Page 3829 – Christianity Today (2024)

Pastors

Ed Rowell

Go get some sleep!

Leadership JournalMay 1, 2003

Jesus said, "Let's get away from the crowds for a while and rest." There were so many people coming and going that Jesus and his apostles didn't even have time to eat.Mark 6:31

A recent Internet pass-around had the heading "Signs you've had too much of the '90s." Several of these "signs" give evidence that we tend to ignore Jesus' words regarding rest:

You have a "to-do list" that includes entries for lunch and bathroom breaks, and they are usually the ones that never get crossed off.
You get excited when it's Saturday and you can wear sweats to work.
You think working a "half-day" means leaving at five o'clock.

Working long hours and not getting enough sleep are so common that we no longer consider them liabilities. We brag about them to one another. We never stop to consider the spiritual impact of contemporary work and leisure habits.

Scientists tell us that before the invention of electric lights, most people slept an average of ten hours per night. Today, we average less than seven-and-a-half hours. Many of the health problems that we face today are directly related to a lack of sleep, yet we doggedly attempt to squeeze a little more out of each day. 'What we discover is that in our quest to do more and be more, we often create such a high degree of stress that we cannot sleep when we get the chance!

In the passage above, Jesus had just learned that his cousin, John the Baptist, had been killed. Even the Son of God experienced the limitations of the human body when faced with grief, hunger, and too many demands. By his example he taught the disciples to minister effectively over the long haul by taking care of their physical needs.

Somehow, we must come to believe the words of Jesus and learn to create time and space for rest and quiet. Just as stress and fatigue put a damper on marital intimacy, they create a real barrier to our spiritual intimacy as well.

Time-management experts often recommend keeping a time log in order to identify wasted time. Their goal is to redeem that time for productive work. But the same exercise could also be used to redeem time for rest and recreation. Instead of giving in to the cultural expectations to do more, we can focus on those spiritual disciplines that lead us to be more.

Ed Rowell

ReflectionWhat if I adjusted my bedtime backwards by fifteen minutes this week—and then by another fifteen minutes next week? What would I lose? What would I gain?

PrayerLord, help me to remember that rest is necessary and productive, and a gift from you!

"Sometimes, the most spiritual thing we can do is take a nap."

—Richard Foster, writer

Leadership DevotionsCopyright Tyndale House Publishers.Used by permission.

- More fromEd Rowell

Burnout
Giving
Prayer
Renewal
Sabbath
Solitude
Spiritual Disciplines

News

Ted Olsen

By mid-March 41 percent of churchgoers said their pastor had not mentioned the war

View Issue
Subscribe
Give a Gift
Archives

21%	10%	37%
Churchgoers who said their clergy took a position on the Iraq war by March 16	Americans who say religion is the strongest influence in thinking about the war	Rise in sales of Bibles, hymnals, and prayer books from Jan. 2002 to Jan. 2003
41%	17%	7%
Churchgoers who said their clergy hadn’t even mentioned it by then	Regular church attendees who say this	Drop in sales of other religious books during that time

Related Elsewhere

Christianity Today’s recent Go Figure columns include:

What percentage of Americans say they are spiritual but not religious? (April 24, 2003)

The power of Jesus shows in magazine sales. (February 4, 2003)

What role did abortion play in the congressional race? (January 8, 2003)

Is cheating more rampant at religious high schools? (December 18, 2002)

What do Americans pray for? (December 9, 2002)

How much more time do evangelical fathers give their children? (October 25, 2002)

What percentage of Americans believe in heaven? (September 13, 2002)

Americans continue to give to religious groups following September 11. (August 14, 2002)

The majority of Americans say September 11 proved there’s “too little religion.” (July 11, 2002)

Statistics on the Protestant clergy shortage and The Prayer of Jabez (May 23, 2002)

The number of Americans who say they have no religion is growing (May 8, 2002)

- More fromTed Olsen

Ted Olsen

Culture

Greg Garrett

Neo’s return reminds us that a fallen world full of people is a world worth saving

Christianity TodayMay 1, 2003

In her recent Christianity Today piece on The Matrix, Frederica Mathewes-Green pointed out a heresy at the heart of the movie. The choice being posed in the movie, she noted, is between a worthless physical world and a worth-filled spiritual realm, a world of the real. I think theologically Frederica and I are in agreement: The Matrix doesn’t reflect the fact that the earth is full of God’s glory, and that we are to glory in it.

But as one of the hyperventilating postmodern Christians looking for meaning in the Matrix films, I can imagine some reasons that author/directors Andy and Larry Wachowski pose the false dilemma they seem to give us.

We should note first that the worlds of the Matrix films—the computer-generated matrix that humans are a part of and the “desert of the real” that we see after the destruction of most of the human race—are actually both human creations, not God’s creation. Except for a scene in Reloaded where Neo discovers himself to be sequestered five hundred miles away from the main action at a villain’s chateau in the mountains—which strikes me mostly as a plot device to make it harder for Neo to save the day—the matrix we see is strictly urban, a megalopolis of gray concrete based on the so-called height of human civilization.

If there is a flower, a rainbow, or a smidgen of God’s creation to be found within the program, I don’t recall it. Likewise the “real” world is the ultimate devastated product of human civilization, and unless you find majesty in blasted rock and nuclear winter, I can’t see much of an opportunity for the characters in the films to find beauty in much of anything except each other.

In the Matrix movies, we don’t really have the chance to see God’s world and it’s majesty, which works, I think, to the Wachowski Brothers’ dramatic purpose: They are streamlining the possibilities of grace and spiritual connection to better fit their story and their messages. Through the symbol of the matrix they encourage us to question our beliefs and to seek enlightenment in a world where too many are willing to accept the world as it seems. At the same time, they also seem to believe that the world as it seems is still very much worth saving. For people of faith, their story covers familiar sacred ground.

The matrix of the films is a world that devours the soul and controls the mind; it literally consumes the human beings in it. The images of people being consumed in order to power that world are among the most powerful and disturbing scenes of the original Matrix. The world of sensation seems so true that most people in that world are unable to break away, to see beyond it to what is real and lasting. They are lost in sleep, in a destructive dreamland that will destroy them. Clearly the idea of the matrix allows for some important spiritual lessons: We take our reality for granted. We tend not to question what we see, hear, and feel. We toil away for purposes that sometimes are counter to our truest selves.

The cosmology the Wachowski Brothers are using here seems to be drawn from Christian Gnostic thought—that the world we know (the matrix, if you will) is fallen and unredeemable, with no spiritual value, while the spiritual world is the sole realm of light and life. There aren’t so many Gnostic Christians around these days.

All the same, this is an idea that has plenty of currency in the world—many Hindus, Buddhists, and contemporary Christians see this world as merely an annoying stage to be passed through, of no importance except in a negative sense. And many people—of all faiths and no faith—tend to accept that the world as it is either isn’t worth changing or can’t be changed, tend to accept the beliefs they’re given without challenging them. That’s what the character of Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, has done up until the beginning of the first Matrix film. He has been our representative, stranded like us in the web of the world we perceive.

But here’s where some different spiritual ideas get introduced, where the notion of the two worlds gets complicated. Neo is told in the first film that he is the One, the savior of both worlds. He’s not inclined to believe it, and neither are we, frankly, at least not in the shape of Keanu Reeves. But at last, he does believe, as do we, and at the end of the first Matrix film, Neo accepts his destiny and transcends the boundaries of the physical world. He dies in—and potentially to—that world. Then he comes back to life.

He could pass on to the next world. But like Jesus, he returns to the physical world—in a physical body—because the work of redemption continues there. Neo doesn’t leave the matrix, even though he could; to save the people of that world, Neo has to enter it, engage it, just like Jesus came back to our world to wrestle with his hard-headed disciples. If he hadn’t sent them out to tell the good news everywhere, they might still be milling around.

And most of us would be lost.

Neo’s story leads me to think of the central mystery of our faith, incarnation. This world doesn’t simply reveal the presence of God; it has hosted God. Neo’s return reminds us that while the matrix may be a fallen world, it is still a world full of people very much worth saving. Our God came into physical form for that very reason, and no matter how much of a mess we make of things—even if, perish the thought, we were to blast our own world into blackened rock—God would still come to bring salvation.

I’d be the first to grant that the Matrix films don’t work as a Sunday school lesson (or as tracts or theological texts for any of the many faith traditions referenced by the Wachowski Brothers). They don’t pose definitive answers. In function, if not in form, they actually remind me of a Zen koan, one of those head-scratching questions like “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

That’s okay with me. As much as I look for grace and truth in all kinds of stories, Jesus gave me some perfectly good ultimate answers, and I’ll happily point the curious toward them. I’m drawn to the Matrix films for other reasons. Most of our popular culture doesn’t even rise to the level of competent entertainment; when a popular film like The Matrix seriously considers questions of being, faith, and purpose, when it engages millions of people in thought on those questions, and when it dramatically suggests that answers are out there if you only believe—well, let’s just say I’ll gladly put down my money to see a movie like that.

Greg Garrett is the author—with Chris Seay—of The Gospel Reloaded: Exploring Spirituality and Faith in the Matrix, and of the novel Free Bird. He teaches fiction writing and film at Baylor University.

The views expressed in Speaking Out do not necessarily reflect those of Christianity Today.

Related Elsewhere:

Other Matrix dicsussions:

Film Forum: Talking About Revolutions | What religious critics are saying about The Matrix Revolutions… (November 6, 2003)
Exegeting The Matrix | A lot of spiritual stuff went into The Matrix films, but not as much as some authors think. (November 6, 2003)
The Dick Staub Interview: Why We Are Drawn to The Matrix | Chris Seay, coauthor of The Gospel Reloaded, says the first movie was about finding belief and the second looks at walking that path. (May 27, 2003)
Film Forum: Matrix Sequel Flaunts Flashy Effects, Tedious Talk | Christian film critics find little enthusiasm for The Matrix Reloaded, Down with Love, or Daddy Day Care, but they are impressed with Man on the Train. (May 22, 2003)
The Matrix Reloaded | Christianity Today Movies did not review this film, but here’s what other critics are saying … (May 15, 2003)
Speaking Out: Desert of the Real? | The world of The Matrix is wrong: Creation really is beautiful.(May 12, 2003)
Liberated by Reality: The Matrix | Tony Jones (September 1999)
The Matrix Trilogy Bible-based Discussion Guide | What do these ground-breaking films say about the nature of self-knowledge, faith, love, reality, free will, and destiny? For personal use or as a group series, download this Reel-to-Real study to look deeper at these challenging moral and philosophical questions.

- More fromGreg Garrett

Film

Culture

Frederica Mathewes-Green

Related Elsewhere:

Other Matrix dicsussions:

Speaking Out: Looking for God in The Matrix | Neo’s return reminds us that a fallen world full of people is a world worth saving. (May 16, 2003)
Film Forum: Talking About Revolutions | What religious critics are saying about The Matrix Revolutions… (November 6, 2003)
Exegeting The Matrix | A lot of spiritual stuff went into The Matrix films, but not as much as some authors think. (November 6, 2003)
The Dick Staub Interview: Why We Are Drawn to The Matrix | Chris Seay, coauthor of The Gospel Reloaded, says the first movie was about finding belief and the second looks at walking that path. (May 27, 2003)
Film Forum: Matrix Sequel Flaunts Flashy Effects, Tedious Talk | Christian film critics find little enthusiasm for The Matrix Reloaded, Down with Love, or Daddy Day Care, but they are impressed with Man on the Train. (May 22, 2003)
The Matrix Reloaded | Christianity Today Movies did not review this film, but here’s what other critics are saying … (May 15, 2003)
Liberated by Reality: The Matrix | Tony Jones (September 1999)
The Matrix Trilogy Bible-based Discussion Guide | What do these ground-breaking films say about the nature of self-knowledge, faith, love, reality, free will, and destiny? For personal use or as a group series, download this Reel-to-Real study to look deeper at these challenging moral and philosophical questions.

Mathewes-Green is a columnist for Christian Reader and Beliefnet.

Frederica Mathewes-Green’s earlier Christianity Today articles include:

Tex-Mex Orthodoxy | A former Southern Baptist, Dmitri Royster is now a maverick of the Orthodox Church (May 16, 2002)

Whatever Happened to Repentance? | We’ve come to think our faith is about comfort. It’s not. (Feb. 22, 2002)

Brother from Another Planet | When a 15-foot-high stranger told Howard Finster to paint for God full time, he listened (Dec. 11, 2001)

Judgment Day | God promised that calamity would follow disobedience. So why are we quick to dismiss it as a reason for the September 11 attacks? (Sept. 25, 2001)

Chasing Amy | God intervened in a NOW activist’s unlikely conversion (Jan. 27, 2000)

Wanted: A New Pro-life Strategy | Twenty-five years after Roe, and 37 million abortions later, we have to admit we are losing the fight (Jan 12, 1998)

Men Behaving Justly | It’s clear that men and women need each other. You would almost think someone planned it that way (Nov. 17, 1997)

Free Love Didn’t Come Cheap | It’s hard to share your body when your heart keeps getting in the way (Oct. 6, 1997)

The Hungry Congressman | Democrat Tony Hall is pioneering a new political model for Christians (Sept. 1, 1997)

Embarrassment’s Perpetual Blush (July 14, 1997)

The Dilemmas of a Pro-life Pastor | How churches should handle the delicate issue of abortion when nearly one-fifth of women who get abortions are sitting in our pews. (Apr. 7, 1997)

She is also a former columnist for Christianity Today. Her columns included:

Unrighteous Indignation (Oct. 5, 2000)

A Clear and Present Identity (Sept. 5, 2000)

Every Day Is Casual Friday (July 18, 2000)

Get It? (May 18, 2000)

Sex and Saints (Apr. 11, 2000)

Psalm 23 and All That (Feb. 15, 2000)

The Abortion Debate Is Over (Dec. 28, 1999)

The Thrill of Naughtiness, (September 6, 1999)

Escape from Fantasy Island, (July 12, 1999)

Men Need Church, Too, (May 24, 1999)

My Spice Girl Moment, (January 11, 1999)

Moms in the Crossfire, (October 26, 1998)

Gagging on Shiny, Happy People, (September 7, 1998)

Whatever Happened to Middle-Class Hypocrisy? (July 13, 1998)

I Didn’t Mean to be Rude, (May 18, 1998)

See also Dick Staub’s interview with Mathewes-Green about The Illumined Heart.

- More fromFrederica Mathewes-Green

Film
Frederica Mathewes-Green

Christina Bieber

Andre Dubus and the lessons of brokenness.

View Issue
Subscribe
Give a Gift
Archives

In July of 1986, Andre Dubus stopped to help a motorist on the side of a Massachusetts highway and was himself struck by a passing car, costing him one leg and the use of the other. To anyone familiar with his fiction, the accident was uncanny. Dubus (pronounced dub-yoose), a Catholic writer from the South, had made a career from telling stories in which characters experience various accidents that force a self-reckoning. He could have scripted this one himself. But Dubus was not like his characters—men and women who have grown spiritually numb and are in desperate need of a wake-up call. Dubus was already wide awake and attuned to the spiritual significance of the physical world. He had, in a sense, already thought through the implications of such a life-changing accident—he did not need it to actually happen to him.

But it did happen. And it changed him—in ways he could not have predicted. While Dubus had always made his characters face challenges, provoking them from passivity to activity in order to achieve redemption, the challenge posed by his crippling accident led him in nearly the opposite direction. The strong and vital man who had always defined himself by action learned in a much deeper way the action of receiving.

Dubus has been described both as a man’s man and a writer’s writer. A kind of Catholic Hemingway, he wrote muscular prose that is “lathed to perfection,” as one critic observed; in his stories, meaning is fused almost imperceptibly to action. Dubus was born in 1936 in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and he went to Catholic school in Lafayette, the heart of Cajun country. In a culture known for aggressive and “manly” men, he experienced a conventional boyhood of hunting, baseball, coming-of-age challenges, and the felt need to prove himself to his father. It was partly to please his father that he entered the Marine Corps Platoon Leaders Class at Quantico, Virginia, at age 19, and that he later served as a Marine captain. Though he confessed to being too much led by his father in joining the corps, he never saw the decision as a bad one. His experiences shaped him as a writer, as is clear especially in his Paul Clement stories.

Typical of Dubus’ work in the 1960s and 1970s, the Paul Clement stories explore the silent terrain of the relationship between father and son, and the unspoken tests of manhood—almost always defined by activity—that become a rite of passage. For example, in “Cadence,” Paul faces a difficult sergeant who nearly crushes his spirit during basic training. Just at the point when Paul feels that his body will betray him, he “regains possession” of his legs and finishes the course, triumphant. Paul’s rite of passage has a high moral cost in this story, as he betrays his friend Munson (who cannot finish the course) in order to join the corps of men. Yet the betrayal that reveals Paul’s moral weakness does not render the test of manhood invalid. As he takes his place among the other men of the corps, he reflects on his past—the job digging trenches that his father had got him when he was sixteen. It was the first real physical challenge he had ever faced: the sun’s heat and the backbreaking labor brought him to the point of exhaustion and nausea, and he wanted only to go home. But when his father arrived and took him to buy a pith helmet, he found the strength to stay on the job and earned the silent respect and pride of his father.

Dubus’ Paul Clement stories are as autobiographical as Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories. Readers would later discover in Dubus’ essay “Digging” that Paul’s memory of the trenches is Dubus’ own. Because he and his father could not really talk to each other, this test of manual labor passes between them as a kind of spiritual gift from father to son. The gift is the opportunity to attain manhood, and the older Dubus reflects that “it is time to thank my father for wanting me to work and telling me I had to work and getting the job for me and buying me lunch and a pith helmet instead of taking me home to my mother and sister.” If he had quit, Dubus writes, “he would have spent the summer at home, nestled in the love of two women, peering at my father’s face, and yearning to be someone I respected, a varsity second baseman, a halfback … yearning to be a man among men, and that is where my father sent me with a helmet on my head.” “Going home” to the women would have been to settle for passivity, to consign oneself to a world of yearning instead of a world of action.

For Dubus, to mature is to move from yearning for respect to earning it through right action. This theme runs throughout his essays and fiction, whether the characters be male or female, and whether the challenges be physical or spiritual. It was a sensibility he learned from the Marines—the conviction that action and assertiveness are always preferable to passivity. Dubus believed, along with Hemingway, that the world is inevitably filled with brokenness, pain, and accidents. Although the only thing we can control is our response to such events, the assertion of will inherent to an active response is a considerable power indeed. The Marines respect this truth by working to discipline and train soldiers so that action, not talk or thought, becomes the instinctive response. For Dubus, right action arrives at its ultimate perfection when it becomes unselfconscious, an unspoken outgrowth of one’s previously willed and determined commitments.

It is easy to see the role of instinctive action in the realm of evident physical need: Dubus’ Marine training clearly went to work in him when he saw the stranded motorist and got out of the car to help. But the need for right action is equally imperative for Dubus in the spiritual life and in human relationships. In an interview in 1987, Dubus said that “I certainly believe in a series of gestures with escalating and enduring commitments. I agree with gesture, with actions, with ritual, more than with talk when it comes to love. I think that so many of my characters and us, since you ask, fail to live up to this for one reason: because we are defeated by our own pain.”

Those who permit the inevitable pain of life to render them inactive are the most pitiable of people. And although Dubus speaks quite truthfully about the love he feels for all his characters, he has open pity for the many of them that are lukewarm, like Polly of his story “The Pretty Girl.” Spiritually lazy, Polly drifts through life on her good looks, makes no real choices for herself, and ends up with a miserable husband who stalks and rapes her. Polly does not deserve the rape, but Dubus suggests that she doomed herself far earlier by living a passive life. When she finally does act decisively, getting a gun and shooting her husband when he comes for her again, she is paralyzed by the consequence of her actions, leaving him to bleed to death on the floor. Dubus told an interviewer the biggest problem was that Polly was not even aware that she lived her life so poorly. “What’s wrong with her life is that there’s nothing she loves and wants. She’s passive … she’s got to stop being just a pretty girl.”

Since passivity is the problem, activity is the solution. In Dubus’ fictional world, men and women have nearly equal opportunities to achieve redemption through action, a kind of redemption that they may better achieve when they are unaware that they are achieving it. “Rose,” another story of domestic abuse, is vintage Dubus. The narrator is a man who listens to a woman tell her story to him in a bar and then interprets that story for the reader via his redemption-through-action philosophy.

Although the narrator does not hold all of Dubus’ religious convictions, that philosophy of action is Dubus’ own. Indeed, Dubus deliberately makes the narrator an atheist to show that an active nonbeliever comes closer to redemption than do wishy-washy Catholics. It is the atheist narrator who speaks the truth that Rose and her husband Jim were Catholics who were “never truly members” of that faith because

they could not see a single act as a renunciation or affirmation of a belief, a way of life. No. They had neither a religion nor a philosophy; like most people I know, their philosophies were simply their accumulated reactions to their daily circ*mstance, their lives as they lived them from one hour to the next. They were not driven, guided, by either passionate belief or strong resolve. And for that I pity them both, as I pity others who move through life like scraps of paper in the wind.

But to the delight of the narrator, Rose proves herself to be more than a scrap of paper in the wind. She rescues her children from the house her husband had set on fire, clearly ready in that moment of unselfconscious love to give her life for theirs. And although she survives to tell her story in despair rather than triumph, believing she does not deserve her own children, the narrator celebrates her heroism. The life she had previously chosen for herself in passivity had “slowly turned on her, pressed against her from all sides, invisible, motionless,” but through her recent action she “re-entered motherhood, and the unity we all must gain against human suffering … she redeemed herself, with action, and with less than thirty minutes of it.”

Dubus shows his love for characters like Rose by putting them into these situations. He liked to tell stories of moral and ethical dilemmas because, like a fork in the road, they force action. They prove—or disprove—one’s spiritual mettle. Dilemmas foreground the fact that life is a series of decisions, and they illustrate how one makes decisions, whether from the will or from the heart, from right action or from what feels good at the time.

One of Dubus’ best treatments of such a dilemma is the oft-anthologized “A Father’s Story.” A Catholic parent, Luke Ripley, has the kind of real, down-to-earth faith that Dubus admires. He is aware of the need to give God praise for his very breath, to honor him with gratitude in the daily action of life—”while making the bed and boiling water for coffee, I talk to God: I offer Him my day, every act of my body and spirit, my thoughts and mood, as a prayer of thanksgiving.” But Luke’s peace is challenged, as it always will be in a broken world. His daughter, driving alone at night, hits and kills a man on the side of the road and returns to her father, sobbing. Instead of reporting the accident to the police or to his friend, Father Paul, Luke covers up for his daughter and thus loses his peace.

Guilty and defiant, Luke accuses God of never having had a daughter. For Dubus, a father himself to four daughters, the father/daughter relationship is one especially charged with passion, the desire to shield and protect whatever the moral cost. But for all its purity, that passion is dangerous because it can cloud the judgment necessary for right action. Right action always comes from commitment to love. To love, says Dubus, means “to be loving. But it also means to do what’s right—what’s truly right for your daughter, say, instead of what feels right at the time … to have that sort of integrity requires a combination of judgment and experience and feeling.” Luke Ripley, though he has the resources to attain it, does not act out of that integrity, and it costs him.

“A Father’s Story” is interesting because Luke has a real connection to a tradition that would enable right action if he would choose it. Dubus believed that most Americans lack integrity because it “requires a sense of historical direction,” and most people “seem to live as if the world began when they were born.” For Dubus, the sense of historical direction is fading because the Catholic Church is losing influence. Being a Catholic entails the re-enactment in the Eucharist of Christ’s salvific action, both in becoming flesh and then sacrificing that flesh for others—an action undertaken in history at a specific time and place. Though the world is fallen, Christ’s incarnation proves that the creation is itself a good gift, worthy of the action he will take to redeem it.

But how exactly does one live out that sacramental understanding? In Dubus’ 1977 story “Adultery,” faith commitments clash head on with the power of human need and loneliness. The story describes a woman named Edith who is married to a selfish and adulterous writer, Hank. Edith becomes the lover of a lapsed Catholic priest, Joe, who is dying of cancer. Dubus pushes against all kinds of boundaries here—the Catholic fixation on sexual sin, the issue of celibacy in the priesthood, and the difference between an adulterous attitude like Hank’s and a committed love like that that between Edith and Joe.

Joe’s struggle with guilt leads him to abandon the practice of his faith in order for him to keep his belief in its sacramental truth, which is wound together for him now with human sexuality:

He maintained and was committed to the belief that making love could parallel and even merge with the impetus and completion of the Eucharist. Else why make love at all, he said, except for meat in meat, making ourselves meat, drawing our circle of mortality not around each other but around our vain and separate hearts. But if she were free to love him, each act between them would become a sacrament, each act a sign of their growing union in the face of God and death.

Although adultery is not clearly condoned, Dubus confirmed in an interview that the story ends with a celebration of Edith’s decision to divorce Hank. Since it approaches blasphemy for Dubus to invoke the Eucharist in this situation, the move invites some thorny questions. Who gets to decide which commitments are absolutely binding and which can be bent? Can an action really become a sacrament through a decision of the will, even if you break other commitments in the process? That Dubus cannot or will not answer these questions probably has more to do with his personal struggles than anything else.

“Adultery” is just one of many stories in which—though they are not strictly autobiographical—one feels Dubus struggling with the failed commitments in his own life, the choices and rationalizations he must have made, the times when he acted in ways that were not ultimately redemptive. He had left the Marines in 1964 when his father died, and went with his first wife to the University of Iowa to get an MFA and commit himself to the writing life. He had three children by his first wife (one of the children, Andre Dubus III, is himself a successful writer). After Iowa, Dubus and his family moved to Massachusetts, where he would live the rest of his life. He divorced his first wife in 1970, remarried in 1979, and had three more children before that marraige ended. Dubus didn’t write or say much about either divorce, though occasionally he hinted that not maintaining his marriages was his deepest regret. In spite of these personal difficulties he became as successful as a short story writer can be in America, winning a Guggenheim in 1986 and the coveted MacArthur “genius” fellowship a few years later. It was just before the birth of his youngest child, Madeleine, that he stopped by the road to help someone in need and nearly died.

By Dubus’ own admission, the accident knocked him out of writing seriously for two years. He was operated on 12 times, had to endure intense physical therapy, and had days in which he could not control his bowels. He struggled with thoughts of suicide. He was frustrated at having to be cared for. Eventually Dubus’ second wife left him; whether that was because he could not receive the care, or she tired of giving it, is unclear.

Nevertheless, true to his character and to his convictions about the redemptive power of action, Dubus returned to his work, using the accident to write about the same issues that had always interested him. These essays, appearing in Broken Vessels and Meditations from a Movable Chair, are not maudlin in any way. At first he deals with the accident by remembering it amid the sort of heroic action he admired. Though he had blacked out and did not remember much, he eventually discovers from talking to others that he must have grabbed the woman and pushed her to the side of the highway, away from the approaching car: “I knew, from the first moments in the stationary ambulance, that a car struck me because I was standing where I should have been; and, some time later, in the hospital I knew I had chosen to stand there, rather than leap toward the guard rail.” He had to see his own action in the event as potentially saving the woman’s life in order to be able to accept it.

As the years passed and Dubus continued to write about the accident, something changed. In a subtle but fundamental shift, he began to write about human brokenness—especially his own—in a way that had never been truly available to him before. It started with the full recognition of the reality of his physical transformation: a man who had so enjoyed feeling the strength in his legs while running had to learn new ways to exercise. He had to learn to slow down; a cripple, he says, takes three times as long to do anything.

There were blessings in return. The slowing down offered an opportunity to even more fully possess the idea of life as sacrament. In one essay, he acknowledges that he had always been grateful for the legs that enabled him to run, but that he never really thanked God or anyone for them. He delights in the Eucharist more openly than ever because he needs for Christ’s love to be tangible, a real connection between this world and the spiritual one:

See Also

Page 2115 – Christianity Today

Being at mass and receiving Communion give me joy and strength. Receiving Communion of desire on my bed does not, for I cannot feel joy with my brain alone. I need sacraments I can receive through my senses. I need God manifested as Christ, who ate and drank and shat and suffered, and laughed.

With the definition of sacrament made simple—”an outward sign of God’s love”—the sacraments can be found everywhere for Dubus; they are not limited to the seven of Catholic doctrine. “The church is catholic, the world is catholic, and there are seven times seventy sacraments, to infinity.” He sees God’s presence in the simple act of making sandwiches for his daughters, now that he is forced to focus on every action he makes:

on Tuesdays when I make lunches for my girls, I focus on this: the sandwiches are sacraments. Not the miracle of transubstantiation, but certainly parallel with it, moving in the same direction. If I could give my children my body to eat, again and again without losing it, my body like the loaves and fishes going endlessly into mouths and stomachs, I would do it. And each motion is a sacrament, this holding of plastic bags, of knives, of bread, of cutting board, this pushing of the chair, this spreading of mustard on bread, this trimming of liverwurst, of ham. All sacraments, as putting the lunches into a zippered book bag is, and going down my six ramps to my car is.

In the new slowness of his life, Dubus seemed to learn something vital about receiving the sacraments instead of achieving them. The accident took away much of the power of his own body, a body he had always thought of as a tool or as a weapon to defend others. A man who had written about the importance of physical challenges to male initiation had to struggle, during intense physical therapy, with the need to redefine manhood:

Moving across the long therapy room with beds, machines, parallel bars, and exercise bicycles, I said through my weeping: I’m not a man among men anymore and I’m not a man among women either. Kathy and Betty gently told me I was fine. Mrs. T said nothing, backing ahead of me, watching me leg, my face, my body. We kept working. … It’s in Jeremiah, she said. The potter is making a pot and it cracks. So he smashes it, and makes a new vessel. You can’t make a new vessel out of a broken one. It’s time to find the real you.

The “real” Dubus is still the man who would act first, who would give his body for others. But the real Dubus is now also one who understands human limitations, especially his own. He knows that he cannot ultimately protect anyone in his life, not even the women, whose protection calls upon what he feels as the highest impulse.

In the late essay “Giving up the Gun,” Dubus realizes that by always carrying a gun—for the best of reasons, to be prepared to defend the weak—he has become more likely to use a gun even when it should stay holstered. He recalls a conflict outside a bar, when he used his gun from instinct, an instinct he now wants to retrain: “That night on the sidewalk, my only instinct had been to aim a gun. I had no conflict, because I had only one choice. Now I wanted more choices, and I wanted to know what they were.” He understands that the responsibility of accidentally killing someone is the price one might pay for self-reliant and unselfconscious activity. And so Dubus gives up the gun—to God:

Then, as I looked out the train window at snow on the ground, one sentence came to me: With my luck, I’ll kill someone.

That was all. Luck was not the accurate word, and I do not know what the accurate word is. But with that sentence, I felt the fence and gate, not even the lawn and porch and door to the house of sorrow I would live in if I killed someone. Then I felt something detach itself from my soul, departing, rising, vanishing; and I said to God: It’s up to you now. This is not the humble and pure and absolutely spiritual love of turning the other cheek. It is not an answer to turn someone else’s cheek. On the train, I gave up answers that are made of steel that fire lead, and decided to sit in a wheelchair on the frighteningly invisible palm of God.

A number of stories in Dubus’ final collection, Dancing After Hours, illustrate just how easy it is to enter into the sorrow of causing someone else’s death. Although Dubus never judges his characters for their responses, the stories suggest that the characters have yet to learn the paradox that his essays outline: to surrender one’s will to God opens up more choices, including the choice of right action in the place of mere action.

It is not surprising that in the late essays, such as “Bastille Day,” Dubus revisits his relationship with his father, seeing the two of them more equally now as “mere men.” In 1988, Dubus catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror and sees his weakness as a reflection of his father’s weakness before he died. It is an essay about reduction, diminishment; Dubus’ accident is teaching him how little is really required to live. But the essay is far from defeatist. His father had sung the “Marseillaise” to them; now, writes Dubus, the battle looks different. It is still a fight against weakness, but the challenge is to move toward grace: “I see him assaulting with me the gate, the walls, the prison and armory of our flesh: my father in his final and radiant harmony, and I crippled in my chair: mere men, rushing to grace.”

And as Dubus writes tenderly of his father’s death, and of how he learned to communicate love to him through his actions, we get a picture of how Dubus must have faced his own death in 1998. Dubus’ faith, his learned ability to live in gratitude for the gifts of the present moment, ultimately enabled him to receive his death in its own time instead of taking his life as Hemingway had done. Hemingway sought to control his life as he had controlled his fiction; he attempted in both to triumph over inescapable pain—to act, in some way, against it. In contrast, I suspect that Andre Dubus died as he lived, with the joy of learning a spiritual balance few of us attain.

To read him now is to learn that while we must indeed receive grace—we cannot merit or control the gifts we have been given any more than we can effect our own existence—we must achieve gratitude by living fully in the present moment, giving away in love what we have been given. It is a kind of active passivity—we choose to receive. Living life well and writing well are in the end the same challenge: to concentrate, to receive, to affirm, to give. Dubus’ final gift to his readers is the gift that his condition was to him. “My crippling is a daily and living sculpture of certain truths: we receive and we lose, and we must try to achieve gratitude; and with that gratitude to embrace with whole hearts whatever of life remains after the losses.”

Christina Bieber is assistant professor of English at Wheaton College.

- More fromChristina Bieber

Michael Cromartie

A conversation with Gilles Kepel

View Issue
Subscribe
Give a Gift
Archives

In 1984 the French scholar Gilles Kepel published a pathbreaking study of modern Islamist movements, issued the following year in a slightly updated edition in English translation as Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and Pharaoh (Univ. of California Press). Kepel, who is professor of Middle East Studies at the Institute for Political Studies in Paris, has revisited the subject in his important book, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, published last year by Harvard University Press. Michael Cromartie spoke with Kepel in December.

Some commentators on your book suggested that you paint an overly optimistic picture of the future.

Many people do not really understand what I was saying. It’s not an issue of being optimistic or pessimistic; it’s more an issue of trying to be realistic about what is taking place in the Muslim world today.

So it’s more descriptive.

Yes. And it may be perceived as optimistic because, after 9/11, many commentators—who became instant experts on the issue—have described the Muslim world as irredeemably violent, characterized above all by a deep-seated animosity against the West.

We should not mistake the tree for the forest. Making such distinctions is particularly difficult now, but I have been doing that job for 25 years. I was probably the first scholar in the West to write a book on contemporary Islamist movements, Muslim Extremism in Egypt, which I wrote in the mid-1980s. Political Islam is nothing new to me. I’ve always tried to look at it in cold blood.

Today there are signs of increasing openness to democratization. But this is really the only alternative if the whole Muslim world is not to slide back to the Stone Age. They are lagging behind everywhere. They have not created anything in terms of the advancement of science. Their scientists are increasingly poor. There is no upward social mobility. What they have is oil and nothing else. And oil is unevenly distributed. This is the big challenge they are facing.

You say that political Islam has been “two-pronged” from the outset. On the one hand are the Khomeinists, who were behind the 1979 revolution in Iran. On the other hand are the Wahhabis, whose influence is strongest in Saudi Arabia. How are these two kinds of political Islam different?

Well, Khomeinism needed to mobilize the impoverished masses, in order to achieve the aim of toppling the Shah’s system. When Saddam Hussein attacked Iran, the year after the revolution, those impoverished masses were sent to their death in the Iraqi minefields. Much the same thing happened in the French Revolution with the sans-culottes. After the revolution, they were sent to Italy to pillage and loot so they would be estranged from the political center in France. But the Khomeinists had to mobilize the downtrodden masses to bring about revolution, and so from the outset their movement had a socially revolutionary parlance.

In contrast, the Wahhabis were never social revolutionaries. They were, and still are, social conservatives. Their understanding of religion favors the dominance of central Arabian Peninsula Bedouins, and has been used to legitimize their possession of the oil money from the Saudi royal family. To accomplish that, they needed two things. First, they needed to be in a very close alliance with the United States, a deal which was done when FDR met with Ibn Saud after the Yalta conference in February 1945. And, at the same time, they needed to buy peace with their local constituency. They used Islam as a means, if you will: by pretending to be exceedingly pious and uncompromising in religious matters, they deflected criticism for being stooges to the United States and for using the oil money disproportionately for themselves.

Wahhabi Islam was an ally of the West during the Cold War, against Soviet influence in the Middle East, particularly in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and South Yemen—and ultimately in Afghanistan. After the success of the Iranian revolution in 1979, the Khomeinists hoped to unify the diverse Islamic movements under their control. In response, the United States encouraged the Wahhabi establishment as a counterforce within Islam that might attract young radicals, not to Iran, where they would be used against the West, but to jihad in Afghanistan, where they could be enrolled against the Soviet Union.

You describe a power struggle between these two versions of political Islam throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

Yes, and this has to be understood in the light of U.S. policy. Clearly, through the 1980s there was a strategy of containment, which was designed around Iran so that the Islamic revolution would not spread. Saddam Hussein—who then, we have to remember, was the darling of the West and the darling of conservative Arab states—attacked Iran with the West’s blessing on September 22, 1980. That led to an eight-year trench war, which was absolutely awful, between Iran and Iraq. And simultaneously, there was the jihad in Afghanistan, which was supposed to distract radical revolutionary Muslim youth from attacking the West.

From one point of view, the strategy worked spectacularly well. In 1988 Khomeini had, as he said himself, “to drink from the poisoned chalice,” i.e., he had to sign a cease-fire treaty with Saddam Hussein. And on February 15, 1989, Gorbachev decided to pull out of Afghanistan, which sounded the death knell for the Soviet empire. Everyone focuses on fall of the Berlin Wall, which took place the same year. But there would have been no bringing down of the Berlin Wall had there not been a Soviet pullout that signaled a clear military defeat of the seemingly invincible Red Army.

When I was kid in France, when I wouldn’t eat my soup or whatever, people told me, “You have to be good, otherwise the Soviets in 48 hours can reach you!” The Red Army was seen as a threat. They had been equipped with tanks that could roam all over the flat plains of Central Europe. But they proved inefficient on the very different terrain of Afghanistan. And the shoulder-launched Stinger missiles kept Russian planes out of the skies.

Afghanistan was crucial. I think that historians of the Cold War have downplayed it because they focus on Europe. But the test was Afghanistan. Afghanistan was the Vietnam of the Soviet Union. It was a Vietnam that led to the demise of the entire Soviet empire, which was not the case for the real Vietnam, from which the United States recovered even though it was weakened significantly.

In 1989, then, U.S. policymakers believed that this issue of radical Islam was under control. My contention would be—and I know this is difficult for an American audience to accept—that to a large extent, 9/11 was the “chickens coming home to roost.” That is, it was the outcome of this cheap war in Afghanistan. The United States thought the Afghan jihad was a bargain because no American kids died there; it was only those bearded guys who were freedom fighters, who had no mothers, who would not come to the mall and protest; no Vietnam War mothers. And it was a bargain because the cost of the war was $1.2 billion a year, half of which was covered by the Saudis and the Kuwaitis. Six hundred million dollars a year to topple the Soviet Union was peanuts.

But the war in Afghanistan proved to be a turning point for the Islamist movement. Those who had fought there believed that there was no time anymore for an alliance between the pious middle classes and the young urban revolutionaries. They argued that the Islamist movement should mimic the Afghan jihad experience, seeking to implement something similar in Egypt, in Bosnia, and so on, a sort of guerrilla warfare to seize power.

For their part, the pious middle classes were frightened out of the movement by the violence of the radical youth. Gradually, they sought a new type of alliance with the secular middle classes against authoritarian regimes. So on the one hand, we have bin Laden, who engaged in ultra-terrorism—terrorism as a means to mobilize people through spectacular violence that then is transmitted by the media. And on the other hand, there is the Turkish experiment. In the Justice and Development Party founded by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, you have a core group who in the old days were allied with the radicals, but who have now severed their ties with them, finding common cause with the secular middle classes on the basis of an anti-authoritarian program. The result is a hybrid party, led by former Islamists who now say their goal is democracy, getting into the European Union, and so on. They have to be taken at their word, and we’ll see what happens next. Will they continue to meld with the upwardly mobile secular middle classes, or will they be driven back toward radical violence?

We in the West should be very careful in our analysis. I do not believe that political Islam is a unified movement. On the contrary, it continues to be racked with internal strife and contradictions. We have to assess those contradictions very clearly if we want to understand what we are dealing with.

Does that make you optimistic about the decline of radical Islam?

It’s not the decline of radical Islam. It’s the decline of Islamism as a movement that was able to reconcile the deprived, radical youth and the middle classes. My contention is that the key group within this cluster was the pious middle classes. And they are now seeking alliances with secular middle classes, as in Turkey. Then the radicals are marginalized. That is why they engage in spectacular violence, in order to mobilize those around them. This is a very volatile situation, especially given the potential war on Iraq. Depending upon how the war is managed, those pious middle classes may revert to an alliance with the radicals—if, for instance, the war with Iraq is perceived as a war against Islam—or, on the contrary, they may cling to their newfound alliance with the secular middle classes.

And your prediction is?

I don’t know. I think it will largely depend on how the war is implemented.

- More fromMichael Cromartie

Bruce Kuklick

Rescuing Nathaniel Taylor

View Issue
Subscribe
Give a Gift
Archives

Douglas Sweeney’s biography of the 19th-century theologian Nathaniel Taylor is part of a whole wave of scholarship on high American religious history propelled by Oxford University Press and Harry Stout’s Religion in America series, and Eerdmans’ Library of Religious Biography, edited by Mark Noll, Nathan O. Hatch, and Allen Guelzo. This new religious history has many facets, but one of them, which Sweeney’s Nathaniel Taylor exhibits, is the attempt to breathe life into the history of American divinity. The book under review is a more than competent examination of Taylor’s ideas, but I am dubious if its style of presentation will resuscitate the subject.

Sweeney focuses on Taylor’s theology, which he knows inside-out and which he lays out in an articulate fashion. Although the body of the book is short (150 pages), the 100 pages of notes are a treasure trove for the serious scholar. Sweeney aims to demolish the view of Taylor as a clever Arminian; he argues that while Taylor did have a major impact on evangelicalism and revivalism, it was beneficial and in the respectable and “orthodox” tradition of Jonathan Edwards. While Sweeney may be pushing the conventional interpretation of Taylor a bit, his characterization of Taylor as far more than a high-class Charles Finney is certainly correct. But Sweeney’s overall strategy, which is to concentrate on Taylor’s claims to be an Edwardsean, does not satisfy me.

As many readers of this magazine will be aware, Taylor made his career at the Yale Divinity School. When Congregationalism in New England seemed to have reached a dead-end composed of a rigid theoretical determinism, on the one hand, and an inability to combat various Massachusetts religious liberals, on the other, Taylor revitalized thinking by elaborating on a spontaneous human freedom. His scheme avoided problems of Calvinist fatalism and provided the framework for a socially concerned ministry to operate in southern New England. Taylor had a set of brains to marvel at, and Sweeney is at his best in explicating his vision. Sweeney also emphasizes, rightly, that Taylor thought of himself as carrying on the tradition of Edwards, and demonstrates at length not just the quality of Taylor’s ideas but the way in which Taylor tried to think the tradition out of some of the troubles it had gotten itself into in its 75-year commentary on Edwards.

This is all to the good, but over and over again Sweeney tells us that Taylor was himself an Edwardsean. This special pleading falls short for three connected reasons.

First, Edwards’ philosophical inheritance lies in Locke and Hume; Taylor’s in Reid and Stewart. The latter developed a full-blown faculty psychology that is different from that of the former. Edwards’ philosophy of mind contradicts Taylor’s. It is as persuasive to call Taylor an Edwardsean as it is to call Reid a Lockean.

The second reason is that, consistent with his psychology, Taylor did elaborate a notion of the will’s “power to the contrary.” The bride at the altar could have said no, instead of yes, were her circ*mstances and character the same; she could have done otherwise—period. Not so for Edwards. He was a believer in a deterministic, causally governed world. This is the fundamental tenet of Freedom of the Will. Do we want to call someone an Edwardsean who denies this tenet?

The final reason is connected to this one, and readers will pardon an excursus into the thicket of theology. But it is necessary to make a point, for it is just this thicket that Sweeney cultivates.

For Taylor, the efficient cause of an act was the bride’s free will, an act of willing initiated by nothing but itself. Taylor himself did not think Edwards had stigmatized this position and made his own position compatible with Freedom of the Will by noting Edwards’ inferences from the work of his English Arminian antagonists, Daniel Whitby and Thomas Chubb. For Edwards, these men argued that a person acted without motives and, consequently, that the will was determined only by itself. Then, according to Edwards’ famous argument, a previous act of will determined the initial act. Edwards’ inference might have been fair, but no one defended such a position, for all believed that no one acted in the absence of motives, even if individuals were free to act, or not to act, in spite of all motives. Indeed, Taylor explicitly said that the will always acted with motives, so that the will alone never determined action—thereby, he thought, agreeing with the president. But his reason for agreeing was not that the will lacked spontaneity (which Edwards denied), but that motives always accompanied willing. Edwards’ original opponents in actuality limited the spontaneous power of the will in the same way that Taylor did. The will had a competency to attend or not to attend to a presented motive, and to act or not to act as it pleased. Do we want to call someone an Edwardsean who stands on this issue with Whitby and Chubb?

Why is Sweeney driven to make Taylor an Edwardsean? Some of this is a quibble over who gets called what, and the semantics leave much to be desired. I don’t care if Taylor is an Edwardsean or not. But Sweeney’s interest needs to be explained.

The main group of historians who see Taylor as a trickster and underminer of Calvinist verities are practicing Presbyterians, still clinging to the idea that Charles Hodge at Princeton should be regarded as the 19th century’s great figure, a thinker still unappreciated. Sweeney, I believe, is taking on this historiographic tradition. He wants to rescue Taylor from the descendants of the enemies he acquired at Princeton in the 1830s.

I sympathize with the rescue of Taylor, but what Sweeney has in mind is not the right way to go about it. Taylor is the major creative religious philosopher in America in the 100-year period between Edwards and Bushnell. To regard him as great, we do not need to claim him for the Edwardsean tradition; he is no more Edwardsean than Bushnell is, or is not, a Taylorian; or Edwards is a Lockean. He is just Taylor. Sweeney’s categorization—or rather the fact that he puts so much weight on making the categorization—suggests to me he is still caught up in the battles of 19th-century theology, as if what is at issue is how close, or not so close, these men were to The Truth of Edwards.

I began this review by intimating that one problem at issue is how likely it is that volumes such as Sweeney’s will resurrect these long gone but remarkably astute divines. I believe such studies of ideas will revitalize general interest in these men if the studies find a way themselves to break out of the grip of the New England Theology. If you doubt this conclusion, try to interest yourself in my paragraph eight.

Bruce Kuklick is Nichols Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author most recently of A History of Philosophy in America: 1720-2000 (Oxford Univ. Press).

- More fromBruce Kuklick

Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe

What should we make of Horace Bushnell?

View Issue
Subscribe
Give a Gift
Archives

What should we make of Horace Bushnell, that pivotal figure in 19th-century American religion? Brave pathfinder of fresh and relevant ways to express evangelical truth in a rapidly changing modern world? Misguided romantic whose subjectivism squeezed out biblical-theological authority and hence the gospel itself? Does he model for postmoderns creative faithfulness—or apostasy? Or is the quest to decode his (or any historical figure’s) “message” for the 21st-century church itself an unfruitful, old-fashioned enterprise?

Bruce Mullin’s deeply researched and well-written study of Horace Bushnell, published in Eerdmans’ Library of Religious Biography series during the bicentennial of his birth, is a different sort of book than would have appeared in previous generations. Bushnell himself, one of the last great New England pastor-theologians, felt misunderstood by contemporaries and believed that only future generations would be able to appropriate his religious ideas. Most interpreters, accordingly, have presented him straightforwardly as a pioneer. Admirers have found it easy to describe what Bushnell meant for their own day. Mullin resists this temptation, aiming rather to understand Bushnell on his own terms and in his own time. If this seems a humbler approach, it is one that results in a more sophisticated piece of scholarship than that typically produced in the days of Protestant optimism.

When progressive Protestants observed the centennial of Horace Bushnell’s birth in 1902 (26 years after his death), they could claim him confidently as the father of theological liberalism in America. If religious movements need a symbolic Luther or Wesley, then the pastor-theologian of Hartford, while no founder in the institutional sense, would do well enough. Washington Gladden, Theodore Munger, and similar-minded liberals looked to him as their inspiration and resonated with his call for “the softer standards of feeling and the broader compass of a more Catholic and genial spirit” to replace the dry rigidity of “exclusive and destructive dogmas.” He was “the American Coleridge,” ruminating on the symbolic nature of language, and “the American Schleiermacher,” celebrating experience over doctrine.

True, his embarrassing antebellum views on slavery, belief in modern-day miracles, fascination with speaking in tongues and other spiritual gifts, rejection of Darwinism, and denunciation (in 1869) of woman suffrage as “the reform against nature” would have to be overlooked. But his 1847 CLASSic Christian Nurture, in its expanded 1861 edition, provided a foundation for the psychologically based Christian education movement. His repeated attempts at expounding the atonement as God’s expression of sacrificial love, while far from compelling as constructive doctrine, completed the purge of substitutionary theories begun by the older New England Theology—while respectfully retaining a place for Christ’s work on the cross and for biblical “altar imagery.”

Then there was his New England pedigree, his place in what was construed as sacred history. Not long after his death, historians began to describe Bushnell as simultaneously the end of the whole Puritan-Edwardsean line and the beginning of a new era in Protestant theology. Leaders in the older American Protestant traditions—including Bushnell’s own by-then thoroughly progressive Congregational denomination—saw to the republication of his writings in the 1890s and early 1900s. They smugly assumed that theological liberalism or some version of “progressive orthodoxy” would win over not only the churches but the national culture in the new era about to unfold.

One of the many ironies surrounding American religion at the turn of the 20th century was that those who embraced “modern” religious, scientific, and social ideas—and sought to reconcile these areas of thought and life—did so for essentially conservative reasons. Like Bushnell, they longed, if not for a return to “the age of homespun,” at least for the kind of social cohesion and integrated worldview exemplified by the New England town with its church on the green. Bushnell, and those who celebrated him a hundred years ago, assumed that American society would be shaped first and foremost by Yankees—liberated Puritans—the nation’s God-ordained New England diaspora. It was a patrician vision which died hard over the course of the 20th century.

In his avoidance of speculation on contemporary relevance, Bruce Mullin differs from Bushnell’s other recent biographer, Robert L. Edwards, a pastor who played out his career in the same towns and churches as his subject and whose appreciative portrayal concludes with an assessment of his ongoing relevance for the church.1 The closest Mullin comes to this may be his provocative suggestion that Bushnell was as much a proto-Pentecostal as he was a proto-liberal. His odd-couple friendship with evangelist-cum-professor Charles G. Finney (himself something of a proto-Pentecostal who preached “entire sanctification” and “Holy Ghost baptism”) suggests the hopeful possibility of holding together religious impulses that almost always flew apart in the 20th century.

But Bushnell didn’t travel in holiness circles—not even the genteel version available in the New York City parlor of Phoebe Palmer, much less the variety encountered at rough and ready tent meetings where God might deliver the Acts chapter 2 spiritual gifts Bushnell believed were still operative in the modern world. In his fascination with beyond-the-ordinary (“supernatural”) experiential religion—phenomena Ann Taves has discussed so impressively in Fits, Trances and Visions—Bushnell the scholarly Yankee anticipates William James more than he does Maria Woodworth-Etter, Charles Fox Parham, or William J. Seymour.2

Mullin effectively presents Bushnell as a figure of his time who, like others of his self-consciously transitional generation, was “far more in tune with the immediate past than … with the coming future.” If Bushnell was “a bold innovator, reconceptualizing … almost everything that crossed his path,” his style was more accurately that of “a great tinkerer, always interested in improving that which he found before him.” Not so much a major theologian as an earnest preacher, the Bushnell discovered by Mullin is a Yankee who can’t shake off his Puritanism, “profoundly conservative” in his “desire to preserve the values and confidences of the world of his youth.”

Mullin argues convincingly that Bushnell’s primary concern from the beginning of his ministry in 1832 was the reestablishment of cultural hegemony by “the children of the Puritans.” The New England social covenant had been swept away by Irish Catholic immigration and the rise of a strong Episcopal Church (headed in Connecticut by Bishop Thomas Church Brownell who, with his ironically similar last name, engaged Bushnell directly in controversy). Bushnell’s cutting-edge work on the metaphorical nature of religious language and doctrine represented his attempt to move beyond the theological disputes that had racked Congregationalism for the entire century since Jonathan Edwards—and to find a way of reuniting the whole body of Trinitarian and Unitarian New England churches which had been rent by schism in the first decades of the century.

The crucial year Bushnell spent in Europe, 1845-46, further reinforced his anti-Episcopal sentiments and his vision of church unity. Mullin can’t decide whether Bushnell was a “middle-aged minister” with 15 years under his belt when he made the trip or “a young pastor coming into contact with an ever-enlarging world.” Since Bushnell was 43 at the time, and since Mullin shows that upon his return he launched into the most productive and controversial period of his career, the trip obviously came at just the right time to re-energize the now-veteran pastor who was entering his prime. Perhaps most important, in Britain he made friends with John Daniel Morell, a young pastor who was developing in his own writings the thought of Schleiermacher and German Romanticism. Bushnell’s lectures, sermons, and books from 1846 to 1849—Christian Nurture and God in Christ, followed in 1851 by Christ in Theology—built upon what he observed and learned during this European tour.

The heart of Mullin’s book, contained in chapters 5 through 8, is his close reading of Bushnell’s publications during the full decade between his return from the European tour in 1846 and 1857, when he published Nature and the Supernatural following his sojourn in California. Regarding the legacy of the New England tradition, Bushnell viewed the Puritans “in the opposite way from Lyman Beecher” who had sought “pan-evangelical unity in the face of Unitarianism and unbelief.” For Bushnell “peoplehood took the place of ecclesia” and “the memory of the Puritans,” with their social covenant, provided “a symbol of pan-New England unity in the face of both revivalism and episcopacy.”

Mullin explores Bushnell’s efforts at “reimagining theology in the name of religion” and the storm of controversy which ensued with deft precision. He is less adept at explaining why this pastor, who espoused the irenic ideal of Christian unity and criticized the divisiveness of theological wrangling, would reject the olive branches continually offered by colleagues who disagreed with his views but loved him still. But then, as the author tells us up front, this is a “public” life of Bushnell which does not delve much into his personal or family life. The fact that in Nature and the Supernatural—which Mullin considers “Bushnell’s masterpiece”—personal knowledge and experience of God return almost shockingly to center stage suggests that much about the inner life of Horace Bushnell remains to be explored.

The Puritan As Yankee will become the standard modern biography of Horace Bushnell. The 25-page bibliographical essay, which the Eerdmans series includes in lieu of footnotes, is not only thorough but a fascinating chapter in itself. While Mullin wisely declines to give us a Bushnell for the 21st century, concluding that he left “a questionable legacy,” we are spiritually and intellectually richer for this engaging portrait of the Bushnell of the 19th century.

Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe directs the D. Min. program and teaches at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. His writings include Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of America Evangelicalism (Eerdmans.)

1. Robert L. Edwards, Of Singular Genius, Of Singular Grace (Pilgrim Press, 1992).

2. Ann Taves, Fits, Trances and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton Univ. Press, 1999). See also Mullin’s earlier book, Miracles and the Modern Religious Imagination (Yale Univ. Press, 1996).

- More fromCharles E. Hambrick-Stowe

Mark R. Amstutz

The moral responsibility to halt genocide

View Issue
Subscribe
Give a Gift
Archives

The term “genocide” was coined in the mid-20th century by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew, who first became concerned with ethnic killing when the civilized world failed to hold Turkey accountable for the mass extermination of Armenians during World War I. After Germany invaded his homeland, Lemkin fled to the United States, where he continued his single-minded struggle to combat the deliberate and systematic efforts to destroy national, ethnic, racial, or religious groups of people. Since this crime did not have a name, he developed the concept “genocide,” rooted in the Greek geno, meaning “race” or “tribe,” and the Latin suffix cide, meaning “killing.”

Based upon Lemkin’s indefatigable efforts, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution in December 1946 condemning genocide “as contrary to moral law and to the aims and spirit of the United Nations.” More importantly, the measure called for drafting a treaty that would ban this crime. Two years later the General Assembly approved unanimously the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Since the convention defined genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” it ironically omitted the most destructive source of mass, systematic killing in the 20th century—namely, violence inspired by politics and ideology. The omission of political and ideological violence was deliberate, however, since Lemkin wanted to develop an international legal concept that distinguished violence in war from the deliberate extermination of people groups. In 1967 Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin became convinced that the United States needed to become party to the genocide convention and vowed to address this topic daily until it was ratified—a vow that resulted in 3,211 senate speeches over 19 years! Although the Convention entered into force in 1950, the United States did not formally ratify it until 1988.

While the defense of justice permits states to undertake humanitarian intervention, states have been extremely reluctant to intervene solely for moral purposes. Even the United States—a country that has regarded itself as a beacon of human freedom—has been far more eager to undertake foreign intervention for ideological purposes than for the defense of human rights. “No U.S. president,” Samantha Power writes in “A Problem From Hell,” “has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence.”1

A former Balkan war correspondent and current head of Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Power examines the role of the United States toward six major 20th-century genocides (all of the numbers that follow are rough estimates): the slaughter of 1-1.5 million Armenians by the Turkish Empire in 1914-15; the mass extermination of two million Cambodians by communist militants (Khmer Rouge) in 1975-79; the killing of 100,000 Iraqi Kurds by the troops of Saddam Hussein in 1987-88, including the massacre of 5,000 Kurds with chemical weapons; the l992-95 Serb genocide of Bosnian Muslims, resulting in 200,000 deaths and more than two million refugees; the l994 extermination of 800,000 Tutsis by Hutu extremists; and the 1999 Serbian killing and ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, a conflict that resulted in 8,000 deaths and the displacement of about 1.3 million Albanian Kosovars. Curiously, the book omits the genocide in Sudan—a conflict that has gone on for more than two decades and has resulted in the death of more than two million people.

The United States got involved militarily in only two of these six cases, and it did so only reluctantly and belatedly after much suffering had been inflicted on innocent persons. In the Bosnian war, the United States resorted to multilateral (NATO) action only after it was able to broker a peace accord in Dayton, Ohio, in 1995 that brought an end to the fighting among Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. And in the 1998-99 Kosovo political conflict between Serb forces and Kosovo Albanians (Kosovars), the United States waited until Serb forces had killed 3,000 Albanians and forced the expulsion of 400,000 of them. Only after Serb president Slobodan Milosevic had rejected the Rambouillet Peace Plan—a Western initiative to replace Serb army and police personnel with NATO forces in Kosovo—did the United States join its NATO allies in carrying out military action to halt Serb ethnic cleansing.2

Power shows that throughout the 20th century, the United States avoided engagement in major humanitarian crises with a variety of excuses, arguments, and denials. Using categories developed by economist Albert Hirschman (futility, perversity, jeopardy), she demonstrates that when confronted with foreign mass atrocities, U.S. decision-makers have historically justified inaction or even outright opposition to humanitarian intervention by claiming that military action was likely to be ineffective, counterproductive, or even downright harmful.

But the most fundamental reason for inaction was not lack of knowledge or lack of military and political resources to do something about it. Rather, the main reason the United States avoided humanitarian intervention was a lack of political will. “American leaders did not act because they did not want to,” Power writes. “They believed that genocide was wrong, but they were not prepared to invest the military, financial, diplomatic, or domestic political capital needed to stop it.” At stake is not simply the refusal to deploy ground troops to halt the atrocities: “U.S. policymakers did almost nothing to deter the crime. Because America’s ‘vital interests’ were not considered imperiled by mere genocide, senior U.S. officials did not give genocide the moral attention it warranted.”

The Rwanda Genocide

The most egregious moral failure in U.S. foreign policy toward mass killing is the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The 1993 Arusha Accord had ended fighting between the ruling Hutus and the Tutsi opposition, the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RFP), and called for power-sharing, internationally supervised elections, and repatriation of refugees. To help oversee the agreement, the un had established an observer force of 2,500 peacekeepers, known as the un Assistance Mission to Rwanda, or unamir. But this fragile Hutu-Tutsi peace collapsed on April 6, 1994, when the country’s president, Juvénal Habyarimana, was killed when his jet was shot down as it was landing in Kigali.

The downing of the presidential plane unleashed an immediate mass extermination campaign. Although the genocide was limited to the capital in the first few days, it quickly spread to other parts of the country through a systematic and well-orchestrated campaign led by Hutu extremists. At the height of the genocide, more than 8,000 Tutsis were being butchered daily—a killing rate that was higher than that of any other previous genocide, including the Holocaust. Much of the killing was carried out with machetes in a brutal and sad*stic manner that defies comprehension. As Power notes, “the Rwanda genocide would prove to be the fastest, most efficient killing spree of the twentieth century.”

A day after the violence broke out, the United States decided to close its embassy in Kigali and evacuate embassy personnel and other Americans from the country. At the same time, Belgian, French, and Italian soldiers intervened to evacuate 4,000 expatriates. Major General Romeo Dallaire, the head of unamir, sent several urgent messages to the United Nations, pleading for reinforcements to double his troop strength to 5,000. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Kofi Annan, the head of the un’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations, however, not only failed to support Gen. Dallaire’s request but did not even keep the Security Council informed of his reports and pleas.3 For its part, the United States—which was still recovering from the tragic death of l8 élite commandos in a peacekeeping operation in Somalia the previous October—was in no mood to get involved in another tribal or ethnic conflict in Africa. As a result, the United States not only opposed an expansion of unamir’s mission but also called for a withdrawal of the un peacekeeping operation altogether.

The killing stopped only after the Tutsi RFP had defeated the Hutu army and militia in mid-July. Once the Tutsis took control of the country, many Hutus, fearing retribution, fled to neighboring Zaire, where two million refugees and Hutu soldiers and militia filled overcrowded camps. When 2,000 refugees began dying daily from cholera and dysentery, the Clinton administration deployed 4,000 troops to confront a perilous humanitarian situation. Ironically, a government that had opposed intervention to halt a brutal genocide subsequently authorized a major humanitarian operation to confront starvation and disease.

Why did the United States fail to act in Rwanda? For Power the answer lies in domestic politics—namely, the American people did not demand such action. When Tony Lake, Clinton’s national security advisor, was asked why the United States did not make the mass killing of Tutsis a priority, he responded by saying that “the phones weren’t ringing on Rwanda.” While little domestic political pressure existed on Rwanda, significant congressional influence was being generated on Haiti after a military coup had toppled the government of elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991. Accordingly, the Clinton administration opposed military action to halt the Rwanda genocide but decided to send 20,000 troops to Haiti in September 1994 to restore democracy in that land.

Although public opinion is important in explaining the conduct of American foreign policy, a more compelling reason for foreign policy decisions is the political and moral commitments of leaders themselves. As Walter Lippmann observed long ago, public opinion is not sufficiently informed to provide a basis for governing. As a result, effective political leadership must initiate actions, explain and justify policies, and then marshal support for decisions. The question thus remains: why did the Clinton administration decide to intervene in Haiti to restore democracy when at roughly the same time it failed to act to save the lives of a half million persons in Rwanda?4

In March 1998, President Clinton traveled to Rwanda to pay his respects to the genocide victims and to apologize for the failure of the international community to halt the killing. In his comments

on the tarmac of the Kigali airport, he implied that the reason the United States had not responded to the slaughter was that he did not know. “It may seem strange to you here,” he said, “but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.”

But for Power this excuse is unconvincing. Administration officials had ample data on the widespread, systematic killing of Tutsis soon after the massacres had begun. They were unwilling to define the killing as a genocide because of their reluctance to consider the plausibility of what they regarded as morally incomprehensible acts. Deferring action until still more knowledge on the situation in Rwanda had been gathered, U.S. government officials “used the search for certainty as an excuse for paralysis and postponement.”

Reforming U.S. Foreign Policy

Power argues that if the United States is to maintain its credibility and moral authority in the international community, it will have to take more seriously the crime of genocide. The United States must be willing, as a last resort, to use its political and military power to deter and, if necessary, to halt the mass slaughter of civilians and to hold decision-makers accountable for genocide through trials.

Although Power’s indictment of American inaction is lucid and authoritative, her call for a more humane foreign policy is not fully compelling for two reasons. First, she underestimates the difficulties in distinguishing genocide from war, especially wars of self-determination. When ethnic groups like the Chechens, Kurds, or Kosovars demand political autonomy and resort to violence to press their case, how should governments respond? When two ethnopolitical groups begin fighting over the partitioning of territory, how should the international community respond to such intrastate conflicts? To a

significant degree, the brutality of wars of national self-determination derives from the resort to terror, indiscriminate killing, rape and torture, and ethnic cleansing—tactics that are not only inconsistent with the codified laws of war but also are crimes against humanity.

Power chides Secretary of State Warren Christopher for his hesitation to CLASSify the Bosnian war as genocide. But his reluctance to define this war among Bosnian Croats, Muslims, and Serbs as genocide was based not on moral insensitivity but upon an empirical assessment of the fighting. Even though Serbs were thought to be chiefly responsible for ethnic cleansing and mass killings, senior government officials assumed that all parties were partly responsible for human rights atrocities. Thus, while the United States was prepared to acknowledge “acts of genocide” in Bosnia and later in Kosovo, the reluctance to CLASSify the war as genocide was based upon the perception that the quest for political autonomy, not ethnic and religious hatred, was the driving source of the fighting.

A second shortcoming in Power’s call to action is the absence of a strategic perspective that balances power and morality, the pursuit of national interests with the demands of global justice. If the United States is to reform its foreign policy, more than moral condemnation and shame will be required. Remedying the moral poverty of U.S. inaction on genocide will require a careful analysis of the strategic constraints on foreign policy. As columnist Charles Krauthammer has noted, “To intervene solely for reasons of democratic morality is to confuse foreign policy with philanthropy. And a philanthropist gives out his own money. A statesman is a trustee.” Thus, if the United States is to become more responsive to the threat of genocide, leaders must generate greater political will on behalf of peoples victimized by their ethnicity, religion, and nationality, and devise a more effective strategy for defending the innocent. Since foreign policy involves the pursuit of vital interests, the challenge in developing a more vigorous defense of human rights is to develop a strategy that will help distinguish between brutal civil wars from mass, systematic killings.

While Power may not offer a solution to the awful problem of systematic human rights atrocities, her powerful and persuasive study provides one of the most compelling accounts of 20th-century genocide available. Her deeply moving case studies remind us that, notwithstanding the significant technological, social, and economic progress of the past century, the world remains a dangerous place where radical evil arises from time to time. And if the extraordinary power of the United States is to be used in the service of global peace and justice, then American decision-makers must be prepared to confront radical evil with the use of force.

Mark Amstutz is professor of political science at Wheaton College.

1. The title of Power’s book is taken from a statement made by Secretary of State Warren Christopher when he warned in 1993 of the dangers of U.S. involvement in the Bosnian conflict. Christopher said, “The hatred between all three groups—the Bosnians and the Serbs and the Croatians—is almost unbelievable. It’s almost terrifying, and it’s centuries old. That really is a problem from hell.”

2. To try to halt the Kosovo war, the United States, France, and Britain sponsored a peace conference at a chateau in Rambouillet, France. The so-called Rambouillet Peace Plan called for Kosovars to temporarily give up on their quest for national self-determination and for Serb police and military troops to withdraw to Serbia. A NATO peacekeeping force of 40,000 soldiers would maintain peace.

3. For an excellent account of the un failure in the Rwanda genocide, see Michael Barnett, Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda (Cornell Univ. Press, 2002).

4. The number of persons who might have been saved from the genocide by U.S. military intervention is a hotly contested topic. In The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention: Genocide in Rwanda (The Brookings Institution, 2001), Alan Kuperman argues that the largest number of people that might have been saved is 125,000. But his estimate is inadequate because he makes three dubious assumptions: a) that 500,000 Rwandans died in the genocide, rather than 800,000; b) that the U.S. government did not know for sure that a massacre was underway until three weeks into the genocide—by which time it was too late to make a significant difference; and c) that the United States could not have acted swiftly because it did not have sufficient military forces and equipment readily available. A more realistic assessment, I believe, is that a swift and well organized U.S. military intervention early into the conflict would have resulted in 400,000 to 500,000 persons being saved from the genocide.

- More fromMark R. Amstutz

Otto Selles

Religious language, believing and non-.

View Issue
Subscribe
Give a Gift
Archives

Contemporary poetry usually doesn’t make me think of catechism class. But upon receiving five books to review for this article, I was brought back to Tuesday nights, the church basem*nt, and questions and answers on human misery, deliverance, and gratitude. For when poets give their books such loaded titles as The Fall, Signs and Abominations, Atonement, or Waiting for the Paraclete, it is fair to ask if the intent is in any way theological. In other words, do these collections indicate a desire to tackle spiritual questions through verse? Or are these titles the sign of ambiguous appropriation, seizing upon the richness of religious imagery without embracing its sense? The answer is somewhere in a poetically religious middle, as talented writers put the faith they have—or had—into poetry.

David Citino’s collection The Invention of Secrecy takes perhaps the most conventional route by presenting faith as something that has lapsed into an element of poetical reflection. The initial poem begins with memories of delivering the newspaper before the morning Mass. Returning to the present, Citino sights the comet Hale-Bopp:

Never
have I seen my own going so radiant,
the sky lightening, the beauty of my death
twisting slowly its long, glittering trail.

In the title poem, he remembers “Saying the Latin answers at the Mass” and hearing “a new music.” This public connection contrasts with the privacy of reading silently, of “deceiving ourselves into believing / that, alone, we could be complete, / silent, we would not grow too full.” In another poem, “The Harrowing of Hell,” Citino argues that if hell were to exist, its horror would be “the thoughts of one mind, lukewarm, / too intent, too alone.”

Amid such secrecy, hope still springs like faith, eternally misguided, according to Citino. As a youth, he could believe that angels floated above Cleveland. Now he realizes “we’re suckers for cartoon promises.” But Citino still wonders “what happens / when the poem ends?” In the book’s final poem, “Sky Burial,” he calls upon birds to consume his dead body, fly up to the sky, and then drop his seed “to bless / the soil.” By springtime, he will “rise / from roots on tentative stems, / stand up in crowns of new green, / robes of carmine, ocher, blue.” Rejecting any idea of heaven, Citino takes Christian vocabulary to present decomposition as a thing of celestial radiance.

Like Billy Collins, Citino knows how to maintain a reader’s interest, from a “photo-booth tryst” to the tourist-shop canonization of Princess Di and Gianni Versace (“Santa Bulimia” and “St. Cool”). With a lightness of line and tone, his poems often echo in their emptiness, while others suggest a desire for renewed linguistic and spiritual communion.

In Atonement, Judith Harris uses a simple style not for ironic effect but to provide a graceful presentation of her family and Jewish upbringing. She recalls the “cold shoulder” of the displayed Torah, the congregation

parted and flowing
through two paths up the aisle
the coming and the going,
waiting for God’s judgment
from the birth of the round world
to the day of atonement,

As a child, she thought God resembled her father, angry, “middle-aged and adrift, / in the motionless garden.” In the title poem, Harris describes a trip to the market that turns into a reflection on the God she seeks:

I want to keep it simple
I want to ask God to forgive me.

When I die, I want
to walk out of my body, whole
the way someone walks out of a house
on an ordinary errand.

Harris hopes to taste of “this one gold-armored apple,” “not out of hunger, but love.” In her book, there is little question of the Messiah, except to say in the poem “Waiting” that “He does not come.” While Harris does not use poetry to promote a specific faith, Jewish or Christian, she expresses the desire for a new relationship with God, to be a new Eve in the garden, with “more light to break in.”

Linking the notion of atonement to personal memories, Harris’ writing has an undeniable therapeutic purpose. In portraits of her mother and father as well as childhood vignettes, she makes up for what was not said, what was not understood. When dealing with the present, however, her poems can border on the sentimental, in the mold of the poet looking at a tree, her daughter, her husband, etc., and sharing thoughts so deep. That said, there is much to enjoy and appreciate in Harris’ fine book.

In The Fall & Other Poems, Joseph Bottum shares Harris’ knack for finding the theological in the ordinary. For Bottum, autumn evokes nothing less than “The Fall”: “The thick remains of sin are coursing / through October’s trees to splatter / red New England’s sky with leaves.” By contrast, winter offers a hope, difficult to fathom:

Deep in snow New England holds
lovely, silent, finished, clean.
What mercy after such forgiveness?
What resurrection waits on spring?

Not one to let an image rest in peace, Bottum makes his point about grace rhetorically, as in the book’s first poem when he asks, “who’s thanked the Lord for broken things?”

Unabashed about his faith, Bottum is also unafraid to show a love for alliteration and traditional verse forms. Seeking “Restoration,” he comments on the debasing of love to lust: “our speech / is shoddy-stuffed with winding sheets.” In the pursuit of the right rhyme and meter, however, his rich language sometimes weakens: a “whole” finds a “bole,” “now” a “bough,” and standing on the “strand,” the poet hears, with a somewhat tin ear for diction, “the constant rollers break.” Fortunately, Bottum’s delightful humor saves his collection from both conventional writing and conventional wisdom. In a book review in rhyming couplets, he brilliantly trashes an anthology of “Modern Catholic Verse.” He concludes with a charitable twist of the knife: “But most of this work is not good and not bad. / It’s just pious and worthy and terribly sad.” Bottum is at the top of his form when he succeeds in blending the pious with a mordant wit.

In contrast to Bottum’s love of traditional faith and form, Bruce Beasley aims at poetical innovation and a critical examination of Christianity in his collection Signs and Abominations. The introductory poem, “What Did You Come to See,” considers a painting of John the Baptist:

I stared at his finger
crooked toward the business of the cross,
clumped vein over bone in the twisted wrist,

and barely glanced toward Calvary.
Signs, abominations:
it’s always the diversion

that attracts me,
what doesn’t mean to be seen that I need
to stare down

To give an example of what attracts Beasley, his “Spiritual Alphabet in Midsummer” comments under the letter “P”:

Walking the dogs,
talking about graces and sins,
docetic heresy and Incarnation,
plastic bags of scooped dogsh*t
swinging in our hands.

Is this the sign of a piercing poetic vision finding the sacred in the profane, or merely of self-conscious sophistication? To quote a wise line by Bottum, Beasley often “shocks by supposing that shocking is new.” Although he presents Flannery O’Connor and Emily Dickinson as his models, he lacks their ironic finesse. In “Hyperlinks: Incomplete Void,” he begins with a reference to John Calvin’s catechism and its presentation of regeneration. The poem then shifts, with an ironic click of the mouse, to the mention that “A blood in the sem*n webpage / has been created.” The result is somewhat cold and, as in many of the poems, intellectually overwrought.

These criticisms aside, Beasley is an extremely able poet, as is made clear in a narrative poem, “The White Children of Macon,” about a particularly twisted first-grade teacher. Also, his formal innovations can be thought-provoking, as in a “Mutating Villanelle” on cloning. And he offers surprising, meditative lines that linger in the mind long after the book is closed: “In my Father’s house, so many closed-up rooms.” As such, Beasley strips away the niceties of religious verse to examine Christianity in a challenging and often deeply spiritual manner.

Lise Goett’s Waiting for the Paraclete does not attempt many formal innovations, but her book certainly bends imagery to its breaking point. Goett writes poems to scratch your head by, with lines such as “the loins’ pallor and flame mute as doves / under ice.” Perhaps the strongest and most challenging writer among those reviewed here, she can sear the page, as in her description of suicide, “that alpine lake that glimmers / in the reptile brain” or in the line “Look up. Your life is suddenly ending—.”

In her images, the Bible is a frequent reference point: “then in the morning we’ll arise, we’ll begin, / stick by stick as we always do, to build our Babel again,” and “Ever since Adam, ours has been a race sentenced / to drink a draft to be made much of and let go.” She focuses especially on the desire for completion, to be “galvanized by the body’s own lightning, / clairvoyant as stone.” In the poem “Conversion,” she describes the morbid attraction of her girlhood friends to a young man whose eye was pulled out in a fishing accident. At night, the girls “prayed to a god with a foraging heart” and

thinking how grace must enter the body like this
as we slipped out under the nameless bowl of stars
to feel the hunger of our own darkness:
the sweep and whisper of the line,
the suck and gape of the eyeless socket,
the god who reels us in.

While looking for galvanizing grace, Goett dismisses “god” and also the Church. In one poem, for example, she describes Paris’ Notre Dame cathedral, “buttressed for renovation like the sagging rites of this religion.”

If institutional religion does not spell relief, where’s the Paraclete? In her poem “Where Earth, This Fire” (first published under the title “Waiting for the Paraclete”), Goett writes of those who await “the final election by fire” and stare “into the omega / of not-being.” She ends by presenting three “theories / of transformation”: suicide, masturbation, and “the advice to the Jews: / go home / and wait, / close your doors, / this pain will pass over.” Apart from sexual pleasure, she seems to suggest the only real comfort in life is the simple acceptance of death. In bringing such a message, she uses the Bible as a poetical cash machine, from which the poet withdraws images at her own will.

From a religious perspective, maybe these five collections merely underscore that you cannot always judge a poetry book by its title. And it is perhaps not surprising that, even in religious dress, contemporary poetry tilts, or most often bows down, to the delights of a well-wrought image. As a genre, poetry seems better equipped to raise a question as vividly as possible than to reply with a solid and set, catachetical answer.

When I finished rereading all the books, however, I couldn’t help but wish that religious poetry could find more often a balance between questioning and confessing, between artistic creed and Christ. Perhaps the challenge is to seek out as well as to create poetry that combines the merits of these books, expressing doubt and faith through vivid imagery, limpid lines, and formal variety, all tied by a constant play of wit and seriousness.

Otto Selles is professor of French at Calvin College and the author most recently of New Songs, a collection of poems.

- More fromOtto Selles

Page 3829 – Christianity Today (2024)

21%

10%

37%

41%

17%

7%

Related Elsewhere

Related Elsewhere:

Related Elsewhere:

The Rwanda Genocide

Reforming U.S. Foreign Policy

References