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The Land That Greed Forgot

Vilcabamba, a village that lies in a quiet valley in the Ecuadorian Andes, is famed for the longevity of its inhabitants. Its 1972 census showed a total population of 819, with nine of this number -- two women and seven men -- more than 100 years old. In the United States we have fewer than 7,000 centenarians. To match this tranquil village we would have to have more than 2.5 million. In other words, Vilcabamba produces centenarians at a rate 366 times greater than we do.

A striking difference. But more impressive is the phenomenal condition of Vilcabamba’s old people. I visited the village last fall and spoke with some of them. There was Micaela Quezada, a spinster whose baptismal certificate, on file in the local church, attests that she was born February 19, 1870. She has lived in Vilcabamba all her life, working for some years as a seamstress. I watched this 104-year-old woman thread needles and read newsprint, without difficulty and without glasses. Her health is obviously good and her memory is clear on events of years ago as well as on recent happenings.

I talked with Miguel Carpio, possibly the oldest man in the world at 127, and listened to him sing and play the guitar. He told me he had a few aches and pains but generally feels pretty good. Don Miguel has long had the reputation of being a ladies’ man, and he still likes to flirt with the women, even though, as he says, he "can’t see them too well anymore." Since the church in the community did not open until 1850, there are no birth certificates to verify his age and that of some of the other longevos. However, Micaela Quezada said that she has known Miguel Carpio all her life, and he is considerably older than she. He too has a fine memory for the past, remote or recent. While I was talking with Miguel his 75-year-old grandson came riding into the town on horseback, looking vigorous and fit and exuding the vitality of a man far younger than his three quarters of a century.

I talked with Rafael Vasquez, a youngster of 84. I asked him to come with me to the park in the center of town and let me take pictures of him working there with his machete. The park was surrounded by a fence and the gate was locked; so he nonchalantly strolled up to the fence and climbed over. Like most men in the village, he has farmed all his life and kept active with hard, physical labor. And, like all the Vilcabambans I spoke with, he was relaxed, open, very pleasant and helpful, and obviously in top mental condition.

A Healing Environment

Before going to Vilcabamba I spent several days in Quito, the capital of Ecuador, and there met Jorge Santiana, one of the nation’s leading cancer specialists. Dr. Santiana told me that in three trips to Vilcabamba he had carefully examined these incredible oldsters and found no trace of skin cancer in any of them. This freedom from skin cancer is unusual in people who are not only extremely old but, living as they do close to the equator, are subjected to direct sunshine the year round.

I heard of a prominent Quito cardiologist, Miguel Salvador, who took a team of technicians and heart specialists to Vilcabamba in 1969 to study its oldsters. After thoroughly testing 338 men and women the team reported that none of them had heart problems or circulatory difficulties, that their metabolism was excellent, and that the condition of their arteries was such as ordinarily would be found only in much younger people. Dr. Salvador returned to the area a year later for additional testing and concluded that the extraordinary health of the inhabitants is due to gentle climate, calm environment, pure water, clean air, hard physical work and a tranquil attitude. Vilcabamba’s altitude is about 5,100 feet above sea level and its water supply comes from two sparkling rivers, the Uchima and the Chamba. The soil is rich in minerals, so that farming is carried on without chemicals. The men and women of the area sleep eight, to ten hours a night. But, as Dr. Salvador exclaimed, "To sleep six hours in Vilcabamba is worth eight hours anywhere else."

Tales abound of sick people who came to the "sacred valley" and there recovered completely from severe heart ailments and crippling arthritis. Carlos Tosi, a 46-year-old native of Cuenca, a town 135 miles away, arrived in Vilcabamba in 1971. He had suffered three nearly fatal heart attacks and was barely able to walk. Having exhausted all conventional medical treatments, he came to the quiet village because nothing else held out any hope for him. He spent his first week there in bed. The next week he was able to walk, though slowly, to the park, to sit in the sun and visit with the affable local citizens. About two months later he began to play volleyball and to take long walks along the mountain roads. After six months in this healing environment he returned to Cuenca and has lived there in excellent health ever since.

Jaime Vaca, of Quito, was born with a faulty heart, which hampered him in every way. In 1969 he underwent heart surgery in Brazil, and returned to Quito no better than before. The next year he moved to Vilcabamba. Several months there transformed him. He began to enjoy the finest health he had ever experienced. In time he married one of the women of the town and plans to spend the rest of his life there.

A Concern to Prevent Exploitation

So many cases of this kind were described to me by people in Vilcabamba and in neighboring Loja that it was impossible to discount them. Loja, a city of 60,000 and the capital of the province of Loja, lies 25 miles from Vilcabamba and is accessible only by a narrow, winding dirt road that serves as a natural barricade. Flying there from Guayaquil, a seaport and Ecuador’s largest city, I met the governor and the prefect of the province and the mayor of the city. All three told me that they are concerned to prevent any exploitation of their small neighbor that might destroy its unique healing quality.

The governor, Colonel Victor Hugo Vega, is a native of Loja city and has lived there most of his life. A thoughtful man with a deliberate manner, he said: "We’re all very interested in the phenomenon of Vilcabamba and want to make it available for anyone in the world who needs it. But we want to avoid any abrupt changes and make sure that it is preserved for the coming generations. Any sharp alterations in the community are likely to destroy the environment that apparently plays the key role in its ability to heal desperately sick people."

The mayor of Loja. Ruben Ortega, is an enthusiastic, affable lawyer. He has taken more than a dozen victims of heart trouble over to Vilcabamba. "They have all improved after several days," he told me. "The old people there remain absolutely lucid even when they are well over 100. Their thoughts are clear and their memories are sharp. Manuel Augustin Polo, who lived in Loja, had an extremely bad heart and had gone to Mexico and the United States for treatment without any improvement. He went over to Vilcabamba in 1957 when he was 70 years old and in a few months moved to Loja, completely recovered. He remained healthy until he died in 1970 at the age of 83."

A railroad worker from the southeastern United States, Frank Krammel, arrived in Vilcabamba in the summer of 1970. A tall, thin man in his 60s, he was so badly crippled with heart trouble that he was unable to walk even a block without resting. He spent three months in the healing atmosphere of the village. Gradually his condition improved. He found himself able to move about with increasing ease, and finally to walk two or three hours a day. He returned home completely recovered.

Most of Vilcabamba’s own senior citizens retain their teeth along with their vitality. Vilcabambans’ diet is high in starch and surprisingly low in protein. Most families have their own farms and grow and eat their own produce -- corn, potatoes, papayas, oranges, grapes and a starchy vegetable called yucca. Investigators report that the mineral-rich soil in this Ecuadorian Eden produces exceptionally nutritious fruits and vegetables. It also produces sugar, which is used unrefined, and coffee, which is brewed so thick and strong that visitors expect it to seep right through the cups. One of the area’s dietary staples is a banana soup, which sounds unusual and tasted the same way when I tried it.

Linked to Eternity

Hard workers, the people of this region remain relaxed. Their tranquil, timeless approach to living, which seems to link them to eternity, is a reflection of their strong religious faith. Manuel Patino, a quiet, gentle little man of 95, still farms eight hours a day six days a week and goes to church every Sunday. He would like to live "as long as God wants me to." Rafael Vasquez, the 84-year-old who climbed the fence so effortlessly, said: "We live long here because there’s something good here. I was born to work and take care of my family and want to live as long as God gives me." In splendid physical and mental health, Rafael sleeps eight to ten hours a night and has been married 60 years to the same wife.

Clodovea Heredia, a charming old lady who gives her age as 100, was once a seamstress, like Micaela Quezada, and like Micaela she easily threaded needle after needle as I watched. Evidently Clodovea too still has perfect eyesight. In conversation she is alert, for her memory remains clear despite the ten decades behind her. "God has favored us with long lives," she told me, ‘and I would like to live as long as he wants me to, 50 more years or until tomorrow is all right."

Face to Face with the Laws of Ecology

My sojourn in this tiny Andean community gave me an acute case of culture shock. I found the facts of Vilcabamba difficult to reconcile with my own experience. When I left the area I headed for Peru aboard an Iberia plane. I spent several days in Lima and, subsequently, a week in Colombia, and all the time I was haunted by a lingering disquiet. The unease persisted after my return home to a Chicago suburb. Was the lesson of Vilcabamba simply one of natural diet, pure water, clean air, physical labor and quiet living? That’s part of it, but only part.

The people of Vilcabamba would be called poor by all but the most poverty-stricken inhabitants of the United States. Yet they have no shortages; they have little but they have enough. They seem totally free from the greed that has driven us into profligate misuse of our resources. And that gets to the real lesson of this extraordinary place. Within limits, we can have whatever we want if we want it badly enough -- but we cannot determine the price. That we learn later, and gradually. And that’s precisely what we are learning, today. We have come face to face with the laws of ecology. The well-known ecologist Barry Common lists these three laws: (1) everything is connected to everything else; (2) everything has to go somewhere; and (3) there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

These Ecuadorians appear completely devoid of fear and anxiety. They live calmly in the present, without regrets about the past or worries about the future. Partners with nature and in tune with their surroundings, they remain uniquely free from physical ailments and mental breakdowns. Everything is connected to everything else, and I have come to the conclusion that their phenomenal health is a reflection of their freedom from greed -- a freedom that, along with the profound faith in God they demonstrate in their daily lives, keeps their environment pure, their wants simple and their lives purposeful. Their keen awareness of what’s really important has kept them from duplicating the basic errors we have committed.

Greed is a primary manifestation of the ego’s screaming battle to have its own way, and it inevitably leads to the fear and ignorance that are glaringly evident in the highly educated confusion in our culture today, in our poisoned environment and wasted wealth, and in the affluent uncertainty that afflicts us as it turns out that too much is never enough.

Among others, Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley have insisted that reducing greed is the first step in breaking loose from the ego’s choking grip and moving toward sanity. We’re generally reluctant to try to reduce our greed, because at least in its early stages, greed is pleasant. Unchecked, however, it gradually smothers us. The more we get the "things" we think we want, the less we are able to experience the contact with God we really want and must have to live. We become ignorant of who we really are and frightened lest we either lose what we have or be unable to get still more.

To Enhance the Spiritual Life

Greed has three facets: love of things, love of fame, and love of pleasure; and these can be attacked directly with frugality, anonymity and moderation. Reduction of greed will be translated into stepped-up vitality, diminished self-centeredness and a clearer awareness of our real identity. For a permanent commitment to working with the tools of the spiritual life provides a disciplined basis for liberation from greed’s tentacles.

If I consciously try to simplify my life, I shall effectively weaken my dependence on possessions and on other people’s opinions. Then my identity no longer derives from things or from the attitudes of others but, to some degree at least, stems from a clearer understanding of the truth of my relationship to God; and this understanding can sharply decrease the fear generated by ignorance of who I really am. It will only come, however, out of persistent striving for freedom from the wants and dependencies that inevitably block it.

This simplicity extends into the realm of ideas and knowledge because here too greed creates the ignorance that makes it difficult, perhaps impossible, to comprehend and appreciate the transforming power of fundamental spiritual truths. Note, however, that "keep it simple" does not mean "keep it superficial"; it means recognizing that more knowledge often means less understanding. For example, while our highly trained physicians seem to know a great deal about sickness, the longevos of Vilcabamba instinctively know more about health than any medical men I ever met.

There is no cheap grace. Reality is not given; it is mined, like gold. Spiritual growth is synonymous with increasing sanity, and it comes from unremitting effort to strip away false ideas and spurious goals. As we make such effort we shall find freedom from the fear and ignorance that are inextricably tied into the package of greed. We shall know increasing vitality, growing sanity, greater health and vastly expanded usefulness. And, as the ego’s shrill clamor for possessions, pleasure and recognition subsides, the voice of God grows more distinct and the concept of his guidance moves from abstraction to daily experience.

I can profit from the vision the longevos of Vilcabamba hold out -- the vision of simplicity and peace created by freedom from needless, heedless striving. Too much can never be enough, whether of things, knowledge or recognition. A conscious, direct attack on these false dependencies through spiritual discipline will weaken my craving for temporal trivia as it strengthens my dependence on God. Slowly but certainly, it will give me the things I really want and must have to become what I should be.

The Benefits of Fasting

In the spring of 1957 I was managing the airport in Point Barrow, Alaska, the main supply site and a scene of heavy air traffic during the construction of the Distant Early Warning Line radar stations along Alaska’s northern coast. Working 50 to 60 hours a week, I hadn’t taken a day off for nearly a year and was scraping the bottom of the energy barrel. Overweight, irritable, tired all the time and feeling much older than my 34 years, I decided that a vacation was a necessity. Not just any vacation, however. I went to a health resort near Escondido, California, and fasted for two weeks under the direction of a physician. I drank as much water as needed but ate nothing at all for 14 days.

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Before this I had tried a few short fasts of three or four days on my own but had never gone longer than that with only water. James McEachen had supervised many fasts and understood what to look for. He told me to take no exercise but simply to rest and sunbathe during the day and to drink water whenever I was thirsty. About the fifth day without food I developed a sore throat, my back began to ache and my teeth hurt. Dr. McEachen explained that this was a healing crisis: my body was cleansing itself of toxic substances. About the tenth day these symptoms cleared up.

With McEachen’s guidance I broke the fast on the 14th day. This was a crucial point. A fast has to be ended properly and carefully or there can be painful and dangerous complications. I was given small amounts of orange juice every three hours for two days and then allowed to eat whole fruit for another two days. After this I was given more substantial food on a regular meal time schedule. I stayed there for a week after I resumed eating and then returned to my job in Point Barrow feeling 1,000 per cent better than when I left.

I experienced a number of specific benefits from the two weeks without food. My energy was greater than it had been since I was 20. I fell asleep immediately at night, slept soundly and awoke refreshed and alert. The job of managing the Point Barrow airport was hectic at times, but after the fast it was easy to remain calm and unflustered no matter how much pressure the work generated. I lost 25 pounds during the two weeks without food, which put me a little below my best weight, but I gradually regained the needed pounds. The benefits from the fast far outweighed what one would expect to experience from taking a three-week vacation.

I have fasted many times since the stay in Escondido in 1957, for periods of a few days up to 40. In every instance the fasts have provided such benefits as increased energy, calmness, improved concentration and a feeling of well-being. In the past five years I’ve visited David Stry’s health resort near Cuernavaca, Mexico, five times and fasted there from four to eight days.

Last year my 54th birthday arrived. Friends my own age who used to joke about my dedication to diet and exercise have been creaking and puffing around for some years now. They’ve quit laughing and started asking what they might do to repair the damage that careless living has wreaked on their bodies. Probably the best place to begin is with a fast to clean out the system and give it a new start.

Many people begin fasting because of sickness. As one who has always had good health, I approached the fast as a possible way to make good health even better. It has. Physical conditioning through fasting -- as well as exercise -- is essential to effective functioning in my life. And without exception, fasting also has enabled me to pray and meditate better.

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Meditation became a part of my life in 1949 -- long before the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi arrived in the United States with his mystical talent for gathering immense quantities of publicity and money for TM. the mantra that a TM initiate buys for $125 is simply a basis for meditation. Anyone can select a mantra of one’s own and achieve the same results through persistent practice. A word or a phrase will do it, and it doesn’t cost a penny. In fact, the thought of selling this kind of knowledge is repugnant to many.

Short fasts of a day or two, by quieting the mind and the body, improve mediation and contact with God, and liberate a vitality for change. Prayer, meditation and fasting are extremely useful vehicles for anyone traveling the spiritual path. Fasting purges the emotions and drains away hostility and uneasiness. It provides a sounder base for sitting quietly and listening for the voice of God.

An experience I’ve always found with fasting is that time moves more slowly. Obsession with the past or future begins to disappear. Hurry seems stupid. Perspective is restored, and priorities can be examined. An easy joy in the present replaces the relentless compulsion to get and to have.

Mahatma Gandhi was an ardent advocate of fasting as a way to change character. He declared that “hurry and overwork are always sins.” If we define sin as anything that separates us from God, we can see the truth of his assertion. A great deal of hurry and overwork may be generated by the kind of hyperactivity that characterizes that popular national phenomenon, the work addict. Perpetually on the move, the work addict uses activity to avoid facing the self. Often the work addict is employed in one of the “helping professions.” He or she may be a minister, social worker, physician, psychologist or psychiatrist. When questioned about the constant work, perpetual meetings and limited family time, a work addict has the finest answer of all: “I’ve got to do this because these people need me. They depend on my help.”

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Fasts of a day or two can be used without danger and generally turn off that kind of hard-driving activity. “I find that short fasts are extremely helpful in slowing me down,” said Richard Dunn of Hankins, New York. “I began experimenting with fasting about six years ago. I generally use it in any of three circumstances: (1) If I’ve been overeating; (2) if I’m having severe problems with anger, resentment or frustration; or (3) for a spiritual discipline. The longest I’ve fasted is four days. My results have generally been similar. There’s a physical purging that is reflected in increased clarity, reduced hostility. It knocks out worry and self-concern. The fasting improves my Yoga practice, and that in turn helps my meditation.”

Dick Dunn’s wife, Cathy, is another advocate of fasting as a way to better mental, physical and spiritual health. “I fasted one day a week for a year, and one of the things fasting did was to give me a much clearer awareness of my relationship to food -- of why I eat, for example. Often it’s not simply to satisfy my hunger but because I’m bored or feel I’m owed some pleasure. Four days has been my maximum fast. I was surprised to learn that I could serve food without hunger problems. Fasting makes me feel lighter, cleaner. It creates an easiness in living and helps my meditation.”

An attractive couple in their middle 30s, the Dunns have two children. They moved to New York from Chicago five years ago. Dick Dunn still speaks with some awe of what fasting accomplished for Dick Gregory. Dunn was an associate producer on the staff of WMAQ-TV in Chicago, and Gregory appeared on a TV program Dunn produced.

“Dick Gregory seemed to be completely free from hostility and anger of any kind,” exclaimed Dunn. “He was relaxed and stressed the need for love and understanding in improving our society. He was totally different from the man who had been so violently angry in his civil rights participation. Gregory said that he had been able to find freedom from anger and hate through fasting and adopting a vegetarian diet. He said that fasting cleanses the body, and as the poisons are thrown off there is a release from hatred and other sick emotions. He was a powerful witness for his ideas.”

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Matthew 17:21 asserts the need for “prayer and fasting.” From a limitless number of round clergymen and equally pudgy church members this verse has never stirred much response. Both the Old and New Testaments proclaim the importance of fasting. Fasting played a key role in the spiritual journeys of Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad and Moses. Plato and Socrates recommended fasting for increasing mental and physical effectiveness. Such ancient physicians as Avicenna, Paracelsus and Hippocrates advocated fasting for treating a varied range of illnesses.

For thousands of years surprisingly diverse groups have fasted. Some fasted for spiritual initiation. The Zulus have a saying: “The continually stuffed body cannot see secret things.” Pythagoras fasted 40 days for enlightenment. The Cure of Ars fasted continually and demonstrated remarkable sanctity.

Yoga texts single out fasting as an important discipline for spiritual growth. Twenty-four-hour fasts on new-moon and full-moon days are usually suggested. Fasting is used as a means to develop detachment. Historically, Yoga philosophy views the body as the vehicle a person occupies on the journey through life. The individual is the traveler using the body to live out necessary experience, but is not the same as the body. This is a fundamental and crucial difference. Yoga texts say that we have forgotten our true identity. We have lost ourselves in a maze of desire destined to bring us only ignorance and misery. Yoga offers breathing exercises, meditation and such physical disciplines as postures and fasting. These build a road to higher levels of consciousness that rip away the blinding shrouds of ignorance.

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These practices echo a view found in some Christian circles that we can find freedom only through persistent training and discipline. For example, many scholars believe that the familiar quotation “The meek shall inherit the earth” is the result of inaccurate translation. In their view, the Greek word praos, which was translated “meek,” should have been rendered as “trained” or “disciplined.” This alteration gives an entirely different meaning to the phrase.

Proponents of fasting stress the need to view the human being as a mental, physical and spiritual unity. Everything is connected to everything else. They also believe that in many instances a sick body will heal itself if given the opportunity through fasting. This theory is diametrically opposed to the view that a sick person must eat to keep one’s strength up. Animals, who have an instinctive understanding of self-healing, will usually not eat when sick.

The fast, along with rest and sunshine, provides an opportunity for the body to repair itself. Hunger usually disappears within the first two or three days of the fast; the tongue becomes coated, the breath foul. It is time to break the fast when the tongue clears up and hunger returns.

A distinction must be drawn between fasting and starvation. Fasting begins when the body begins to support itself on its reserves. Starvation occurs when abstinence continues past the time the reserves are used up. In practice, a human being has substantial reserves that will sustain life for many weeks. There is no danger of starvation during this period, although there may be healing crises that require the skilled supervision of a practitioner experienced in all aspects of reactions to fasting.

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Dave Stry, who has supervised thousands of fasts over three decades, is an astonishingly energetic man of 66. He became converted to fasting at the age of 37 when a 30-day fast restored him to peak health. Stry has seen remarkable results in improved mental and physical condition among guests in his Cuernavaca resort. “Unquestionably,” he says, “fasting sets the stage for improved spiritual discipline. In my experience, a person can generally reverse his health problems through fasting and better living habits. Better health created by fasting will be mirrored by increased calmness and serenity and reduced anger. For a long fast, a person should have supervision throughout, because as the body cleanses itself, it sometimes forces healing crises. It’s also critical to break a long fast carefully.”

Dave Stry and other seasoned observers report the effectiveness of fasting in treating a staggering array of ills. These include heart trouble, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, prostate trouble, migraine, colitis, gallstones, peptic ulcers, allergies, glaucoma, cataracts and Ménière’s disease, to name a few.

Allan Cott, an internationally respected New York psychiatrist, told me that he has found fasting highly effective in treating schizophrenics. He went to Russia in 1970 and studied the work of Yuri Nikolayev, who prescribed fasts for mentally ill patients. Says Cott: “Dr. Nikolayev’s experience extends to more than 6,000 patients treated by fasting in the past 25 years. A study of his statistics showed that 70 per cent achieved such significant improvement that they were restored to functioning.” Cott described this as an “unparalleled achievement” in treating schizophrenics, because these patients had been treatment failures through an extended program of different kinds of therapy. The fasts consisted of complete abstinence from food for 25 to 30 days.

Dr. Cott’s book, Fasting: The Ultimate Diet, has been a runaway best seller since it was issued by Bantam in 1975. Describing the spiritual benefits of fasting, Cott says, “If a person makes fasting part of his life he’ll experience a heightened spiritual awareness. By taking a long fast or two and then fasting one day a week he’ll gradually find a growing peace and personal integration.”

Father John Moriarty, who lives in Guayaquil, Ecuador, is another enthusiastic advocate of fasting. “I’ve tried it for several days and one time for a week,” he said. “The weight loss was welcome, but I also found a noticeable increase in calmness and ability to live in the present. It improves my prayer life. Fasting’s benefits are both subtle and obvious.

Originally from Chicago, Father Moriarty is a Roman Catholic priest who has spent the past nine years in Ecuador. He was my interpreter on two trips to Vilcabamba, the Ecuadorian village famed for the longevity of its residents. In December 1975 Father Moriarty and I talked with Father Luis López in Guayaquil. Famous throughout Latin America, Father López is a staunch believer in fasting’s efficacy. John Moriarty and I talked with a man in Guayaquil who swore that four years ago López cured his mother-in-law of cancer by prescribing a fast. Today, he says, she’s in excellent health at 60.

Some claim that fasting can induce special powers. But men and women who have gotten somewhere in the spiritual life are invariably adamant when they speak of the trap of seeking special gifts and special powers. They point to these as egotistical blind alleys filled with danger for the seeker.

“God is among the pots and pans,” St. Theresa declared. With compelling clarity she stripped away the mystery and confusion in following God’s will. It is simply doing what I’m supposed to do each day, doing my job and other duties honestly and responsibly. Today, in my view, the spiritual life has nothing to do with special powers and everything to do with a growing ability to work effectively where God has put me.

The basic lesson seems to be that I’m free only when I’m willingly doing God’s will -- that the finest prayer is simply “Thy will be done.” Fasting, prayer and meditation blend easily together and improve my ability to pray this prayer with wholehearted commitment. They bring a degree of freedom from obsession with movement and things and help me sit quietly and listen for the voice of God. This concentration is reflected in greater stability, increased energy, absence of hurry and a growing awareness of what’s really important.

The Dominance Syndrome

Galatians 3:28 has been receiving a great deal of passing recognition, these days. It is indeed hardly possible to address the subject of liberation in the cause of any oppressed group without reciting, “There are no more distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, but all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (The Jerusalem Bible). A great deal depends upon the way this verse is interpreted -- and there is much more here than support for one or another kind of liberation movement.

In this letter to the Galatians, Paul develops the doctrine of faith in Jesus Christ -- that faith which frees us from the slavery imposed by service to the old Law, and which makes its the very offspring of God and thereby the heirs, the ones to receive the inheritance. That inheritance is the freedom of life in the Spirit, the freedom of the single commandment which replaces the whole of the Law -- “Love your neighbor as yourself” and calls us to “serve one another . . . in works of love (5:13-14). In the fifth chapter of Galatians Paul also declares:  “When Christ freed us, he meant us to remain free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery” (v. 1).

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We have always had difficulty, however, understanding what all of this means. The whole business about justification and law -- for example, Abraham and his heirs, which Paul uses as a comparison to clarify the issue -- usually confuses more than it clarifies. When he warns, “Everyone who accepts circumcision is obliged to keep the whole Law” (5:3), he is speaking both literally to the Galatians and also typologically to us: If we insist on following the old customs required by those laws which have not yet been superseded by faith in Jesus Christ (that faith “which makes its power felt through love”), we will continue to be slaves, to be kept in our place, to be oppressed by those who have power through those laws to dominate us.

We have a lot of trouble too with words like “faith” “freedom” and “love.” But don’t they all have to do with how we relate to each other and to Jesus Christ -- whether we relate vertically as child to parent, as serf to free person, as baron to king, as alien to citizen, as tribal member to colonial usurper, as subject-wife to master-husband, as Third World country to powerful nation, as sharecropper to landed gentry, as migrant laborer to union or employer, as novice nun to mother superior, as female to male, as poor parishioner to monsignor-pastor, and on and on; or whether we relate horizontally as the grown-up heir now equal to his father, as world citizen to world citizen, as worker to worker, as minister to minister, as partner wife to partner husband, as sister to sister, and sister to brother? Could it be that Paul’s announcement in Galatians 3:28 is really a practical statement about relationships of equality (“there are no more distinctions .  . .”), horizontal forms of connection that are to replace the old law of castes, or vertical orders determining the relation of each person and group to others ranked above or below them?

It is clear that this is precisely what Paul’s statement is about; but because he was expressing a vision of reality that he himself was unable to spell out in a practical application to his own culture, we also have continued to stumble around in the slavery of the old law regarding relationships, catching the vision in some areas -- in theory, at least -- and ignoring it in others. And we have justified our slavery by quoting and misquoting other passages in Scripture. One of these is found in the third chapter of Genesis.

Most of the first three chapters of Genesis, which record the two stories of creation, has been mistranslated, misinterpreted and misused. It must be remembered first of all that there are two stories and that they do contradict each other. Each is a mythic expression: that is, first, an attempt by a people to explain the unexplainable by using the legends handed down from generation to generation; and second, a rationalization of the status quo. The second definition fits the second creation account in that it provided the moral imperative needed to support the patriarchal Hebrew culture at that time. Even so, myths have a way of providing insights that transcend the culture which creates them, and the two stories of creation taken together can do this for us.

For in the first account, humankind is created in perfect equality, the final act of creation: on the sixth day “God created man in the image of himself, . . . male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27). But in the second account “man” as male person is created even before bushes and wild beasts. After all else is created, God fashions woman from Adam’s rib rather than from fresh soil so that there could be no possible difference between them, and when Adam saw her he greeted her as his adult equal: “This at last is bone from my bones, and flesh from my flesh!” -- than which, indeed, there is nothing more equal (Gen. 2:23).

II

Such equality must have prevailed until after the mythic fruit was eaten, because the account indicates that Adam was present during the serpent’s dialogue and Eve’s choice: “So she took some of its fruit and ate it. She gave some also to her husband who was with her, and he ate it” (Gen. 3:6). Only after both have eaten does disorder appear in their relationship, for when Yahweh God calls them to account, Adam blames his wife and Eve blames the serpent. With his curse, God proclaims the state of disordered relations which has been incurred: between the “accursed” serpent and other wild beasts (and by inference, between the devil and Eve’s posterity), between woman and man, and between humankind and the earth.

In the mythic account Adam and Eve are the only people in the world; representing all people, they provide the model for all relationships. In this context, God’s words to the woman take on a special significance not usually assigned them. The Jerusalem Bible best captures this meaning in a key verse, Gen. 3:16b: “Your yearning shall be for your husband, yet he will lord it over you. Something comes through here that can be missed in other translations, such as the New American Bible’s “Yet your urge shall be for your husband, and he shall be your master.”

Misogynists as well as many well-intentioned people through the centuries have used this curse to confirm woman’s inferior position, while at the same time allowing the male a free hand in his efforts to overcome his curse of being mastered by the soil. (With the blessing of church and society, he has mastered the earth -- only, of course, to create disorder in his very mastery, by prostituting and depleting the earth’s resources.) But these verses have been interpreted far too narrowly and have been selectively misused. For Genesis 3:16 is not Gods first commandment to women, nor is it an imperative order of creation; it points to the disorder that came about through the human choice to sin. It is a statement, a prediction, a prophecy, of how man degenerated by sin would dominate, lord it over, not only the wife, but anyone or any group which could be subdued. On the level of male-female relations, the mythic account of the fall in fact describes the patriarchal society of the early people who created this Genesis myth, which in its turn confirmed the social structure of male dominance and female subjection. But the myth also does much more. It provides first the model and then a justification for the dominance syndrome.

For if a husband may lord it over his wife, then it is only a matter of establishing additional categories as the human race increases and civilization becomes more complex: chiefs and little people, conquering tribe and conquered tribes, white people and dark people, rich and poor, the “civilized” and the “barbarians.” As long as the model of husband over wife, male over female, continues to be confirmed as the one level where dominance may not only be tolerated but must be honored, oppression of peoples will be continued on every other level of culture.

III

For those of us who are comfortable with a theory of evolution that acknowledges the common origin of the human and animal kingdoms, the scientific evidence that corroborates this syndrome of dominance in the mythic Genesis accounts is of special interest. For within the past 40 years anthropologists in general have begun to accept the data provided by lonely birdwatchers and other students of animal behavior which demonstrate that the primal instinct in animals is neither to reproduce nor to survive. It is the instinct to dominate, and it is independent of sex; that is, it can be present in the female as well as in the male. Among the wildebeest (gnus) of East Africa, for instance, the strongest males assert their dominance and establish their territories before mating ever enters their instinctual memory. Precise traits differ from species to species, but in some the mating process is actually the prerogative of the female -- the strongest females choose the dominant males, and so the law of natural selection operates and the fittest survive. In the case of many types of birds, such as the jackdaw, a precise hierarchical order is established so that everyone knows who can peck whom -- literally -- down to the lowest unmated female who has no one to peck.

One could conduct one’s own experiment by putting a half-dozen male swordtails (those darting red tropical fish) in a tank and watching them rapidly arrange themselves in a distinct hierarchy. For each will find quickly those he may dominate and those to whom he must submit. His rank determines his access to food as well as to females, and maintaining his rank will remain his most belligerent occupation. If you want to test his priorities, you can gradually cool the water and you’ll find that at some point the male will lose all interest in sex, but will still fight for his status.

The point of all this is that dominance is the one animal instinct the human race either inherited from its primate forebears and retained after losing all the other instincts, or acquired by imitating this animal behavior when the human race fell from a higher nature. If we evolved from the lower primates, then when we reached the stage of reflection and conscious choice (when the image of God entered into that line of primates), we made the decision to “sin” -- to dominate and to kill in order to serve our own ends, rather than to follow the call of that “image of God” which had entered into the human creature. Since then, as the fossil remains of our hominid ancestors show, these primates used the ability to reflect and choose for the development of ever-better weapons which killed more efficiently, refining the instinct of dominance to an art.

What the Genesis accounts tell us in figurative language, the anthropologists and paleontologists have discovered. Dominance is the order of existence on the animal level which provides for the survival of the fittest and thus for the natural ecological balance of the physical universe. However, in the perfect unity of the Godhead, dominance is unknown. When the image of God entered into the species which is humankind, that species was ordained to find its order on a plane other than the animal, and because of the presence of that divine image, dominance on the human plane is not a natural order but a disorder.

Religion in human life is the voice which expresses that image of God in us. All of the great religions have attempted to call human beings to their proper relationship to God and with each other -- that relationship which is love. For us who are Christians, who believe that Jesus the Christ revealed the fullness of God in a human form, there is no doubting our destiny: life in God, which is the fulfillment of the God-image in us, realized in loving relationships. Love in relationship is possible only when God is present, for God is love. God is also perfect unity. Hence, in love there can be no dominance -- no possession of another person or group to serve my profit or pleasure. For us who are Christians all of this is demonstrated in the words and encounters of Jesus Christ as recorded in the Gospels; it is spelled out most clearly in the Epistles of John and in the letter of Paul discussed earlier.

IV

Very often champions of one or another cause -- the elimination of racism, sexism or militarism -- become too single-minded in their zeal. Those working to eliminate racism often tend to think that anyone combating sexism is wasting her time on trivialities; antimilitarists may wonder how anyone can bother with migrant workers when our countries have stockpiled enough ammunition to destroy the world 435 times. Such narrow vision does not take in the broad view, the single cause of all of these disorders -- humankind’s propensity to dominate.

Our experience should have taught us better. We all know of instances in which racial minorities, women, and colonized countries -- as soon as they have gotten into a position of independence and power -- have become more oppressive than those who had oppressed them. At the time it became clear to us that slavery was wrong, or when we understood, in theory at least, that in Christ there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, we should have realized also that there can be no distinction between male and female. Because we are so late in recognizing this first disorder in relationship, we have contributed to the problem that pervades our culture. For so long as women settle for a position of subordination in marriage, in the church, and in the economic order, we will be aiding and abetting the ills of racism, militarism, and all the other oppressive structures in our society. Conversely, so long as we operate as superiors when we get into positions of power over the “inferiors”, we will be perpetuating the ills of the dominance syndrome.

We should have recognized long ago that the male-female model portrayed in Genesis 3:16 is a model of disorder. Upon this model of hierarchy we have built our political systems -- from the Greek city-state and the Roman Empire to feudal castes, the Holy Roman Empire, and modern nations. Even our so-called democracy is only a refined model with different names for the dominating roles -- from the president and the housing authority, to the bureau chief and the local cop. Theologians have used the same model to erect a cosmic and eschatological pyramid in which women, along with children, are still at the lowest level. The Christian theologians took their cue from other letters of Paul’s in which he is clearly using his culture’s customs to resolve friction that had arisen when women began responding to the liberating gospel of Jesus Christ. And Paul’s culture got these customs from that animal instinct, that disordered urge, to dominate.

V

If we could not recognize the model of disordered relationship in its more benign manifestations, we should have done so in the malignant ones. But again we have paid heed to the outer layers of the problem rather than the roots. For example, most of us consider war the greatest aberration in human existence, the final horror. But war is only an expression on a large scale of what is a more basic horror -- rape. Rape is the primary model of all genocide and war, and rape is our way of life. Consider as evidence of this proposition the reluctance of the US. legal system to punish the rapist although if he is black, the punishment shifts to another level, that of genocide. When the victim of rape is nonwhite -- as in the trial of Joan Little for the murder of her rapist -- it takes the rousing of national support to get justice done. When that is missing, as in the case of Inez Garcia a few years ago, our legal system judges the victim to be the criminal, presumed guilty of provoking the crime. The image of the raped woman forms an exaggerated metaphor for the oppression that every woman knows from her own experience, at least emotionally if not physically. And yet women who have been trained into the system of disordered hierarchy are often the first to suspect and condemn the sister who has been raped.

Genocide is the extension of rape to the subordination of a whole race. The world of the concentration camps,” Ionesco has said, was not an exceptionally monstrous society” It was only more refined than what occurred on plenty of plantations in the Western hemisphere, than what occurs today in plenty of fields of vegetables and fruit. During a lecture by a black person last spring, I overhead a white student mutter, “We should have killed them all.” Because the dominance syndrome continues in our hearts it is also expressed in more sophisticated forms of rape and genocide on other levels, when the physical becomes messy or loses its impunity.

In the dominance syndrome, war is the third side of the triangle. In the milieu of our Western culture, war develops the manly virtues: “The army will make a man out of you” The final illogic of war’s morality is the destruction of other cultures in order to “save” them. If we think we will cure our world of war and genocide by starting on the political level, we are only kidding ourselves. So long as a sexual hierarchy obtains which allows a man to rape a woman with impunity, or a husband to rape a wife and call it legal, all such crimes of dominance will continue, the poor will be kept poor, and war will flourish despite all our tinkering with world economies and reaching for solutions through diplomacy.

VI

The syndrome of dominance, institutionalized in every structure of hierarchy in our culture, is the root of all the systems of oppression we attempt to combat in our ministry for justice. Every single human being -- male and female, dominant and dominated -- experiences this disorder in one way or another. It has taken the women’s liberation movement to uncover the roots of the human problem because these women have had to probe deeper than the focus of visible denigration. The movement to correct the injustices of sexism can reach deep enough to effect changes in racial and political areas of our common life as well. But it will do so only if the cultural transformation is genuinely profound -- that is, if structures of hierarchy and authoritarian leadership are transformed into structures of partnership and collegial agreement.

For the church that means transforming the caste system of male clerical hierarchy to partnership in ministry, and putting Galatians 3:28 -- as well as the stance of the American Catholic bishops that “women should be in decision-making roles” -- actually into practice. If we succeed in changing the hierarchies we have imposed on people according to their race and color and sex, then we can have a world of persons, of horizontal relationship rather than hierarchy, a world of expression rather than oppression, where “there are no more distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female,” where we are all “one in Christ Jesus.”

The Icon Tree

Easter: that day which follows the harrowing of hell of Great and Holy Saturday; Easter, which turns a terrible Friday into Good Friday. It is almost too brilliant for me to contemplate; it is like looking directly into the sun; I am burned and blinded by life.

Easter completes the circle of blessing, and the joy of the completion remains, despite all the attempts of the powers of darkness to turn it into cursing.

A graduate student wrote to ask if my Christianity affects my novels, and I replied that it is the other way around. My writing affects my Christianity. In a way one might say that my stories keep converting me back to Christianity, from which I am constantly tempted to stray because the circle of blessing seems frayed and close to breaking, and my faith is so frail and flawed that I fall away over and over again from my God. There are times when I feel that he has withdrawn from me, and I have often given him cause; but Easter is always the answer to “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!”

Easter is the most brilliant of all blessings, and all through the Bible, in both Old and New Testaments, comes the message of blessing, and that it is the vocation of the People of God to bless as well as be blessed, and to turn away wrath with a soft answer -- a softness which is not flabby, but which has the power of meekness.

That is the point which is most important to me in the story of Balaam and his ass, and perhaps because I loved this story as a child, I responded to it with particular affection when I returned to it as an adult.

I

One of the best pieces of advice I had from Mary Ellen Chase, that superb teacher I was privileged to study with in college, was that anybody who was seriously considering writing as a profession must be completely familiar with the King James translation of the Bible, because the power of this great translation is the rock on which the English language stands.

So, as a young woman, I turned to the Bible for purely literary reasons. But I discovered that the Bibleis a great deal more alive than the church establishment seemed to be. It is a repository of joy and piety and history and humor and storytelling and great characters, and my writer’s mind was nourished. I stayed with the Book all through the years when I kept my back turned on the Establishment.

One of the first messages that struck me is that the Bible is not a moral tract. It may contain all that is necessary for salvation, but the glory of Easter is not a result of self-righteousness. Not long ago I gave a talk to a group of students studying for advanced degrees in education. During the question-and-answer period one of them asked me about the moral precepts in my stories, and the question alarmed me, because a novel should not be a moral tract, it should be a story. Moralism and moral values are by no means the same thing, but with the slurring of language the two have come pretty close. So I said, somewhat dubiously, because this was a secular lecture to a general audience and I was afraid of being misunderstood, that my point of view about life was going to show under the story, because that’s inevitable, but I never consciously write about moral precepts, and I do not like moralism, which is another form of do-it-yourselfism. And I tried to explain that people who think themselves capable of setting up rigid moral standards are playing dictator, like the occasional prideful people who attempt to get Winnie-the-Pooh taken out of the library because they think it’s immoral.

Other questions came in then, but I went on thinking about it, afraid that some of the students thought that I was advocating immorality. Finally I ventured to mention the Bible. The Bible is not a moral tract and it is not about moral people. Look at them! Ordinary human beings, full of flaws, sins, humanness, but found by God. God called Abraham, an old man past his productive years, to be the father of a nation. Jacob, whose behavior was shabby, to say the least, wrestled with an angel. And Rahab was a harlot and Jesus was gentle with a woman taken in adultery.

If a calling committee today were looking for someone to take over an important parish, they’d pass over such people as being completely unqualified. And Paul of Tarsus would certainly never have made it, with his particular list of credentials, such as helping at the stoning of Stephen. But God always calls unqualified people. In cold reality, no one is qualified; but God, whose ways are not our ways, seems to choose those least qualified, people who well may have come from slums and battlefields and insane asylums. If he had chosen great kings, successful and wealthy merchants, wise men with their knowledge of the stars, it would be easy to think that these people, of their own virtue and understanding, accomplished on their own the blessing which God asked them to complete.

And Jesus chose his disciples with the same recklessness as his father; he chose them not in the Sanhedrin, not in the high places of the wealthy; he found them as they were fishing, collecting taxes, going about the ordinary business of life.

The men and women called by God to do his work would never have passed a test in moral virtues. David’s getting Bathsheba by conniving to have her husband killed in battle was a totally immoral act. Nathan the Prophet made this quite clear to his king, and David repented. Everything that happened to the shepherd boy who became a king was a lesson, loud and clear, that the blessing is always God’s.

But at that lecture one of the students, still hung up on moralism, said, “But you’re looking for something in your books, you can’t deny that.” “Of course I’m looking for something. But I’m not looking for morals, I’m looking for truth.” Probably in searching for the truth of love I’ll discover something about morals, though I’m not sure. The older I get and the more I learn, the less qualified I become to make correct moral judgments; that may not stop me from having to make them -- an event must be assessed before it can be blessed -- but I have learned with hindsight that with all the goodwill in the world I may be wrong, and it is only by offering my judgments to God that they can be redeemed and blessed.

Slow am I as always to recognize what is right in front of me. Of course: all I’m fumbling on about moralism has already been said for me by Paul. Moralism belongs to the old law and the old covenant. Jesus Christ in his life, death and resurrection overturned the laws of moralism. Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us. That’s not very acceptable language, but it does help to put my fragments together.

It is difficult to bless and not to curse when one’s control of a situation is taken away. I witness daily the cursing which is the result of impotence. My threshold of anger is much lower than it used to be. Small annoyances provoke much too strong a reaction of irritation. I may not curse, but blessings do not come to my lips as often as I would like.

The doors of many of the neighborhood shops around our apartment are no longer open to welcome the customer. One has to be buzzed in, because there have been so many shopkeepers shot or stabbed that it has become necessary to live in this sadly realistic climate of suspicion, which increases my own feelings of impotence. When my husband, Hugh, is late coming home from theater or television studio I pace about nervously, fearful that he may have been mugged. And the very muggers themselves are reacting irrationally to an impotence and frustration far greater than mine, so it is no wonder that they respond with a curse.

But our television commercials, our political speeches, our “how-to” and “do-it-yourself” books would seem to offer us a world in which if we only eat a low-carbohydrate and low-cholesterol diet, or buy a new combination washing machine and outdoor barbecue, we will be in charge of our lives.

We aren’t, and most of us know we aren’t, and that isn’t easy to accept. If we have so little control over the world in which we live, can our lives, and the lives of those we love, have- any meaning?

Easter affirms meaning, even though it’s not possible for finite brokenness to define the meaning of infinite wholeness. The acceptance of this not-knowing is nothing new; rather, technocracy has refused to accept what the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing understood and expressed for us so beautifully.

It is only when I am not afraid to recognize my own brokenness, to say, “Turn us again, Lord God of hosts, cause thy face to shine and we shall be whole” -- that the broken bones may begin to heal, and to rejoice. Without this phos hilaron, this joyous light, we fight against our impotence, in our spiritual lives, our intellectual lives, a large portion of our physical lives.

But in the small events of daily living we are given the grace to condition our responses to frustrations. It’s something like driving a car. If you’re driving along a highway and a car comes at you from a side road, and you have to think what you ought to do, you’re not likely to avoid an accident. In an emergency you don’t have time to stop and think. You act before thought, on your conditioned reflexes.

So it is with all of life. If our usual response to an annoying situation is a curse, we’re likely to meet emergencies with a curse. In the little events of daily living we have the opportunity to condition our reflexes, which are built up out of ordinary things. And we learn to bless first of all by being blessed. My reflexes of blessing have been conditioned by my parents, my husband, my children, my friends.

Blessing is an attitude toward all of life, transcending and moving beyond words. When family and friends gather around the table to break bread together, this is a blessing. When we harden our hearts against anyone, this is a cursing. Sometimes a person, or a group of people, do or say something so terrible that we can neither bless nor curse. They are anathema. We put them outside the city walls, not out of revenge, not out of hate, but because they have gone beyond anything we fragile human beings can cope with. So we say, Here, God, I’m sorry. This is more than I can handle. Please take care of it. Your ways are not our ways. You know what to do. Please.

But sometimes I am confronted with a situation which demands a response of either blessing or cursing, and from me. I cannot refuse to meet the emergency by turning aside. And I have cause to remember Balaam, who was ordered by King Balak to go and curse the children of Israel. Rather reluctantly he saddled his ass and went to do the king’s bidding, and his ass stopped in the middle of the road, because she saw something Balaam didn’t see; she saw the angel of the Lord standing in the path, and she refused to allow Balaam to go on. And in the end Balaam heeded the ass, and he blessed the children of Israel, blessed instead of cursed;

Blessing is no easier for me than it was for Balaam, and there was a Friday after Easter, two years ago, when I was put to the test.

II

When we open our house in the country in the spring we know that it will still be winter on our hill; Crosswicks is a good three weeks behind New York, where the Cathedral Close is bursting with blossom, and the cement islands which run down the middle of Broadway are astonishing with the glory of magnolia blooms. At Crosswicks the forsythia will show no bud, though if I bring it indoors it will take only a day or so before it bursts into gold. The house, even with the furnace running, will not be quite warm enough, and we’ll huddle around the fire and rush upstairs to bed to plunge beneath the covers. Things which were part of the burden when we lived in Crosswicks year round are fun when it’s only on a weekend basis.

I look forward with intense anticipation to the first weekend in the country. Each year the city gets more difficult. Each year the world seems in a worse mess than it was the year before. Our own country is still in trouble, and this trouble is reflected in the city and on the Cathedral Close. I need to get away and find perspective.

On that particular Friday after Easter it had been a bad week in the world, a bad week in the country, a bad week on the Close. I looked forward to the peace and quiet of the first weekend the way, as a small child, I had anticipated Christmas. When we got up to Crosswicks it was still light, one of those rare blue-and-gold afternoons when the sky shimmers with radiance. Hugh said to me, “I bet you’re going right to the brook.”

“Would you mind?”

“Go ahead, but don’t stay too long.”

So I called my dog, Timothy, from sniffing the rock garden and set off across the big field and over the stone wall. Easter was late that year, and the trees were beginning to put forth tiny gold shoots which in another couple of weeks would be green leaves. Some of the budding maples were pale pink, and the beech trees were almost lavender. I could feel myself unwinding from the tensions of the past weeks. I felt surrounded by blessing.

I have several favorite places where I love to sit and think. Probably the most favorite is a large rock above the brook. Directly in front of the rock is an old maple tree. When the trees are fully leafed it is always shaded, and on the hottest day it is cool there. I knew that now the brook would be rushing, filled with clear, icy water from melting snow.

The summer before, I had gone with my daughter, Josephine, and her husband, Alan, and their two little girls to a fair at Regina Landis Monastery in Bethlehem, Connecticut. I have a good friend among the sisters there, and that afternoon she gave me a small, laminated icon of a medieval Mother and Child, and a little cross. I had put these on the trunk of the big maple, and in the late afternoon it was my habit to go to my thinking rock and say my prayers and then, with the icon tree as my focus, to try to move beyond the words of prayer to the prayer of the heart.

So that spring afternoon I headed straight for the rock and the icon tree. But as I started down the tiny path through the trees which leads to the rock, I felt that something was wrong. I quickened my steps and when I had climbed up on the rock I saw. Someone had shot the icon at close range. It was split in four parts. There was a bullet hole through the face of the holy child. The cross had been pulled from its ring; only the broken ring still clung to the nail. I felt an incredible wave of hate flood over me. I was literally nauseated. What had been done had been done deliberately; it was not an accident; it was a purposeful blasphemy, an act of cursing.

I was beyond any response of either blessing or cursing. But I knew that I couldn’t go home until I had been washed clean of the hate. The very trees around the rock seemed to draw back in horror and apology because they had not been able to stop the intruder.

Feeling sick and cold, I called Timothy and walked and walked. My dog knew that something had upset me. He kept close as we walked, instead of tearing off in great loops. We kept walking until I had come to the point where I could simply turn over to God whoever had shot the icon and the cross. This person was beyond my puny human ability to understand. I could not add to the curse by cursing. But I did not know how to bless. I went back to the house and told Hugh what had happened. The next day I carried tools and took the remains of the icon off the tree and gave them to the brook. I took away the small nail with the broken loop. Then I sat on the rock and looked at the gouge in the tree’s wood. What I describe in the sonnet below did not happen that day, but it did happen, and redeemed the act of hate, and made the tree far more of an icon for me than it was before:

As I sit at the shot-at tree

The rough wound opens and grows strange and deep

Within the wood, till suddenly I see

A galaxy aswirl with flame, I do not sleep

And yet I see a trillion stars speed light

In ever-singing dance within the hole

Surrounded by the tree. Each leaf’s alight

With flame. And then a burning living coal.

Drops hissing in the brook, and all the suns

Burst outward in their joy, and the shot child,

Like the great and flaming tree, runs

With fire and water, and alive and wild.

Gentle and strong, becomes the wounded tree.

Lord God! The icon’s here, alive and free.

 

Balak sent Balaam to curse the children of Israel, and the ass saw an angel of God and sat down under Balaam and refused to move, and the curse was turned to a blessing.

I don’t understand and I don’t need to understand.

Bless the Lord, 0 my soul, I cry with the psalmist whose songs after all these thousands of years still sing so poignantly for us. 0 bless his Holy Name, and may he bless each one of us and teach us to bless one another.

I affirm my faith in the promise of Easter, of the resurrection, not only of the Lord Jesus Christ but of us all; the resurrection not as a panacea or placebo for those who cannot cope without medication, or as the soporific of the masses (Simone Weil said that revolution, and not religion, is the soporific of the masses), but as the reality which lights the day. The experience with the icon tree was a symbole of resurrection for me, an affirmation which helps me to respond with a blessing where otherwise I might curse.

There are too many books which affirm resurrection now and can’t quite believe in resurrection after death. Resurrection now is indeed important for resurrection then, but resurrection now means little if after death there is nothing but ashes to ashes and dust to dust. The God who redeemed the icon tree for me will not create creatures able to ask questions only to be snuffed out before they can answer them. There is no pragmatic reason why any of my questions should be answered, why this little life should not be all; but the joyful God of love who shouted the galaxies into existence is not going to abandon any iota of his creation. So the icon tree is for me a symbole of God’s concern, forever and always and unto ages of ages, for all of us, every single one of us, no matter what we think or believe or deny.

So let there be no question: I believe in the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth as Jesus the Christ, and the resurrection of the body of all creatures great and small, not the literal resurrection of this tired body, this broken self, but the body as it was meant to be, the fragmented self made new; so that at the end of time all Creation will be One. Well: maybe I don’t exactly believe it, but I know it, and knowing is what matters.

The strange turning of what seemed to be a horrendous No to a glorious Yes is always the message of Easter. The destroyed icon and the wounded tree are a poignant symbol of the risen Christ. The gouge in the tree is beginning to heal, but I will always know that it is there, and it is living witness that love is stronger than hate. Already things have happened which have put this knowledge to the test, and sometimes I have been where I could not go to the rock and see the tangible assurance of the tree’s tall strong trunk. But I can turn in my mind’s eye and see it, can image the whole chain of events from the cruel destruction of death to the brilliance of new life.

I need to hold on to that bright promise.

Whatever Happened to Ministers’ Wives

It wasn’t very many years ago that I wrote a book titled, without so much as a blush, The Care and Feeding of Ministers! How quaint. The tables are turning to such an extent that one might be tempted to write The Care and Feeding of Ministers’ Spouses -- but not quite. Almost everything we once held sacrosanct as “queens” (oh, dear God!) of the parsonage has been demythologized -- and not a minute too soon. It seems only fitting to ask a few questions and make a few observations about the new women married to ministers. We have to ask these particular questions since women who happen to be married to ministers are still around in rather large numbers, while men who happen to be married to ministers are still relatively few. The church’s experience with women clergy and with the “minister’s husband” has seemingly not yet provided us with enough data to permit us to generalize about the problems unique to those marriages -- or to produce stereotypes that need to be unlearned!

The spouses of male clergy are still confused about role expectations which they deny exist, are still anxious to please people they claim not to give a damn about, and are still worried about their image -- which, of course, is irrelevant. In other words, there are still nagging vestiges of the old problems. Yet one has to admit that the minister’s wife who once read books like mine and who attended anxiously and diligently to the “duties” imposed on her from without belongs to a vanishing species. Where has she gone? Will we miss her? Should she be rescued and returned to the place she once occupied?

I

First, a description of this endangered species: she seldom worked outside the home unless she was a teacher or nurse. She worried about making financial ends meet, but she was very careful not to mention this preoccupation outside the parsonage bedroom. She was the last to surrender the hat and the white gloves she had always worn to church. She felt guilty if she did not sing in the choir, attend all women’s meetings and teach Sunday school. She felt guilty that she was not a good enough Christian to be an exemplary person for one and all. She feared being criticized almost more than she feared death. She tried to be the perfect mother. She was highly embarrassed if any of her brood behaved badly. She tried to be the perfect wife and to do all the things perfect wives did superbly -- ironing, cooking, entertaining ad nauseam. She was uptight and believed that that was the only way to be.

Now the few wives who find themselves described as “endangered” may be embarrassed. It is like hearing one’s children ask: ‘Mom, how was it in the olden days when you were young?” It wasn’t all that long ago, and we weren’t all that peculiar. We tried to live as best we could where we were. A lot has happened to us and around us -- so much, in fact, that we do not even talk about it among ourselves very often. But let’s try.

No doubt the women’s movement and the resultant rise in consciousness of women as people has had a great impact on the wives of ministers. In fact many of them were in the forefront of the movement. Nowadays one feels positively guilty if one does not have a career or a job outside the home. One feels downright put upon if one has to prepare all the meals, if one takes care of the children full-time, if one has to entertain often. Somehow one feels that one is deserting one’s sisters -- and, even worse, setting a rotten example for one’s sons and daughters. A new life style is upon us, with new demands, new guilts and, one hopes, new satisfactions. The new woman in the parsonage is having an effect on the way her minister husband feels about life and on the way in which he ministers. One way of looking at this impact is in terms of what this new wife is concerned about and how she is dealing with problems.

II

She is concerned about holding her marriage together. Divorce is being tolerated in ever-increasing numbers among clergy; the wife of a minister no longer has the assurance that she will not someday be divorced. Wives mention this concern as their first. Why? Some wives mention types of “encounter” groups as the villain; others cite attitudes of “letting it all hang out” or “doing ones own thing.” In general there seems to be increased opportunity for extramarital sexual encounters accompanied by a less compelling sense of restraint.

Many young working wives feel that the long hours they are away from home cause loneliness and frustration in their spouses -- much the same kind of experience they themselves had as housewives. Other women express concern about their own ability to behave with integrity. They are constantly exposed to tempting encounters with men they meet in business and professional circles. Some find that men are attracted to them simply because their aura of specialness as ministers’ wives is a challenge, in much the way some men are tempted by virgins.

Possible effect on the ministry: The positive effect is a concern about one’s marriage and the work necessary to keep it alive and well. This concern can create stronger marriages. Taking one’s spouse for granted is never healthy. The fear of divorce can, however, be self-defeating if it expresses itself in undue jealousy, lack of trust, tension.

2. She is concerned about her relationship to her children. Ten years ago I was shocked when a woman confessed that she feared she would use physical violence against her own children. In a parsonage? This terrible extreme was not an isolated instance, for I subsequently heard similar statements many times. The most unspeakable kind of behavior toward children is at least feared as a possibility in the minister’s own home.

But by and large the concern of the working wife is that she may be neglecting her children, depriving them of some necessary ingredient in their lives. The result of such fears may be undue tension, and/or undue indulgence. Where once her concern was to have perfect children in the eyes of the congregation and community, she is now preoccupied primarily with her own adequacies as a parent.

Possible effect: One has to ask whether the children are better off because of this change of focus. They may well be. At least the children of the parsonage feel that they are like everyone else; they are not pressured constantly to be good examples. They may, however, feel less of a sense of personal security than they once did with mom on the home front -- but this situation is prevalent within society In general and certainly helps ministers and their families to understand the problems others face.

3. She insists on a sharing of labor in the home. This necessary aspect of home life for working couples has its impact on husbands and children. The trend of involving men in the ho-hum duties of the household is a sound one. Accomplished together, some of the duties that are otherwise tedious can become occasions for sharing and can be less onerous than when one person assumes the whole burden. The employed wife feels that she has expended at least as much energy outside the home during the day as has the husband, and that therefore equal amounts of energy should be expended in the home tasks.

Possible effect: House duties can become a threat to the male minister who comes to prefer them to some of his other tasks such as office work, calling, studying and the like. They can become a crutch on which he leans to dispel guilt for undone work he did not want to do anyway. One sure thing about house-work is that it expands to fill the amount of time available for doing it. When one is new at it, either disgusted or intrigued by it, there is no knowing when it is “done.”

III

4. She has a primary concern for her own life and career. We cannot know what the consequences of this new focus will be on the male minister’s marriage and his career. In many cases the minister’s wife is entering a career in which changes dictated by her husband’s career will be threatening. This woman begins to feel her own sense of worth in the greater world, and she gains personal satisfactions of accomplishment totally unrelated to what is happening in her husband’s ministry. He may well be having his worst times when she is on a high in her career.

Possible effect: When a minister’s wife has a career that refuses to move when her husband must move, there will be tremendous problems to be solved. The impact of the marriages of women ministers and nonclergy professionals whose moves must be coordinated may aid administrators and churches to be helpful in the future in ways they are refusing to be now. Yet the question will remain a nagging one; Who will give in the most? One young couple formulated a plan of taking turns yearly to determine where they would work. What happens when a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity comes to either party when it is the year of decision for the other? Solving that problem will never be easy. Can we see a future when ministers and their spouses actually live in separate locations with only occasional times together, as some academic couples are now doing? What will be the cost?

5. Her husband’s ministry is not the most important thing in her life. This may well be the crucial change after all else is said. Once upon a time a wife cared desperately and from moment to moment about every aspect of her husband’s work. She had time, or made time, to be into everything with which she thought she could be of help. She devoted much effort to improving relationships with parishioners; she often “filled in the gaps” in her husband’s abilities. She may still care desperately, but it inevitably is in a new and more detached manner.

A loving wife certainly cares if her husband is being hurt, but she is less inclined to jump into the fray than she once would have been. The “team” approach is restricted to the home; if it exists in the church work, it is certain to be confined by limited time and energy.

Possible effect: Many a minister who could make it when a wife filled in the weak places in his ministry will have a much more difficult time without that assistance. In fact, some men have already fallen by the wayside for this reason. On the other hand, some dependent clergymen may well take over their own lives in new and creative ways and become stronger for going it alone.

IV

6. She is likely to be more interested in causes than in coffees. The wife employed outside the home is more likely to apply what free time she has to the cause about which she cares the most, be it hunger, abortion, child abuse or women’s rights. She, like her sisters around her, is less and less interested in the nitty-gritty activities of women’s groups in the church -- or elsewhere, for that matter. She wants to get something important done in the limited time she has. She tends to feel less need for the socializing enjoyed by women who have fewer outside-the-home contacts.

Possible effects: She may feel less compatible with the women in the church who are full-time homemakers. If she desires a closeness to many of the women, she will certainly have to work at it in ways other than the usual contacts through service groups.

7. She would rather go to a seminar on finances than to one on “expectations of ministers’ wives.” The new financial security that results when there are two wage-earners in the parsonage brings out practical financial questions and interests on the part of earning wives. They are interested in real estate, investments, medical security, insurance, pensions. In her previous incarnation the minister’s wife worried about these things only on occasion and was assured that the Lord would take care of her in an uncertain future.

Possible effects: We can say “thank goodness” for the number of ministers’ families who can surmount the genteel poverty of earlier days. But the increasing number of two-salary homes has tended to make clergy less concerned about salary standards, and this change has a negative effect on the family in which the wife wishes to remain in the home full-time, for one reason or another. It also leads to attitudes on the part of laity in the church that “his wife will support him, so we don’t have to worry.”

The working wife is only one of the factors, but an important one, in making the parsonage system obsolete. Of course, clergy families should be building up equity in a home of their own, or in other real estate. The wife’s income may just provide the push for many unmotivated couples to make this change. Some may be bothered by the materialism involved in two-salary families; yet how one relates to money and what it stands for is a concern for every one of us, whether we have a mite or millions. It is, after all, our attitude toward money which saves or condemns us.

The listing of her concerns says a great deal about this new kind of wife, yet does not say it all by any means. Obviously she has problems yet to be solved. One good thing about her new problems is that they are pretty much those of her neighbors, and not hers just because she is the wife of a minister.

She often betrays the same kinds of floating anxiety that her predecessors did; that is, in overeating, overdressing or underdressing, overdominating and oververbalizing -- she does a lot of things “too much.” But, I venture to guess, she is more interesting to live with because she finds life more exciting. Most of all, she is still an exceptionally caring person, sensitive to the needs around her, but in new ways. At least that is my hope and my dream.

Dismantling the Cross: A Case Against Capital Punishment

At the festival season the Governor used to release one prisoner at the people’s request. . . . “What shall I do with the man you call the King of the Jews?” They shouted back, “Crucify him!” “Why, what harm hits he done?” Pilate asked; but they shouted all the louder, “Crucify him!” So Pilate, in his desire to satisfy the mob, released Barabbas to them; and he had Jesus flogged and handed him over to be crucified [Mark 15:6-15].

The Romans did not invent capital punishment, but they were among early practitioners of the art of putting to death persons adjudged guilty of heinous crimes. One of their prisoners gained unprecedented notoriety, partly as a result of his execution at their hands, and today the Roman equivalent of the electric chair is a religious symbol for hundreds of millions of Christians.

An alien, an outsider who incurred the hate and fear of both the masses and the authorities, Jesus was executed because of who he was as much as for what he did. At the time, his execution helped to affirm the rule of the Romans over the Jews, and provided an outlet for the Jews’ frustrations. Calling for the death of the deviant Jesus, the mob identified (at least outwardly) with the power that maintained a hold on them.

Society’s Outcasts

What does this account have to do with the reinstatement of capital punishment in contemporary America? Surely Charles Manson, Gary Gilmore and the other former and present inmates of state prison Death Rows -- there are presently more than 300 Death Row occupants nationwide -- cannot be compared with Jesus. And the United States in 1977 is hardly an occupied land governed by a distant emperor. Yet the basic social and cultural patterns that today condemn men and women to death, in accordance with the wishes of 65 per cent of the American public, remain in some ways remarkably unchanged from ancient times.

Every society has its particular class of outcasts, deemed for one reason or another unfit to live. While the killing of an enemy usually takes place in the context of war, behind strategic battlelines, there is also the “enemy within,” a “criminal element” designated a threat to society, forcing it to draw domestic battlelines: in its courts, precincts, prisons and streets. To eliminate the undesirables, society adapts the technique it employs when going to war.

Not long after the death of Jesus, his followers were being thrown to the lions in a more bizarre form of execution. When early Christians banded together to worship their God, live in common, hold common property, and refuse to take up arms, they were branded misfits and public enemies, and in many cases were put to death. Capital punishment then was administered in ways which seem particularly primitive and barbaric by modern standards that call for a high level of technology and sophistication in putting a person to death. For example, thieves were nailed to wooden crosses until they died from dehydration or loss of blood; men and women were herded into dens of hungry lions, to be mauled or eaten alive; some were burned alive. Yet the general principle that applies to almost every method of execution is that the process be fairly simple, brutal and blood-curdling in order to impress the victims -- and more important, would-be criminals -- with the severity of the infraction and the depth of society’s righteous anger.

During the Middle Ages, a segment of the peasant population in Europe and Great Britain was singled out for executions on a massive scale. From the 14th to the 17th centuries, church and state cooperated in putting to death thousands of women accused of being witches. In the face of the growing rebellion against feudalism and the rise of Protestantism, witchhunts were designed to eliminate deviants and heretics. Citizens were compelled to report any known “servant of the devil,’ under threat of excommunication and temporal punishments. Torture and public trials resulted in burnings at the stake of poor and working-class women viewed as symbols of rebellion against the ruling church. In certain German cities, executions occurred at an average of 600 a year, or about two a day.

The earliest laws in the New World included witchcraft as one of the crimes punishable by death. The Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636 ordained the death penalty for a large assortment of offenses, inherited with the death penalty itself from England. Along with witchcraft, they included idolatry, blasphemy, murder, sodomy, rape, man-stealing and rebellion. By the 1800s, capital punishment was a long-established legal instrument and public ritual in this country, utilized for a variety of purposes in various social situations. For example, North Carolina used the death penalty to assist with the maintenance of slavery; slave-stealing and inciting slaves to insurrection were capital crimes.

It happens that the last public hanging in America involved the execution of a black man. On August 15, 1936, 20,000 people stood on rooftops and climbed telephone poles to watch the hanging in Owensboro, Kentucky. From that time on, executions took place within the confines of prisons -- except for lynchings, which continued in some areas of the country without legal sanction. However, ad hoc hangings of blacks under the auspices of the Ku Klux Klan and other white vigilante groups could not have taken place without benefit of social sanction. They occurred in an atmosphere of racism and hatred that also led to the passage in several southern states of death penalty laws intended for blacks accused of raping whites.

Ritual Deaths

Seen against this background, it is no surprise that capital punishment throughout the United States in this century has been administered arbitrarily in a manner characterized by socioeconomic and racial bias. Now, as during Roman times, capital punishment is nearly always reserved for the outsider, the feared and hated in. our society. The poor and powerless are condemned because of who they are as much as for what they may do contrary to the law.

Only a small proportion of those guilty of capital crimes are actually put to death. It has been estimated that since 1930, over 50,000 capital crimes have been committed. But during that period, only 3,859 persons were executed. Of these, 2,066, or 54 per cent, were black, although blacks represent only about one-eleventh of the population. Nearly 90 per cent of those executed for rape were black.

The rich, influential and well-counseled rarely meet a trial judge and almost never see the gas chamber or electric chair. In the words of former Governor Michael V. Disalle of Ohio: “I found the men in Death Row had one thing in common: they were penniless. There were other common denominators -- low mental capacity, little or no education, few friends, broken homes . . .”

Today the vast majority of Death Row prisoners fit the description; they are outsiders, almost half of them from minorities. They sit in lonely cells just steps away from the ritual-death mechanism. Some have admitted their guilt; others will maintain their innocence to the last. But they are all products and victims of a violent, unequal, vengeful society. Revulsion at acts of rape and homicide is channeled against this small group of despised, dispossessed individuals, branded subhuman and antisocial, therefore unworthy to live. As members of the predominantly white, middle-class, law-abiding majority, we condone their ritual deaths in order to affirm our own “humanity” and identification with the existing social order. Yet in different circumstances, we might be the victims, once we accept the proposition that the state can decide who has no right to live.

Modern-Day Crucifixion

As we anticipate widespread use of the executioner in the wake of new court rulings and death-penalty laws, it is sobering to recall the bizarre circumstances of one of the last executions to take place in this country prior to 1977. Aaron Mitchell, the next-to-last man executed in 1967, succeeded in mythologizing the liturgy of death by removing all of his clothes a few hours before his execution, slashing his wrists with a razor blade, and standing in the form of a crucifix, arms outstretched. As blood dripped to the floor, he cried, “This is the blood of Jesus Christ.” Dragged struggling and screaming into the gas chamber, he was still shouting “I am Christ” when the cyanide hit him.

Even more to the point is the death of Jesus himself. Contemporary society, like the society in Roman times, will never arrive at a perfect and equitable system of justice or succeed in totally eliminating human error and prejudice. If we reinstate the death penalty, innocent and guilty alike will receive the nails of modern-day crucifixion. The outsiders, the feared and hated, with their damaged, discarded lives, will suffer execution for who they are as well as for what they are accused of having done.

By identifying with the Jesus of the Electric Chair -- a victim of capital punishment along with “common criminals” of his age and our own -- we might take the side of the outsider, the condemned. We might discover a deeper commitment to life, compassion and social change than to death, vengeance and the status quo. And a movement of contemporary Christians and others may arise to dismantle the cross and abolish capital punishment for all time.

There were two others with him, criminals who were being led away to execution; and when they reached the place called The Skull, they crucified him there, and the criminals with him, one on his right, and the other on his left. . . . And [one of them] said: “Jesus, remember me when you come to your throne.” He answered, “I tell you this: today you shall be with me in Paradise” [Luke 23:32-43].

Small Is Beautiful, and So Is Rome: Surprising Faith of E.F. Schumacher

What does it mean that E. F. Schumacher’s book Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered (Harper & Row, 1973), has caught on so strongly, especially among people who are exploring “alternatives” of various sorts -- economic, political, spiritual? Originally published in England, the volume has now sold more than a million copies worldwide. Is its best-selling status another sign of decay in the old establishment world view, and further evidence of growing efforts to transcend that world view through a new consciousness, replace it with a new life style, and outlive it in a New Age?

Well, maybe. Those who think so include people who have compiled records of intelligent and dedicated radicalism going back a decade or more. But then again, other people have seen the book as representing something very different. One of them is E. F. Schumacher himself. As he puts it with unusual bluntness, “All this lyrical stuff about entering the Aquarian Age and reaching a new level of consciousness and taking the next step in evolution is nonsense. Much of it is a sort of delusion of grandeur, the kind of thing you hear from people in the loony bin. What I’m struggling to do is to help recapture something our ancestors had. If we can just regain the consciousness the West had before the Cartesian Revolution, which I call the Second Fall of Man, then we’ll be getting somewhere.”

Putting the ‘Inner House’ in Order

I talked with Schumacher recently when he passed through the San Francisco Bay area on a nationwide tour. While in the area he dropped in on one of his biggest local fans, California Governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr. for a private dinner, then for two days sat in on a big conference on Small Is Beautiful held by the extension department of the University of California at Davis.

Reporters thronged his press conferences, underlining his underground superstar status. During his U.S. visit he was hosted by five governors and a lieutenant governor, a passel of universities and social-change groups, and -- with fine ecumenical sense -- the heads of several large corporations. My conversation with him came in bits and pieces between lectures, local tours, speech preparations and fugitive efforts to catch a little sleep.

Most of his talks and the bulk of the questions he fielded had to do with the unorthodox economic proposals set forth in his book and his other writings: the idea, above all, of an “intermediate technology” appropriate in scale and cost to the needs and conditions of the people using it -- neither too large nor too small. But most of his specific suggestions seemed secondary to what came through as the primary message of Small Is Beautiful -- a message so skillfully delivered that it has been absorbed by his audiences apparently without being noticed. What is the message? Nothing less than a passionate plea for the rediscovery of old-time Western religion -- Roman Catholic religion, to be precise.

That’s right: E. F. Schumacher is really an apologetical preacher, one of the rare breed whose experience has made it possible for him to employ effectively the language and concepts of economics as a medium for communicating what is essentially a sermon, a call for readers to repent, believe the gospel and reorder their lives accordingly.

Schumacher himself insists that it is this “metaeconomic” foundation of his argument that is most important, rather than the specifics of, say, his attacks on nuclear power or the use of chemicals in agriculture. “Everywhere people ask,” he writes in the book’s final paragraph, “What can I actually do?” The answer is as simple as it is disconcerting: we can, each of us, work to put our own inner house in order.”

The key word here is “inner.” Skim over it, and one can easily imagine that, like some Earth Day orator, he’s only saying, “Ecology begins at home,” with recycling your bottles and flattening tin cans. He recommends these things, to be sure, but they aren’t the point.

The Anti-Christian Trauma

This “inner” part was what I wanted to talk to him about. He readily owned up to being a Catholic, a certified convert as of five years ago. This item is not mentioned in his book; in fact, one of the most frequently cited chapters, “Buddhist Economics,” almost made it appear as if he were deeply involved in Eastern religions. But wasn’t this chapter, I inquired, really more informed by the Catholic writings and thinkers he mentioned so frequently elsewhere in the book -- the papal encyclicals, Newman, Gilson and, above all, Thomas Aquinas?

Schumacher grinned. “Of course. But if I had called the chapter ‘Christian Economics,’ nobody would have paid any attention!”

This is not to say that the reference to Buddhism was a sham; he is firmly convinced that the basic elements of a common religious outlook are to be found in all the world’s major religions. But it was done artfully, to help get his message across. “You see, most people in the West are suffering from what I call an anti-Christian trauma,” he explained, “and I don’t blame them. I went through that for 20 years myself.”

Paradoxically, it was Buddhism that opened the door to Schumacher’s return to Western religion, so his use of Buddhist concepts, besides being shrewd, is authentically based in his experience. “I was raised in Germany in the atmosphere of scientific materialism,” he explained, “though with a veneer of Christianity -- Lutheranism. But after I went to the university, I reacted very strongly, like many young people, against veneers of religion and culture, and that was the beginning of my own version of the anti-Christian trauma. There’s much truth to that reaction too, of course, because the churches have become associated with so much that’s wrong about our culture.”

But this scientific materialism was hardly a satisfactory alternative world view for a sensitive soul. “These attitudes,” said Schumacher, “all left the taste of ashes in my mouth,” and it wasn’t long before he was searching for some better view of life.

Overcoming Egocentricity

Then about 1950, he said, he stumbled across a book about Buddhism. “My eyes had been firmly closed to truth,” he said, “but Buddhism opened them. As I read the book I kept saying, ‘This is what I’ve been looking for!’ And I wanted to learn all I could about it. As part of this study I became an economic adviser to the government of Burma, a Buddhist country.” Schumacher was then chiefly occupied as the head economist for the British National Coal Board, one of the largest industrial enterprises in Europe.

Another part of his exploration of Eastern religion included reading Gandhi. He was impressed by the Mahatma’s reported advice to his Christian friends from the West. As far as religion was concerned, Gandhi insisted, “Stay at home! Stay at home!”

These words echoed in Schumacher’s mind. “One thing I realized was that I was no different from anyone else in my society, really. And in my own view it is a very important part of a person s spiritual development to overcome his own egocentricity, his pride. And if I were to go around England passing myself off as a Buddhist, then I would also be thinking that everyone else around me was stupid, because they’d all got the wrong religion. They’re all unenlightened, while I’m the one who has the truth. And there are many people in the West these days going around acting like quasi-Orientals, with dreadful results.

“Of course, there are exceptions to this rule; I know Western people who are quite humbly and genuinely Buddhist. But in my case Gandhi was right; such an attitude would only signify a slipping back into my own egocentricity. And besides, I was quite sure that the Lord would not have left all the Christians without any truth in their tradition. This was all part of the process of overcoming my own anti-Christian trauma.

At Home in Catholicism

Once over this hump, Schumacher began exploring the styles and beliefs of the churches around him. “I found that in England almost any old nonsense was being written and passed off as Christianity, even by bishops. And so I finally decided that the Catholic tradition was the one where I felt most at home, and where the essentials of Christianity were best preserved.”

But why join a church at all, I wondered. If the central elements of various religions have so much in common, if they form what Schumacher calls the philosophia perennis, why did he feel obliged to settle for a single, necessarily limited institutional expression of it?

Schumacher leaned back in his chair, allowed that it was a good question, and took his time before answering. “All I can say,” he admitted finally, “is that I did it out of deep consciousness of my own weakness, my unreliability, my need for ‘crutches,’ for a framework. In these circumstances, to go it alone was simply not a good idea for me.

“In this way too, I heard echoes of what Gandhi said: ‘Stay at home! If everybody else around who is a Christian has a need for a church, am I really so different and better that I don’t? No. And in fact I get a great deal out of the church. The ritual, for instance, is extremely intelligent, in the fullest sense, so it is a great help. And finally, I am a family man [Schumacher at 66 has eight children, the youngest a son two years old], and even if I could sustain a free-floating spirituality, which I can’t, the children surely couldn’t, and it’s important to me that religion be a family affair. The church enables me to have that.”

The Catholic tradition provided Schumacher with more than a personal spiritual haven, however. It also gave him the building blocks for his own economics of human scale and appropriate technology.

“Schumacher is a contemporary voice of what I call social Catholicism,” commented John Coleman, who shared a panel with the Englishman at the Davis Extension Conference. Dr. Coleman is professor of religion and society at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, and he had delivered a paper discussing some of the ethical implications of the approach. “By this I mean the stream of Catholic thought that built on Thomistic principles, as particularly reapplied in the work of Jacques Maritain. Its adherents stressed that human institutions ought to be manageable in size, respectful of the human scale, and sanely run so that they did not damage the people involved in them.”

“These writers,” said Coleman, “also asserted that there were institutions in society outside the government which stood between the individual and the state, and which did not derive their right to exist from the state. In other words, they stood alongside and, if necessary, over against the state. The two institutions usually cited as being of this character were the family and the church itself. Schumacher extends this approach to technology.

“The problem with social Catholicism,” Coleman continued, “is that it has been mainly enunciated rather than acted upon. But in Europe, for instance, most of the Christian Democratic parties have endorsed the idea of workers’ councils as part of management in corporations -- a policy which Schumacher proposed in his book. And in England earlier in this century there was a group of Catholic distributists, headed by G. K. Chesterton, Hillaire Belloc and Eric Gill, who talked of decentralizing industry along lines that in spirit were very much like what you find in Small Is Beautiful.”

Coleman added: “Maritain was very much opposed to the bourgeois capitalism of his time; yet he also could not accept totalitarian socialism. So his work represents among other things an effort to find a ‘middle way’ for Christians. In his work as well as Schumacher’s you find a tension, an almost paradoxical character: they’re ‘conservative revolutionaries’ or ‘reactionary radicals,’ mixing the old and the new with all the risks that involves.”

Schumacher agreed with this catalogue of thinkers as sources for his own outlook. In keeping with their thought, he frequently repeated, in his talks at the Davis Extension Conference, his conviction that the first task of the people in the audience who agreed with him is “to sort out our values and our views of reality, to clear our minds.”

But as he urged them then to get down to more concrete work in support of various efforts of appropriate technology research and development, their comments and questions kept skimming past this first priority to the practical pros and cons, the alleged sins of the oil companies, his attitude toward women’s liberation, the possibility and desirability of violent revolution.

The First Task

Schumacher did not harangue them on the point. But he confirmed for me his strong sense of the priority of what he calls “metaphysical reconstruction.” “That is the first task,” he said, “because without it all these various technological fixes will only add to the confusion. But nowadays, to talk openly about such issues is hardly permitted in polite society.”

This comment reminded me of something else he had said often during the question periods following his lectures: “I’m not a scholar, or even a writer. I’m a practical man: I run things and get them going.” It is, I suspect, part of this practicality that leads him to approach the abstract side of economics -- its metaphysical and religious underpinnings  -- through more “practical” (that is, saleable) concepts like Intermediate Technology and Buddhist Economics. Some Catholic apologists have likened this approach to a “slippery slope,” a line of thinking which, once embarked on at any point, would slide the inquirer, imperceptibly but most certainly, down into the expansive lap of Holy Mother Church.

Schumacher had to leave to catch a plane before I could ask him whether that’s what he expected to happen to many of his devoted readers. But it’s a good bet that he does; after all, as he said, he’s no different from the rest of us -- and that’s what happened to him.

Are You Blocking for Me, Jesus?

It’s a game, yes -- and much more: a school for life, a cultic celebration. Football, I mean. It is what we are and what we will be. Passionate involvement with football begins for most American males in grade school; for a few, it culminates in playing with the National Football League; for most, it eventuates in watching the NFL on TV from an easy chair.

Let me make my own position clear: I may presume to comment on the game and the society it mirrors, but I am no disinterested, dispassionate critic. For years I thought I was. I arrogantly declined to attend the local high school and college games; and with eyes narrowed and brows aloft I flipped from the Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday TV battles to the public broadcasting channel for a film by Ingmar Bergman or a lecture from Chicago on recent trends in Bulgarian poetry. But last fall, when after ten or more long, sad seasons of mediocrity and travail my own alma mater -- Baylor, home of the fighting Bears -- began winning a few games, something surprising and a bit frightening happened to me. A flame I thought long dead came leaping up to thaw my cold heart.

At first I just checked the Sunday papers for scores -- still detached, uncommitted. But then I found myself collecting news features, the longer and more fantastic the better, about the Cinderella team of the Southwest Conference. Before long I was hanging out at the faculty lounges bragging to the boys about how the old green and gold had disposed of last week’s opponent. And when at the end of three months of glory I was forced to see those brave colors stomped flat in the Cotton Bowl in Dallas by Penn State, I was so disconsolate that I couldn’t eat or sleep.

I was, I am, a man as other men.

‘In Town’ and ‘In the Field’

I suppose it’s natural for an American male to love the national sport. It’s hard to overcome conditioning. People create games of real life -- as lumberjacks invented logrolling, cowboys rodeos -- and pass on through their games the rules and values and dreams of their lives. Football is rooted in our deepest psyche; it replays our experiences as a people.

Baseball, that pleasant anachronism we play in the dog days when we have time to catch our breath and dream of the dusty past, was once our game. It was played on long, slow, warm Sunday afternoons. There was little danger of injury to undermanned teams. There were no time limits to interrupt or hurry the ritualistic chewing and stretching and scratching, because the cows could always wait another hour. Team play was less important than individual skill and power. Discipline mattered less than heart. But even then it was obvious that people had more fun "in town" than "in the field." We all wanted to be "in town."

Football was born and grew to maturity, as did the modern age, in those burgeoning industrial towns, once the farmer’s dream, now the urbanite’s reality, where people were and are expendably plentiful and time artificially, efficiently restricted. Its fast pace, its strict discipline, its controlled brutality were all perfectly tailored to the needs and style of a society where it is not heart but guts that matter. For half a century now, football has been telling us who we are and what we will be. We made it; now it makes us.

Vietnam: Not Our Kind of Football

It probably even helped us win those two world wars, both fought as if under a referee’s eye along well-defined lines, according to established rules, mostly fair and sportsmanlike (if entirely without moral conscience). And of course the game was ended before anyone got bored or hungry or lost too much time at the mill. We fought as football had taught us; convinced that the side with the better players and coaches and training had won, we came home happy champs, worried only by the fact that somewhere along the way we had misplaced the trophy.

Our football mentality may even partially explain why we fell so colossally on our faces in Vietnam. ’Nam just wasn’t our kind of game. The opposition, the red team, wouldn’t play by the rules. They showed no signs of shame or repentance when our coach called them bums. We found ourselves losing, though the statistics and even the scoreboard showed us winning. In the confusion our game plan went awry, and we didn’t know how to correct it without using strategy that would make bums of us. The battle went on and on without a timekeeper and with less and less hope of a final gun. Our own cheering section began rooting for the other side. Rookies refused to report to camp. An impossible situation.

And so, after a long afternoon’s journey into night, butting our heads against first one goalpost, then the other, we had to admit that the opponent wanted the game more than we did, that in fact they had more guts, and as the sensible team we were, we began to take ourselves out of the chaotic field "with honor." We sent in a few expendable substitutes and agreed to keep supplying uniforms and paying rent on the stadium. We told the subs it was their game to win or lose, wished them luck, and got on the bus and left for the hotel. We just hadn’t played enough cricket to learn patience or enough soccer to be able to bring order out of chaos in medias res.

But we are still football people. Vietnam, embarrassing as it was, did nothing to diminish our faith in or devotion to the game. The ’Nam game was a fluke. We weren’t up for it. It had nothing to do with us as a team or with our rules or style’ of life. Rocky Bleier might be cut down in Vietnam, but back in the civilized world he could still lead the Steelers to the Superbowl. And now that it’s Monday morning and the sun is shining, things are looking up. It was just a bad game. Wait’ll next week.

Metaphors for the Faith

For years now, certain sages have been calling football America’s newest indigenous religion; and the more I watch it, the more I tend to agree. It certainly has all the trappings of a cult: colored banners, armies of good and evil, fanatic supporters, the cosmic sphere, even its own miniskirted vestal virgins to fan the flames. And far more important than these superficialities, it acts as a religion by teaching its followers how to order their personal and professional lives. For those who play, it is an educational act, an immersion in truth. For the rest of us, who are too small or too clumsy or too old to play and have to watch from the stands or before television screens, it is not unlike a Latin high mass performed by professionals for the edification and instruction of those deemed by the Heavenly Commissioner unworthy to participate personally.

Thoroughly American, it shows us American men, in its colorfully dramatic way, that in our drab lives we can best succeed by becoming expert specialists, by playing sensible odds, and most of all by occasionally running a gutsy risk of injury. The American dream, conceived by pioneers, redefined by immigrants, taught to the next generation by football, seems to be that by the age of 30 any young man, given lots of hard work and a little luck, can be both rich and crippled for life.

And even more authenticating is the fact that football’s teachings are borrowed from the "wisdom" of the ages and that it passes that wisdom on to a new age in a manner that the people of the new age can understand and accept. Thus the dream of today’s young American man, reared in the religion of the gridiron, is not very different from that of the young Roman legionnaire or the young medieval crusader or, more important, of the young European immigrant to the new world, his own ancestor. He believes that sacrifice and specialized daring lead to wealth and glory. He works for wealth and honor, the spoils of war.

Yet strange as it seems, though a new religious expression of some rather old verities has sprung up in our midst, no Christian theologian of any real merit has made any significant effort to make of football -- and the wisdom it seeks to transmit -- a metaphor for the faith. It has of course been said -- as many said of Platonism and later Aristotelianism and more recently existentialism -- that because football is not of truly Christian origin it is essentially irredeemable; it could not bear the weight of the gospel; it would by mere association pervert the Good News and make it Bad. But as Augustine, Aquinas and Tillich have demonstrated, those who said that of the other systems were wrong, and so too probably are those who say it of football. To tell the Story through the language and categories of football would in all likelihood be no less profitable than St. Paul’s attempt to liken the Christian disciple to a Roman soldier or the early missionaries’ attempt to portray Christ as a divine tribal chieftain or the rock generation’s creation of Jesus Christ Superstar.

Another typically American and equally barbaric cultural phenomenon once thought irredeemable, the western movie, has indeed provoked a new and intriguing and perhaps even legitimate Christian theological expression. Chaplain Wesley Seeliger of Texas A&M University, aroused and inspired by the "Gunsmoke" craze of the ‘60s, wrote a compelling little book called Western Theology (Forum, 1973) in which he showed how the American obsession with the 19th century trans-Mississippi west could be used as an occasion, and the western a medium, to teach the Christian faith. He made a plea for what he called pioneer religion -- in which God the trail boss and Jesus the scout lead the church, a covered wagon always on the move, as the minister dishes up for the pioneers fresh meat brought in by the Holy Spirit -- over settler religion in which God the mayor and Jesus the sheriff run the church as a courthouse and the minister-banker protects the interests of the religious establishment.

A bit campy, perhaps a touch heretical, but on the whole a refreshing and creative response to a phenomenon clearly understood by the masses yet considered by professional theologians too mundane to touch. A valiant effort. Unfortunately no one with Mr. Seeliger’s imagination has yet tackled football.

Winning with Jesus

Which is not to say that no one has tried. It’s just that those who have been willing to give it a try have either misunderstood the game or misinterpreted the faith. They have been a bit off-base or, I should say, offsides. Anyway, they have failed to score.

Arnold Mandell, who for two years held the unique office of psychiatrist to a professional football team, has found that the position a player fills on a squad is dictated as much by his personality as by his physical endowments. The most articulate and at the same time the most religious of all players, for example, the potential theologian of the team, is the quarterback. And so it would seem that from one of the many Fellowship of Christian Athletes passers, from a Staubach or a Tarkenton, one of those handsome guys who go around telling church camps how it feels to win with Jesus, would have come at least the raw materials and perhaps even the incipient form for a football theology. But in my vain search for such materials and forms, I have found among the golden boys a distressing theological superficiality. God is a great general manager. Jesus is a terrific coach. Life is a terrifically great game if you’re playing for Those Two. It’s OK to gamble on fourth and one, but don’t gamble with your soul. And that’s about it.

Perhaps this, can be explained by Mandell’s discovery that quarterbacks are the most intensely conservative members of the team, Joe Namath notwithstanding. They follow game plans. They do as they’re told. They don’t think daringly unless a daring play is sent in from the sidelines. They are settlers, not pioneers. They are uncreative.

What we probably need, if Mandell’s categories are accurate, is a theologically sophisticated wide receiver, the most daring man on the field. But wide receivers are loners, a bit paranoid, and they don’t like to talk in public about matters as intimate as religion. Besides, they’re usually the team bad boys, and theologians must be holy. Offensive linemen are holy, always ready with a smile, extroverted, protective of their fellow players -- but not very penetrating: more bishops than theologians. Defensive players are penetrating but notoriously demonic, and they have all kinds of trouble constructing things. They’d much rather tear them down.

So the job has been left to a rather odd assortment of men, amateurs either at the game or the faith, who have tried with very little success to make sense of matters too deep for them.

Average Christian Carries the Ball

The first person I know of who made a stab at it -- a pioneer in the truest sense -- was a young entrepreneur from Waco, Texas, who in the early ‘50s put out a long-playing album that revolutionized American sermon illustrations. It was a dramatized allegory, complete with sound effects, of the football game of life. If I remember correctly, Average Christian carried the ball and Jesus the head coach picked him up after every nasty spill and encouraged him on to the eventual touchdown. All very emotional; all very profitable for the young entrepreneur. Simply a renovation of the old baseball game-of-life allegory, it hit the market at a time when football’s popularity was on the rise, and it proved a tremendous success. The young man made enough money to start his own recording and publishing company. He scored.

There was never any question as to where he got the idea. He had listened to a decade or more of Baylor University’s football-playing ministerial students. They were once legion, as they doubtless will be again now that Baylor is once again a power. They fanned out from Texas to every corner of the country bearing their various versions and interpretations of the game. Perhaps the most famous of these -- a college All-American, a professional defensive lineman, a seminary graduate -- was Bill Glass. He’s still around today, still playing to packed houses all over the nation.

Mr. Glass spoke to the Baptist World Congress in 1965, and his most memorable sermon illustration left the Americans in the audience laughing and the foreigners confused. He explained in great detail that just as a defensive player must get past a certain blocker to get to the quarterback, so must every man go through Jesus to get to God. I must confess I was as confused as the Africans and Russians. It made little sense unless Jesus is a barrier to be jumped or knocked down and God an opponent to be sacked.

But it all seemed clear enough to a good portion of the crowd. The meeting was, after all, held in Miami’s Orange Bowl. Perhaps those who laughed so heartily had heard such homilies before and grown accustomed to the logic. You can hear them at summer camps any year. They are usually handed out by religious athletes who -- I’m guessing here -- spent more college hours on the field than in the library. A paragraph from a recent Christian Athlete article by Kent Kramer amply demonstrates what I mean:

The Christian faith is not a rose garden. It’s something like third and two with Green Bay’s Dave Robinson as linebacker and the play coming over me at tight end. Man, you’ve got to fire up and help get that first down.

Footballing the Word

But pro linemen aren’t the only ones with the spunk to make fools of themselves. A few ministers have tried their hands at footballing the Word as well. Their motives are beyond reproach, their efforts courageous and sometimes even imaginative -- but such strange results!

One pastor in British Columbia sent his bread-and-butter play in to the Christian Athlete. It appears to be a sermon outline. According to his diagram, the defensive line in the Christian’s life is made up of Fear, Sin, Satan, Despair, Worry and Separation. The linebackers are Sorrow, Tribulation and Unbelief. Deep backs are Darkness and Death. The offensive line is Love, Joy, Grace, Christ (?), Hope, Peace and Faith. The quarterback is Prayer, the blocking backs are Resurrection and Light, and the ball carrier is "You, the Redeemed."

The pastor explained:

Jesus Christ is the center of this big play. He snaps the ball to Prayer and then brings down Satan. Prayer calls the signals, hands off to Redeemed and takes worry out of the play. Faith removes unbelief; Peace overcomes tribulation; Hope blocks despair; Grace covers sin; Joy erases sorrow; Love casts out fear; Light wipes out darkness; Resurrection overcomes the last enemy death; and Redeemed scores.

He adds: "Separation is no threat in this play." The end zone is marked "Eternal Life." A dark line marks Redeemed’s certain pathway there, untouched by a single hostile arm.

There are some interesting points in this little allegory. Christ as offensive center instead of coach or quarterback is brand-new so far as I know and should remain popular as long as Gerald Ford does. Mandell says in his study that ‘the offensive lineman, especially the center, is unselfish -- sacrificial, even -- but he is also terribly undramatic, as indeed Ford is (as Christ isn’t). On the whole, though, it all seems too easy. Every blocker gets his man. Every victim stays down instead of jumping back up to try again as fierce competitors are trained to do. No penalty calls halt the play, not even when Grace holds Sin until the play is past and Love uses his hands to cast out Fear. And while the point about Separation’s being no threat to Redeemed may be comforting to us all, it becomes allegorically suspect when it requires a defensive end to stand stock-still while across the field a cocky halfback threads his way through falling bodies to paydirt.

In its ease and smug self-assurance the whole business reminds one of a certain life insurance company’s recent TV ad in which a balding, middle-aged family man without pads runs behind one pro team of beefy huskies through another equally beefy bunch to the security of an end zone free of financial worries. We have to wonder how many new policies such sermons sell.

A Theology for Failure

And so it goes. Despite some admirable efforts -- and some not so admirable -- past attempts to make football a motif for the faith have fallen somewhere between faintly amusing and hilarious. Or, if you take them seriously, between vaguely threatening and downright sinister. They have all missed the mark by yards and yards. I have run across a few good ideas: one writer suggested celebrating communion by sharing your dog and suds with a bleacher-mate. But mostly it’s been one big goose egg.

And why? Is it because the football field is indeed an inappropriate arena for the Word? If so, then perhaps the society which it mirrors is too.

Is it that there is simply no one around who understands both the game and the faith? Perhaps that’s part of it. But surely there are enough intelligent Christians around, even among football fans, to have produced one decent apologist. Superstar stands waiting to be an inspiration.

Or does the problem go deeper? Could it be that the game is indeed a good motif, better than most for our day, but that no one has been willing to admit what it is really saying to us? So far we have looked for the new theology to come from winners: the successful football-playing preachers, the victorious products of the game, or theologians who are themselves successful in the modern game of life. Maybe it’s time we got our message from today’s Christ and his disciples.

If I read his story correctly, Christ was one who stood -- and no doubt still stands -- over against rather than in support of the game of his day. By the standards and rules of his time, he was a loser, and perhaps he still would be, still is. Yet through his "failure" he brought, and still brings, hope to all those knowingly or unknowingly victimized by the game. Even Superstar, glamorous as he was, didn’t get to ride the bus back to the studio. So how could Christ be coach of the year and his followers all-pro? Wouldn’t Christ and his disciples today be more like Rod Serling’s battered and self-sacrificing prizefighter in Requiem for a Heavyweight than like the quarterback of the Superbowl champs?

Maybe the real message of the game is being preached, but by a voice we don’t really want to hear. Perhaps it is saying that as in every other age Christ is the one who exposes the violence and exploitation of our crassly commercial game of life and through his subsequent rejection by the powers-that-be dramatically illustrates his message of freedom to those who couldn’t see or hear it any other way.

Maybe what our age and its game are finally forcing upon us is a Christ symbol modeled on that half of our population most visibly victimized by and hostile to the game, whether on TV, in the stadium, or in the marketplace.

Maybe it’s time for us to explore the implications of a female Christ.

A Church in the Wildwood

There’s a church in the valley by the

    wildwood.

No lovelier spot in the dale . . .

 



It was a song to end the hot and snappy concert of a gospel quartet helping raise money for a new civic center in a sprawling midwestern city. It was a melody once found in all the softbound gospel hymnals with “shaped notes,” ordered by rural churches in boxes of 100 from Philadelphia or Dallas. To someone determined to be cynical, it would have sounded sentimental, antiquated, even hokey -- especially since it was sung by four young men in orange suits, faces trimmed with lush mustaches, each sporting his own unattached hand microphone. They were all too young to remember little churches in the wildwood.

Yet the rambunctious crowd, calmed by the simple tune, sobered by its unapologetically nostalgic message, seemed not to notice the mellow sacrilege amid blatant bathos.

How sweet on a clear Sabbath morning

To list’ to the clear ringing bell

Its tones so sweetly are calling,

Oh, come to the church in the vale.

 

It seemed to touch a tender spot, actually about 3,000 tender spots, long unnoticed or unacknowledged, this song about a distant rural past known to modern urbanites only through legend and television.

No spot is so dear to my childhood

As the little brown church in the vale.

 

That’s the only way I could explain all the tears being shed so openly.

It probably shouldn’t have struck me as odd that a people whose only contact with the America of little brown churches is some faintly remembered trip to a grandmother’s farm or an occasional dose of television’s “Little House on the Prairie” should mourn the passing of an age and lifestyle now deemed better than this one. The more I considered it, the more I knew that I was watching, there in that outsized basketball arena, an authentic reflection of the deeply felt needs of a rootless, churchless people to identify with some specific religious spot, even if it were so long ago and far away as to be irretrievable. For it is a fact of human nature and human history that religious experience and expression -- both of which modern, secular, urban Americans need as much as their forebears did -- must be identified with a particular place.

A sense of place, of holy ground, a spot to commune with the source of our being, is apparently missing from the lives of most Americans today. The easy chair in front of the televised pop-culture evangelist’s pulpit just doesn’t suffice. Something more concrete is needed; and a song about a little brown church awakens that need.

Anyone who has traveled through parts of the world longer settled than the U.S., with social and religious traditions older than ours, knows how habituated human beings are to the establishment and perpetual maintenance of places considered holy -- the place where a child saw a vision, or where a saint performed a miracle, or where a church or temple has stood since before humans kept records.

In Europe, venerated churches such as the Cathedral of Chartres and monasteries such as Monte Cassino are built atop the rubble of earlier Christian buildings, themselves built upon the ruins of pre-Christian shrines, testifying to the possibility that some places are warm with religious power. Coventry Cathedral in England, which for all we know may have been built on the site of some Druid grove, still lies in ruin wrought by Nazi bombs of World War II. It is a “place” made all the holier by its mute testimony to the folly of war, just as its replacement nearby, sparkling and ghastly, testifies to the folly of modern architecture.

Thomas More may have been right when he said, “All places on earth are equidistant from heaven.” Perhaps any place where humans choose to build a sacred shrine can become a holy place and satisfy their need to locate worship. But whether divinely appointed or humanly chosen, the places people regard as holy, from shrine to cathedral to modest parish church, are important to them. These are the places where faith becomes concrete. Without them, without at least one of them to claim as his or her own, the individual is a religious orphan, homeless, destitute.

For many theologically literate people, the “place” of religious experience is a local church, a particular building on a particular street in a particular town. It is the place where we caught our first glimpse of God’s love, and the building itself played a decisive part in that experience.

It is sad that relatively little thought is given to the design, construction and maintenance of churches being built now, the churches where our children will catch their glimpses. We tend to forget how important a church building’s physical structure is to the religious experience of the men and women who will call it their place, who will worship there, who will be molded by it.

A church building, like the people it serves, is a living thing. It is conceived, it is born, it flourishes and does its appointed work, and it dies. It does all these things well or poorly depending on its fitness to serve as a meeting place for people searching for God. It demonstrates God’s concern, and his compassion, for his people. It shares in a triune relationship with God and with his people.

A church is at its best when its form and style are determined by the people who worship in it. It most clearly transmits its truth when it gives material expression to their beliefs, when it effectively facilitates their worship. Frank Lloyd Wright was correct when he allowed that the best of buildings is the indigenous folk building. A church, then, should be a place whose shape and decor emerge from the collective religious experience of the people who, in the words of Epictetus, “enjoy the great festival of life” there together.

It’s a great pity when a congregation does not shape its own place of worship, for a building can lead people into moods and practices that might be wrong for them. “We shape our buildings,” Winston Churchill wrote; “thereafter they shape us.” But they shape us even when we don’t shape them. The less control people have over shaping their buildings, the more likely those buildings are to be misshapen and to misshape.

The degree to which a congregation is able to design and construct its own building depends, of course, upon the vision and skills of its members. Few congregations have the necessary conceptual, architectural and carpentry gifts to mold and make a building with their own minds and hands. But as Frank Lloyd Wright said, an architect should first be a poet, and the good poet observes closely and listens carefully. It shouldn’t be too much to ask an architect to observe the people who will worship in the building and listen to them before beginning the blueprints. The designer should make the structure express them in such a way that they will continue on their path of progress without losing their way. The building should be not the architect’s but the congregation’s.



The church of my youth, the place where I first learned the ways of God, was, I believe, a true representation of the human being at worship. It was designed and built, literally, by the people who worshiped there, my people. It was neither grand nor beautiful, but then neither were we. It expressed us, what we were, what we believed, and it perpetuated the best that was in us.

It was a wooden building, painted white outside and stained brown inside. Sunday school rooms all around spilled into a sanctuary where pews were arranged on either side of a central aisle that led to a pulpit and an altar -- for to us education led to worship, and worship to public confession and commitment. I remember, from earliest days, thinking of this organic wood structure as a tree: a tree of life to shelter the young and weak; a tree of knowledge, both of good and of evil, for those ready to plunge headlong into life; a tree of cool shade for people to pass their later years in peace.

In my maturing years, as I went out to search for my own knowledge of good and evil, I visited some of the historic churches of the world; but in the end my visits were really nothing more than visits. A church made into a museum is merely a museum. It can inspire, it can awe, it can testify to the faith of previous generations; but it can never be a visitor’s “place” as long as he is only a visitor. None of the great churches I have visited, not St. Paul’s in London or St. Peter’s in Rome, as inspiring as they are, can ever mean as much to me as my hometown church did.

I must admit that I have felt the presence of God in many places. I have prayed and felt my prayers heard in locations as remote from the place of my birth and from each other as a Buddhist monastery in Burma and a railway station in Greece. But none has the significance for my life, none has given me as much direction in my religious quest as my boyhood church.

It was a human place; a place where people spent a lot of time with their mouths open in song and their eyes closed in prayer; a place to see human nature stripped down to essentials as young romances began with smiles and ended with tearful public confessions; a place for a boy’s spirit to be roused and forever stranded between the love and the fear of God as he watched an occasional man or woman “get happy” in the Lord; a place to learn.

I still speak -- in prayer exclusively -- a rich Elizabethan English, for it was the standard medium of my church. I never had a moment’s trouble with Shakespeare in school, or with the Bach I learned at seminary, or with the Barth I discovered while scouring graduate libraries; for my church had taught me to understand their rhythms. For me, God is still a Thou, never a You, and is best honored and celebrated in classical language, melodies and theology.

My mind is deeply ingrained with memories of childhood days in church. I made my public confession of faith there. I was “born again” when I was eight years old. According to our custom, I repented of my rebellion against the will of God and was baptized standing on the bottom step of the newfangled indoor baptistry pool. (I was too short to stand on the floor and keep my head above water until the proper time to go all the way under.) I would wander pretty far astray several times in later life, and do more hardcore sinning that I ever dreamed of before my “conversion,” but that initial commitment would never let me go. I suppose it just goes to prove (and expand upon) the proverb: Raise a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will return to it  -- again and again.

It was in my childhood church, one summer during our usual long, hot, two-week August revival meeting, that 12 grown men “found God” and hit the sawdust trail. It was some sight. Twelve rough, tough farmers, faces brick-red, dressed in denim and khaki, none under six feet and 200 pounds, casting their lots with Jesus and his people. A new folk hero was born the afternoon our diminutive pastor baptized all 12 without losing one.

A wave of enthusiasm swept over us as one after another of the 12 men took the dare and came forward to start new lives at midlife. We had always been blessed with an abundance of dedicated women, and now we would have a few men to share the burden of leadership. Now there would be, as I would come to understand and verbalize in later years, a reflection of both sides of God’s sexuality. The fact that the men never quite equaled the women either in spirit or in effective churchly skills didn’t diminish the importance or significance of their presence.

I also remember my father’s funeral, which was held in my church, my mother’s church, because his denomination had no church in town. He died on a Friday evening, after completing the week’s work, and lay in state in our living room Saturday, with the men from the Masonic Lodge keeping the wake. By Sunday afternoon, as we arrived at church; the crowd spilled out of the sanctuary and covered the yard. He was widely loved.

I could see his face from where I sat in the front pew. The minister tried to make us feel better, but my greatest comfort came from watching my father’s face. His expression in death was as whimsical as it had been in life. One more sermon, he seemed to be thinking, and I can rest in peace. I would be a decade older, a seminarian in a school that fancied itself sophisticated, before I would learn that people who leave coffin lids open at funerals and try to imagine what the dead would think of all the fuss are barbarians.



After I went away to college, I virtually lost contact with the church. I got occasional reports from my mother: that there were too many new babies for the old place to handle; that there were ominous signs of structural decay; that a new day called for bold new plans. But still I assumed that the old place was as eternal as the faith I had found there. Then one day I went home for a visit, and it was gone, wiped away as if by a thoughtless giant hand.

I walked over and wandered through the trees that once sheltered the church and kicked at the clumps of weeds that grew so lushly on its rich holy ground. I felt angry. What right did they have to do this, to take away my place? And when I saw the new building down the street, I felt despair. How could the people I thought I knew so well have built such a monstrosity?

Eventually I went inside the new place, as an obedient son would, to attend services with my mother. They were, the same people, except for the old ones who had died and the babies who had been born since my day, and they sang the same songs and recited the same litany of prayers. I would never sing or pray here, but I had no right to judge them.

Neither had I any right to question their future or the building in which they would meet it. It had Sunday school rooms, an aisle, a pulpit, an altar, all the necessities of our theology. The kids sitting around me would remember this place, I hoped, as I remembered the old one. I saw in all this, as people abandoned a dying building for a new and living one, as they established a new place for themselves and their children, a symbol of resurrection.

My church had given me a living example of the gospel. There I had seen birth and death. There I had seen men and women called to discipleship. There, in its death, in its reappearance in another place, I had seen resurrection. This is why I understood the longing, inarticulate but powerful, of those rootless, churchless urban Americans who shed tears over a mythical little church in the vale. They needed a church -- to have, to lose, to rediscover. They had a long way to go.

Helping Omega Make Its Point: The Pitfalls and Promise of Understanding Catholics



I am now learning what I suppose ecumenical pioneers have known for decades -- that religious integration is both the simplest and the most complicated of human endeavors: simple in design, complicated in detail. This is true of all kinds of integration – racial, social, sexual, but most of all religious.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whatever history’s judgment of his intellectual contributions may be, certainly left religious thinkers a healthy morsel for leisurely munching when he dropped the broad metaphysical hint that all things move constantly toward a point of complete union, which he called the Omega Point. As the God-man, Teilhard’s vision would instruct us, Christ was both the symbol and visible evidence of the process of integration-toward-unification; and as Christians, we must surely see, it is our task to help Omega makes its Point in whatever ways we can. Those who have tried know how exciting but also how difficult this task can be.

I found myself playing a small part in Omega’s pageant last Easter season as I stood in a dressing room of my college’s Newman Center, tossed aside my Baylor (Baptist) sweat shirt, and was fitted with rabbinical robes so that I could act as “father” for a Passover Seder meal. I fully relished my part, as did the elderly black cook who played my wife, as did the young Catholic and Methodist students who played our sons and daughters. It was all very ecumenical: eating our chicken legs (we hadn’t a lamb’s shank), drinking our grape juice (there were Baptists present), singing and praying and having a laugh or two together. Omega seemed to be making its point with clarity.

It was especially nice that after the final prayer the Wesley Foundation chaplain’s wife, as pretty and freshly pink as Meryl Streep playing a Wesley Foundation chaplain’s wife, thanked me profusely for coming to share my faith with her and her fellow Christians. It was a completely appropriate thing to say to a bearded, “Jewish-looking” man who happens to be founder and sole member of a football boosters club called “Southern Baptists for Notre Dame.” But even before the Seder candles had flickered and died, before the brief ecumenical glow dimmed, I was all too aware of just how superficial our acting really was. We had played our parts, and played them well, but Omega had not made its point. The walls that separate religious groups are not so easily scaled or razed.

My caution was perhaps the product of the hard lessons I have learned during the three years that I, a confirmed Protestant, have taught church history at a Roman Catholic seminary located within the confines of a Benedictine priory  -- a seminary for the education of men with belated vocations. I must say that I have been well treated, if a bit underpaid, and I have made many close friends. I have been made a kind of honorary Catholic, and my students feel that my soul is about as safe as a Protestant’s can hope to be.

I had relatively little trouble surviving the initial Inquisition, a nervous hour when the seminary’s board of directors asked me how I planned to handle the supremacy of Peter and I answered, “Gingerly.” There was never any real trouble from the dean of students, a former Protestant, who reportedly listened to my lectures through the wall of his room with a stethoscope. And we were all able to share a healthy laugh when one of the more conservative students, reacting with some heat to Luther’s Table, Talk, blurted, “Thank God I’m not a Protestant,” and all I could manage was a lame, “Yes, thank God.”



It has all been instructive and rewarding, and I plan to continue offering my services to Omega; but it has also taught me how rocky the ecumenical landscape can be. We have a long way to go, over a rough and still uncharted terrain, before we reach the Point of a universal Christian church and even farther before Christianity and other religions find that Point.

The rocky obstacles we face are, of course, of our own making. Robert Frost, in his famous poem “Mending Wall,” describes in earthy New England symbols the humanity-old dedication to erecting barriers between ourselves and others, the very kinds of barriers that separate religious groups. Frost and his neighbor are reconstructing the wall that separates their land, because stones have fallen during the winter, when it occurs to him how very foolish this annual ritual has become. Neither man any longer has cows. Every year sees the wall broken. But his neighbor continues to override his every objection with the traditional formula: Good fences make good neighbors. Never mind that “something there is that doesn’t love a wall”; this man and his kind the world over will go on stacking stones.

That “something” which, Frost says in classic understatement, doesn’t love a wall, Christians know, from reading St. Paul, is God the Father of Jesus Christ, who has shown humankind in every possible way how ungodly our walls are. Yet humankind keeps building them, and while Christians may learn not to aid the construction, may even work to raze a section here or there, we still have to live in a world of walls.

What I find so maddening in my efforts to negotiate the barriers between my Protestantism and my seminarians’ Catholicism is that while we are united in so many of our convictions and practices, we are divided by differences real enough to make the Omega Point almost as remote as in the bad old days of open hostility between our churches. We share a faith in Christ, the very symbol of universal unity, yet we are divided by our widely different views of such things as Christian freedom.

Our differences over “right to life” go far deeper than the issue of abortion, on which quite a number of Protestants and Catholics agree. Our differences concern the freedom of the individual to determine his or her own fate. Our ecclesiastical differences go far deeper than the debate over the supremacy of Peter to the issue of theological authority itself. It has to do with the Catholic willingness and the Protestant unwillingness to submit to an institution’s opinion or order even when it contradicts one’s own convictions. There’s just too much Aquinas in them and too much Luther in us.



More important and more difficult to deal with than such differences in teaching on will and freedom, however, is a wall known only too well by those of us who have worked with Omega to help it make its Point: the wall of what Catholics are tempted pridefully to call pietistic faith and what Protestants are tempted cynically to call superstition. This is the Catholic devotion to and the Protestant rejection of postbiblical Christian mystical folklore, stories of wonders which most Protestants find amusing or appalling, a characteristic that makes us more the offspring of Erasmus and Voltaire than of Luther or even Calvin.

My feeling is that this wall of popular piety may be the greatest barrier to Omega’s work. It is not that all Catholics are irrational and all Protestants are rational. Far from it. Catholic scholasticism and Protestant pietism disprove that. (Try introducing a Jesuit to a Pentecostal.) It is simply that, given our different views of human nature, human freedom, ecclesiastical authority, and the significance of historical events, we simply differ on what makes religious sense. We experience our religious faith differently because we believe differently; we have known a different set of historical experiences. We are different because we have gone separate ways, and we have gone separate ways because we are different.

In Catholic Naples, for example, the blood of St. Januarius, kept in two vials behind the altar of the cathedral, is said to liquefy twice yearly, once on the day of the saint’s martyrdom and once on the day his remains were transferred to their present resting place. Large crowds come to pray for the recurring miracle and to rejoice when the priest watching the vials announces the liquefaction.

The typical Protestant either shrugs and smiles at all this or asks in sincere bewilderment what difference it makes. During my year in Italy when the blood failed to liquefy, the priest announced that this sign indicated God’s displeasure over the large communist vote the public opinion polls were predicting for the upcoming national parliamentary elections. The Communist Party promptly lost most of southern Italy --and the election.

In Foggia, at the abbey of San Giovanni Rotondo, lies the body of a Capuchin monk named Padre Pio, a shrine attended by Catholics from all over the world, the very epitome of popular piety. Padre Pio became a monk at the age of 15 and at 31 received the stigmata. He is said to have been praying in the choir when his brothers heard him cry out and found him unconscious, bleeding from his hands, feet and side. His five wounds, formed like those of the crucified Christ, remained open, yielding a cup of blood a day, yet uninfected, until his death 50 years later. Padre Pio, though an oddity to Protestants, is not unique. There are some 70 canonized stigmatists, including Francis of Assisi.

We are dealing here, of course, with a Mediterranean Catholicism, not a cerebral German or a pragmatic Irish Catholicism -- nor with that strange blend of cynicism and naïveté called American Catholicism. And it must be noted that not all Catholics in any particular region are devoted to the like of Padre Pio. Many Catholics find such piety a bit of a bother, a good excuse to evade more important responsibilities. Some damn it with faint praise, as did Pope Paul VI, responding to San Giovanni Rotondo’s growing numbers of pilgrims. But few scoff. Most Catholics feel that, whether one likes it or not, the Padre Pio phenomenon makes religious sense.

Not all Protestants scoff either. If the defense of the Turin Shroud by Moral Majority types indicates a future direction for fundamentalism, we may well see Protestant fundamentalists laying flowers at Padre Pio’s tomb. But even fundamentalism’s hunger to prove the historical fact of Christ’s sacrifice by exhibiting an authentic oil negative photograph of Jesus does not extend beyond the death of the apostles. Even fundamentalists hesitate to plunge into the Middle Ages, the “Catholic” centuries. And liberal Protestants are rationalistic enough to be suspicious of all acclaimed miracles. To most Protestants, unlike most Catholics, the pietistic folklore that lies like vast, fermenting compost heaps along the trails our common ancestors walked does not make religious sense.

Padre Pio is admittedly an overstatement, an exaggeration of the piety that separates Catholics and Protestants. But exaggeration, enlargement, is sometimes necessary to identify microscopic causes for macrocosmic effects. For those of us who work for Christian unity, an understanding of such causes is vital.



There is an enormous and sad paradox in the Protestant-Catholic estrangement. Catholics and Protestants are so close yet so far apart. In every Catholic mass (especially in the ones Padre Pio managed so painfully) Christ’s suffering is renewed. The Catholic theology of transubstantiation defines Christianity as the continuing crucifixion of Christ, the continual repetition of his suffering. For the Protestant, so deeply influenced by Luther’s rediscovery of the Christian faith’s historic core, there is not so much a continual repetition of the suffering of Christ as an eternal model, a “once for all” to which the Christian must look backward.

It would at first appear that while the Catholic has a strong sense of the continuing revelation but a somewhat deficient vision of the original model, the Protestant has a strong vision of the model but a somewhat deficient sense of the continuing revelation. But that is not really the case. The Catholic’s continuing revelation is based solidly, if unacceptably to Protestants, on the model; and the Protestant’s model enables him or her to see that Christ’s suffering must and does continue -- if not in the Eucharist, then in the Christian’s life. Protestants and Catholics have the same two sides of the same coin; they are merely reversed.

We need each other. The Catholic can teach the Protestant, and the Protestant can teach the Catholic, faithfulness to the original model and response to the challenge of continuing revelation. But we must not underestimate the difficulty of learning to trust and understand each other. The journey of a thousand miles to Omega Point may indeed begin with a first step; but the one who makes the trip should understand how far a thousand miles is and should be prepared to negotiate a lot of rocky barriers along the way.