easy trek. Winner admits that "evangelical friends of mine are always trying to trim the corners and smooth the rough edges of what they call My Witness in order to shove it into a tidy, born-again conversion narrative." Yet she remains unsure about the time and place of her conversion, only that it has happened or is happening. When she confesses her infatuation with Christianity to a Christian pastor, instead of being supportive, he admonishes her, "you know, Lauren, you can't just divorce Judaism." She avoids Jewish friends for fear of being labeled a turncoat, a traitor.
When we enter this book, we enter as fellow pilgrims. With Lauren Winner, we encounter the risen Christ, and all else is preamble. In that sense, as we read, the title becomes not Girl Meets God, but [Your Name] Meets God. With Winner, we doubt, and with Winner, we have the opportunity to trust, and be delivered.
Discussion Questions
Editor's note: This week marks Frederick Buechner's 85th birthday. As we celebrate, we also take a moment to look back at the beginnings of the Buechner Institute and the way we try to honor Fred's life and career. This January 2008 article, by Institute friend and Milligan College professor S.J. Dahlman, is a good reminder of what we're still trying to accomplish--with Fred's example.
Frederick Buechner is not a religious writer.
"The term … gives me the creeps," the novelist-essayist-poet-theologian said this week from his home in Vermont. "It means to me obvious, preachy, unrealistic. I don't think I'm a religious writer at all in that sense."
Instead, he has aimed in a six-decade writing career "to see the world as it is, to be as honest as possible with the representation of life as I've known it all these years." For Buechner, the world is all flesh and spirit, humanness and holiness he has richly portrayed in an assortment of characters.
There's Leo Bebb, an unctuous preacher who turns out to be something of a redeeming figure, a surprising stage on which God performs.
There's Godric, a pirate turned priest from the 11th century, a real-life monk who was eventually named a saint. As imagined by Buechner in a novel nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, Godric is racked with lust and doubts, but no less longing for God.
"In everything I write, I try to give a doubt a voice," Buechner said. "There's always a question mark, a shadow. I never pretended faith was easy. It's not so much a conscious effort to decide whether it's true or not, but the task of living in this world raises the question."
Saints and sinners are not opposites in Buechner's stories, essays and memoirs. They are the same people. They are like real humans, that is, and Buechner is comfortable being human.
"Lucky is he who is flawed and recognizes he's flawed," he said. "There's a better chance to see things the way things really are, including themselves. They're not living on automatic pilot."
Buechner, now 81, grew up in a family "without any religious sensibility," but came to belief just as his writing star was rising in 1950s New York. He earned a degree from Union Theological Seminary and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister. He never held a pulpit, but he taught religion at Philips Exeter Academy of New Hampshire before returning to full-time writing in the early 1960s. "Words are my ministry," he has said.
Among his literary parishioners is Dale Brown, a professor of English at King College in Bristol, Tenn. Before moving there last year, Brown taught at Calvin College in Michigan for 20 years, where he directed the annual Festival of Faith and Writing. He had struck up a long-distance friendship with Buechner, and had come to regard Buechner as a mentor.
Three years ago, Brown visited King College for a sabbatical, researching and writing a book about Buechner. Along the way, he planted a seed for what is now called the Buechner Institute.
The institute will be inaugurated on Monday at the college, with a program that includes three seminars, a concert by Christian singer-songwriter Michael Card, and an evening interview featuring Buechner and theologian Walter Brueggemann.
"I admire (Buechner's) work … not just because he's a really great artist, but has a deep understanding of faith," Brown said this week. "He kind of fills the space between secularism and sectarianism. In our area, I hope the institute can be a place that invites people from a lot of different perspectives. We want to encourage a conversation that does not involve setting up walls."
Brown is planning monthly events and a future research center where scholars and artists can explore "the intersection of faith and culture," to echo Buechner's work.
"I'm touched by the honor they do me," Buechner said. This is his first contact with the college.
"I'd love to see (the institute) explore other writers who work the same territory I do," the author said, naming the late Flannery O'Connor and Cormac McCarthy, author of "No Country for Old Men," among them.
This territory, as he calls it, "pays attention to the thin places," those moments when the boundaries between heaven and earth, between physical and spiritual almost evaporate, when "an event that seems very unimportant becomes transparent to mystery, to holiness."
Paying attention: that's not only Buechner's calling card. That's his advice.
"Henry James said writers are those on whom nothing is lost," he said. "Try to be someone on whom nothing is lost. Watch where you go, watch what memories see you through."
Years ago, during a particularly harsh Michigan winter, I injured my back and could not shovel the snow accumulating in our driveway. One of my good Calvin College colleagues, seeing my plight as he was also a neighbor, came to my rescue one Saturday afternoon. Chatting with him later that day by phone, I thanked him for his ministrations. Just as I was wrapping up with the line, "Thanks again for the snow," my son, four or five years old at the time, happened to be passing by. After I had hung up the receiver, my son asked, "Dad, were you talking to God?"
His voice betrayed no incredulity with the question. He seemed to believe that it was quite possible, even likely, that I had been chatting with God via that old landline telephone. I suppose this was at least something of what was in Jesus' mind when he referred to children as exemplars of the kingdom. Children have the exuberance of God, a faith in the hard-to-believe that comes easily. And we get over it, of course; perhaps sooner now than ever in our information age.
Recently I accompanied a group of students to what must be one of the last, venerable holy places on earth, a used book store. This one is in Chattanooga, a chaotic hodgepodge of randomly arranged books presided over by an ancient woman who sits at the front of her cavernous treasury weaving on an antique spinning wheel. Visiting with her, we learned that she had spent some years as a courtroom expert in handwriting analysis. One thing led to another, and, egged on by the students, I offered my scribbling for analysis.
Glancing only briefly at my paragraph, she squinted over at me and said, "Well, you have a problem with authority, don't you?" It wasn't really a question. I swear those were her exact words. The students laughed uproariously. My demurral was unheeded. I knew, abashedly, even on the spot, that she had struck right at the heart of me. "A child of the 1960's," I wanted to say. "There's been plenty to question," I thought. But my defensiveness was the wrong tack; I see that now.
In his memoir, The Sacred Journey, Frederick Buechner credits Frank Baum's Rinkitink with having left an inestimable mark on him during childhood readings in Oz. It was Rinkitink who passed along the wisdom, "Never question the truth of what you fail to understand for the world is filled with wonders." Faith and art often conspire to push us toward such understanding. Indeed, "There are more things in heaven and earth" than our orderly plodding may take into account.
Always good at the doubting part, I have never been very good at the submission part. And sometimes, as Pascal says, knowing when to submit may be the most important piece of all. Accepting the mysterious, the unanswerable, the bewildering, has never been my forte. I've wanted logical conclusions where the inexplicable reigns in knots of confusion. Maybe God never called me on our black telephone hanging there on the kitchen wall, because I never really thought he could.
Note: These remarks are from a speech given at the Buechner Institute. Check out Jeff's new blog at readingwritingwatchingsaying.blogspot.com.
Of all the revelations in Dale Brown's wonderful Book of Buechner, none caught my attention as much as learning on page 323 that Frederick Buechner hums the song Seventy-Six Trombones from The Music Man under his breath when he writes. I appreciated that connection, because I've often thought that if Professor Harold Hill, the spell-binding traveling salesman hero of Meredith Wilson's musical isn't Leo Bebb's blood-brother, he is at least a relative.
Did someone say something about a pool table?
Attention Please, May I have your attention please,
I can deal with this trouble folks with a wave of my hand, this very hand.
Please observe me if you will, I'm Professor Harold Hill,
And I've come to organize a River City Boy's Band.
Now think my friends how could any pool table ever hope to compete with a gold trombone,,,
That's from the introduction to Seventy-Six Trombones. I could do more, much more, but I promised my wife I wouldn't.
Now I am going to go out on a limb and assume that none of you folks made it to the Flint Southwestern High School production of The Music Man in December, 1975. If you would have been there, you would have discovered that -- unlikely as it seems -- director Clarence "Bud" Bergman did not cast me as the romantic lead Harold Hill, but instead cast me as the awkward, pompous anvil salesman Charlie Cowell, who was trying his best to expose Harold Hill as a fraud. My big line was "He's a fake and he doesn't know the territory."
As much as Frederick Buechner's had Seventy-Six Trombones playing under his breath for years, I've heard that line under mine every time I've ever climbed into a pulpit or stood in front of a group of people. I think somewhere deep inside every preacher there is the fear that one day a traveling anvil salesman will throw open the doors of the sanctuary, point an accusing finger, and cry out, "He's a fake, and he doesn't know the territory."
We leave our homes and the people who know us best and pile up degrees at colleges and seminaries and move across the country all in an attempt to escape our pasts and legitimate ourselves, but the doubts and inner voices never leave us. I am deeply aware of the presumptuousness of my ordination - of putting a religious title in front of my name and somehow claiming that I have been set apart by and for God. I believe any preacher who is truly honest has that same anxious mix of self-doubts swimming around somewhere. We want to somehow suppress our humanity, but cannot. In a recent clergy survey, when asked to name what word best describes how God views them, 70% of the ministers choose the word "disappointed."
The first preacher I ever encountered honest enough to admit this was Frederick Buechner. My first Buechner book was Telling the Truth, and when I opened it a couple of decades ago and read on page two that in his shame and horror Henry Ward Beecher wrote the notes for his lecture on preaching at Yale in blood because he was flesh and blood like all of us, and that every preacher carries his or her loves and hates, fears of death and fears of life, anxieties, longings, pride and dark doubts on their backs the way a snail carries his shell, I felt a solidarity I had never felt before.
"We have all cut ourselves," the book says. "We all labor and are heavy laden under the burden of being human or at least of being on the way, we hope, to being human." We are all fakes who don't know the territory.
What I learned from Buechner is that the first words preachers say should be words to themselves. We don't preach ourselves - we preach the outrageously foolish message of Christ crucified - but we should start by preaching to ourselves. It's been three decades since Frederick Buechner asked preachers to have the guts to tell the truth, and our broken and polarized world needs men and women who will do that today more than ever, because, as another great preacher has said, what goes deepest to the heart will go widest to the world. The church needs ministers who can break free of the building fund campaign, the software upgrade meeting, the marketing committee, the area ecumenical council, and the pressing need to do a performance review of the Christian Ed Director long enough to say an honest word, first to themselves, and second to their congregations. Break free of the Christian script you think you are supposed to say, long enough to find your true voice and tell the truth about life. When Dale Brown originally asked me to talk about Buechner's influence on preachers, I joked with him that if we really told the truth about that, we'd have to admit how many sermons had been cribbed from Fred. That's a whole different topic we could talk about later. Suffice it to say, I don't think Buechner has asked us to use his voice. I do think he's challenged us to find our own voices.
Thank you Frederick Buechner, that with eloquence and elegance, amid tears and with great laughter, you have encouraged us to tell the truth about ourselves and about our world, where terrible as well as wonderful things happen. You wrote, "The preacher pulls the little cord that turns on the lectern light and deals out his note cards like a riverboat gambler. The stakes have never been higher...the silence in the shabby church is deafening." What should the preacher do? Tell the truth. Tell the truth out of that silence about the absence of God as well as the presence of God. "What is truth? Life is truth, the life of the world, your own life, and the life inside the world you are."
Thank you Frederick Buechner, for helping me see the truth in my life, for helping me embrace my adolescence as the gospel as comedy; for helping me understand the gospel as tragedy and teaching me about the stewardship of pain after my wife's stroke at the age of 24; and the gospel as fairy tale after the natural birth of our daughter two years later and our son two years after that. Thank you for telling the truth about your own life, and asking the rest of us to do the same.
On January 28-29, the Buechner Institute hosted its annual weekend of Buechner Lectureship activities. This year's lecturer, Katherine Paterson, was introduced by Abbie Roberts, a senior English and Spanish major and member of the Institute's student governing board. Abbie's reflections here beautifully capture what the Institute celebrates about faith and imagination:
We are honored today to welcome, once again, King College alumna Katherine Paterson as our 2011 Buechner Lectureship guest. Perhaps when you think about Katherine Paterson, you automatically think of Bridge to Terabithia as I do (it was one of my staple reads as a child), and perhaps when you think about Bridge to Terabithia you think about imagination, and friendship, and loss. And perhaps, that is why Dr. Dale Brown has chosen me to introduce our esteemed speaker. Last year, when I lost my best childhood friend of fifteen years, Dr. Brown expressed a sympathy that others did not and seemed to truly understand the universal truth that a dog really is a man's best friend. Because of another common affinity we share, however, Dr. Brown recently gave me the following consoling quote from Groucho Marx: "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."
The year I came to college, my family moved from Indiana to Louisiana, and I still remember that fated day that my mom called to tell me that somehow all of our childhood books had been lost somewhere along the way. The dreadful image still flashes in my head of Cordoroy sitting on the side of the road, mud splashed all over his dark green overalls, and of Anne of Green Gables re-braiding her messy red hair, and then, of dear, flustered Mr. Tumnus gathering up his scattered parcels nearby. I can just imagine cars whirring past as Stuart Little and Peter Rabbit dash for the bushes, and Heidi and Jo March, straighten the wrinkles of their lately pressed dresses. Had these treasured books not been later recovered and properly placed on the bookshelf in our new home, I might still be wandering up and down Interstate-65 surveying the torn pages of my childhood. Somewhere along the way, I would most certainly have come upon Gilly Hopkins, The Great Gilly Hopkins, muttering the expletives of an angry, lonely, displaced little girl, and I would, no doubt, also have found Jess Aarons and Leslie Burke trying to reshape their once-majestic Terabithian castle, for along with all the other aforementioned classics, these beautifully crafted Katherine Patterson stories also make up, in part, the fiber of who I have become. The loss of them, would indeed, have been a serious business.
During her 2007 visit to King College, Katherine Paterson herself said, "The consolation of the imagination, is not imaginary consolation," thus attesting to its validity and seriousness. Katherine Patterson, along with winning numerous awards including two National Book Awards, two Newbery Medals, and the Hans Christian Anderson Award, and currently serving as the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, has aided in cultivating my imagination, certainly, as well as the imaginations of millions of children all over the world. I'm pleased to offer my gratitude for this, as well as for pointing me toward the ultimate purpose behind imagination, and magic, and fairytales - behind story - to begin with.
Please join me in welcoming to King College, and to the 2011 Buechner Lectureship, Katherine Paterson.
The Necessity of Communal Conversation
I have long subscribed to the "build it and they will come" philosophy. Such a view is fundamentally American, I suppose. There's the better mousetrap theory and all that. I have spent the better part of a career trying to provide stimulating programming for audiences, programming verging into issues of faith and culture, art and religion. In the 1970's I travelled with a singing group where the issue was always what sort of material would bring the folks out. Then it was working for churches where the challenge was to offer meaningful meetings for members. Further along at Calvin College, I watched the growth of the Festival of Faith & Writing as visitors responded to that biennial event. Now with the Buechner Institute, the niggling question remains. What will gather a crowd?
At a National Guard Armory near my home, I observe the crowded parking lot on the evenings when they are offering something they euphemistically call "wrestling." On a recent Sunday, I drove by a small church near a river where I noticed only three cars in the parking lot. Along the river, five cars testified to the fishermen. Musical concerts and even athletic events are down in attendance, I'm told, though megachurches still do ok and Super Bowl tickets still sell for more than a song. Several intriguing questions drift around in these murky waters, but I wonder what audience there is these days for events that stimulate the mind, challenge imaginations, and raise issues of contemporary culture? What can we do to fill those seats?
Maybe the heyday has passed. Last semester I revisited Emerson and was again reminded of such movements as the Chautauqua and the Lyceum. Apparently, people turned out in droves to hear orations, speeches on contemporary intellectual and spiritual topics. Now we have the web.
As I have observed the rise of so-called "on-line learning," preachers on DVD, YouTube entertainment, and electronic access to information beyond belief, I have also watched the demise of the public event. Why get all dressed up to sit in uncomfortable pews or folding chairs to hear speeches that can be acquired with a few strokes of the computer key? The answer, if there is one, has something to do with this mysterious business we call communal conversation.
There is splendor no doubt in the joys of our electronic cabins. But the price we pay is a sort of isolation. Perhaps we have disdained the public lecture because we aren't convinced that anybody has anything to tell us anymore. Perhaps we are simply inundated with voices and unable to imagine the necessity of yet another one. Perhaps we have all the community we can use. Whatever the reasons, I am convinced that churches, schools, and the society at large suffer when we have no place for those public gatherings which bring important questions before us for contemplation and conversation.
At the Buechner Institute, we have proceeded on the old-fashioned notion that some public figures-writers, politicians, musicians, dramatists, pundits, and thinkers-have news worth hearing, arguments worth hefting, advice worth consideration.
A blog like this one is evidence of our capitulation to the new century's revolution in communication. There's no going back, I know. But is there still a place for talk in the public square? I don't mean a an electronic talk-back feature where you text in a response. I mean off-line and face to face. Back in the day, cities were actually built around commons where, I understand, people would gather to talk about the news of the day. Some small towns may yet have a bench for whittlers right there on the town square by the courthouse. (Whittlers, of course, aren't making anything. They are talking.) The town hall, the meeting place, and the church hall are going the way of the corded telephone and the Remington upright, I suppose. So be it.
But let us be careful what we lose.
Editor's note: The Buechner Institute is dedicated to promoting conversation and long-term thinking on
important cultural issues. Here's Governing Board member, Matt Roberts, reflecting on a provocative talk from last year.
Waiting for Moments that Never Come....
For my contribution to this year's Freshman DC trip, I volunteered to lead the track at the National Holocaust Memorial Museum. As I prepared for this experience, I found that my thoughts kept running back to a recent BI lecture. Last February, we were fortunate to have among our midst Holocaust survivor Alfred "Freddie" Traum. I still recall the atmosphere of the chapel vividly: the solemnity of the subject matter caused everyone attending to sit up in their seats, ears perked to receive what we believed to be another traditional Holocaust narrative.
But this only lasted for about 15 minutes into the lecture....
As the lecture reached the half-hour mark, I started to develop an uneasy feeling. In retrospect, what I regarded as a lack of cohesiveness (or too stream of consciousness) on the part of the speaker was really my own knee-jerk reaction and bias. I didn't know quite how to describe it at the time, but there was a palpable uneasiness growing among many in the audience that day. As time continued to lapse, it became evident to me, and to others, that this particular lecture would directly challenge our expectations of what a Holocaust narrative should contain.
Finally it became clear to me: there were to be no specific tales of horror or concentration campordehumanization coming from Freddie's lips. Those traditional Holocaust narratives we have come to expect, satiating our voyeuristic tendencies, were virtually absent in Freddie's speech. I suppose this phenomenon is roughly akin to how many of us react as we drive by a terrible car wreck. We may squirm as we drive by; we may even say a quick prayer for those involved, but as passers-by we are tempted to catch a glimpse of the resulting horror. If you don't believe this is the case, just ask any first responder the major causes for bottlenecking at an accident scene.
Being in the last row of the chapel, I was privy to witness the perplexed and disappointed looks on some other faces. Some left early, already clutching onto their cell phones in texting position, ready no doubt to salvage what they perceived as a wasted moment.
Yet I was determined to stick it out and understand Freddie's choice of narrative. Then I began to feel guilty. I began to question my own motives for being present at the lecture. Why couldn't I allow myself to be moved by the story of a Holocaust survivor who spoke not about the atrocities, but about the hope and fullness of life-a life saved by the goodness of the British Kindertransport program? Though I've always patently disavowed such things like Nazism, concentration camps, andThe Final Solution, this lecture opportunity exposed my desire to hear the blood and the gore narrative more strongly than I previously was aware of.
As I discussed this collective cognitive conflict with Dale Brown, he suggested that it may be apoverty of imagination on our part to fully grasp the depth of such a narrative. After all isn't it horrific enough to hear Freddie utter "I was lucky" and "I lost my family" within the same talk?
Then I remembered my Anne Frank. Though she had every right to focus on the inhumanity forced upon her and her family in hiding, she chose rather to focus on the hope and goodness--just as Freddie did. In a journal entry dated July 15, 1944, Anne penned:
It's difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hope rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart. It's utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death.
Ironically, the learning opportunity this Buechner lecture afforded me carried over into a teachable moment in one of my classes a week later. Discussing the merits of postmodernism as an educational philosophy in a survey class can be, by its very nature, a difficult and abstract endeavor. Yet I couldn't think of a more appropriate and timely example of how postmodern thought embraces the tolerance of ambiguity issue than to discuss student reaction to a Holocaust narrative not-as-usual. As Gerald Pine puts it, postmodernism "rejects artificially sharp dichotomies and delights in the inherent irony and particularity of language and life." For me, having this event gave a local context to test drive postmodern inquiry. Hearing obtuse statements like "he wasn't a real Holocaust survivor" showed me as an educator just how important it is to confront such black and white rhetoric. As Marilyn McEntyre reminded us at this year's convocation, "such language doesn't invite conversation, it stops it." My hope is that the Buechner Lecture Series will continue to challenge our expectations of sensitive narratives and provide opportunities to not just open conversations, but to sustain them as well.
Editor's note: The Institute's opening weeks have been wonderful: rich and provocative. We're pleased to feature the response of one of our hard-working student board members.
Probably the most outstanding statement that Shane Claiborne made during his Monday morning convocation address was this: "If we look closely, we can see that Christianity spreads best, not through force, but through fascination." This declaration is the vocalization of something that I have been struggling with for a long time: do my physical and emotional actions in any way resemble my vocal faith? Am I just another evangelical that marches the aisle once a year, singing "Just as I Am," while staying just as I was?
Shane talked about three remedies that could quite possibly change our walks, and the fallen world that we walk in. The first was that we should seek to recapture the movement of the kingdom of God, in that God went to those people that he was seeking and saving. Our goal in this life should be to make our lives an intersection between our faith and the suffering of the world, and be a "different kind" of whatever we're choosing to be. I currently live in a state of versatility, where I can literally change the outlook of my whole life by turning in one Request Change of Major Form, and can be that "different kind." And so often, I choose not to take advantage of it.
His second point of "Christianity Reform" is the one that I have the most trouble with. He suggested that our attitude regarding money and possessions is wrong, and while I agree with that wholeheartedly, I'm not sure that the redistribution of wealth that he was suggesting could work in the broadest sense. I do think that the church as a whole has a responsibility to attempt to provide for the impoverished and needy in our communities, and my home church makes great efforts throughout the year to take care of those needs. While we understand that we alone cannot eliminate hunger in the greater Sullivan County, TN area, we know that we are making a difference, and can show individuals Jesus by handing them a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of bread. But - I'm not entirely convinced that we can convince the rest of the world to live in such a way that "Capitalism won't be possible and Marxism won't be necessary," at least, not without withdrawing completely from the greater world community.
His third and last suggestion to the King College community during his lecture was that we should always and forever attempt to be people of reconciliation and hospitality. I had heard the Martin Luther King, Jr. quote about 11 o'clock on Sunday mornings being the "most segregated hour" before, and it bothered me even more when Shane brought it up. We should always endeavor to build relationships with the individuals that we might not normally build relationships with, for those are the people that we need to show Jesus to. I have to continually remind myself that the healthy people don't need a doctor, so why should I only show Jesus to my closest friends and family?
Shane reinforced a lot of the issues that I have been struggling with the last year, and gave me more reason to be empowered to NOT be normal, and to be peculiar because that's simply what I'm called to be, and to display some of that "scandalous love and hospitality." My favorite quote of the morning was when Shane recollected a border patrol officer in Iran, who stated that, "You might be Christians, but you're crazy." Crazy's not always a bad thing, you know?
The Get
I hope you have had a chance to peruse our new schedule and are making plans to join us whenever possible. We are excited about the possibilities.
I am often asked about how I get the speakers and performers for the various programs we do through the Institute. I was asked the same question over the years that I directed the Festival of Faith & Writing in Grand Rapids. A second popular question has to do with how I decide whom to invite. The less frequent question, but a most significant one, is how we pay for it!
I'll start with the "get." The toughest ones are the dead ones. At the Festival, we used to invite attendees to make their requests for the conferences ahead. One year, Flannery O'Connor led all suggestions with 28. C.S. Lewis always did well. Walker Percy was popular. Sometimes I could find a stand in.
I wish I could say that the selection of a group of speakers and performers follows a rigorous adherence to theme. It doesn't. I read a book or get a suggestion or hear someone on NPR. Then I see if I can find contact information. Then I try to find out about interest, availability, and fees. Then I research along with my stalwart partners on the various Boards. Then we try to work out a date.
I would very much like to believe that Providence plays a role. Sometimes it feels that way. With speaker fees reaching the many digits, we are fortunate to find good people for the prices we pay. I heard this week from a former professional athlete whose speaking fee is $150,000.00. And he takes no questions. A popular documentary filmmaker requires $60,000.00 plus two first-class airfares. Former politicians are off the charts.
So we do the best we can. Your suggestions are much appreciated. We do our best to keep up, but we cannot do it without your good offices. Thanks again.
