Archives: Articles

A Way of Seeing: Chaim Potok and Tradition



During the past decade Chaim Potok has emerged not only as a pre-eminent American author, but also as one whose books are avidly and widely read. Why has this Jewish author whose books are openly religious in theme and tenor achieved such uncommon public success? Why does he appeal to this age, saturated as it is with the expressive realism that oozes from books, films and television? In a sense Potok addresses those very questions, for the central theme of all of his books has been the enduring and changing religious tradition of a people, and how that tradition shapes the present moment and is shaped by it. As a result, Potok’s books leap beyond narrow categories and become universally appealing. His protagonists, always young men of pronounced individual convictions, carry on a warfare with their tradition and, to varying degrees, find their own place and nature in relation to it. Thus, these are the stories of all humankind living in the ongoing matrix of religious, ethnic and cultural beliefs.

In public lectures Potok has often directly addressed people’s conflicts with their traditions. These conflicts, the central issue of his fiction, are formulated by the author as providing three possibilities for interaction. A person can totally reject his or her tradition, but this, in Potok’s estimation, is reprehensible. Second, he or she may wholly capitulate to tradition and be subsumed by it, an alternative perhaps worse than the first, since it both locks the rest of life out and locks the life of the tradition in. Untouched by any fresh idea, unruffled by any change, such a life constitutes a prison of unmitigated spiritual and artistic sterility. The third alternative, and the healthiest one in Potok’s estimation, is the presence of some tension between the individual and tradition, a willingness to question and be questioned. Such spiritual flexibility allows both to grow. At the conclusion of his history of the Jewish people, Wanderings (Knopf, 1978), Potok states:

In some future time, eyes will gaze upon us as we have gazed in his book upon worlds of the past. They will say of us either that we used our new freedom . . . to vanish as a people, or that we took advantage of the secret opportunity concealed within the persistent but hidden trauma we are now experiencing -- a Jewry and Judaism decisively changed by its confrontation with modern paganism -- to reeducate ourselves, rebuild our core from the treasure of our past, fuse it with the best in secularism, and create a new philosophy, a new literature, a new world of Jewish art, a new community, and take seriously the meaning of the word emancipation -- a release from the authority of the father in order to become adults in our own right.

The question that the young protagonists of his novels begin to ask of their fathers is, “Can we trust our tradition sufficiently to grow with it, or must we only guard it jealously as a precious memory?”

This issue, which David Stern suggests is “the dilemma of modern Judaism itself” (“Two Worlds,” Commentary [October 1972], p. 102), focuses squarely on how the law for living is conceived within the tradition. If the law is an end in itself, as Reb Saunders of The Chosen believes, then clearly there is no room for individual vision. It also then necessarily follows that the law is a static codification of rules, perhaps empty of spiritual vigor. Locked in place at one time, it makes all future time conform to itself. Individual actions must bend backward to achieve this conformity. But the law does not have to be conceived in this manner -- and should not be.

Torah is an untranslatable word; as such, it means many things. Isaac C. Rottenberg points Out that

Torah means ‘teaching,’ ‘instruction,’ and ‘guidance,’ but none of these words alone nor all of them together exhaust its meaning, because in the last analysis ‘Torah’ refers to God’s own gracious and righteous presence. Laws, statutes, and precepts are part of Torah, but they are not its essence. Torah must be primarily understood in dynamic terms, not as a set of legal rules [“Law and Sin in Judaism and Christianity,” the Reformed Journal (November 1979), p. 12].

The last sentence particularly is of striking importance. Torah is a means for ordering life, not for dictating life. Halacha, precepts leading to the way of a sanctified life, is not a set of rules, but a dynamic, living guide for life. The precepts are not carved in stone, but etched on the spirit -- which may respond to, be stimulated by, and receive guidance from them. Because the law is not an end in itself, but a teleological guide to right action, people must be allowed considerable freedom in their exercise of it. The temptation is to use the law to circumscribe life. Rottenberg points out that “Judaism is deeply aware of the yetzer hara, the evil urge which operates within the human heart and makes our lives the scene of a continual moral struggle’’ (p. 14). Precisely because they clearly recognize the problem of evil, people may try to use the law as a means to avoid moral struggle, rather than to engage in that struggle, with its attendant risks. In My Name Is Asher Lev (Fawcett, 1972), Potok depicts such a situation in the parents’ fear that Asher Lev’s artistic vision may come from the sitra achra -- the Other Side.

We might put the situation a bit differently. People who are aware of the very real presence of the sitra achra, which threatens to destroy the tradition, might believe that they must shut their eyes to such a threat. They might feel compelled to shun even the conception of such a threat, lest a chink be found in tradition’s armor that, once admitting a corrosive freedom, would eat away at its very supports, eventually bringing about the collapse of the entire structure. A person may try to save a house that seems in danger of falling by shielding it in an armor of steel. But one may also feel the strength of the tradition so powerfully that one opens wide one’s vision to life. By freely engaging life, this alternative suggests, tradition grows stronger, gaining muscle through hard experience.

Such is the clear option in two of Potok’s best-known novels, The Chosen (Fawcett, 1967) and My Name Is Asher Lev, both stories about young Jews coming to a point of decision about their tradition and their individual lives.



Potok has structured both books around the central metaphor of the human eye, or human seeing. Those who use tradition as a means of seclusion from the world are repeatedly described as having narrowing eyes, blank eyes or shut eyes. But those who use it as a base from which to engage the world hold their eyes wide open.

In The Chosen, the metaphor rises out of the initial action of the book, a lively and competitive baseball game in which Danny Saunders raps a line drive that strikes Reuven Malter in the eye. Temporarily blinded by the blow -- and waking up for the first time to a recognition of himself and his tradition -- Reuven recovers in a hospital ward peopled with tragic representatives of life: the nearly blind ex-boxer who has been pummeled brutally and chatters incessantly, and the small boy who stares ceaselessly with blind eyes. This ward of readjusted vision is also the threshold for Reuven’s refocusing vision of life: “I lay there a long time, thinking about my eyes.” The image of the eye is developed steadily throughout the book, and eventually becomes clearly associated with the conflict between the individual and the tradition. “What’s inside us is the greatest mystery of all,” says Danny at one point. That exploration of oneself is perhaps life’s ultimate adventure. The novel suggests two ways to go about it, one quick and superficial, the other hard and deep. Reuven’s reflection on the two ways to study Torah strikes a forceful analogy:

Rabbinic literature can be studied in two different ways, in two directions, one might say. It can be studied quantitatively or qualitatively -- or, as my father once put it, horizontally or vertically. The former involves covering as much material as possible, without attempting to wrest from it all its implications and intricacies; the latter involves confining oneself to one single area until it is exhaustively covered, and then going on to new material. . . The ideal, of course, was to be able to do both [p. 155].

For Potok, a person needs to be deeply rooted in tradition, while also attempting the broad view of life. Always the individual person is the vital link between the bedrock of tradition and the flow of life. “‘I learned a long time ago, Reuven,”’ says Mr. Malter, “‘that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something”’ (p. 204).

Finally, it is people who fulfill the law, not the law that fulfills people. People forge and effect a tradition as much as they are forged by it. The argument of Potok’s fiction is for that freedom within the tradition that allows people to hold their eyes open.

In Asher Lev, this tension becomes more stark in the compelling drama of a young artist exploring both his gift and his relation to his tradition. The book is even more deliberately structured by the eye metaphor than is The Chosen. Many of the novel’s characters almost seem to be acting on a stage, in full dramatic posture, with the author providing calculated stage directions. As on the stage, much of what is left unsaid is conveyed by mannerism -- here particularly, eye mannerisms. Asher Lev’s mother fears her son’s gift, recognizing its potential for endangering their tradition. Her eyes are consequently detailed in alternating images of great fear and abject resignation. Early in the book Asher notes that “I saw a flicker of light in her eyes,” but when the subject of painting is brought up “the dead look returned to her eyes.” When she becomes ill and Asher promises to draw a pretty picture for her, ‘‘Her eyes fluttered faintly but remained closed” (p. 24).

The father, whose occupation and proccupation are to bring others into the tradition, to cement the body of believers, reacts with vitriolic anger to Asher’s flirting with the sitra achra (he readily identifies Asher’s painting as such). Repeatedly his eyes are described as “dark,” “tired,” “narrowing” and “squinting.”

In contrast, as an artist Asher Lev discovers his vision always opening. It is important to note that he considers himself “an orthodox Jew” (p. 9). He stands not in open rebellion against, but as a troubled seeker of, his place within a tradition. He manifests most clearly and dramatically what we also find in Potok’s other young heroes, Reuven Malter and David Lurie.

In the novel’s early scenes, Asher Lev frequently stands by the window of his parents’ apartment, looking toward the street below. This prison symbolism is embellished in Lev’s controversial painting “Brooklyn Crucifixion. In the picture, Lev’s mother is tied to the venetian blinds of the apartment window, her arms outstretched in an anguished crucifix. The window functions metaphorically as the threshold between tradition and the larger world. While Asher persists in looking outward, his mother and father are careful to keep the venetian blinds drawn. These blinds are frequently askew, often awkwardly knotted up so that the outside world and inner tradition persist in tortured meeting. Finally, the mother is a slave to the blinds, tied there by the father’s austere legalism. In the painting the father looks at the crucified mother, but he does not release her. The three, mother, father and son, portray varying degrees of dealing with tradition as it is metaphorically represented by the window: the father solidly within, the mother caught by the mesh of blinds and the son persistently peering outward.



Lev’s outward-looking vision is not simply an impudent rebellion. He cannot help the way he sees. His artistic drive and vision persist in breaking through, as he comes, with terror, to understand:

That was the night I began to realize something was happening to my eyes. I looked at my father and saw lines and planes I had never seen before. I could feel with my eyes. . . .I felt myself flooded with the shapes and textures of the world around me. I closed my eyes. But I could still see that way inside my head. I was seeing with another pair of eyes that had suddenly come awake [pp. 105-106].

To try to kill that vision, he realizes, would be to kill himself. In an anguished scene of self-analysis he takes his stand within, but against, a tradition of static law. Compelled finally to complete the crucifixion painting, Lev recognizes that

it would have made me a whore to leave it incomplete. It would have made it easier to leave a future work incomplete. It would have made it more and more difficult to draw upon that additional aching surge of effort that is always the difference between integrity and deceit in a created work. I would not be the whore to my own existence. Can you understand that? I would not be the whore to my own existence [p. 312].

But even in so saying, he remains within the tradition. He is “an observant Jew.” Thus, while standing against the static, legalistic elements of his tradition, he seeks to find his place within its dynamic impulses.

Figuring significantly in that process is the crusty old painter, Jacob Kahn, who tutors Lev in the realities of the larger world. At once tender and harsh, arrogant and loving, of keen vision and tormented spirit, Kahn is a strange guide to the spiritually wandering youth. It is important to note, however, that Kahn has been appointed to his heuristic task by the rabbi and has, therefore, received the blessing of the spiritual leader of the faith. The sum of Kahn’s teaching may be encapsulated in a quotation from a book, The Art of the Spirit, which, ironically, is given to Lev by his mother after she hears that he is being tutored by Kahn:

Every great artist is a man who has freed himself from his family, his nation, his race. Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a ‘‘universal” without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere [p. 195].

Jacob Kahn succeeds where other characters fail: he points out clearly the risks involved in this other world that lies beyond the window of Lev’s tradition -- and the risks are genuine. The strength of tradition resides in the security it provides. Indeed, to refocus for a moment on the concept of halacha, the reason for any codification of law is to attempt a structured certitude within that law. To live halacha properly in the dynamic flux of existence is an act of risk and of considerable daring. As Asher Lev discovers, and as Jacob Kahn well knows, it can be a life of anguish. So it is that he immediately counsels Lev to return to his tradition

 “Jacob,” the woman said softly. “You are frightening the boy.”

“It is my intention to frighten him out of his wits. I want him to go back to Brooklyn and remain a nice Jewish boy. What does he need this for, Anna?”

“What did you need it for, Jacob?”

“I know what I went through,” he said [p. 204].

Kahn would spare the boy the pain of the exposed life, of the questioning spirit assaulted by the world’s answers. If one persists in asking the right questions, however, and if one possesses the steely courage to sort through the world’s answers, this crucible of tension refines and strengthens. Moreover, as a pilgrim in the outside world, the seeker may learn better the place that is his last refuge, his art.

Not all the torment arises from the world outside tradition. In fact, this world is so large that it offers a different kind of security: anonymity, a kind of rootlessness in the faceless crowd. It offers security, moreover, from those within the tradition who would gladly reject the troubled seeker. A note is slipped into Asher Lev’s Gemara one day:

Asher Lev

Won’t go to Heav;

To hell he’ll go

Far down below.

 

This is perhaps the greater pain: not rejecting one’s tradition, but being rejected by it. Where does the seeker go then? If tradition is sometimes a bed of misunderstanding and hatred, and the world a maze of ready but insufficient answers, is he or she left to walk a precarious tightrope buffeted by forces beyond his or her control?

In a sense, Potok’s answer is Yes. But one can learn, through experience and effort, to walk that tightrope with confidence. The tormented young protagonists of Potok’s novels will never be at ease. The discovery of their individuality is their important task, however -- their life-consuming task. After Lev’s first summer in Provincetown with Jacob Kahn, he tells his father: “That’s what art is, Papa. It’s a person’s private vision expressed in aesthetic forms” (p. 288). It is a language that few understand, and its vocabulary is ill suited to neat answers which will still the ire of tradition or lay straight the world’s maze. It is a private vision that rises from and through the individual, to be expressed in forms constituting the only real language a person can know. For Potok, the solution to the problem of our relationship to tradition seems to lie in precisely this kind of willful person who does not attempt to destroy his or her tradition or to embrace the world wholly, but who builds some bridge, however flimsy, between the two. If this reconciler’s language is imperfect and imprecise at first, perhaps we can grow to understand it as we study its vocabulary. Lev discovers his place in the dynamic flux of his heritage, and learns that he is called to work his own unique mitzvot -- deeds that fulfill God’s will. The tension with tradition is not thereby erased, but it is, perhaps, resolved.

People, Lev learns, must by themselves resolve the tension between tradition and the outside world. Compelled, after the exhibit of the crucifixion paintings, to live outside his tradition by his rabbi’s orders, Lev seeks solace in the realization that “we must give a balance to the universe.” As he leaves home, his parents watch from the living room window. One imagines the hand raised to the cord of the venetian blinds.

Tolkien’s Crucible of Faith: The Sub-Creation

On bright days, when I was a child, I dreamed summer clouds into shapes of wonder. The clouds became my own being, and depending on my disposition I peopled my sky with elves or ogres, birds or beasts. Now no longer a child, I know that clouds are of various types -- cirrus, cumulus, cirrocumulus, cirrocumulus castellanus -- and that they portend rain or merely reflect the summer-day idleness that I have no time for. And something has been lost from my being for this gain of knowledge.

"A child," says J. R. R. Tolkien in his piece "On Fairy-Stories," "may well believe . . . that there are ogres in the next country; many grown-up persons find it easy to believe of another country" (Tree and Leaf [Houghton Muffin, 1965], p. 39). I have come to realize that my discovery about clouds is old hat, that many others made the same discovery years and centuries ago. And some of them have lamented it more eloquently than I can. Friedrich Schiller, seeking to recapture the naïveté and innocence of youth, admitted sadly that they were unattainable for the adult. He saw that, as it staggered, heavy and uncertain, into the adult realization of a mechanical universal order, a world ruled by Process, childhood was the first and last gasp of romanticism. Thomas Hardy grimly attests: "As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the center of your time, and not at a point in its circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized with a sort of shuddering. . . . All around you there seemed to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped it" (Jude the Obscure [Houghton Muffin, 1965], p. 17).

I learned, as Hardy did, that the world badly wanted me to grow up. And to grow up is to strip yourself of gauzy clouds of wonder and put on heavier garb -- woolens and cottons that protect you from winter’s cold or summer’s heat. Like Goya, we have found it necessary to clothe Venus and to call her by other names, such as Maya. In Vedantic philosophy, Maya is the way of illusion -- the illusion of the reality of sensory experience, and also (or consequently) the illusion of the experienced, sensory qualities of the self. So the beauty of wonder is now named Illusion.

Allow me once more to recall my past. When I was young I was a greedy lover of books. When I was eight my father, a busy and important man who nonetheless made time to be important to his four children, took me to the library and drew out a library card for me. I was by no means a precocious reader, no Jonathan Edwards who at 12 could read Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding and understand it. My book world was peopled by adventurers, explorers, fantasists. My father is fond of saying that when one is young the line between fact and fiction is as thin as paper.

Dickens and Schiller on Children

Among my earliest serious undertakings were the novels of Charles Dickens. I often wondered why Dickens put so many orphans into his stories, as if half the world were lonely and outcast. Now that my faith wears adult garb, I realize that not half the world but every person in it is at one time or another an orphan, lost and lonely and wandering. Dickens’s children endure even in our age of television. In the back reaches of my mind I often encounter Little Dorritt, Little Nell, Pip, Little Em’ly; I hear Little Jo of Bleak House repeating the Lord’s Prayer as he lies dying; and I see David Copperfield walking anxiously up the path to Betsy Trotwood’s cottage toward hope. For a time then I am with these children once again, and like them I am naïve, innocent.

Dickens’s children, and his grownups too, lack the knowledge which brutalizes life. Lev Shestov says (in his Athens and Jerusalem [Simon & Schuster. 1966]) that man exchanged faith for knowledge in the fall. Dickens tries desperately to recapture vestiges of our prelapsarian state. Of course he would be among the first to admit that we cannot restore Eden; but he seems to say that we can remember what we have lost.

Schiller began to remember, but considered the loss irrevocable. In a famous essay of his he distinguishes between the naïve poet, who is characterized by spontaneity, immediacy and absence of self-consciousness, and the sentimental poet, who subjects his feelings to the scrutiny of the intellect, tests their validity by reference to some external criterion. Naïveté, Schiller says, is the ideal; sentimentalism is what we have. The ideal is unattainable -- for the adult; but the child, who naturally exists in this state of naïveté or innocence, reigns as a supreme symbol for Schiller. Children, he says,

are what we were . . what we should once again become. . . . They are . . . not only the representation of our lost childhood . . . but fill us with a certain melancholy. But they are also representations of our highest fulfillment in the ideal, thus evoking in us a sublime tenderness. We are touched, not because we look down upon the child from the strength of our height and perfection, but rather because we look upward from the limitation of our [adult] condition (Naïve and Sentimental Poetry (Ungar, 1966), pp. 85, 87].

Possessed of Wonder

Tolkien rescues me from Schiller’s "sublime tenderness." Schiller would have us believe that wonder and innocence are irrevocably lost. Tolkien reminds me that this is not so. When I first began reading Tolkien I thought, "Here is a new order of beings, that of the hobbits." Yet, unique species though they be, hobbits are human, and through them Tolkien reminds us of the enduring qualities of the race of man: friendship, fidelity, vision and hope; and of something more: that we are all possessed of wonder, that we have the capacity to dream dreams and envision noble goals, and that in the struggle to realize the vision we may find it true.

"Are fairy-stories for children?" asks Tolkien in the piece cited above. He laments that children read fairy stories as stories while adults read them as Curiosities. He also laments the loss of wonder. But that loss, he says, is neither necessary nor irrevocable, for through Faërie we may experience once again the awe of vision, learn to see through the optics of insight. Faërie is a world, a subcreation, not a genre.

We can best define the subcreative world of Faërie by considering what it is not. The allegorical fairy tale teaches a moral by application to real life. Faërie teaches real life by the experience of the tale. The creator of Faërie does not make application from it; he takes us into it. Oscar Wilde does that in "The Fisherman and His Soul," but fails to do so in "The Selfish Giant." In the former tale Wilde gives us a self-contained entity. We learn the value of the soul from within the story. The latter turns on a lad with a hole in his side and nailprints in his hands, and we need an external referent -- the Gospels -- to determine the extent and limitations of the meaning.

Grimm’s fairy tales hardly qualify as subcreation. The stories and lessons are self-contained, but we are not invited into the fairy-tale world to share the story and experience the lesson. We stand outside this world, deducing -- and deduction is the bane of subcreation. Similarly, despite some attempts to interject racial judgments into them, Joel Chandler Harris’s tales place the reader outside, watching the cunning resourcefulness of animals whose human-like pride is on the line.

A Spell Woven with Words

Tolkien objects also to the grotesquely fantastic -- for instance, to the world of Drayton’s Nymphidia with its walls of spider’s legs and "windows of the eyes of cats." By its very "otherworldliness" the grotesque places limitations upon itself. Nymphidia may show us the grotesque within us, but we do not see ourselves in it. The magic of Faërie is a tool for exploration of the human spirit, its desires and needs. That is, the human spirit is the subject matter of Faërie, and we learn about ourselves by entering into this subcreative world.

"Subcreator" is Tolkien’s term for the true literary artist of Faërie, the one who constructs an alluring secondary world which we believe in so long as we are in it. It is not merely a case, as Coleridge argued, of the reader’s suspending disbelief, but of the artist’s sustaining enchantment. His spell is woven with words. And if we begin to disbelieve, the spell is broken. Yet Tolkien himself proves that even today words in the hands of a literary magician still have the power to enchant. We need only read his books to be convinced.

To make the charm work, the literary artist must provide a solid foundation for his subcreation. Most necessary, Tolkien says, is the power of "giving to ideal creations the inner consistency of reality" (op. cit., p. 47). Second in importance is language. Tolkien himself had a rare gift for creating words that gave his fairydom substance. William Ready remarks in his Understanding Tolkien (Warner Paperback Library, 1968) that the old mesmerizer used to sing songs in an elfin tongue of his own invention -- or would Tolkien have said "discovery"?). In any case, those who heard the songs understood them, though they did not know the meaning of the words. Tolkien was blessed with the ability of speaking in keener tongues the substance of English.

However, he also manifests more earthly traits and techniques. There is no straining in his art, but a reliance upon the factual, declarative statement. The psychology here is important. We are accepted into his world, not coerced into it. We make our decision by opening the book and reading. Once we have made this commitment we are accepted as longtime friends and fellow travelers. The first line of The Hobbit, for example, reads: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." Note, what we understand at once is not that there are holes in the ground peopled by hobbits, but that there are hobbits and that they naturally live in holes in the ground.

We soon discover our similarities with this creature -- the human in the hobbit and the hobbit in the human. When the dwarves begin arriving at Bilbo’s door to avail themselves of his courtesy, we begin to feel an uneasiness that increases as Bilbo’s courtesy is so nearly abused. Abuse is an effective means of creating sympathy for Bilbo. The abuse is innocent enough, and natural enough considering the nature of dwarves, but sympathy arises nonetheless.

Lover of words that he is, Tolkien knows how to make effective use of them. He is a gifted namer of places, people, things, and possesses an ear attuned to matching sound with emotion. The slimy Gollum still sends shivers through me with his long, sinking "s" sounds. These are qualities that many have praised. But not enough has been said about the unpretentiousness and simplicity of Tolkien’s diction. Few flowers of rhetoric bloom in his prose. His choice of words is straightforward and precise, marked by aptness to the emotional and physical pace of his tale.

Fantasy as a Human Right

Thus the world in which Bilbo lives and moves is a real world -- real not in the physical but in the metaphysical" (i.e., the "beyond physical") sense. Bilbo’s meetings with eagles, dragons, elves and wizards are the meetings of man with himself as he responds to danger and turmoil. "Tolkien’s great Contribution to the canon of supernatural literature [is that] no more need there be even, hope of a happy ending. The decision to struggle on when defeat seems inevitable is the true glory of Man": thus William Ready (ibid., p. 57). The struggle for spiritual confirmation and affirmation -- that is Tolkien’s theme. Until the very end of The Hobbit his fellow pilgrims are skeptical about Bilbo, and he must repeatedly try to prove himself worthy of a quest which, at least for him, is not after physical treasure but after spiritual treasure -- for self-identity, friendship, service.

Thus, by simplicity of diction, appropriate naming, skill in evoking mood and emphasis upon concerns which affect every human being, Tolkien has created an accessible world, a world that both invites and directs us.

Art, or artistry, Tolkien holds, is the link between imagination, fantasy and the subcreation. The sub-created world, constructed as it must be by imagination, is necessarily fantastic. But here Tolkien cautions us:

Fantasy, of course, starts out with an advantage: arresting strangeness. But that advantage has been turned against it, and has contributed to its disrepute. Many people dislike being ‘arrested." They dislike any meddling with the Primary World, or such small glimpses of it as are familiar to them. They, therefore, stupidly and even maliciously confound Fantasy with Dreaming, in which there is no Art; and with mental disorders, in which there is not even control: with delusion and hallucination [op. cit., pp. 47-48].

Fantasy is immensely difficult to achieve, but narrative is the best means of access to it. Drama, argues Tolkien, is hostile to fantasy, since it sets before us a physical reality that limits the mental reality we construct around it. (No doubt we shall soon see hobbits on a cinematic screen, and one can only guess at the pain this would have caused Tolkien.) But the "Elvish craft" of fantasy, properly practiced, produces enchantment, and enchantment ‘produces a Secondary World into which both designer and spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their senses while they are inside; but in’ its purity it is artistic in desire and purpose" (ibid., pp. 52-53). Through enchantment, the product of fantasy, we adults begin to retrieve the childlike wonder we had deposited in the litter basket of our mental past. Fantasy, argues Tolkien, "remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker" (ibid., p. 55). Through enchantment we regain, as Tolkien says, "a clear view" -- we recover the optics of insight into the human spirit and rediscover childlike wonder at the glory of being.

Escape from Prison

Let us return here to the child, to that part of our nature which, Tolkien reminds us, is our nature -- the part of our self which we have merely misplaced. Through fantasy and the engagement in subcreation the reader comes to immense knowledge -- knowledge about the being of man, a knowledge that is also called wisdom. Wisdom is the discovery of self in a world of selves, the discovery of being human in humanity. That there are so many people in the world is a fact of knowledge; that there are other people in the world is an insight of wisdom. One calculates, the other accepts. So with fantasy and with the child. But wisdom does more than accept the presence of other life than our own, more than place the self outside the self and in the context of others: it orders life. Tolkien calls it Desirability -- a kingdom of enchantment whose visitors know that the dragon is not of the same order as a horse or an orc of the same order as an elf.

Wisdom is not naïveté. Naïveté fails to understand life; wisdom copes with, life. There is the great lesson of fantasy for modern man:

The process of growing older is not necessarily allied to growing wickeder, though the two do often happen together. Children are meant to grow up, and not to become Peter Pans. Not to lose innocence and wonder, but to proceed on the appointed journey; that journey upon which it is certainly not better to travel hopefully than to arrive, though we must travel hopefully if we are to arrive. But it is one of the lessons of fairy-stories (if we can speak of the lessons of things that do not lecture) that on callow, lumpish, and selfish youth peril, sorrow, and the shadow of death can bestow dignity and even sometimes wisdom [ibid., pp. 44-451.

A student of mine once told me: "I can’t write on Tolkien’s works. I enjoy them too much. Sometimes I need to escape from the present world and simply enjoy the fantasy." He missed the point. Tolkien discusses his art in terms of a contrast -- that between the Escape of the Prisoner and the Flight of the Deserter. My student fell in the latter camp. For the Prisoner, says Tolkien, dreams of escape from his cell, of his family, of life on another and higher plain. Since we are all prisoners unto ourselves, have all created tight systems for our daily existence and placed bars and limitations upon our spirit, we rightly long for an escape into active engagement with life. But the Deserter flees from engagement. Because the quest to be human is often a difficult and frustrating one that demands the utmost of our mortal wisdom, he chooses the ease of the prison.

This then is what Tolkien’s characters discover: that our need and calling is to escape from the prison and struggle onward toward a goal that becomes precious only in the striving for it.

Fantasy Literature’s Evocative Power

The fact that Ballantine Books has created a special division to publish only fantasy literature testifies to the enormous interest in such works. Indeed, the purchases -- and one would assume the reading -- of fantasy books are staggering. According to the New York Times Book Review (October 16, 1977), this year Ballantine expects to sell 850,000 copies of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Silmarillion, a work which the author abandoned early in his career but attempted to revise and finish before his death, and which was finally completed by his son Christopher. Sales of Richard Adams’s Watership Down, a fantasy work of the first order, are expected to reach 125,000 copies during: its fourth year in print -- the figure attained in one month by an "epic" fantasy, Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara. And 100,000 copies of the perennial Winnie-the-Pooh will move into young and eager hands.

The list could be continued, on into the satellite propositions such as the Brothers Hildebrandt’s Tolkien Calendar which sold nearly a half-million copies last year. But numbers alone, however impressive, are relatively meaningless -- particularly in the publishing world. For example, over 8 million books on Elvis Presley were sold in the three months following his death (5 million ordered in one week). We also recall that Raynor Unwin (of George Allen & Unwin, Tolkien’s British publisher) expected to lose £1,000 on the first edition of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which had an initial printing of only 10,000 total copies.

I

However entertaining and impressive -- the figures, we have to look well past them to assess the significance and grasp the meaning of fantasy literature.

Fantasy literature as a genre has the capacity to move a reader powerfully. And the motions and emotions involved are not simply visceral as is the case with much modern literature -- but spiritual. It affects one’s beliefs, one’s way of viewing life, one’s hopes and dreams and faith. Since I have had all these -- beliefs, hopes, dreams, faith -- affected by such literature, I feel compelled to ask somewhat uncomfortable questions about the experience.

Questions like these: What is the worth of this thing fantasy? What does it do? Why and how does it do what it does? I have not found these questions adequately addressed in the dozens of secondary works I have read on fantasy and fantasy writers. That the works do have such an effect everyone readily admits, but few care to say just how it comes about.

Indeed, it may be precisely in defiance of such theorizing that fantasy exists. Still, I am concerned, professionally and spiritually, with its why and how. Something that works this powerfully on the human spirit needs to be understood. Thus my concern here will not be to craft a paean to fantasy literature, but to attempt a theoretical understanding. In considering why, how and to what end fantasy literature operates, I am tempted to turn to well-known authors -- Lewis, Tolkien, Le Guin, Tennyson, L’Engle -- for convincing examples. I shall resist that temptation insofar as possible and stay with the theory.

First, a confession: After my initial reading of J.R.R. Tolkien’s works, I was not immediately swept into "Hobbidolatry," and I still resist that adulation which conceives of Tolkien as a presiding deity over his created world. Too many people, it seems, want to leave our world for a fictive one. Like Robert Frost, I feel that "earth’s the right place for love." Further, it strikes me as all too easy, as in some recent critical circles, to make a point, however flimsy; gloss it with a quotation from C. S. Lewis; and consider it thereby as apodictic truth, beyond disputing.

The understanding of the form is important, I believe, because authors of fantasy are often visionaries of the spiritual nature of man. The question which has confronted them in making their art is this: Given that vision of man’s spiritual nature, his spiritual needs and the answer to them, how does a writer incarnate the vision in art so that others may also see? Further, how can the artist focus the optics of insight so that others not only see, but see themselves within the vision, so that the world the artist creates becomes the world of the reader?

Ideally, all literary art strives for this interpenetration of the reader and artist in another world reached by the mind, so that the "I" of the reader becomes one with the "I" of the work. The great task of all literary artists is to show others their vision, posing it in such a way that others may say: Yes, this is true, this is a part of my life, this is valid for my life.

"A child," J. R. R. Tolkien wrote, "may well believe a report that there are ogres in the next country: many grown-up persons find it easy to believe of another country" ("On Fairy Stories," The Tolkien Reader [Ballantine, 1966]). Here is the invitation fantasy holds out to the reader: to recover a belief beclouded by knowledge, to reaffirm a faith shattered by fact. We know there are no ogres in the next country, yet we may well believe there are. The lure of this recovery has attracted thousands to Tolkien’s writings, has sent readers tumbling through the enchantment of his literary kingdoms, has in fact delivered what it promised: a recovery of being, a refreshment, a keener realization of the importance of our spiritual nature. The surprise is that so many readers are surprised by the experience. The lure of great literature has long been precisely this which fantasy holds forth in a new way: the lure of losing self in order to rediscover or recover one’s self in a fresher, revitalizing perspective.

II

In order to characterize a work as fantasy literature, I would argue, there are six traits which must be present to some degree: story, common characters, evocation of another world, use of magic and the supernatural, a clear sense of good and evil, and the quest.

The fact that fantasy relies on a compelling, well-spaced story, while seemingly obvious, nevertheless is often overlooked. Stated quite simply, the story is the narrative plot line, the unfolding of events, the fleshing out of characters into living beings who think about actions, who do act, and whose actions have effects. Moreover, a story must move through a beginning, a middle and an end, and in the process must move the reader.

By describing the story in traditional terms I thereby exclude from fantasy literature the allegory, which is frequently mistaken for fantasy. The fantasy story must be significant in its own right and not, as in allegory, always subservient to the interpretation -- a situation that casts reins and boundaries upon the imagination. Story seeks to free the imagination, to allow it for a time to live in another world. Allegory imprisons the imagination within an intricate puzzle. Essentially two dimensional, allegory moves without variation from the plane of the narrative to the plane of the allegorical meaning in an interrelationship that must be patterned, precise. There is a certain satisfaction in fitting the pieces of the puzzle together, but that is the end of the matter. Story, on the contrary, has the capacity to live on in us. Rather than merely working out someone else’s puzzle, we appropriate the story as our own.

Such a view of story would also disallow a great deal of what is variously described as "reflective," "analytic" or "stream-of-consciousness" fiction. While the characters in fantasy often have powerful mental and spiritual struggles -- struggles that lead them through vales of sorrow and dark tunnels of the mind -- they never forget that they are acting in a drama which involves others and which is moving resolutely to an ending. The mental struggle itself is not the end. The characters in fantasy can be as profound as life itself or as illuminating as a sunrise, but the life moves somewhere and the sun not only rises but sets. In fantasy the story, often a powerful tale, is compelling upon the reader, but it is also impelling in the work, providing action, encounter, desperation and resolution.

III

The second trait of fantasy literature is that the central characters are of a common nature. In the fantasy tale they might be any one of us -- and that is precisely the point. We are asked not to stand on the outside and survey this tale from detached perspective, but to enter into it so that the story becomes ours. Thus we find characters quite like ourselves.

Even when the characters are not human beings, they are like us; Tolkien’s hobbit far prefers an easy chair and a pipe full of good tobacco to an adventure. Elwin Ransom of Lewis’s Space Trilogy, a philologist by profession, is forced to undertake a quest. Many of the central characters of fantasy are country people, like those in Evangeline Walton’s Mabinogion tales and other Welsh fantasies, The wizard Ged of Le Gum’s Earthsea Trilogy is the son of a bronzesmith on a rustic island and is referred to as "goatherd."

By virtue of the common character it thereby becomes easier for readers to see themselves in the action. Even though we may all like to play Superman, in literature it seems that we stand outside the larger-than-life hero. He is ably equipped, after all, to fight his own battles. In fact, we usually know at the outset who will win; we’re just not certain how. But with common characters we recognize their shortcomings (they are our own), and want to come to their aid. When a character gets knocked down, which occurs frequently, we would like to help -- from the safety of our easy chair. Maybe between us we can pull it off.

There are two other considerations that account for the trait of the common character. First, the common character is naïve, retaining a certain innocence rather than becoming cynical, hard-bitten, or spoiled by the world. Common characters have not lost the childlike trait of wonder, the willingness to engage adventure. Tolkien explored this idea in his essay "On Fairy Stories," and Lewis has commented on the nature of the fantasy character, albeit indirectly. Often the characters of fantasy are children, since authors have found in children a universal, common human nature, unspoiled by the specialized, regimented and categorized adult world.

The second reason for the use of a common character has to do with heroism. In literary history the hero has often been a figure who acts for us, who stands in our place in the face of danger and by superhuman powers overcomes on our behalf. The theme in fantasy literature is that anyone may be called on to become the hero. Each person may be summoned to tasks which seem beyond his or her capability -- tasks such as a sojourn through sorrow, a struggle to define the nature of goad and evil, the quest for joy. Each person has to act in these instances, has to rely on his or her own insights, cunning, or in some cases strength. Even in tales which clearly envision a supernatural presence, a ruling God, the individual is forced to act on his own strength.

The point of a fantasy is not to hand us tidy morals, but to provide us with growth by experience. Since in fantasy we learn not morals but lessons on life’s way, it is necessary that we clearly recognize this distinction through the characters. They are called not to be heroes, but to be human -- to recognize the human situation for what it is. and what possibly can be done about it.

Evocation of another world, the third trait characterizing fantasy literature, has received attention in critical circles and has been well elucidated by such scholars as Eric Rabkin, C. N. Manlove and J. R. R. Tolkien. So I will simply remark on several qualities of the created (in Tolkien’s terms, "subcreated") world in which fantasy characters live and move and have their being.

First, the world of fantasy is not a dream world, a never-never land, but a world that matches ours in reality. The characters confront the same terrors, choices and dilemmas that we do. Why, then, create a fantasy world at all? The reason is to make it possible to confront more openly and daringly a spiritual reality too often ignored in our world of system and fact, According to Eric Rabkin (The Fantastic in Literature [Princeton University Press, 1976]), "Admittedly, the fantastic is reality turned precisely 180 degrees around, but this is reality nonetheless, a fantastic narrative reality that speaks the truth of the human heart." Perhaps it is the case that when these realities of the human heart are devalued in daily life, one must look to another world where such realities can be restructured and given credence and value.

It follows, then, that the world of fantasy is not an escapist world but one through which we begin to see our own world more clearly. No one, I believe, has addressed this quality more eloquently than Tolkien in his essay "On Fairy Stories." Rather than attempt to reproduce his argument, which would somehow seem to derogate it, I refer the reader to it. In fantasy there is always this reciprocating action, an interchange between two worlds. One of E. Nesbit’s stories is entitled "Whereyouwantogeto" and ends "Whereyoustartedfrom." Precisely.

IV

In Modern Fantasy: Five Studies (Cambridge University Press, 1975), C. N. Manlove has argued that the use of the supernatural -- and I would include magic -- is not simply a possibility in the fantasy tale; it is a driving force in the story and takes a central role in the development and shaping of characters as well as plot. In going into this fourth characteristic of fantasy literature, magic and the supernatural are terms which I use interchangeably (at some risk) to connote the presence of powers whose origin and nature lie outside of human knowledge or common experience.

One form that magic takes is found in the tradition known as "high fantasy," with the supernatural or magical power providing much of the story’s driving impetus. The story is, if you will, about magic and how it affects people. In this form of fantasy the powers are always mysterious, but by certain rites, incantations or motions they can be drawn upon by humans and used to human ends. In Le Gum’s A Wizard of Earthsea (Bantam, 1968), the mage Ogion says to young Ged:

Ged, listen to me now. Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light? This sorcery is not a game we play for pleasure or for praise. Think of this: that every word, every act of our Art is said and is done either for good, or for evil. Before you speak or do you must know the price that is to pay!

Not only are the powers of good or evil controlled by people, there is, further, a sense of balance between such powers, an equilibrium. People can tip the balance either way.

Another form of magic in fantasy occurs when authors, specifically Christian authors, reject what in this approach appears to be a Manichaean dualism with good and evil in conflict and with its resolution left in human hands. Authors in this camp clearly establish the view that the power of evil is limited, and that the power of good (or God) is the absolute authority which sets the limits. Evil does wield a certain power when individuals allow themselves to become a receptacle through which it can operate. Even so, the power of good is always seen as the prior and absolute power, not dependent on human nature but always working directly. In fact, people are often surprised at its appearance, for it lies beyond human expectation and comprehension. Because this power is wholly outside their control, the characters sometimes describe it by the adjective "magical" simply to indicate that it is not understood. One might also use the word "miraculous."

The fifth trait follows from the above, for in all fantasy literature there is a keen recognition of forces of good and evil, a sense of right and wrong -- but also a driving necessity to act on such recognition. It may be the case, however, that in the character’s human struggle to act on choices between good and evil, the distinction becomes blurred. Often the character does not know for certain whether the action is correct until he or she has acted. Often the choice must be construed from what appears to human perspective as a gray area, and it is precisely this, as Robert Browning pointed out in The Ring and the Book, that constitutes "life’s terrible choice." Distressed by the obscuring of the clear word in the modern age, Goethe rephrased the first chapter of the Gospel of John as "In the beginning was the deed." And so too in fantasy. One must act in order to see clearly. The act itself may be committed in great tension and uncertainty, but it is only by acting that one arrives at certainty.

In fantasy’s portrayal of such choices is a keen awareness of the terror of life as well as its joy. There is held forth as one of fantasy’s central tenets the belief that the end of a successful fairy story is joy: not a joy apart from sorrow, however, but a joy distilled from the experience of agonizing choice and a painful awareness of the errors in human decision-making. Only through such decisions, and the actions attendant upon them, may the often hazy edges of good and evil be clarified.

V

The final, and perhaps most important, characteristic is that fantasy is always marked by a quest. If one must act, one must often seek long and desperately for a basis for action. The quest is distinguished from mere adventure, a trait which marks a great deal of nonfantasy fiction (going back, perhaps, to the picaresque novel). While the adventure may be undertaken for any number of reasons and may lead anywhere, the quest is always toward something, although that fact often becomes clear only with the seeking of the goal. It is generally a spiritual or religious undertaking, with its grave or serious nature contrasting with what may well be frolic in the adventure,. Further, the quest is always marked by a sense of struggle, of imminent or actual danger in which all of the character’s will and power will be called forth in order to push on.

In his essay "The Quest Hero" (Texas Quarterly, 4 [1962]), W. H. Auden distinguishes the nature of the true quest in historical literary tradition, illuminating as well this central factor of fantasy. The true quest, he argues, is typified by the following:

(1) A precious Object and/or Person to be found and possessed or married.

(2) A long journey to find it, for its whereabouts are not originally known to the seekers.

(3) A hero. The precious Object cannot be found by anybody, but only by the one person who possesses the right qualities of breeding or character.

(4) A Test or series of Tests by which the unworthy are screened out, and the hero revealed.

(5) The Guardians of the Object who must be overcome before it can be won. They may be simply a further test of the hero’s arete, or they may be malignant in themselves.

(6) The Helpers who with their knowledge and magical powers assist the hero and hut for whom he would never succeed. They may appear in human or in animal form.

Auden observes, moreover, that each of these six elements "corresponds to an aspect of our subjective experience of life." That observation, I believe, is of crucial significance in fantasy, for frequently the quest is an interior or spiritual one. The real struggle is for self-realization. For example, The Hobbit has a clear-cut quest which fulfills all of Auden’s criteria. Yet the book’s real quest goes on within the protagonist, Bilbo Baggins. Hence, when Bilbo descends into the dark cavern to confront the mighty dragon Smaug (who possesses the "treasure"), the narrator can say that Bilbo "fought the real battle in the tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait."

There, in essence, lies the goal of fantasy: to lead the reader into a keener self-understanding. This is the central point of the genre. The artist of vision and fantasy expects us to learn something about ourselves by having made a sojourn through fantasy, to probe our spiritual nature, to grow in experience, to resolve our lives toward new directions. If fantasy begins in another world, it is in order to reach that mysterious other world of the human soul.

VI

There is a further question I personally have to consider, and that concerns the role of fantasy in a Christian life. On this issue, fantasy literature has come under some insensitive and often bitter attack. For example, Dove magazine, a publication of Faith Ministries Association in Pittsburgh, once carried an essay that denigrated fantasy as pernicious, false and a tool of Satan ("Satan’s Fantasy," March 1974). Tolkien, for one, suffered unmercifully in the attack, although the writer gave no evidence of any firsthand reading of Tolkien.

There are other reasons for such questioning of fantasy, however, and several of these tie in with what I have already written. For example, many distrust the power of fantasy to affect the human spirit. That is precisely why I felt compelled to consider the nature of the genre in a systematic fashion.

Can one, however, construct a convincing argument for the appropriation of fantasy in a Christian life? In many respects, the Christian life is not wholly unlike fantasy as I have described it. (In fact, Tolkien maintained that the gospel was the world’s greatest fairy tale.) Consider these points.

Christianity cherishes story, not in the sense of a fictitious tale, but rather in a view of life which is whole, with a beginning (creation), a middle (the incarnation and crucifixion), and an ending (the resurrection). History is often said to be God’s story, the revelation of God to humankind. In a sense we are actively partaking of that story. We are characters in the universal drama which God is writing in time.

Notice too that the characters of this story are common. Jesus Christ, himself a carpenter from Nazareth, proclaimed that he came to save sinners. That, I would contend, is our common unity -- our fallen nature. No one can write the eternal story of ones own life; all of us are wholly dependent on Bethlehem’s child-king.

Christianity does more than merely evoke another world; the Christian, albeit with faltering footsteps, attempts to walk in the Kingdom of God, a world we live in now as we try to do the king’s will. This other world is not a never-never land, one divorced from everyday reality. Indeed, it is the true world of the spirit by which we are called to redeem the world of the present age.

I have sought to indicate the different perspectives by which fantasy views and engages themes of magic and the supernatural. In the Christian life there is no "magic," yet the word may serve as a marvelous term (properly understood) for the illimitable power of God, who works in ways which we cannot comprehend and whose response to our need is often beyond expectation. Whatever we see shadowed in part always seems to us something magical.

Moreover, this ultimate power reigns sovereign over evil. From our worldly perspective good and evil seem to be at war, and often we can’t tell which is winning. Yet, the Christian "fantasy" presents us with a vision of evil as being eternally cast in chains, and a vision of God’s daily protective power against evil. It was with keen recognition of this struggle that Paul wrote the moving eighth chapter of Romans. Also, we Christians are mindful that we are instrumental in the struggle. We are not allowed to sit on the sidelines awaiting the final outcome, but must be players in the game, often frustrated, joyful when there are small gains, and always in the thick of it.

Through all this, however, the Christian is steadfastly confident that the struggle on earth is not the end of the matter. The quest to do the Maker’s will finds completion in the lost treasure of the Quest, that treasure from which we were separated at the fall and which we eagerly anticipate: the restoration of union with our Maker. Then the fantasy will indeed be recognized as reality itself.

Shedding Light on the Darkness of Depression

At the most unexpected moments it slips people its dark poison. One scarcely notices the initial sting. Slowly, insidiously, the poison spreads until the victim finds herself cut off from life by a gray veil. The monster, what Winston Churchill, a longtime sufferer, called "the Black Dog." is depression. Medical statistics indicate that in the adult U.S. population approximately 12 per cent of males and 18 per cent of females have had a major depressive episode at some time.

Call it what you will, the most agonizing fact of the illness is that pall of darkness laid upon the mind. Life and light seem beyond reach. Something intervenes: a gray mist of separation, the inability to feel loved and needed, a feeling of being locked away from everything and everyone -- including God.

Perhaps this is one way to distinguish between the "blues," which afflict nearly everyone at one time or another, and the blackness of clinical depression. Clinically depressed patients cry, "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" -- and sometimes add, "But I really can’t blame you for doing so." Unworthiness. Forsakenness.

Clinical depression can generate a number of specific symptoms that are severe, persistent and disabling. Its causes may be internal (endogenous) or external (exogenous) But if it becomes severe, it is marked by a profound biological unsettling of the delicate interplay of chemicals in the brain. Into that imbalance enters the appalling cloud. It was this biological depression that sucked my wife -- and my family -- into its black maw. We became a vivid example of suffering in the Christian life.

Acknowledging that Christians can suffer from depression flies in the face of popular religious slogans that tell us about the power of positive thinking, that we should let go and let God, that all is well with the world when one is right with God.

Seven weeks following the birth of our fourth child, my wife, Pat, fell victim to postpartum depression. Though she entered the hospital diagnosed with severe, major biological depression, the admitting psychiatrist assured us that she could expect to leave within two to three weeks as antidepressant medications took effect. Her hospitalization lasted seven weeks, through a tormenting sequence of failed medication and terrifying mental affliction, culminating in a series of electro-convulsive treatments.

So many of us will worry over even a sore throat and seek condolences from others, but we are strangely reluctant to admit to mental affliction. It appears a sign of weakness or, in the perverted view of some, a sign of sin. However difficult it is to acknowledge depression, it is a fact that many Christians have experienced it. Just how many is difficult to say; statistics are often contradictory and unreliable. For many years depression, unless it required hospitalization, was something we hid in the closet (and even then we hid it if possible) As more people are recognizing the nature of the illness, more are seeking help. For all those on the continuum from "blues" to clinical depression, I want to affirm that the black dog can be tamed; depression can be healed.

But how can people recognize depression? What signs can they look for? The most recent psychiatric guidelines, given in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd edition (American Psychiatric Association, 1981) , draw attention to persistence and severity, usually gauged as at least two weeks’ endurance (distinguishing depression from the common, passing blues) of four or more of the following symptoms: persistent feelings of guilt, sadness and hopelessness; thoughts of suicide; poor concentration; changes in appetite; alterations in sleep patterns; decreased interest in sex; and loss of interest in daily activities.

Clinical analysis generally divides depression’s signs and symptoms into four major areas. Affective signs include states of feelings, ranging from mild sadness to severe despair. The depressed person often feels some degree of anxiety, worry, anger or confusion.

Cognitive thought-process signs are the way in which the patient thinks about himself or herself, and about relationships with others or with situations. Typically, the depressed person has very low self-esteem, feels incapable of clear decisions, and seems to have little control over thought processes, into which thoughts of death or suicide intrude.

Both of the above may be observed in behavior signs. Because of their low self-esteem and confused thinking, depressed people may become terribly dependent and submissive, fearful of being left alone, and given to relentless crying and withdrawal. Agitation may give way to restless behavior such as pacing, trembling or handwringing. Their speech and action may become impeded. They may neglect routine activities, such as picking up the mail, reading the newspaper or making coffee. They no longer take pleasure in formerly enjoyable activities.

Depression inevitably takes its toll upon the patient’s physical functions. Initially, depressed people seem to lack energy, which may spiral rapidly into acute fatigue as sleep habits are disturbed. They may suffer physical symptoms such as constipation or diarrhea, indigestion, nausea and headaches. Despite the longing for physical contact, sexual patterns may be disturbed. Posture is often affected; the patient might slouch, bending shoulders forward as if a weight were pressing upon them. The eyes might appear dull and listless, seeming to turn inward with a kind of glazed look. Few illnesses reveal as clearly the relation between body and mind.

Having examined some of the indicators of depression, the word why inevitably arises. Here is the great perplexity of depression: Why does this happen to me? As a rule, depressed persons, because of the acute sense of unworthiness which typifies the illness, generally believe they are depressed because of something they have or have not done. They believe themselves to be responsible, even if they can find no direct cause-and-effect relationship in their lives. Since so many factors come to bear upon the illness, it is understandable that people are prone to inventing causes; they want to name, identify, pinpoint and blame someone or something specific.

Psychiatry has postulated causes that are more probable than one’s own actions. For example, genetic factors may to a certain extent make one more susceptible to depression. Those with a family

background of mental disorders are al greater risk. Second, stress can provoke emotional mood shifts. A third area, the chemical functions of the brain, has become a primary focus of medical research into biological depression. Current science provides convincin8 evidence that disruption in hormonal patterns and the neural synapses in the brain are involved in clinical depression. Because of this chemical imbalance, the use of certain drugs has become critically important to the treatment of depression.

Psychiatry generally distinguishes between two major kinds of depression: bipolar and unipolar. Bipolar, or manic, depression is characterized by recurring mood shifts which the patient cannot control. Unipolar depression is a single, progressive state, without the mood swings. One theory speculates that too little of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine causes unipolar depression; too much of it causes manic depression. More recent theories hold that several transmitters are involved -- serotonin and dopamine, for example. Treatment for both types of depression may involve pharmaceutical control, depending on the diagnosis of probable causes and background for the individual’s condition.

The use of medications in the treatment of depression, often prescribed over an extensive period of time, provokes considerable dismay in many people. They fear the possibility of physiological and psychological dependency upon the drug.

Having considered signs and symptoms of depression, the major kinds of depression and drug therapy for them, one has still skirted the medical fringes of a catastrophic human experience. Left begging is the key question: What is depression like? No single item emerges more clearly from studies of the experience of depression than the fact that it attacks the very individuality of the sufferer and is therefore unique to each person’s experience of it. It afflicts parts of us that make us individuals -- our minds, emotions and personalities.

Some indication of what the illness is like may be gleaned from a journal my wife kept during her seven-week hospitalization. As she began to respond to medication her moods bounced up and down. It seemed that depression was a dark beast, always lurking behind some huge door in her mind, ready to spring out at unexpected moments. It was always there, and its attack could not be predicted. Fear of the beast was as terrible as the attack itself.

June 23 (after one week) :

When I awaken, I have a sick feeling as I remember that I am here. Sometimes it still seems like a bad dream. I attended chapel but found it very hard to concentrate. The message seemed meaningless. June 28 (after two weeks) :

Last night was a frightening night. The overwhelming feeling of depression hit me during the night. I felt nauseated, like my nerves were in knots, and had diarrhea.

. . .Tears have flowed like rivers today. I really feel I need strength from the Lord to help me get through this hospitalization. Sometimes I feel so alone and worried about a recurrence when I get home.

July 7 (after 3 weeks) :

I feel so guilty that I can’t seem to get well. I feel like a stranger to myself. . . . I can’t read my Bible or pray. I know God knows my needs and the needs of my family, and I trust He will take care of us all. I’ve reread my favorite Bible promises. But I can’t feel them right now.

July 12:

I awakened about 3:30 A.M. I feel very nauseated and very thirsty. At 5 A.M. I got up for some ginger ale and a cracker. I still feel nauseated and my head is spinning. I am very discouraged. I still am thirsty. . . "I’m trying so hard to believe all of God’s promises. I know that they are true and I thank him that they aren’t dependent upon my feeling them. I feel totally helpless today. I feel that with every depressing day a little more of me dies.

During this time Pat’s medication was not being effectively metabolized. Since switching her to a different medicine would have taken several weeks, and she had already been separated from her family for nearly six weeks, her doctors decided, with our approval, to use electro-convulsant therapy (ECT)

The use of ECT has always been extremely controversial in psychiatry, and its mere mention strikes fear into the heart of the patient. The modern use of ECT, however, is far more carefully regulated and benign than the old-fashioned "shock treatments" of the 1960s. The careful administration of muscle-relaxants and tranquilizers reduces the "shock" to the body. The small surge of electricity penetrates the disrupted activity of the brain, jarring the neurotransmitters into normal action. The most common side-effects are short-term memory loss and headache, the latter usually relieved within 24 hours. While seldom a first course of treatment for depression, ECT has resulted in considerable relief for biological depression. While the normal course of treatments runs a course of 6-12 administrations, ECT proved so successful for Pat that she was given only four. A week later she was discharged.

Discharge from a hospital, however, is only a beginning on the road back to health. A major depressive episode such as Pat’s may last as long as 18 months. In fact, it was almost two years before she was able to go completely off antidepressant medication. For some people, the battle with depression and the necessity for medication or therapy may endure for years. However long the ordeal, however, the experience will forever be a part of the person. The fear of recurrence is always there; the memory of the anguish never fully disappears.

Second. we learned how much the body of Christ must support members in need. We experienced this help in bountiful and unexpected ways, reminding us with a tremendous urgency of our corporate need and responsibility. Church members regularly lifted our need before God in intercessory prayer. Pastors and friends delivered meals to us, cared for the children and comforted us. We experienced the New Testament ideal of being one body in Jesus, and the care that each member shares.

We learned that others also suffer enormous hurt on their pilgrimage through this fallen world. It is not, however, a vale of tears with no light finally to show the way. The many helping hands that attended us testified to the opposite. But sometimes it takes the jarring impact of personal pain to remind us of the wounded spirits to whom we can minister. This need is particularly great, we found, among those who suffer psychological pain. For so many it is a private grief, borne upon lonely shoulders, hidden from the world.

Depression should no longer carry a stigma; we must recognize it as an illness entailing specific spiritual and psychological needs, and requiring specific treatments. Depressed people need recognition and urgent caring. One great need is for human contact, whether through greeting cards or visits. To the depressed person, the well of human kindness seems to have hit dry rocks; there never seems to be enough love available.

Our experience tutored us, painfully, in the reality of suffering among faithful Christians. We have no easy answers. But we felt the pulse of pain and, by looking to the cross, gained some understanding.

Jesus, the true light himself, the very son of God, stands in the form of humanity -- the very same who marred God~s perfection and cast darkness over that light. To restore that light, Jesus, the perfect light, underwent the full anguish of complete darkness. He knew separation from God thoroughly; he plumbed the deepest sea of terrifying darkness in order to build a bridge out of it for us. There he cried, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" He felt cut off from God, forsaken. Still caught between the perfect light and the dark imperfection, we cry out the same plea. Though he was plunged into the sea of human despair, the devil could not hold Jesus. A shattered grave, blasted apart by the light of all ages, is the testimony. In the gutted wreck of that grave lies the foot of the bridge out of all darkness.

The Grapes of Wrath Fifty Years Later

In celebration of this anniversary the Steinbeck Research Center of San Jose State University will sponsor a conference exploring the novel from every conceivable angle -- sociological, political, historical and literary. The University of Alabama’s prestigious Literary Symposia series will this year focus on "The Steinbeck Question." Dozens of other enterprises have developed, including several new scholarly treatises. Scores of classrooms will turn their attention to the novel.

Such attention to one of America’s literary masterpieces is gratifying, but it tends to mask the agony and the ecstasy of the novel. When one walks into an art museum and first glimpses a masterpiece, the experience can be breathtaking. When that same painting is broken down into photocopied details for closer analysis, something of the rapture also breaks down.

Such attention is also warranted. Steinbeck said the novel had "five layers" of meaning, and he may have underestimated. But it is good to recapture the story of the novel as well as the story in the novel.

The seeds of the novel were sown some time before the writing of it. One myth has it that Steinbeck joined the migrants on their long trek from Oklahoma City to Bakersfield. He did not. Returning from a trip to Europe in September 1937, Steinbeck and his wife, Carol, bought a car in Chicago and headed south to pick up Route 66 to California. He traveled enough of the route to provide geographical details, but the firsthand experience with the migrants occurred in the fields of California.

The San Francisco News had assigned Steinbeck to do a series of articles on the migrants of California. The migrants’ situation had rapidly gone from bad to abysmal. By the hundreds of thousands they arrived in California, driven from the midwestern states by drought and sandstorms that turned the region into a blinding haze of dust. Impoverished and desperate, they looked for homes and a future in the green valleys. But where would they all live? California’s 8,000 public and private camps, for which the state provided only three full-time inspectors, couldn’t begin to hold them. The migrants pitched tents in fields, in "jungles" by dirty rivers, even on piles of manure to get warmth from the decaying offal. Strikes and violence became commonplace as wages dropped throughout the 1930s. Landowners advertised widely for pickers of fruit or cotton. When 5,000 arrived, they employed 500 at reduced wages and hired guards to keep out the rest.

Native Californians, many of whom had migrated during the earlier gold rush years or had wrested the rich land from Mexicans and Indians, were bewildered and angry. The great migration started in 1925 when cotton pickers were needed in California and handbills promising good wages and good homes were circulated in the dust-bowl states. In. ten years the population of Madera County doubled. In Kern County, fully a quarter of the population was on relief. The budget for the Kern County Hospital soared from $100,000 to $1 million in a decade, with the costs borne by taxpayers.

While writing Steinbeck kept a daily journal of his work, plotting sections and developments carefully. The journal, which also records Steinbeck’s fears and uncertainties about his massive undertaking, contains a tense drama of its own. The novel’s subject was of epic proportions, and the story nearly possessed the author. Steinbeck faced disconsolate moments when his best craft seemed unable to capture the raw truth of the human emotions. Then came moments of ecstasy when he felt that he had expressed precisely what he wanted and the migrants needed. By the time he arrived at that memorable closing scene in which Rose of Sharon, who bears one of the names of Jesus, acts in the humility and love of her namesake (having lost her baby, she suckles an old man dying of malnutrition) , Steinbeck was physically at the point of collapse. His nerves, he said, were ready to flare out in a white heat. When he finished he collapsed, and did not write again for nearly a year.

Upon publication, The Grapes of Wrath attracted immediate attention and stirred tremendous controversy. It soared to the top of the best-seller lists, where it remained for over a year, and it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940. Its impact upon American affairs was intense. Fierce political backlash broke out on two fronts. California landowners fought desperately to discredit the novel, branding Steinbeck as a communist troublemaker. However unjustified, the label stuck for years. In Oklahoma, political powers organized to censor and ban the novel for allegedly presenting a derogatory view of the migrants.

Also, many people reacted sharply against Steinbeck’s faithfully realistic rendering of the migrants’ language. The novel has been and still is routinely censored as profane. Oklahoma Congressmen Lyle Boren went on record in 1940 with this comment: "Take the vulgarity out of this book and it would be a blank from cover to cover.

The fact is, the migrants were often a profane people. Referring to another of his novels, Steinbeck commented that he couldn’t portray such characters talking like college professors. He aimed for authenticity. The truth of the migrants’ plight, he believed, had to be told, and in the power of their own words.

None of these charges, however, can diminish the novel’s strength, nor Steinbeck’s deep sympathy with a people in terrible need. Why does it move readers today, far removed from the hounding anguish of the Depression, the cruel experience of the dust bowl and the struggle to put a plate of food before a starving family? Perhaps because these conditions, in varying forms, still exist today. Now, too, people wander homeless and helpless in the heart of the promised land. Human need is always with us, and we do well to be mindful of that need. But there are other answers as well.

The novel gives rich testatment to a spiritual idea of humanity. In struggling heroically to hold her own family together, Ma Joad nonetheless possesses a vision of the family of all humanity. This idea has not lost an iota of spiritual urgency in our "me-first" age. If the poor are always with us, we are obligated to see them as extensions of ourselves. This is no less a radical and daring concept today than it was in 1939. And no less important.

The novel also establishes a spiritual hope which, while it transcends human hopelessness, is manifested through humans. Rose of Sharon is one of the great heroines of literature. She changes from a naive little girl whose passion for herself is all-consuming to a woman who can lay down her life and set aside her own need to minister to others. While demonstrating the urgent need for humanity, the novel provides a stirring spiritual response to that need. No wonder the book has made so many so uneasy.

The significance of The Grapes of Wrath endures also because of its literary achievement. For hundreds of pages the reader is spellbound by a story woven with intricate craftsmanship out of the rich fabric of biblical symbolism and the flowing rhythms and patterns of the intercalary chapters. That it was written in so short a time is a wonder.

The Grapes of Wrath earned Steinbeck a Nobel Prize more than 20 years after it appeared. Its greatest commendation, however, lies in the fact that it is still read today. This disquieting drama of a dispossessed people who in 1938 packed their lives aboard dilapidated trucks in search of the promised land is very much a story of America, a story of each of us, which we are constantly rediscovering.

America’s Moral Landscape in the Fiction of Richard Ford

I discovered Richard Ford while looking for a novel to accompany Tocqueville, Habits of the Heart, and the travel narratives of Jonathan Raban and William Least Heat Moon in a course on American character. I sought one that would help illuminate the moral consciousness of America in the ‘80s, a nation bogged down and hemmed in by the individualism it had long touted as its strength; a tough and belligerent nation, still stunned and whimpering from the Vietnam war; a country whose politicians were campaigning on "family values," while it seemed that hardly a family was not sundered by abandonment or divorce; a post-Christian society, even pagan, that thirsted for a taste of faith.

I had considered Russell Banks’s Continental Drift, the story of a frustrated, priapic New Hampshire boiler repairman whose life disintegrates when he uproots his family to chase the American dream to Florida. James Atlas called it "the most convincing portrait I know of contemporary America." But the protagonist, Bob DuBois, though in the narrator’s eyes a "decent," ordinary man, seemed to me too destructive, too crazy, too criminal.

In the summer of 1986, when the Greenwich Village bookstores were crowded with Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City -- a novel whose method of demonstrating the bankruptcy of our culture, one critic said, is to chronicle its parties -- and Bret Easton Ellis’s Less than Zero and Don DeLillo’s White Noise, all in shiny paperback covers, I remembered a New York Times review that called Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter a novel about a good man. I found in Ford far more than I had hoped for: a writer who, by his own account, had "apprenticed" himself to America; whose stories and characters so spring from their landscapes and physical situations as to personify the spirit of the motels, roadside bars, lakes and highways where we encounter them; and who may well be, as his friend Raymond Carver (who died last summer) said, "sentence for sentence … the best writer at work in this country today."

In spite of the critical success of The Sportswriter (1986) and Rock Springs (1987) , the collection of short stories recently issued in paperback, Ford has neither made best-seller lists nor become a familiar name, even in English departments. He resists categories and comparisons. Though born and raised in Faulkner-Welty country, he declares himself "sick of the whole subject" of southern writing. Though a pal and contemporary of Carver, he denies membership in the so-called minimalist school, which, according to Madison Bell ("Less Is Less," Harper’s, April 1986) , concerns itself with surface details and fosters a nihilistic vision. Whatever the validity of a comparison to Hemingway, which rings true in Ford’s many hunting and fishing scenes, his task as profiler of this generation is more complex. He focuses his camera on ordinary -- and sometimes outlaw -- lives, people who for the most part eschew self pity and are slow to judge. Ford helps us, too, withhold judgment.

The Sportswriter begins on Good Friday morning. Frank Bascombe, a 38-year-old feature writer for an unnamed sports magazine (like the defunct Inside Sports, where Ford once worked) , narrates the three-day action, mixed with flashbacks, in the present tense. In a cemetery he meets his ex-wife, referred to only as X, for a private memorial service at the grave of their son Ralph, who had died four years before at age nine. They live in a mythical Haddam, New Jersey, modeled somewhat on Princeton, where Ford and his wife, Kristina, lived while he taught writing at Princeton University and she taught city planning at New York University.

The afternoon of the funeral, Frank flies to Detroit with his girlfriend, Vicki, a hospital nurse; to interview Herb Wallagher, a paraplegic former professional football star, for what had been conceived as a standard spiritual-courage-triumphs-over-bodily-injury story. But Herb is clearly loony, the drugged, bitter opposite of what the American sports hero is supposed to be.

On Easter Sunday they return to New Jersey for dinner in Barnegat Pines with Vicki’s family, which includes her turnpike toll-taker father, Wade Arsenauft, who spends his time in the basement restoring an ancient Chrysler; her querulous younger brother, Cade, a future police officer; and her stepmother, Lynette, a widowed, divorced, pious Catholic. At table she has them all join hands for grace, and Frank, uneasily grabbing Wade’s and Cade’s, can’t help thinking "what strange good luck to be reckoned among these people" rather than "cruising some mall for an Easter takeout . . . lost in the savage wilderness of life."

But before the afternoon is over, X calls to tell Frank that his friend from the Divorced Men’s Club, Walter Luckett, has killed himself, and Vicki, to emphasize that they don’t have enough in common to marry, punches him in the mouth. "Easter has turned to rain and bickering and death." The novel ends with Frank pacing the beach in Florida, waiting for the arrival of a 20-year-old Dartmouth woman who admires his writing. He says he has finally finished mourning his lost son. Maybe now he will finish the novel he had put aside for sports journalism. And maybe not.

In The Sportswriter Ford is able to reproduce a broad and complex cross-section of American middle-class life. Reading The Sportswriter with a map of the United States on the wall and a roadmap of New Jersey on the desk gives one a new sense of America as an organism, a network of flight plans and super highways and back roads linking Alaska, Texas, Detroit, Florida, mid-Manhattan, the Jersey coast and the New England countryside and leading all of us in and out of one another’s moral choices and dreams.

But in Ford’s world our dreams are usually symptoms of our pain. Herb Wallagher dreams of strangling three old women by a roadside until he sees some yellow-eyed deer watching him. And Frank has a vision of Wade walking down a long, empty hospital corridor on a visit from which he won’t return. Frank, the Good Samaritan, shrinks from these dreams, but still hears the dreams confessions and bears their burdens.

Walter has to confess a homosexual encounter to someone, and he picks Frank: "You’re a man with rules Frank," he says, "You don’t mind, if I say that? You have ethics about a lot of important things."

"I don’t mind, Walter, but I don’t think that I have any ethics at all, really. I just do as little harm as I can. Anything else seems too hard."

Frank shrinks from Walter’s attachment. But he is Walter’s one true friend. Frank proclaims himself an individualist, though he is not the individualist about whom Tocqueville warns and whom Robert Bellah and colleagues describe in Habits of the Heart. He is the individualist as writer, who must learn to turn his loneliness into creative energy rather than fall into self-pity. Alone in his magazine office he reflects that while writers need to belong to a club, "for real writers, unfortunately, their club is a club with just one member." Ford repeats the sentiment in a Harper’s essay, "First Things First" (August l988) : "Writing is dark and lonely work, and no one has to do it. No one will ever care much if it doesn’t get done at all." For Ford to close The Sportswriter without indicating whether Frank will retrieve either his wife or his talent may frustrate some readers, but it is an aesthetic decision consistent with the character he has introduced.

Frank, says critic Robert Towers, is a "post-Christian man of good will trying to find his way in a world bereft of the certainties of its religious past." The Sportswriter’s real subject is the modern American’s search for integrity: through sports, through art, through religion,, through simply living up to one’s day-to-day obligations, through the little commitments we make to one another in friendship and love, even when our marriages fall apart. Integrity can also mean settling for less, as it does for Wade Arsenault, whose heroism is in "moving down in rank." It is a move that Frank, with his saintly tolerance, understands.

In one of the novel’s funniest passages on America’s psychic investment in sports, Frank stops at a roadside watering hole named for Sweet Lou Calcagno, center for the ‘56 Giants. It’s one of those sports nostalgia bars, emblazoned with pictures of Jack Dempsey and Spike Jones embracing the beloved host. Frank contemplates a "where-are-they-now?" interview -- only to discover that Sweet Lou was gunned down 30 years before by gangsters and that his widow, the bartender, hates the sound of his name.

There is no salvation through the cult of the sports hero because sports -- and sportswriting -- deals with only the surface of life. Nor is there salvation in literature, as Frank learns in a stint teaching English at an isolated New England college, for it denies the reality of death. On religion, Ford holds his fire. Ford’s mother was thought to be Catholic because she was raised for a while in a convent, and the sisters’ kindness stuck. But institutional religion seems to have neither wounded nor healed Ford himself, and his characters search for meaning or "mystery" on the fringes of the church: Frank consults a psychic adviser and ducks in the side door at Haddam First Presbyterian, and Vicki stops at a wayside shrine. Ford seems neither angry enough to reject these characters’ pseudo-faith nor inspired to bring them inside the faith.

Nor does salvation come though sexual activity or the institution of marriage. Almost everyone in Ford’s fiction is divorced, adulterous or living with someone whom he or she will desert within a few pages. Life seems to make sense mostly on the mediocre dignity achieved by Vicki’s family, and especially in Franks loyalty to the pathetic Walter, whose impulsive kiss he brusquely rejects and whom he really doesn’t like very much, but to whom he represents integrity and a little wisdom.

Part of the focus of the book is on the interaction, on an uncharted Mississippi River island, between two uprooted young men and their eccentric old hosts, who in their odd way seem to have some stability the young men seek -- until one of the old men is killed in a bizarre fishing accident. But most of the energy is sexual -- one young man carries on an affair with his cousin, who is married to a minor league baseball player. She promises him an ecstatic trick if they can just get into a shower bath in the Peabody Hotel in Memphis. They don’t get to Memphis, but when she does try out her "plastic bag" trick in the shower, he is revolted and breaks away, deciding not to participate in a degrading sexual act just when he has his life in order. Then, like the old man, he dies absurdly, shot by a trigger-happy youth "guarding" the mysterious island.

Unlike A Piece of My Heart, the second novel, The Ultimate Good Luck (1981) , is fast-moving and compact. As before, the central characters are marginal and rootless, yanked from one risk-filled relationship to another without a firm sense of whom they can trust. Harry Quinn, a Vietnam veteran, has come to Mexico at the request of his girlfriend, Rae, to buy her, drug-dealing brother out of prison. This novel’s style is part Dashiell Hammett, with its hard brutality, bitter dialogue, murders and betrayals. It is also reminiscent of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, with a displaced American, an evocation of Vietnam, and, especially, a scene in which a Baskin-Robbins store explodes, killing innocent bystanders, revealing to Harry and Rae that they are involved inadvertently but inexorably in an evil far beyond what they had foreseen. In the end, Harry survives a shootout and wonders if he has "perfected something in himself by killing three people he didn’t know, when he had come at the beginning simply to save one, and if now he had pleased anyone anywhere. Though he thought if he hadn’t pleased anybody, at least he’d tried to, and had performed it under control, and he hadn’t coped so bad by himself at the end. He thought, in fact, that he’d done fine."

The Sportswriter’s cosmopolitan milieu of death-denying Jersey suburbs and wry commentary on New York magazine journalism has made its author more accessible to professors, who will start working him into their curriculum. On the other hand, Rock Springs and some recent essays on Ford’s early family and college life represent a return to the basics. The basics are the people William Least Heat Moon or John Steinbeck would meet driving a pickup truck north from New Orleans along the Mississippi to Arkansas and Tennessee, and west through Missouri and Nebraska and Wyoming to Montana (where the Fords live now) to the coast. These are the people Richard Avedon photographed for his startling book of portraits of Westerners -- grimy, half-naked, grotesque, but with dignity intact. It is a bleak land of silos, railroad tracks, trailer parks and seedy bars, and of hunters, thieves and adulterers. The small-town, vagabond, grow-up-quick life has provided Ford his fundamental inspiration.

Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1944. His father was a traveling starch salesman and his mother’s father, a former prizefighter and dining car attendant, ran a hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas, where the family lived for a while. When Richard was 16, his father "woke up gasping on a Saturday morning and died before he could get out of bed." Before that, Richard had had some scrapes with the law. His mother sat him down and told him that he was on his own and should stay out of jail because she wouldn’t get him out. His mother had various jobs, and for a while had a boyfriend who was a married man. Once, worried when she didn’t come home, the 17-year-old Richard tracked her to the man’s apartment. For Ford, discovering this relationship was, like a father’s death, a moment from which a hundred stories would spring.

The stories in Rock Springs touch on the shocks that a young man receives when he’s 16; on characters who, like those in The Ultimate Good Luck, hang out at dog tracks, or who have had scrapes with the law, steal cars and push dope; and on the fleeting presence of strange men and women whom we recognize, without being told, as home-wreckers. Nearly all deal with infidelity. In "Great Falls," an adolescent boy and his father go duck hunting and return to find a blond young Air Force man named Woody keeping mother company. The father shoves a pistol under his face and sends him away. The family then falls apart, the father is killed in an accident and the mother wanders from man to man. The narrator wonders whether it is some "coldness in us all" that "makes us no more or less than animals who meet on the road -- watchful, unforgiving, without patience or desire."

In the longest, richest story, "Empire," Victor Sims, a Vietnam veteran, and his wife, Marge, head east from Spokane across Montana by train. Marge, who has recently survived a cancer operation, sleeps in their compartment while Victor roams around, reminiscing about past love affairs and flirting with a woman army sergeant.

In an extended story-within-a-story, he remembers a tryst with their neighbor’s sister -- who had consorted with a dope-pushing Satanist motorcycle gang -- while Marge was in the hospital. Victor had awakened from their lovemaking in a wild dream about hanging himself, and months later a voice claiming to be "the devil" had called threatening to take Marge in punishment for his adultery.

Victor accompanies the sergeant to her room and takes off her clothes. They discuss the fact that neither has nor ever wanted any children. The sergeant tells Victor a story of looking for her father one night and finding him with another woman (a story much like the one Ford tells about looking for his mother) Victor returns to his wife and they look out the window at a spectacular fire raging on the plains, a fire they imagine does not threaten them or anyone on the train. "The world’s on fire, Vic," Marge says. "But it doesn’t hurt anything. It just burns till it stops." The fire can be a number of things: Victor’s adulterous passion, which may well destroy his marriage; the cancer that almost killed Marge and may well return; an image of Vietnam; or, like the explosion in The Ultimate Good Luck, a sign of the unacknowledged dimension of every human act.

Ford told me once that his ambition is the same as William Dean Howells’s: to "create a literature worthy of America." Surely he shares Howells’s realism, social conscience and occasional moralism. For Ford, there is no fire in human relationships that doesn’t hurt something. In a memoir of his grandfather, the hotel owner, Ford describes how his grandfather "inhabited" his job, painstakingly fulfilled every workaday task, and prayed aloud each morning that he would do it well. Ford concludes: "Everything counts, after all. What else do you need to know?"

Ford has said several times that his goal is to write something that would compare with the end of Frank O’Connor’s story "Guests of a Nation." It describes an Irish boy, an IRA recruit in the 1922 war, who participates in the pointless reprisal executions of two British soldiers the captors had grown to love. It is a story about sin, the end of youth and the infinite weight of moral responsibility. The boy recalls, in words that could have come from Rock Springs: "And anything that happened to me afterwards, I never felt the same about again." In time a good many Americans may say that about reading Richard Ford.

Christian Fulfillment and Jewish-Christian Dialogue

Lively debates are taking place among Christian theologians in dialogue with Jews. Christians are seeking to discover what aspects of their faith are or are not negotiable as churches reassess their positions vis-a-vis Jews and Judaism.

Quite understandably, the Christian belief in Christ as the world’s redeemer is at the center of Christian-Jewish dialogue. Or to put the issue more in terms of the Jewish dialogue partner: If redemption has occurred in Christ, why is the world still so obviously unredeemed? This question has profound implications for other issues such as attitudes toward mission and even approaches to social-political matters.

Eugene Fisher’s article "Covenant Theology and Jewish-Christian Dialogue" in the January-May 1988 issue of the American Journal of Theology and Philosophy may be taken as representative of the Christian attempt to establish common ground for Christian-Jewish dialogue. He writes: "While earlier generations of Christian thinkers tended to stress only the ‘already here’ aspects of the New Testament kerygma, more recent scholarship has sought to reintegrate the eschatological ‘not yet’ into their vision." In other words, we ought not to make claims for redemption today as if the kingdom of God had already arrived, and we should not spiritualize redemption in such a way that we remove it from history. Fisher reminds us that the promises of the messianic age have not yet been fulfilled. Whatever Christians may believe about Jesus as messiah, both Jews and Christians are still waiting for the fulfillment of redemption.

By emphasizing the proleptic or anticipatory nature of Christ’s redemptive

work, and by saying that Jesus is messiah in a not fully accomplished way, we can retrieve for systematic theology the "not yet" aspect of messianic ministry and also meet some of the Jewish objections to certain historic Christian claims. Fisher quotes David Tracy: "To affirm the belief in Jesus Christ is . . . to affirm the faith that in the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus the decisive token, manifestation, prolepsis of the future reign of God (and, thereby, Messianic time) is already here in a proleptic form and, just as really, not yet here." We may add a quote from John T. Pawlikowski: "All talk of a ‘realized eschatology’ must be buried once and for all. What we Christians in our faith now profess is that through the coming of Christ we have a clearer vision of the final dimension of the kingdom."

Fisher also contends that the term fulfillment should be "reserved for its proper eschatological usage, that is to the End time when the Kingdom will be made manifest and the One God, the God of Israel, will be all in all." According to his view, fulfillment is an eschatological category, not so much because it signifies a breakthrough of the future in Christ and through the Spirit and therefore a present reality, but because it represents a future event when God will be "all in all" (I Cor. 15:28)

These proposals cannot, however, be easily reconciled to the New Testament. Like Fisher I welcome the rediscovery of the truth that the New Testament is eschatological. And I think it is of the utmost importance that we recognize that the church is not the kingdom of God, nor is the state of sanctification the same as the promised glorification. Losing sight of such distinctions has usually meant that the church became mired in perfectionism or triumphalism. However, it is also essential that we make a careful distinction between fulfillment and the biblical visions of the End Time when God will be "all in all." Fulfillment is not the same as the consummation of the kingdom of God. Yet it is central to the message of the kingdom. A survey of every instance in the Greek text where we find the word pleroma (fullness) or one of its various derivatives will show that we are dealing with a concept that permeates the New Testament Scriptures; it is foundational to the Christian kerygma.

The idea of fulfillment is used both in a christological and pneumatological context. What God has done in Christ and what God is doing through the Spirit is considered so dramatic and so monumental that the New Testament writers constantly take recourse to the language of pleroma. The concept refers to time, Torah, prophecy, individuals, the church, even the cosmos.

For example, the stories in Acts 1-2 describe the ascension and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on all flesh, and Ephesians 4:9 explains that Christ "ascended far above all heavens that he might fill all things." The New Testament tells us that the incarnation has come to an end, but the presence of the historically acting God has not.

We cannot get away from the fact that in the New Testament we are confronted with statements about redemptive fait accomplis that are both numerous and extraordinary. In Christ "all the fullness [pleroma] of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross" (Col. 1:19) Something has happened. The historically acting God has intervened mightily in the affairs of humankind. At the same time, we are constantly reminded that as those who have tasted "the powers of the age to come" (Heb. 6:5) , we are reborn to a living people, awaiting "a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time" (I Pet. 1:5) There is an "eschatological presence" now (though I agree with Pawlikowski that the term "realized eschatology" might better be avoided) , but the eschaton is not yet.

This tension between the already and the not yet cannot be resolved by deducting christological affirmations or adding eschatological expectations. Fulfillment -- breakthroughs of God’s future in our present -- causes all of life to long for the consummation of the kingdom of God. Expectation is the essence of this fulfillment, not because Christ’s messianic ministry is incomplete, but because in him God has acted decisively in the midst of the chaos of sin.

To talk about the End Time as messianic time seems unnecessarily confusing to me, and counter to I Corinthians 15:24-28. It suggests that in the end the Son will deliver the kingdom of the Father. (The Dutch scholar A. A. Van Ruler called this the "messianic intermezzo.")

During the interim between the ascension and the parousia, says the text, Christ must reign, and he does so during an era when the forces of sin and death are still very much operative. Theologians have distinguished between the reign of Christ and the ultimate reign of God. They are related in the same way that fulfillment and the consummation of the kingdom are related. Just as theologians have said that the revealed God remains the hidden God, so we can say that the power of the age to come in our midst means that signs of the kingdom, very real signs, are revealed to us while at the same time the kingdom remains hidden and is yet to be revealed in all its glory. In that sense the world remains unredeemed. The New Testament makes it very clear that there are still hostile forces to be overcome. "And the last enemy to be destroyed is death" (I Cor. 15:26)

The New Testament message gives many reasons for joy, but none for Christian triumphalism. The kingdom of God has not arrived, nor have we Christians arrived. However, we are not left empty-handed-either. As we read in I Corinthians 4:20, "The kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power." Romans 14:17 expands on this theme by stating that "the Kingdom of God . . . [means] righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit."

What does this discussion mean for redemption? Fisher describes redemption in terms of the Eucharist. But again he uses language that minimizes the Christian reality when he states that Catholics have traditionally been taught that "we have but a foreshadowing or foretaste of the Parousia, the world-to-come."

But a foreshadowing? Is there any reality to it? The broadly catholic tradition -- Roman, Orthodox, as well as Protestant -- affirms the reality of Christ-with-us, in the Eucharist. Fisher continues, "We ‘have’ not its ‘fulfillment’ but rather a definitive hope." True, when we are in the presence of the living God and experience the power of the age to come, we don’t "have" the divine reality, as if it were something that we can grasp and handle. What we have in the Eucharist is nothing more than a morsel of bread and a sip of wine. But what happens according to faith is something else. And in the biblical tradition hope is rooted in happenings, not in theological theories.

Pawlikowski says that "what we Christians in our faith now profess is that through the coming of Christ we have a clearer vision of the final dimensions of this kingdom." But I am not so sure that our vision about the final dimensions of the kingdom of God is actually clearer than that of the prophets of Israel. As a matter of fact, in order to understand the full dimensions of what God’s promises entail, Christians would do well to dig deeply into the messages of Moses and the prophets. We need the very healthy this-worldliness which is to be found there. The intensely eschatological orientation of the Gospels and apostolic letters alone will not do, certainly not for a Christianity that wants to be socially relevant. But Christians. too, deal with final realities that no eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no human heart conceived. When the mystery of the kingdom is revealed, it does not cease to be a mystery.

It seems to me that the New Testament claim is more that we gain a deepened understanding of the foundation of the kingdom of God than that we gain a clearer vision of its final dimensions. In other words, the vision of faith is rooted in the reality of the presence of God, and in Christian terms that reality is understood very much in light of the accomplished ministry of Christ. Pawlikowski is reluctant to talk about a completed messianic ministry of Jesus because he fears Christian triumphalism, the source of so much Christian anti-Judaism. He is right in stating a basic problem of Christian history, but I cannot follow him in his proposed solution.

Judaism also lives by a magnificent vision of the future of the Lord. Both faiths represent journeys of hope. Where we clearly differ is in our understanding of the meaning of redemption in light of Jesus’ life and ministry. But I am convinced that Christians will create more difficulties than they resolve by minimizing the New Testament emphasis on fulfillment, or by talking about a Christ event that is incomplete, a messianic ministry that has not been fully accomplished. Such notions introduce elements into the New Testament witness that strike me as artificial -- foreign substances that the body of Christian kerygma will feel compelled to reject.

If it is true, as some of us believe, that the differences between Christians and Jews run deeper than is sometimes suggested, what does that mean for dialogue? To answer that in a personal way, I accept the fact that my Jewish friends don’t believe a word of some of the things I have affirmed. To some people, certain aspects of the message that I call gospel will sound more like theological gobbledygook. Were I to be told that in a dialogue group, it would obviously give me some pain or discomfort.

On the other hand, I realize that mature dialogue requires one to stand some heat, to recognize the profound faith perspectives that may lie behind other-people’s rejection of one’s position. This encounter can lead, in turn, to a deepened respect for the faith and practices that enrich the dialogue partner’s life. It is often in painful moments that we begin to understand the pain of our dialogue partners, and to face more honestly some of the terrible things that have been done in the name of our own tradition.

I do not believe that the kind of fulfillment theology I have briefly outlined will ipso facto lead to Christian triumphalism. Whatever New Testament "plerophoric" language may mean, it most certainly does not refer to a fullness in our theological wisdom.

Fulfillment Theology and the Future of Christian-Jewish Relations

The book Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? (edited by Eva Fleischner [KTAV, 1977]) contains an exchange between two theologians -- a Roman Catholic and a Russian Orthodox -- on the question of "fulfillment theology" and its significance for future Christian-Jewish relations. John T. Pawlikowski, following other Catholic scholars such as Rosemary Radford Ruether and Gregory Baum, challenges the traditional "fulfillment" concept as basically inaccurate and calls for new approaches in Christology which he believes will "profoundly alter Christianity’s self-definition and make possible a more realistic relationship to Judaism and to all other non-Christian religions." The basic implication of his proposal is that Christians ought to abandon the claim that in Jesus the messianic age has been inaugurated.

Orthodox scholar Thomas Hopko responds to the challenge by expressing the hope that Pawlikowski’s proposal will not be realized, because, he says, "the ‘fulfillment’ understanding of Christianity [cannot] be abandoned without the destruction of the Christian faith." He fears that the suggested changes in Christology will portend "the end of all meaningful religious and spiritual dialogue" and will result in a "sterile relativism, a monistic spiritual syncretism devoid of creative, truly pluralistic conflict and fruitful, truly creative tension."

To this growing debate on "fulfillment theology" I would add a contribution from a Reformed theological perspective: the thesis that New Testament messianic claims can be abandoned only at the cost of sacrificing crucial aspects of the church’s witness to the gospel of the Kingdom, but that Christians do need to abandon a good deal of "fulfillment theology" that finds its source in ecclesiastical triumphalism.

I

The New Testament everywhere contains fulfillment language. In christological context, fulfillment terminology is used to assert that in Jesus of Nazareth, God acted in an ultimately decisive way in history; used in this way, fulfillment language reflects the fait accompli aspects of the Christian faith.

According to the most ancient Christian confession, Jesus appeared when the time was fulfilled, and his coming meant nothing less than the breakthrough of the new age of the Kingdom of God (Mark 1:15). In this faith Christians came to see themselves as people who had "tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come" (Heb. 6:5). In short, an encounter with Jesus as the living Lord was experienced as a foretaste of the future of the Lord proclaimed by prophets and seers. The emphasis in New Testament fulfillment theology is on foretaste, not on the full realization of divine redemption in present history.

Nevertheless, the christological claims of the New Testament can hardly be overestimated. We are told not only that time has been fulfilled, but also that in Jesus Christ the law and the prophets have been fulfilled. In Jesus, claim the early Christians, "all the promises of God find their ‘Yes’ " (II Cor. 1:20). Jesus’ death was interpreted as an act of atonement and as a victory over the forces of sin and death that hold humanity captive. Thus he was confessed as "Lord of all" (Rom. 10:12), who has overcome the world (John 16:33).

II

Traditional Judaism has countered these Christian claims with some very fundamental questions. How can one speak of a breakthrough of the messianic era in light of the fact that the world is so obviously unredeemed? Does not the entire "Christian era" provide one great testimony that the fulfillment of the prophetic promises is still a vision of the future? Some Jewish scholars maintain that empirical evidence shows a deterioration of the human condition since the death of Christ, rather than an improvement.

Redemption, as Martin Buber never tired of pointing out, will mean Die Vollendung der Schöpfung, a fulfillment of the creation which will amount to the re-creation of the whole world. That particular redemption surely has not taken place.

How then do Christians validate their "fulfillment theology"? A common Jewish view is that Christians seek to escape from this dilemma by spiritualizing redemption. "The thesis of historical Christianity has been ‘otherworldliness,’" writes Steven S. Schwarzchild. The messianic idea, according to Gershom Scholem,

is totally different in Judaism and in Christianity; Judaism in all its forms and manifestations has always maintained a concept of redemption as an event which takes place publicly, on the stage of history, and within the community. . . . In contrast Christianity conceives of redemption as an event in the spiritual and unseen realm; an event which is reflected in the soul, in the private world of each individual, and which affects an inner transformation which need not correspond to anything outside [Auschwitz, p. 218].

Once redemption becomes spiritualized and thus effectively removed from the realm of daily life, the danger of Christianity’s becoming a status quo religion is real. Why try to change a world that is so obviously of inferior spiritual significance compared with the salvation of eternal souls for heaven?

Scholem’s and similar views do not show the whole picture of Christianity through the centuries; nevertheless, the first response of a Christian to his kind of challenge should be one of peccavi. We finally ought to face up to the false claims made in some of our "fulfillment theologies" which have contributed immensely to the prevalent misconceptions about Christian views of redemption. In no way am I suggesting that we compromise our faith, but rather that we confess our sins.

For example, patristic literature is full of polemics that seek to prove the superiority of Christianity to Judaism. "Remember," said Paul, "it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you (Rom. 11:18). Faith in Christ’s victory, however, was frequently turned into something quite different: ecclesiastical triumphalism.

As a result of this trend, "fulfillment" became interpreted as God’s rejection of his covenant relationship with the people of Israel. When the church declared itself to be the "New Israel," it usually did so not in order to acknowledge in gratitude God’s new initiatives in Jesus Christ, but rather to reinforce false imperialistic notions about the church’s calling. Ecclesiastical claims that run counter to the biblical witness (for example, Paul’s affirmation in Romans 11:29 that "the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable") became accepted as New Testament doctrine. The Jewish scholar Uriel Tal was mistaken when he wrote that the idea of God’s continued covenant with the Jews "is of course contrary to the theology of the New Testament. That idea is only contrary to the church’s false claims of being the "New Israel," replacing and superseding God’s covenant relationship with the Jews.

III

Krister Stendahl has pointed out that the only New Testament passage claimed for calling the church by the name "Israel" rests on a mistranslation of Galatians 6: i6, a text that really speaks of the original Israel as "the Israel of God." A careful reading of the Greek text, says Stendahl, "must lead to the translation: ‘And as many as walk according to this standard [the new creation in Christ], peace be upon them -- and mercy also upon the Israel of God.’ The Revised Standard Version has suppressed the striking and strong kai (= also) before ‘the Israel of God.’"

Equally unscriptural claims were made about thd New Testament declaration that in Jesus’ coming the law and the prophets were fulfilled. A text particularly significant is Matthew 5:17 -- the opening words of the Sermon on the Mount. The church has struggled for centuries to gain a clear understanding of the meaning of these words. But the text makes unequivocally clear what Jesus did not mean to say. An interpretation this verse seeks to avoid is that the law of God, the law of the kingdom as embodied in the Old Testament, has been abolished, set aside or in any way declared defunct because of Christ’s fulfillment. In fact, Jesus came to affirm and give a new foundation to the righteous. ness of God as embodied in the law. Another interpretation the text wants to make impossible is that the fulfillment of the prophetic promises means that Christians no longer live by promise, whereas the exact opposite is true: fulfillment implies that we live by promise more than ever.

The combination of law and fulfillment, as well as the combination of law and love, is mentioned repeatedly in the New Testament, particularly in the letters to the Romans and the Galatians. The New Testament leaves no doubt of its witness that something radical has happened in Christ’s act of sacrificial love. Somehow, Torah, which certainly is more than a set of legal rules, and which refers to a dynamic reality -- namely, God’s righteousness as. it comes to us in our historical existence -- has been given embodiment. That embodiment is what Christ came to accomplish, and he continues to do so through the power of the Spirit. In this sense the law is called "spiritual" (Rom. 7:14), while at the same time we are told that only "doers of the law will be justified" (Rom. 2:13) and that through faith we do not overthrow the law but uphold it (Rom. 3:31).

Criticism of the law is not an exclusively New Testament phenomenon; it is found in the prophetic writings as well. In neither case does it reflect a disrespectful view of divine law (which both the Old and the New Testament see as grounded in divine grace), but rather it refers to what is bound to happen to the law when we start "handling" it and using it to establish our own righteousness rather than letting the rule and righteousness of God dwell and become embodied in our midst. Any suggestion that such misdeeds occurred among the people of Israel but are not happening among Christians would bespeak a self-righteousness that suffocates the very truth of the gospel message.

All Christian claims that Judaism confesses a God of law in the formal/legal sense in contrast to a "Christian God" of grace are based on false views of fulfillment; such views not only damage Christian-Jewish relations but are devastating for the life of the church itself. First we lose the law, then we lose the gospel of the Kingdom, and finally we end up with a spiritualism and/or moralism with scarcely a meaningful word to say to the modern world. Gerard Sloyan makes an important point when he states that "the teaching church cannot allow the confusion to continue with its grandiose -- and often quite wrong -- contrast between the law and the gospel" (Is Christ the End of the Law? [Westminster, 1978], p. 101).

IV

Another false interpretation of "fulfillment" is the claim that the people of the Old Testament era lived by promise, while Christians possess the reality itself. I shudder when I read Lawrence E. Toombs’s advice to preachers that they should see "the Old Testament related to the New as hope to fulfillment, as question to answer, as suggestion to reality" (The Old Testament in Christian Preaching [Westminster, 1961], p. 27). It is sheer heresy to suggest that those who believe in fulfillment are no longer saved by hope (Rom. 8:24).

Faith in Christ means that people have become "partakers of the promise with the people of Israel" (Eph. 3:6), and one of its main fruits is a rebirth of hope (I Pet. 1:3). How can we describe the Old Testament as "question" and "suggestion" and the New Testament as "answer" and "reality"? Does not the Bible from beginning to end witness to the reality of God’s presence in the world, and does not an encounter with him always make people dreamers of the Kingdom of God?

Abraham Heschel expressed a basic insight found throughout the entire Bible when he wrote: "What lends meaning to history? The promise of the future. If there is no promise, there is no meaningful history. Significance is contingent on vision and anticipation, on living the future in the present tense" (Israel: An Echo of Eternity [Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967], p. 127). The Christian believes that in Jesus Christ, God’s future has broken into our midst and that there is presence of the promised future in the power of the Spirit. But it is precisely through this presence of the Spirit, which is called "the Holy Spirit of promise" (Eph. 1:13) that the whole creation is made pregnant with longing for the final coming of the future of the Lord (Rom. 8). The Holy Spirit is also called "the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it" (Eph. 1:14). To receive the fullness of the Spirit means to be filled with expectation.

Jakob Jocz wrote some years ago that "a bridge theology" between Judaism and Christianity "can be accomplished only at the point of a diminution of traditional Christology." This process is being attempted today by a number of theologians, but more promise may be found in a re-examination of the New Testament pneumatology.

Rosemary Radford Ruether repeatedly (in Faith and Fratricide and elsewhere) makes the point that the church preaches a fulfilled messianism whenever it forgets the Parousia, losing its vision of the future. Historically, many false claims of fulfillment have indeed found their basic source in a loss of the eschatological perspective. On the other hand, the New Testament witness to fulfillment is rooted precisely in the eschatological vision and in the belief that the future of the Lord, albeit in a hidden and fragmentary way, is present in our midst in the form of signs, first fruits, foretaste and so on. These are all pneumatalogical categories. The key concept of pleroma (fulfillment, fullness of the Spirit) in the New-Testament illustrates that fulfillment is essentially an eschatologically charged reality.

"God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself" (II Cor. 5:19) In the incarnation and the act of atonement, according to Christian confession, reconciliation has taken place and the possibility of forgiveness is offered to humankind. Christ’s work is seen in fait accompli terms. But the act of reconciliation does not mean that redemption of the world is now a reality. For Christians it means a renewal and broadening of the covenant (gentile branches are grafted onto the tree of Israel -- Rom. 11: 17) and a new foundation for hope in the ultimate coming of the future Kingdom. Through the presence of the Spirit, signs of that Kingdom are established in the world. In faith, first fruits of the eventual harvest of the new age are experienced; we receive a foretaste of the fullness of history that is yet to come (Eph. 1:10).

These occurrences take place through the presence of the Holy Spirit; they are spiritual realities. But it is a tragic misunderstanding of the Christian message to interpret that truth as meaning that redemption becomes "spiritualized." One must excise major portions from the New Testament in order to claim ‘that redemption and the life of faith have nothing to do with the poor, justice, the state, and other earthly realities.

Gregory Baum states that "the redemption brought by Jesus to mankind in the present is prophetic or anticipatory of the future glory; it is a token, a pledge, a first installment of the complete redemption promised in the Scriptures." This assertion is correct, but the christological and pneumatological aspects of such a statement, while intimately related, should not be confused with each other.

Rosemary Radford Ruether rightly rejects an "illegitimate historicizing of the eschatological." The church is not the Kingdom of God; sanctification is not yet glorification; in the first fruits we taste the promise of the harvest but do not possess the harvest itself, and the fulfillment of time is not the same as the consummation of history. Yet the presence of God in history through the Spirit is real. In sum, there must not be an illegitimate dehistoricizing of the inhabitatio Spiritus sancti either.

V

Martin Buber used to speak of Judaism and Christianity in terms of "two types of faith." Today a noted Hebrew University scholar, David Flusser, who has a profound knowledge of early Christian literature, in his book Jews and Christians Between Past and Future advocates the view that Judaism and Christianity are "one faith." Says he: "When both Judaism and Christianity acknowledge that it is fundamentally one religion, one faith, and do not deny it, as still happens so much either out of ignorance or out of dogmatic prejudices -- then they can really debate with each other." Flusser’s statement seems closer to the truth than Buber’s arguments in his book Two Types of Faith.

Flusser does not wish to ignore the real differences between Judaism and Christianity. Nor do I. But Jews and Christians share a vision concerning the new heaven and the new earth. They also share some basic perspectives on the nature of God’s redemptive presence in the world today, even though the Christian view of history "between the times" is influenced in a decisive way by its christological confession.

At a time when Christians of various traditions are wrestling with questions of political theology, it does not seem to make sense for Jews to insist that Christianity holds an essentially ahistorical view of salvation. That would be tantamount to saying that the Sattlemer Rebbe and his followers, who deny any form of historical realization of eschatological expectations, represent Judaism as a whole. We must move beyond caricatures of each. other’s faith. When Seymour Siegel notes that "the State of Israel is salvation but not redemption," he seems to come very close to what many Christians mean when they speak about "signs of the Kingdom" in historical existence. Such signs are an embodiment of the promise -- fragmentary and constantly threatened by the sinful impulses of humanity, but nevertheless the beginning of the dawn of our redemption. Of course there are also the birth pangs of the Messiah. Both Jewish and Christian literatures have much to say about positive as well as negative signs of the approaching end.

Emil Fackenheim has pointed out that "all attempts to link the precarious present with the absolute future are themselves precarious. . . . Yet, unless the Messianic future is to become ever-elusive and thus irrelevant, its ‘linking with a possible present, however precarious, is indispensable . The Jewish scholar here touches on a basic issue with which both Jews and Christians struggle as they seek to read the signs of the times and to approach their historical responsibility with a sense of honesty as well as hope.

Judaism and Christianity both point to the signs of God’s active presence in history as the foundation of their hope. The role of Jesus in God’s historical-eschatological dealings with the world remains a point of radical difference between the two faiths. Distorted Christian interpretations of "fulfillment" have had destructive consequences for meaningful dialogue. The debate on "fulfillment theology" is therefore of crucial importance, both for Christian-Jewish relations and for the life and mission of the Christian church itself.

Should There Be a Christian Witness to the Jews

Christian evangelism among Jews remains one of the most sensitive and controversial issues in Jewish-Christian relations. In 1975 when the Vatican issued its “Guidelines and Suggestions” for contacts between the church and the Jewish people, the document was greeted by Jewish leaders with a mixture of delight and distress: delight at the change of outlook it reflected, and distress that it still contained references to the church’s “divine mission” and “witness.”

Should there be a Christian witness to the Jews? Many of my Jewish friends, as well as a growing number of my Christian friends, would answer that question with a resounding No. But many other Christians would respond with a firm Yes. Recently the faculty of Fuller Theological Seminary’s school of world mission called on “Christians in all traditions to reinstate the work of Jewish evangelism in their missionary obedience.” According to these scholars, “Jewish-oriented programs should be developed. Appropriate agencies for Jewish evangelism should be formed” (Missiology, October 1976). Others would express themselves a bit more cautiously. Missiologist Gerald H. Anderson, for example, has stated that “Christians have no special mission to the Jews, but neither is there any special exemption of the Jews from the universal Christian mission” (Missiology, July 1974).

An Ecumenical Priority

Instead of a resounding No or a firm Yes, my own answer to the question usually comes out more like “Yes, but . . .” I must hasten to add, however, that for me the qualifying word “but” looms larger all the time. I increasingly feel drawn toward conclusions that I have resisted for decades.

Some years ago I would probably have welcomed the suggestion made recently by a joint committee of the Christian Reformed Church and my own denomination, the Reformed Church in America, that these two denominations enter upon a united program of “Jewish evangelism.” After all, the Apostle Paul tells us that not only would that be the proper thing to do, but in fact it ought to be a priority -- to the Jew first (Rom. 1:16). My argument is not with Paul’s position but with the motives and methods with which it is often applied today.

The early church argued the question of whether the Judaic tradition should be preserved in every detail: for instance, must gentiles submit to circumcision when entering the church? Today we face an entirely different situation. One of the key issues now is that through a long process of de-Judaization the Christian church has lost contact with its basic roots in the Hebraic tradition. For the sake of its own wholeness, the church needs the encounter with Judaism. Christian-Jewish relations should be an ecumenical priority of the first order. However, between the debate in the early church and the contemporary debate lies a long and tragic history of estrangement and, in numerous instances, of the church’s participation in persecution of Jews. The unwillingness of many Christians to come to terms with that history constitutes a major obstacle to presenting a genuinely Christian witness to the Jewish people.

A ‘Mission’ or a ‘Witness’?

I purposely use the word “witness.” It has rich biblical connotations rooted in Israel’s covenant history: “You are my witnesses . . .”  (Isa. 43:10); “I shall give you as a light to the nations!” (Isa. 49:6). The life and ministry of God’s covenant people always involve witness. I agree with Krister Stendahl’s suggestion that this word may yet be exonerated and come to be of key value in relations among believers across all barriers.

Already in Greek antiquity the word “witness” had moved beyond its technical courtroom usage and had come to mean the proclamation and exchange of views held with conviction. In the New Testament, however, witness is not just a matter of words; it involves the sharing of life. To me, the word lacks the connotation of an aggressive campaign, of mission “drives” and evangelistic “crusades.” That’s why I like it.

The term “mission to the Jews” should definitely be abandoned. It will lead only to confusion and to the multiplication of existing misunderstandings in Jewish-Christian relations. Surely the church has a worldwide mission! But because of the common bond in God’s covenant promises, its relationship to the Jewish people is sui generis. That fact should be clearly expressed in the language we use. People who don’t recognize this special relationship and who, contrary to Romans 11:29, insist that God has revoked his covenant with Israel are bound to become boastful and imperialistic in their approach to the Jews.

Believers who share the covenant faith that has come to us through Moses and the prophets don’t missionize each other. Yet there ought to be room for witness, the sharing of faith perspectives and the exchange of deeply held convictions.

‘Faithful Dialogue’

Why not just use the word “dialogue”? Edwin Newman, in a recent TV commentary, called it “one of the most boring words to come along in years a word that is bunk.” According to Newman, dialogue means only that people are talking with each other. In Christian ecumenical circles, where the term is frequently invoked, it is often stressed that “dialogue” carries a broader meaning. Sometimes, in order to make the point that we are talking about “talk plus,” the term “faithful dialogue” is used. The partners in dialogue are to be free to affirm their beliefs.

Nevertheless, when all is said and done, a basic rule of the game seems to be that one must not expect anyone to change. Any such anticipation, it is feared, will inevitably lead to manipulation. It is all right to share convictions so long as one does not try to be convincing; persuasiveness is seen as tantamount to proselytizing.

It is often said that the only legitimate motive for dialogue is to gain better mutual understanding. To be sure, that would be no minor achievement! An I/Thou relationship -- that basic prerequisite for all true dialogue -- cannot be established until some of the prevalent misunderstandings and caricatures have been erased. I have the impression, however, that interfaith dialogue is frequently practiced at the level of intellectualizing; it thus tends to become a polite and somewhat elitist enterprise. In daily life situations, where faith perspectives meet and historical movements encounter each other, things are not so neatly managed.

It seems to me that all witness should have a dialogical quality; i.e., there should be a willingness to listen to and learn from the other. In other words, witness ought not to be triumphalistic -- or, to use a biblical term, it should never be boastful. Whenever we feel called to witness, we ought to be aware of our true motives. They are rarely as pure and loving as we like to make ourselves believe.

Likewise, all dialogue should include a dimension of witness. All too often interfaith dialogue is designed for safety. That unwillingness to risk leads to sterility. A little passion, even a bit of polemics will not damage a dialogue that has reached the stage of basic mutual respect and trust.

I am not pleading for a return to the old-time polemics with its adversary mentality and its barely concealed insults. But in interfaith dialogue we are not just exchanging information; we are also testifying to truths that have taken hold of us and shaped our commitments. There are profound issues at stake, such as the ones raised in Martin Buber’s polemical book Two Types of Faith. We ought to be able to reason and occasionally to argue with each other about those things.

According to a study published recently by the Evangelischen Kirche in Germany, “the point of Christian-Jewish encounter is to male their different confessions of the one God fruitful for mutual witness.” In this way of stating it I sense a dynamic which seeks to move beyond improved mutual understanding; it seeks to affect the life and witness of both communities.

The Message of Conversion

So we are talking about change after all -- not about “convert the Jews” campaigns which are supposed to take the place of conversation, but rather about mutual change. It seems to me that any encounter with the Jewish people lacks Christian Integrity if it does not grow out of a profound recognition that the church itself needs to come to a radical transformation as a result of the experience.

By the same token, it should be pointed out that conversion is an essentially Hebrew concept. The question of conversion arises when we meet the God of Israel -- the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob -- the Holy One who addresses us and calls us to respond. The faith of Israel is fundamentally different from the kind of religiosity that people have in their blood, that simply flows from their being -- their gut feelings. Such religiosity does not demand ultimate decisions. Paganism comes naturally; therefore, the question of conversion does not arise.

At best, the message of conversion is good news about the transforming potential of faith. Jews and Christians both pray for the day when all humanity will turn to the Lord and give glory to his name. Why, then, has it become such bad news to Jews when Christians start talking about making them converts? In order to begin to understand Jewish feelings on this matter, Christians will have to enter into the Jewish experience throughout Christian history in a way few of them have been willing to do.

Most Christian clergy have studied church history without ever being introduced to this shameful aspect of the church’s story. The Jews, however, do know about it. They know about the anti-Jewish polemics of certain church fathers; about the forced baptisms, especially of children; about the church council decree that sanctioned the removal of such children from their parents; about a papal edict encouraging raids on Jewish synagogues by the faithful; about the expulsion of all Jews from a country like Spain; about Luther’s hate language directed against Jews when they did not convert according to his timetable; about the prohibition against Jews living in Calvin’s Geneva; and about all the cruelties Christians have felt justified in perpetrating against the people they called “Christ-killers.” Is it surprising then that, to so many Jews, conversion came to mean “joining the enemy”?

We are not talking only about things that happened in some distant dark age; we are talking about the memories of our neighbors. Listen to Jewish novelist Elie Wiesel, as he spoke in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York:

I do not feel at ease in a church. I hope you will forgive my frankness. I believe in the usefulness of dialogue, but it must be preceded by an honest exchange. As a child I was afraid of the church to the point of changing sidewalks. In my town the fear was justified. Not only because of what I inherited -- our collective memory -- but also because of the simple fact that twice a year, at Easter and Christmas, Jewish children would be beaten up by their Christian neighbors [Auschwitz: The Beginning of a New Era?, edited by Eva Fleischner- (KTAV, 1976), p. 406].

There is more. At an early stage in the church’s history a process of de-Judaization was set in motion -- a process that through the centuries has deprived the church of some of the richest elements of its Hebrew heritage. The U.S. Catholic bishops spoke frankly about these things in their 1975 pastoral message. But the vast majority of Christians have yet to recognize that fundamental fact, let alone come to terms with its implications for the life of the church and its relationships to the Jewish people.

To confront the Jewish people with the meaning and significance of the life and ministry of Jesus as we understand and confess them is one thing. To ask Jews to become well adjusted denominational Christians in a hellenized church is quite another. The best among those Jews who decide to take that step are likely to end up as lonely and misunderstood missionaries, calling an unrepentant church to renewal through a recovery of its roots in the Hebrew Scriptures.

A Recovery of Roots

Let me be clear. I have received perspectives of faith through the witness of the Christian church which I consider to be of ultimate significance to my life. As far as my faith is concerned, Jesus -- his message and the reality of his spirit as a transforming power -- are normative. I believe that there are accents in the New Testament message of grace that will continue to have a powerful appeal to certain Jews.

On the other hand, I can testify from personal experience that to be raised in the Christian church as we know it makes loss of basic elements of one’s Judaic background virtually inevitable, including elements that the church desperately needs for its own renewal. My father, son of a Polish rabbi, while completing his own rabbinical studies in Switzerland was introduced to the New Testament, not by an eager gentile missionary but by his overhearing (quite by accident) a discussion about Jesus in some university hall. After becoming a Christian, he stayed in close contact with his Jewish heritage. He shared his faith with his people, and during the Holocaust he shared their fate in the Nazi ovens.

For me and my family, however, things are quite different (even though my wife, too, grew up in a Hebrew-Christian home). In a number of ways we live in alienation from very rich aspects of the Jewish tradition. And when I look at my children, I realize that in many respects they are tragically ignorant of their Jewish background.

The faculty members of the school of world mission at Fuller Seminary say that it ought not to be so. In their recent statement, they call on Jewish converts to maintain their cultural ties for the enrichment of the whole church. That, however, is not so easy to do when for centuries the church has followed policies (not unwittingly, as the Fuller professors state, but systematically and by unholy design) that sought to de-Judaize the Jews and submerge them in various brands of Christendom. Why, one wonders, such passionate desire to remove the otherness of the Jews? Could it possibly be related to our problems with the otherness of the God of Israel?

Such questions cannot be avoided. How can we talk about converting the Jews when we are not passionately concerned about the conversion of the church? The church needs change, in its theology and in its life and ministry.

The Concept of ‘Fulfillment’

Some dramatic proposals for changes in Christian theology are being made by Rosemary Ruether, Gregory Baum (a Jewish convert to Christianity) and others. Ruether, who holds that anti-Judaism has developed within the church as “the left hand of Christology” -- that it is really the reverse side of the Christian confession that Jesus is the Christ -- defends the position of an “unfulfilled messianism.” In essence this means that the church would abandon its historic confession that in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus the future of the Kingdom of God has broken into the present in a decisive way. The claim of fulfilled messianism, she believes, constitutes an illegitimate historicizing of the eschatological.

In his foreword to Ruether’s book Faith and Fratricide (Seabury, 1974), Baum quotes her as stating: “We might say that Jesus is our paradigm for hoping, aspiring man, venturing his life in expectation of the Kingdom” (p. 20). Ruether has also argued that “what Christianity has in Jesus is not the Messiah, but a Jew who hoped for the coming of the Kingdom of God and who died in that hope” (cited in Anatomy of Contempt, by John M. Oesterreicher [Seton Hall University Press, 1975], p. 32).

Resolving the issues between Judaism and Christianity through this kind of “unfulfilled messianism” sounds to me somewhat like resolving the debate between capitalism and communism by eliminating the idea of private property. Such a proposal tends to create a brief sensation, only to be set aside as another radical fad that has come and gone. Yet I believe that there could be great mutual benefit to the concept of “fulfillment” as the focus of a serious Jewish-Christian dialogue.

The manner in which “fulfillment theology” has been developed by the Christian church has frequently led to ecclesiastical triumphalism and, in many cases, to anti-Judaism. Often Christians have made claims for themselves and against the Jews that have no basis in the biblical message. The issue emerges as soon as we deal with some basic theological questions: How do we see the relationship between the Old and New Testament, between the church and Israel, the church and the Kingdom of God, the presence of the Kingdom in the here-and-now and the church’s eschatological hope?

Let us be more specific. Has the Old Testament become superfluous or at least of secondary value? Has God’s covenant with Israel been annulled? Can the church be equated with the Kingdom? In what sense can it be said that redemption has come to the world? When called upon to answer such questions, Christians have frequently been led astray by unbiblical doctrines of “fulfillment.”

The ‘Already’ and the ‘Not Yet’

God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. That is a basic Christian confession. Now we await with eager longing the redemption of all things. That, too, is a basic Christian confession, one that the church and the Jewish people share. It is when we seek to give an account of the foundations of the hope that moves us that the differences become pronounced. The church, in its witness to Jesus as the Christ, tends to emphasize the “already” of the redemption that has entered history. Sometimes the distinction between the reconciliation which, according to Christian teaching, has already occurred and the redemption of all things yet to, take place becomes obscured in Christian witness. Then Judaism confronts us with its profound sense of the “not yet,” born out of its burning vision of a new world of righteousness and peace.

In the New Testament “fulfillment” (pleroma) is a key concept, a complex one applied in diverse ways. It has christological as well as pneumatological elements. Many things receive pleroma in Christ and through the presence and power of the Holy Spirit -- time, prophecy, the law, people, the church, and even the cosmos.

In essence the New Testament teaching about “fulfillment” deals with the question of the presence of redemption in history. A little over a decade ago, I traced that theme through various theological traditions in my book Redemption and Historical Reality. It is unfortunate that some Jewish scholars still pose an antithesis between Christian and Jewish positions on this issue, claiming that Christian theology conceives of redemption exclusively as an event in the spiritual and private realm of a person’s inner life, but unrelated to history. True, Christian theology has frequently suffered from overspiritualization. But there is a vast body of Christian theological literature that struggles with the question of redemption in profoundly historical terms.

The New Testament speaks about signs of the Kingdom and first fruits of the Spirit. The presence of redemption is experienced as a foretaste and pledge of the promised future. The fulfillment of all things and the consummation of all things correspond to the presence of God’s Kingdom in the midst of historical ambiguities and redemption as it will be experienced in the end time. The Reformers, for instance, carefully distinguished between the regnum Christi and the regnum Dei. Fulfillment does not make hope unnecessary; it nourishes and intensifies it.

These themes are certainly not foreign to the history of Jewish thought, although they are of course developed differently there. I see the concept of “fulfillment” as a much more fruitful basis for Christian-Jewish encounter than all the talk about “unfulfilled messianism.”

Living as a People of Hope

Such an encounter would force the Christian church to take a candid look at the quality of its own witness. Do we indeed live and work in the world as a people of hope? Perhaps the most persuasive witness of the church to the Jewish people would be for Christians to live as a pilgrim people engaged in the practice of the imperatives of the gospel. In that case much of our witness would consist of answering the inquiries of those who want to know what moves us.

Isn’t that what the Apostle Paul had in mind when he saw “evoking to jealousy” as the true strategy for the church’s witness to the Jews (Rom. 11:11)? It seems to me that the more we fail to be faithful to such a witness, the more we begin to act like what Paul called “peddlers of the Word” (II Cor. 2:17), holy hucksters who are prepared to apply the strategies of salesmanship, but who do not appear sincerely interested in the well-being of those whom we encounter. Behind our salesmanship there is often insecurity and an intense desire to control others.

My intention is not to condemn all that has been done in the name of “Jewish mission.” I have seen too many of those people witness not only in word but in deed, and during the Nazi persecution I saw quite a few of them demonstrate their love by risking their lives for their Jewish neighbors. However, I consider an honest encounter between the church and the Jewish people as a priority concern. This, it seems to me, can take place only if the churches become more willing to face their past and to acknowledge their need for radical transformation. Hence, for me the great priority lies not in strategies, programs and campaigns to convert Jews, but in a major Christian educational effort to help church members recover the roots of their faith in Judaism.

The Super Bowl as Religious Festival

When the Dallas Cowboys are at the top of their game, winning routinely and decisively, one of the favorite quips which circulates in north Texas concerns Arlington Stadium, where the Cowboys play their home games. The stadium has a partial roof which covers much of the stands but none of the playing field. Cowboy fans say that God wants to able to see his favorite football team more clearly.

This is the attitude which ancient societies brought to their games. In ancient Greece, for example, the Olympics were only one set of athletic contests which were performed in honor of the gods. Among the Mayans in Central America, the stadium was attached to an important temple, and the stands were adorned with images of the gods and reliefs of sacred animals. The ball game started when the high priest threw the ball onto a circular stone in the center of the field: the sacred rock, the omphalos, considered the sacred center and associated with creation mythology. Thus the game was connected to the Mayan story of the world’s origins.

Professional football games are not quite so obviously religious in character. Yet there is a remarkable sense in which the Super Bowl functions as a major religious festival for American culture, for the event signals a convergence of sports, politics and myth. Like festivals in ancient societies, which made no distinctions regarding the religious, political and sporting character of certain events, the Super Bowl succeeds in reuniting these now disparate dimensions of social life.

The pageantry of the Super Bowl is not confined to the game itself, nor to the culture heroes who attend it -- e.g., Bob Hope, John Denver, Dan Rather and other celebrities -- for the largest audience watches the game via television. And the political appeal of the festival is not restricted to its endorsement by political figures such as President Reagan, who pronounced the 1984 Super Bowl’s benediction. The invocation is a series of political rituals: the singing of the national anthem and the unfurling of a 50-yard-long American flag, followed by an Air Force flight tactics squadron air show.



The innate religious orientation of the Super Bowl was indicated first by the ritual of remembrance of “heroes of the faith who have gone before.” In the pregame show, personalities from each team were portrayed as superheroes, as demigods who possess not only the talent necessary for perfecting the game as an art but also the skills for succeeding in business ventures and family life.

For instance, one of the most effective segments was about Joe Delaney, the former running back for the Kansas City Chiefs who died while trying to save two children from drowning. In a functional sense, Delaney was being honored as a saint. The pregame moment of silence in honor of the life and contributions of George Halas, the late owner of the Chicago Bears and one of the creators of the National Football League, was even more significant: I am not sure whether the fans were silent in memory of ‘Papa Bear” or whether they were offering a moment of silence to him. Nevertheless, the pause was reminiscent of an act of prayer.

Bronco Nagurski, a hall of famer (which stands for official canonization), had the honor of tossing the coin at the center of the playing field to signify the start of the game. The naming of a Most Valuable Player at the end of the game was a sign of the continuing possibility for canonization.

But the Super Bowl and its hype could not dominate the consciousness of many Americans without the existence of a mythos to support the game. Myths, we know, are stories which establish and recall a group’s identity: its origin, its values, its world view, its raison d’être.

Two dominant myths support the festivity and are perpetuated by it. One recalls the founding of the nation and the other projects the fantasies or hopes of the nation. Both myths indicate the American identity.

The first concerns the ritual action of the game itself. The object of the game is the conquest of territory. The football team invades foreign land, traverses it completely, and completes the conquest by settling in the end zone. The goal is to carry the ritual object, the football, into the most hallowed area belonging to the opponent, his inmost sanctuary. There, and only there, can the ritual object touch the earth without incurring some sort of penalty, such as the stoppage of play or the loss of yardage.



This act of possession is itself reflective of cosmogonic myths, for, as Mircea Eliade has noted, “to organize a space is to repeat the paradigmatic work of the gods” (The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion [Harcourt, Brace, 1959], p. 32). Conquering a territory and bringing order to it is an act equivalent to consecration, making the space itself sacred by means of recalling and rehearsing the primordial act of creation.

The specifically American character of the mythology has to do with the violent nature of the game. Not only does it dramatize the myth of creation, it also plays out the myth of American origins with its violent invasion of regions and their settlement. To a certain extent, football is a contemporary enactment of the American frontier spirit.

Amidst the ritual of the forceful quest, there is the extended “time out” of half time, a time of turning from the aggressions of the game to the fantasies of the spirit. During the half-time show, the second dominant American cultural myth is manifest. It revolves around the theme of innocence. The peculiarly American quality about this myth is that even in our nation’s history of subjugation, a sense of manifest destiny was often associated with extending the nation’s boundaries. Indeed, the idea that a divine mandate had authorized the people to move into a place to which they had no claim, other than getting there and staying there, indicates that the people did not think they bore final responsibility for the displacement of natives or infringement on their hunting space. In other words, the assignment to God of the responsibility for territorial expansion was an attempt to maintain the illusion of blamelessness among those who forcibly took alien lands.

In this year’s Super Bowl, the theme of righteousness was acted out in a three-ring circus which featured 2,100 performers from Walt Disney Productions. Although acts took place in the outer rings, which were colored blue, attention was focused on the largest center ring, which was white. In this area, most of the performers wore white or pastel shades of yellow. The visual effect was an overwhelming sensation of cleanliness and purity. And the extravaganza’s music reinforced the impressions of the “whiteness” of it all; the harmonies sunk by the Disney troupe were simple and syrupy, a kind of white sound with less harmonic complexity than that of most Muzak renditions.

The overall effect was one of feigned innocence and the naïve hope often exemplified for Americans by Walt Disney’s vision. Finally, the transition from this scenario was accomplished by the explosion, of fireworks along the perimeter of the field. The fantasy and violence of exploding Roman candles shifted the scene back to the play of the American frontier, simultaneously reviving intimations of the festival’s patriotic character. Fireworks are the hallmark of the Fourth of July, and evoke the national anthem lyrics’ imagery -- “the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air.”

As a sporting event, the Super Bowl represents the season’s culmination of a major American game. As a popular spectacle, it encourages endorsement by politicians and incorporates elements of nationalism. And as a cultural festival, it commands vast allegiance while dramatizing and reinforcing the religious myths of national innocence and apotheosis.