Articles – Page 237 – Religion Online

Pauline Voices and Presence As Strategic Communication

As a historian of performance, I am interested in how bodily presence and speech became issues in Paul's conflict with the Corinthian superapostles in the 50's CE. From the information presented in 2 Cor 10:10 and 11:6, it appears that Paul was deemed ineffective in some form of public speech and that his inability to perform in this way jeopardized his claim to apostolic authority at Corinth. Of course, we will never finally know what mode of oral presentation is referred to here. But there are some things we can consider. First, we have a letter and we know from our knowledge of performance history that such letters were written to be read aloud.

A man read even a private letter aloud in a low voice. This practice obviously had great influence on epistolary convention and style. It also helped to make the letter addressed to an individual or group an easy and natural vehicle for philosophical or religious discussion or exposition (McGuire, 150).

Second, the discipline of performance studies lends us an experiential understanding of what happens within the matrix of text, reciter, and audience when a written text, such as a letter, is orally performed. Part of my method of studying this letter has been to perform it in a variety of contexts. Oral performance is a means of transforming silent texts into sounds and movement through the mediums of speech and gesture. It is a way in which the author-in-the-work becomes an audible presence by means of the speech and movement of the presenter. This is why the performance of Paul's letters contributes some important insights into the sociopolitical dynamics that govern his relationships with those he addresses. For example, I believe that the recitation of Paul's four-chapter letter (2 Cor 10-13) was a counter-performance through which Paul shrewdly and creatively re-established a powerful parousia in the Corinthian church. This event helped to form a basis for reconciliation between Paul and the Corinthians by refurbishing Paul's credibility as a Christian apostle.

The group of itinerate missionaries who came to Corinth in the 50's CE attacked Paul's credentials on many fronts; perhaps the most devastating charge was a personal attack on his ability to communicate the Gospel. Paul actually quotes his opponents in 2 Cor 10:10: They say, 'His letters are weighty and strong, but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech is of no account' (RSV). In the opinion of these rivals, Paul's parousia, that is, his very way of being in that church communicated weakness; his logos, that is, his speech, was empty or of no account. Apparently these categories of oral performance were being established as criteria for evaluating Paul's effectiveness as a Christian leader.

PAUL'S OPPONENTS IN THE HISTORY OF RECITATION

The identity of these opponents remains the subject of considerable debate. I will not review all of the attempts to link this group of missionaries with other figures in the early Christian missionary movement. Dieter Georgi's hypothesis, as presented in The Opponents of Paul in Second Corinthians, is best for highlighting the importance of oral performance in the struggle for apostolic authority at Corinth. Georgi points out that since the missionary activity of the diaspora did not have a central organization, the service of worship in the synagogue was the magnet that drew potential converts. The central feature of this public event was the oral performance and exegesis of scripture. Performance of sacred stories and subsequent oral interpretations made the faith of Judaism accessible to outsiders and helped to assimilate pagans into the communities of worship. A loose network of "oral exegetes" was established to travel about and offer oral performances and interpretations of texts in the communities (91). Georgi identifies the superapostles as part of this network.

One remarkable feature in the careers of these wandering preachers is that they were expected also to perform outside the synagogue. Synagogue officials saw the value in having a talented oral performer soliciting financial support just outside the synagogue. Such performances attracted the attention of potential converts. For the preacher, the attention brought financial reward, prestige, and reputation (Georgi, 101-2). The wandering preacher would not only attract attention to his or her gifts as a performer, but also to the diety that she or he represented.

The centerpiece of these performers' repertoire was the oral intepretation of sacred scripture. These exegetes were: capable of setting free the spirit bottled up in the composition of holy scripture . . . Insofar as they themselves did not create the text which is to be interpreted, the source of the spirit, they are subordinated to it. But insofar as the spirit speaks through their exegesis, they were quite equal to the prophets of old (Georgi, 111).

Public worship revolved therefore around this release of the spirit through the exegetes' performances. The synagogue ceremony, then, was the occasion for highly theatrical activity. Numerous people were included in the ceremony, even if they only accompanied the action with applause. The synagogue became a spiritual theater.

The taste for theatrical activity encouraged architects to design appropriate structures. Epiphanus compares the architecture of one particular synagogue to a theater:

There is a proseuche in Sichem, which is now called Neopolis, outside the city on the plain, at about a distance of two milestones, built by the Samaritans, who imitate the Jews in all things, like a theatre in the open air and a spot which lies free under the sky (Haereses 80.1; quoted in Georgi, 113).

Even a closed synagogue's structure encouraged theatricality. "There was . . . an open area extending from the front into the center, a kind of stage where the participants in the liturgy could act" (Georgi, 113). It is clear from these sources that worshipers in these synagogues encouraged and even expected highly developed, oral presentations of Yahweh's Word. Oral performance provided immediate access to the spirit of God; true worship depended on the release of Yahweh's spirit, which was achieved by the oral interpretation of sacred texts. Performers who possessed particular skill in this art were prophets who represented God.

PAUL'S OPPONENTS IN THE CONTEXT OF PERFOORMANCE HISTORY

Georgi's profile of the superapostles helps to place them within the performance world of the first-century Christian church. Christian worship in the Pauline era was characterized by various modes of oral performance. One of the most common was the telling of gospel traditions in early Christian worship. Eusebius records that the oral performances of gospels were central events in early Christian worship:

A great light of religion shone on the minds of the hearers of Peter, so that they were not satisfied with a single hearing or with the unwritten teaching of the divine proclamation, but with every kind of exhortation besought Mark, whose Gospel is extant, seeing that he was Peter's follower, to leave them a written statement of the teaching given them verbally, nor did they cease until they had persuaded him, and so became the cause of the Scripture called the Gospel According to Mark (49).

Though this account of Markan authorship is contested, the description is an authoritative report of how the gospel would have been orally rendered. Amos Wilder adds a piece to our understanding of what these performances might have been like: When we picture to ourselves the early Christian narrators we should make full allowance for animated and expressive narration . . . oral speech also was less inhibited than today . . . when we think of the early church meetings and testimonies and narrations we are probably well guided if we think of the way in which Vachael Lindsay read or of the appropriate readings of James Weldon Johnson's God's Trombones (56).

Recitation of oral traditions in early Christian worship was emotionally expressive. It reflected the involvement of the performers with the stories themselves and prompted a wide range of emotional responses from the audiences. If the teller was successful in involving the audience with the story, he or she might expect them to become involved in the performance of the story, singing along, humming or even accompanying the tellings with musical instruments (Boomershine, 11). During Christian worship, one performer might be charged with the telling, even though the entire community would come to know the stories well enough to tell them. The effect of these tellings was the constitution of a community. Christian worship became occasions where disparate cultural groups bonded together around the recitation of oral traditions. Jews, Greeks, and other Gentiles learned to identify with the traditions, interpreting them in light of the issues they faced (Boomershine, 35-36).

Christian storytellers resembled the oral singers studied by Albert Lord in The Singer of Tales. To see how the early Homeric rhapsodes might have developed their art, Milman Parry and Lord studied epic singers in Yugoslavia to understand how epics were composed and transmitted in pre-literate cultures:

Oral epic song is narrative poetry, composed in a manner evolved over many generations by singers of tales who did not know how to write. It consists of the building of metrical lines and half-lines by means of formulas and formulaic expressions and of the building of songs by the use of themes (Lord, 4).

A formula is a group of words that is regularly employed under the same metrical idea (30). The earliest rhapsodes (of which Homer was a prototype) were agents of composition, poets for whom singing, performing, and composing were parts of the same creative act. The oral singer accumulates through the years a vocabulary of these formulas and, in the act of utterance, he or she is actually creating the epic. The singer's performance is conditioned by the context of the utterance. The oral singer varies the length and emphases according to the needs of the occasion. Walter Ong states that "All epics are structured around certain themes; the summoning of the council, the arming of the hero, the description of the hero's mount" (24). Ong goes on to explain that each epic singer has his own massive store of these themes, which he weaves together with ease. The oft-repeated formulas, 'rosy-fingered dawn' or 'wine-dark sea,' are metrically manageable (25). To the modern ear, these performances might sound like singing. However, singing carried a different connotation in that culture than it does today. Donald Hargis, a historian of performance, suggests that the best analogue in our culture to these performances is the talk-song from musical comedy (389).

Gospels, like oral epics, were composed anew at each performance; tellers improvised along story lines and using oral formulas just as the earliest Greek rhapsodes had done with Homeric epics. The Christian storyteller would be expected to acquire a repertoire of story lines and formulas to use in recomposing gospels at each telling. Christian performers of sacred stories must have drawn upon the standards of excellence in performance behavior that were dominant in Greco-Roman culture.

The best source we have for determining standards for oral performance of literature in this period is Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria. Quintilian taught that when the good speaker took the stage, his neck was straight, not bent backward, so that his throat would be relaxed. His shoulders would be relaxed, not contracted or raised. The audience would get a clue to the speaker's attitude toward delivery by looking at the speaker's eyes. Quintilian stressed that the "eyes would reveal the temper of the mind, even without movement" (285). The speaker's weight would be evenly distributed over his feet. Quintilian warned against placing the right foot forward or against "straddling the feet . . . when standing still" (311). When the speaker moved out of the standing position, he would move diagonally, keeping his eyes fixed on the audience, and would avoid swaying to the right or the left. Since his garb would certainly be noticed, the speaker's attire must be "distinguished and manly." He would pay particular attention to the cut of his toga, the style of his shoes, and the arrangement of his hair. As he stood, the speaker would raise the thumbs of his hands and slightly curve his fingers, unless he was holding a manuscript. The reciter would bring a good deal of natural talent to the process of preparing for performance. His "natural gifts" would include a good voice, excellent lungs, and good health. Audiences would note the reciter's natural charm and would be aware of his good character. Such traits were essential for the good performer.

In Quintilian's teaching, the voice and body are shaped by the emotional values of the piece in performance. Sound and movement are keys to what the speaker is experiencing himself. An audience will be able to determine degrees of sincerity and insincerity by listening to the tone of the voice and by watching the speaker's movement. "For the voice is the index of the mind and is capable of expressing all varieties of feeling" (277). Gesture is adapted to suit the voice, though movements are also full of meaning (279). Quintilian insists on integration between voice and movement. "If gesture is out of harmony with the speech . . . words fail to carry conviction" (281). Certain emotional attitudes stimulate corresponding patterns of movement in performance. For example, an arm slightly extended, with shoulders thrown back, and fingers opening as the hand moves forward will highlight "continuous flowing passages" (289). Qualities of restraint and timidity are often conveyed by slightly hollowing the hand as if making a vow, moving it to and fro lightly, and swaying the shoulders in unison. For wonder, the head turns upward and fingers are brought into the palm, beginning with the little finger first (297).

In preparing to perform, then, the reciter must bring all his natural gifts to bear. He must be thoroughly acquainted with his piece and work to internalize its performative values. Each letter had a particular sound that suited it; the natural voice should not be over-laid with a fuller sound. Vocal production should be supported from the lungs, not the mouth, and the final syllables of words should not be clipped. He warns that sometimes the personality of the reciter overshadowed the value of the text. Finally, Quintilian emphasized that a reciter sparks interest in a text because he "stimulates us by the animation of his delivery, and kindles the imagination, not by presenting us with an elaborate picture, but by bringing us into actual touch with the things themselves" (11, 13).

Though the Christian movement preferred orality as its repository for sacred stories, its leaders freely employed the art of writing. Texts (such as written gospels or letters) recited or orally composed in Christian worship harkened back to the immediacy of oral discourse. Letters served orality and were thus returned to oral space by way of the public reader.

While Quintilian's Institutes were designed to train the orator of the first century CE, they do present principles that set the standard for a variety of modes of oral performance, including the public performance of an apostolic letter or an oral gospel. Quintilian saw the performer as an instrument for embodying the images presented by both oral and written materials. Through the skillful use of voice and gesture, the representation of felt emotional values, and the thorough knowledge of the style and content of a given text, the oral performer in Greco-Roman culture embodied potent voices present in both oral and written material.

It is probable the Corinthians in particular had a healthy appetite for excellence in oral performance since they lived near the site of the Isthmian games, one of the great festivals where oral poets, dramatists, musicians, and athletes had come every two years for centuries to compete for top awards and prestige. At the time of Paul's visit, the Isthmian games were under Corinthian sponsorship and were being held in a newly restored stadium and theater facility. It is possible that one member of Paul's Corinthian congregation was the civic official named Erastus who made a substantial contribution to the renovation of the theater. The Corinthian Christians may well have appreciated trained oral performance, such as the superapostles seem to have provided.

The text of 2 Cor 10-13 strongly suggests that the apostle Paul was in danger at this point in his career of losing his following at Corinth to these performers of the Word. Apparently, they had made his ineffective speech and presence cause for the Corinthians' concern. If Paul could not himself render the gospel, could he be deemed an authentic bearer of the good news? Paul's problem was how to establish a presence in the Corinthian community that recaptured their attention and loyalty. This is where the reciter of Paul's four-chapter letter plays a significant role in the politics of performance in the Corinthian church.

THE LETTER AND PRESENCE

Robert Funk has observed that in the early Christian church, the apostle's means of exercising power and influence was dependent upon his establishing apostolic parousia in that community. Parousia or presence in a church during a time of crisis gave that apostle social visibility and political authority. Since early Christian missionaries were itinerates, it was not always possible for them to be physically present when difficult situations arose, so the early missionaries employed other means of establishing their presence.

Sending an emissary to read a letter aloud was one of the most effective ways of establishing parousia in the early churches. When the apostle could not visit the church himself, he would commission an emissary to represent him to the members of the congregation. This chosen envoy often carried a letter from the apostle that recommended the emissary as an authoritative substitute for the apostle. Paul, like other ancient epistolers, was dependent upon trusted carriers to deliver their letters to recipients. Martin McGuire writes: "The personal representative or messenger, the visitor or traveller, were almost the sole means of communication between nations and individuals" (185). Before sending the letter, the author would "brief the carrier on the contents of the letters entrusted to them and also make supplementary reports on matters that were not set down in writing" (185). Receiving a letter meant hearing both a message conveyed on behalf of the sender and a written document. Letters, therefore, bore a kinship with oral messages; like oral messages, the sender's name was placed in the beginning. The written document authenticated the messages. The carrier could also provide information about the author of the letter. The letter, then, as written and conveyed, was a major way Paul overcame his separation from his churches. "We also gain a sense of the importance of his emissaries or letter carriers: they receive authority to convey the letters to expand upon them, and to continue Paul's work" (Doty, 37).

Paul likely intended that his emissary to Corinth would not only recite but interpret the contents of 2 Cor 10-13 to the Corinthians. Doty suggests that because of political intrigue and the vulnerability of the postal system, the letter writer was careful to entrust the real message of the letter to the carrier, not merely to the text of the letter itself (45-46). Paul, who made such a point of indicating his trust in those carriers (co-workers), did not think of his written letters as exhausting what he wished to communicate. He thought of his associates, especially those commissioned to carry his letters, as able to extend his own teachings (45-46).

Doty wonders further:

if the Pauline letters may not be seen as the essential part of the messages Paul had to convey, pressed into brief compass as a basis for elaboration by the carriers. The subsequent reading of the letters in the primitive Christian communities were occasions for full exposition and expansion of the sketch of the material in the letters (46-47).

In other words, the oral rendering and interpretation of the letters completes the apostle's logos for the church.

The church receiving the letter would expect the emissary to read it aloud to the congregation. Doty and other epistolary theorists agree that the letters were written by an author who was conscious of his responsibility as an apostle in the congregation and thus fully intended such letters to be read aloud to the gathered community. At Corinth, the oral performance of the letter has particular significance to the Pauline apostolate; since Paul's bodily presence had been deemed weak, Paul establishes a new presence, that of Paul-in-the-letter, which, when embodied by the reciter, gave Paul restored visibility in the community.

PERFORMANCE AND THE POWER OF EMBODIED PRESENCE

Alla Bozarth-Campbell's incarnational metaphor for performance helps explain how composers of texts become present when those texts are performed. Like all texts prepared for public reading, the letter achieves its entelechy in oral performance. When it is rendered orally, the form of the letter is transformed into a presence that is embodied by the reciter. Bozarth-Campbell explains what happens when texts are transferred from surface structures to oral space: Through dialogue the phenomenon of interpretation may come to reveal what was hidden in itself, to show its own processes of rendering what was invisible and inaudible in literature both visible and audible in a dynamic presence (3).

For Bozarth-Campbell, the oral performance of any text is a process that creates a "new being by bringing two separate beings together in an incarnation" and "this process leads to an event which constitutes a transformation of all who participate in it" (13). In other words, the body of the performer meets with the body of the text through the mediums of speech and movement in order to create the new body of the text-in-performance. This process has several phases: the creation of the literary work (which Bozarth-Campbell calls the poem), the matching between the poem and the reader (whom she calls the interpreter), and the communion between the audience and the new being, the incarnate body that is created by the interaction of poem and performer.

Bozarth-Campbell's framework provides a basis for discussing how the rendering of Paul's letter by a trusted emissary established a new, more powerful Pauline presence in the Corinthian church. She states that the primary task of the interpreter (hereafter referred to as the performer) of the work is to create a presence, and to create it so fully that it can contain and involve the audience (18; see also Bacon, 165). Performers must know the piece, not just its parts in isolation, but the feel of the whole. For example, when Paul's emissary stood before the Corinthians to speak the letter, he would have internalized the contents of the letter and would be prepared to interpret the whole of Paul's logos to the Corinthians. This reciter was probably Titus, given his relationship with the church of Corinth (2 Cor 8:16), or perhaps the brother who is mentioned famous among all the churches for proclaiming the good news (8:18). In any case, Paul must have carefully considered the ability of his reciter to render his text in accordance with the standards of excellence of the time. Titus or some other emissary, through the skillful rendering of Paul's letter, intended to guide the audience through an experience of the situation from Paul's perspective.

To render Paul's text effectively, the reciter would have to have, in Quintilian's words, "natural gifts," including a good voice, a measure of charm, and good character. The reciter would have to convey effectively the emotional values of the letter and allow those values to shape vocal production and physical movement. Only then would Paul's authorial presence be embodied in performance. As the letter's performer allowed the body and voice to represent the passions invested in the piece, a process of transformation could begin:

It is in this moment of existence that relationship between interpreter and text takes on the properties of vivid presence in the power of performance, when all things come together to effect a quality greater than the sum of them as separate (Bozarth-Campbell, 40).

If the first act in creating Paul-in-the-letter was composing it, the second act was the performer's enfleshing the presence. Paul's word was transformed from silent surface structures into the mode of being known as flesh by the emissary's performance of Paul's word. In making the word to become flesh the interpreter makes herself or himself into the word, takes the word as poem into her or his body, continues the creation process begun by the poet (Bozarth-Campbell, 52). The purpose of performing a text is to allow the poem to achieve fullness through the performer's body. Given the conventions of performing letters in antiquity, we can imagine the reciter giving Paul's letter fullness, not simply by rendering the written word but by adding oral commentary in the spirit and attitude of Paul himself. The emissary's performance of Paul's letter allowed it to become "a more truly present word, authenticated by a living voice" (Bozarth-Campbell, 75).

The challenge for Paul was exactly this: by means of an effective counter-performance, could Paul demonstrate his ability to be present in the same lively and authoritative way as his opponents? If the superapostles could bring the audience into sacred acoustical space by means of their recitation of texts, Paul could show a different, more powerful image of himself through the performance of his letter.

Bozarth-Campbell suggests that performers of texts become icons for the new body or presence created in performance. "The interpreter's presence--as the embodiment of the poem--constitute a kind of image-meaning, or a sacramental meaningfulness" (103). If Georgi's profile is correct, then Paul's opponents had become icons for the presence of such divine figures as Moses and Jesus. The performer of Paul's letter became an icon for the apostolic presence of Paul, a presence deemed powerful by both the Corinthians and Paul's opponents. The letter-in-performance demonstrated to the Corinthians that Paul's voice and presence could be very strong indeed and certainly quite different from the poor self-presentations Paul had given during his visits. Thus Paul's emissary, as the icon of Paul-in-the-letter, would be able to put the audience in the presence of the holy in a way Paul's opponents did in their performances and thereby place the Pauline apostolate on equal ground with its rivals. The embodiment of Paul-in-the-letter was an act that collapsed the distance between Paul, performer, and audience; this incarnation of the letter's persona transformed the Corinthian audience and established the basis for a renewed relationship between the church and Paul.

Performance as icon . . . alters the very perception of being. One cannot look deeply into the eyes of an icon and ever see the world in exactly the same way again. The icon changes one by bestowing the vision of another world . . . to enter the world of the icon is to take on that world by spontaneous and largely unconscious response to it (Bozarth-Campbell, 118).

The Corinthian audience changes by seeing the Apostle Paul in a new way. The performer shows the persona of the letter, a fool who is speaking with enormous power (2 Cor 11:1, 16, 17; 12:11). This embodied voice lampoons the social order that the Corinthians have set up under the leadership of the rival apostolate. By looking at the situation through Paul's eyes, the Corinthians' perception of Paul's legitimacy as a Christian apostle may have changed.

CONCLUSIONS

Alla Bozarth-Campbell's incarnational metaphor for the performance of literature grants us insight into a strategy by which the Pauline apostolate could re-establish an authoritative parousia in the Corinthian church. Paul created the word for the church; the oral interpreter of Paul's letter (a sympathetic emissary) gave that word its body in performance before the community. The creation of this new body can be viewed as a counter-performance to the effective recitations offered by Paul's rivals, which implicitly demeaned Paul's presentations. The affect of the performance was to re-establish Paul as a potent and powerful voice within the Corinthian community.

NOTES

Mourning at Eastertide: Revisiting a Broken Liturgy

If we make performance do as much work for us as it is capable of doing, we not only reach a fuller understanding of our roles as rhetors and rhetoricians but we may also discover a stronger sense of agency.

Christian liturgy is a ritual performance that takes place in the "eighth day", that is, in a liminal "time outside of time" in relation to the week. Its subject is a set of texts and their ensemble performance in "church". Christian liturgy ritually constructs faith through the agency of performance: speaking words and enacting gestures, displaying clothing, symbols, and a holy book invoke for Christians the "resurrected presence" of their Founder.

Liturgical criticism is "an exercise in judgement that makes value-commitments and value-conflicts overt". As a liturgical critic, I first acknowledge that my own practice reveals the politics, ethics, and poetics of an "insider". I am a scholar/practitioner who is often torn between my academic interest in ritual performance and my responsibilities as a member of the Christian clergy and am myself ordained to perform Christian rites and rituals. Secondly, I declare my aim for revisiting the site of this particular liturgical performance is not simply to assess its conformity to aesthetic categories, though aesthetic enhancement is certainly valuable in criticism of Christian liturgy. It is primarily to discover how performance categories can open and help articulate theological meanings performed as Christian liturgy. It is also, as HopKins suggests above, to determine how performance "can do more work for us" in liturgical criticism.

METHOD

This review explores a ritual performance where dissonance between "liturgical" time and "real" time was sharp for the assembly of Christians of which I am a member. The Spring Glen United Church of Christ is a congregation of about 471 members in Hamden, Connecticut (just outside of New Haven). Its membership is made up of white, middle to upper class residents of the immediate area. As a congregation within the United Church of Christ, the Spring Glen Church exemplifies "liberal, Protestant" or "old, mainline" ecclesial perspectives. This review revisits the performance of a liturgy in Eastertide by this congregation of Christian believers on a National Day of Mourning. The analytical method it incorporates has been developed by Tom Driver in the Magic of Ritual and refined in his lectures at Union Theological Seminary (New York City) in April, 1995.

Driver defines "performance" as a "particular kind of doing in which the observation of the deed is an essential part of its doing. . . . it is a unity of doing and observing" which can be understood as four interrelated modalities: on one axis lies ritual and theatrical modes, on the other lies confessional and political (or ethical).Christian liturgy is an example of cultural performance grounded in a ritual mode but puts together "types of performance that are sacred and secular, that are religious, aesthetic, and recreational", is "quasi-theatrical" but "is no pretense, but an actual, here and now doing" Following Schechner, Driver braids "efficacious" aspects of ritual performance with "entertaining" elements of "aesthetic" theatre.

Performances in the confessional mode in a ritual context are "primarily concerned with identity and self-disclosure"; in the political (or ethical) mode performance "is oriented more toward affecting the world through direct social and political action." For example, in the structures of Christian liturgy in the Protestant tradition, a "call to confession" or an "affirmation of faith" would represent performance in the confessional mode. The "commissioning" at the end of a liturgical performance is in the spirit of Jesus' directive which concludes the parable of the Good Samaritan, "You go and do the same!" (Luke 10:37), is in the political/ethical mode. Driver's modalities give points of reference for identifying tensive aspects of Christian liturgical performance.

OCCASION

April 23, 1995 was declared by President Bill Clinton to be a National Day of Mourning for the victims of the terrorist bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19. Given this context, one point of entry into this liturgy's field of analysis is by way of the "political" modality. This liturgy would take place within a political context, highly charged with awareness of violence in the body politic. What would the relationships be between the performances which defined "National Day of Mourning" with the "confessional" performances of Eastertide? How might the performance of liturgy at the Spring Glen Church in Hamden, Connecticut affect interpretive strategies aimed at the rupture of social order in Oklahoma City?

A second point of entry into the field is by way of the confessional modality. April 23rd was the "Second Sunday of Easter" in the Christian liturgical calendar. Traditionally, worship on this Sunday attempts to extend the flow of celebration and festivity that is released for Christians at Easter. Liturgical performance on this occasion might break formal "norms" in order to incorporate aesthetic elements which move the ritual toward "theatre" in Driver's schema.

Worship planners at Spring Glen assume that the Second Sunday of Easter will be a "low" Sunday, that is, a time when few people will come out "just to go to church". Rev. Bill Hobbs, pastor of the Spring Glen Church, explains his rhetorical strategy for worship for the Second Sunday. "If you want them to come back again the week after Easter, there has to be some motive other than just to come back again to worship . . . one fella said, 'ah, it's a marketing ploy' . . . well, in a sense that is not far off the mark."

Worship planners for the Second Sunday at Easter at Spring Glen United Church of Christ look for ways to heighten the entertainment value of the liturgical performance. Consequently, the Spring Glen Church has invited two professional jazz musicians for three consecutive years to perform a repertorie of "New Orleans-style" hymns in the worship service. As Rev. Kathy Peters, one of the worship leaders on April 23rd noted, "jazz music Sunday" is becoming "something of a tradition at Spring Glen" and is awaited with great anticipation. I overheard one of the members of the congregation say "I have looked forward to this service all year".

The previous performances of New Orleans jazz on the Sunday after Easter created "anti-structure" in juxtaposition to the "normal" structures of liturgical life at Spring Glen. Aspects of liminiality are consciously heightened on "jazz music Sunday". Jazz had created a space in previous years where "different" forms of expressive behaviors were "permitted". One of the musicians stated: "My intent last year was just to go in a raise a ruckus with the white folks." (Jeff Barnhart, the musician I interviewed, is himself white.) Worshippers arrived for worship on April 23, 1995 dressed informally (in contrast to the "finery" of the previous week). Even the clergy were attired in "street clothes" rather than in vestments. On most Sundays, children are excused during the service to attend their own activities. But on this day, the children plan to stay as highly visible participants in the event. Most worshippers remembered that intergenerational "foolishness" had broken out in the form of dancing in the aisles, handclapping to the rhythms, and group improvisational singing.

Both children and adults were expecting an opportunity to "loosen up" and "play" in worship. For Rev. Hobbs this heightened liminoid behavior "is not only okay but healthy to do periodically . . . if you don't nurture that part, it just atrophies and is gone. A serious danger in our liberal tradition is to lose sight of the emotional side of worship."

The bombing in Oklahoma City on April 19 and the announcement of April 23rd as a National Day of Mourning created tension between the impulses to playfully celebrate Resurrection and the need to ritually acknowledge and alleviate the situation in Oklahoma. The bombing on the week after Easter Sunday accentuated a theological motif for Christians: that suffering and death are bound up with resurrection in any symbolic reenactment of God's Incarnation in Jesus of Nazareth.

Signs and images of this ambivalence were at the site for the liturgical performance. Worshippers arrived at church on a National Day of Mourning that was still brightly decorated for Easter. The church itself is in the middle of a neighborhood festooned with Easter decorations. A large cross outside at a church nearby was draped with white fabric, symbolizing "Resurrection" while the local paper ran pictures of rescuers working around the clock to recover the dead in the rubble of the bombed building.

As I entered the sanctuary, recognized the musicians, and read the published bulletin, I realized that this was going to be "jazz music Sunday". This appeared to be a crisis for the liturgical order of the day. The "political" situation demanded that "celebration" move toward "lament" in the confessional mode. It seemed "unChristian" to go ahead with the plan to "play" with Resurrection themes when such a tragedy had occurred. Would the proposed order of worship become the ritual pathway we would follow through this performance crisis? Could it still tighten Schechner's "efficacy/entertainment" braid in a way we worshippers needed? Or would some other plan have to be invented and improvised? The Preacher in Ecclesiastes observes that there is a "time for everything" (3:1-8). But what time would it be on this April 23, 1995 at Spring Glen? Would it be a time to mourn or a time to laugh? A time to weep or a time to dance? How could the assembly set the events of the previous week alongside the ritual experience of Resurrection in its liturgical performance? I remember fearing that I might have to excuse myself because I could not imagine committing my body to the handclapping, dancing and participatory singing that typically characterized worship behavior on "jazz music Sunday". As it turned out, I came to a deeper understanding of the structural polarities and theological paradoxes that communicate "faith" in any efficacious performance of Christian liturgy.

CREATING MEANING IN LITURGY

The communicative patterns revealed in any performance of Christian liturgy are dialectical in character. It does not move along a straight line from "idea" to "assent" in the congregation. Rev. Bill Hobbs explains the structural meaning of worship: "The things that are going on all around you need to find their way into worship. (Worship becomes) a way of integrating what happens to us in life generally with our worship life of God the Almighty." This then is the primary intention for communication in worship: to juxtapose the structures of liturgy and the structures of "ordinary" life to create brokenness and then re/membrance. It is to create a space for Jesus' self-presentation to worshippers, not to transmit an abstract body of "Christian doctrine". Liturgy is not simply "showing and telling" the ideological content of theology; it is a "doing" of new things in relation to old ones. Christian liturgy, like other forms of sacred rituals, is "an efficacious performance that invokes the presence and action of powers which, without the ritual, would not be present or active at that time and place." The power and presence Protestant Christians anticipate is that of "Christ, walking through the congregation as the Word." The affect of this Presence is interpreted by Christians as God's graceful self-disclosure, in other words, as an opportunity for God to act "confessionally" in the sociopolitical context of ritual.

The pull of this (order of worship) against that (structures of everyday life) in an efficacious liturgical performance open "holes in the fabric of things, through which life-giving power flows into the world." Christians perform proscribed and improvised gestures, stand to speak and sit in silence, read and speak words, touch one another, eat, drink and sing as "signs of grace" which "prepare the Way of the Lord" and then expect transformation "make (his) paths straight!"(Mark 1:3).

All ritualized performances are subject to the power of death. On one hand, ritualizing behaviors can lead to the actual death of a sacrificial victim and thus can become the performance of "something absolute" and therefore destroying tensiveness. Tom Driver elaborates, "In ritual slaying, the polarity in what Schechner calls the 'efficacy/entertainment dyad' seems to collapse: The ultimate entertainment (the drama of killing) has also the greatest efficacity (that the victim is really and truly slain, an irrevocable act)." On the other hand, the efficacy of rituals can themselves be "killed" by routinization or maintenance of status quo. Death occurs for sacred rituals when the "hole closes up and no power can come through."

Christian liturgy recognizes tendencies toward death dealing in ritual behavior by looking in two directions at once. First, it sees at one end an irrevocable act of "god killing" in the political execution of "God's Son". It identifies all victims of social and political violence with "crucifixion". Remembrance and symbolic reenactment of this event include the display of a Crucifix and a ritual dismemberment and consumption of the "Body and Blood of Christ". Christians confess complicity in "god killing" as "sin" and perform symbolic identification with the perpetrators through word and gesture. They aim for "communion" by creating ritual spaces for reconciliation with the Spirit of God. The Spirit which animated God's Son is released in "Resurrection" and resumes a ministry of personal and social transformation "in Jesus' name" through believers' performance of the faith in conjoining arenas of "worship" and "everyday life".

The Sacrament of Eucharist becomes a ritual contra ritual in that it brings to a close a cultic tradition of animal sacrifice for the expiation of sins. "As it is, he (Christ) has appeared once for all at the end of the age to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself" (Hebrews 9:26b, NRSV). Though Christians take varying positions on its theological meaning, the ritual killing of an innocent victim who is intimately identified with God is deeply lodged in its memory and practice. "Killing a victim" is no longer theologically "necessary" for the entry of God into the mundane. However, the remembrance and reenactment of a political killing in historical time is a central evocative element in liturgical time.

In the Protestant church, and especially at Spring Glen, the Sacrament of Eucharist does not occupy the place that a Service of the Word does. What lies at the center of the usual liturgical performance is "sermon" or "message". Even when the sacramental meal is not performed, however, the pulpit is in a relationship to the table. The words of any sermon point to the "killing" recalled at the table and, like bread and wine, are themselves "powerful things" which are "not mere brief explanations" but are "symbols, gathering places of multilayered meaning and means to participate in that meaning."

Secondly, Christian liturgy recognizes the power of ritual to "kill" the Spirit of the Holy God. It bears the memory of God's voice speaking through the prophet Amos: "I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies" (5:21). Christian liturgical performance is infused with a "spirit of protest against identifying the truth of God with any finite form." It uses "brokenness" as a thematic motif in speaking of a "holy" God who is radically other than festival, solemn assembly, ceremony or ritual performance. Some Christian theologies admit to the possibility that the Holy Spirit might indeed be "absent" in some liturgical performances.

The central paradox of Christian liturgy is that it uses ordinary things (bread, wine, books, cloth, fire, and water) to speak of the Holy. Yet it understands that these things become "broken" in the presence of the "Holy". It affirms both the transcendence and immanence of God by using these "ordinary-things-become-holy" in performance. A bombed building in Oklahoma City still holding bodies of innocent victims of violence is an agonizing and literal image for the theological landscape for any liturgical performance. Christians always stand in the "rubble" of everyday experiences of violence and use broken words, traditions, symbols, myths, and stories to invoke the Presence of God.

THE MUSIC

"New Orleans jazz" is a style of musical performance suited for the theological juxtapositions of Eastertide. For its originators, jazz in performance meant liberation of soul and body. Not only was it a means for African-Americans to augment subsistance incomes but it provided "unschooled" musicians a way to "express themselves in a new way" by creating a "skeletal, gutty sound . . . that came from their hearts."

Yet jazz, like liturgy, also acknowledges the power of death. A funeral was a significant site for cultivating traditions of jazz performance. The musical interpretation of an individual's death conjoined lament and rejoicing; the progression of the jazz funeral rhythmically retains the theological motif of "suffering death/resurrection." Jeff Barnhart, one of the musicians who performed in the service at Spring Glen, described the basic shape of a jazz funeral as follows: "They (the performers) would play an old hymn such as 'Just a Closer Walk with Thee' in the procession to the graveside. And as soon as the body was lowered into the ground, all hell broke loose and they'd have a good time!" Jazz, he explained, provided mourners with a way of saying "he's gone, she's gone . . . but we loved the experience we had with them, let's celebrate each other now." Jazz is the performance of resistance at different levels: it resists formal boundaries of "schooling" in favor of improvisational expression but also resists the final collapse of form that is death.

THE ORDER OF THINGS

The question of when Christian worship begins is theologically complex. Does it "begin" with the first utterances and gestures which move worshippers toward the "wholly other" or does it "begin" when the Holy breaks into the mundane? Christian worship "begins" in at least two ways. Liturgically, it begins with the gathering of those who will invoke, address, and commune, and finally "depart in peace" through a pattern of behaviors that characterize their performance practice. Theologically, it "begins" with the arrival of "the Spirit" whose power and presence flow through the "holes" to meet the worshipper.

"Meeting" is a potent term in the social and liturgical life of the United Church of Christ. Church buildings are often called "meeting houses". In its traditional order of worship, the interiority of "silent meditation during the prelude" meets the public acknowledgement of one another's presence in "greeting and announcements". Awareness of the Holy (Adoration) meets awareness of sin (confession); oral and silent prayers of confession meet assurances of pardon and passing gestures of "peace" within the assembly; solo performances of biblical texts and a sermon meet ensemble performances of "affirmations of faith"; the recitation of a traditional prayer (the Lord's Prayer) meets improvised "prayers of the people"; the giving of gifts to those outside of the assembly (offering) is met by leaving the assembly itself (commission and benediction) and returning to the structures of everyday existence. "Service" in the confessional mode meets "service" in the political/ethical mode.

The liturgical performance in the meeting house at Spring Glen is framed by the tolling of a bell which tells those within and outside the worship space "what time it is". Throughout the order, silence interplays with group prayer and singing. Worship flows through this dialectical pattern and anticipates a meeting between God and Humankind. It awaits a "breaking and entering" by the Holy who "comes like a thief in the night"(Mt. 24:43) but brings "gifts of Grace". Participants might encounter Divine Presence at any number of meeting places within the order or they might not encounter It at all. Christian worship holds open the possibility that the Spirit of the Risen Lord will arrive and affect transformation within one's own interiority but also in social and political life through media of grace.

I want to revisit two particular moments of the Spirit's "breaking and entering" in the order of worship on April 23. I fully acknowledge that for others, other such moments might have happened. Mary Frances HopKins has written recently that "not everyone experiencing the performance will construe the site in the same way." Indeed, any fabric of worship can always be imagined in liturgical criticism as either "riddled" with holes or, conversely, as a seamless form, unperforated by Divine Presence. What I will look at are two places where "breaks" occurred in the flow of worship which redirected it from "entertainment" to "efficacy".

TRANSFORMANCE

Richard Schechner uses "transformance" to describe how ritual performances "make happen what they celebrate." What Christian liturgy awaits and celebrates, particularly at Eastertide, is the Presence of a "Holy Spirit" who sustained and reanimated the life, ministry and memory of the Crucified One. The Spirit comes in and through the performance of words and actions, discloses Itself as "Presence". In this case, a moment of inbreaking occurred during "greeting and announcements". This is normally a space reserved in the order where information is shared about the mundane affairs of the community. Since it preceeds the "call to worship", it anticipates, but does not affect, the invocation of the Spirit.

That preparatory moment shifted from profane to sacred ground on this occasion. As information was being shared by different speakers in the assembly, one gentleman raised his hand to be recognized by the worship leader. When it was his turn to speak, he began by reminding us that this was a Day of Mourning and that we should not proceed with the worship without remembering the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing. His speech was performative in a "political" mode. In a formal and carefully measured tone, he reminded us of our obligation to think beyond the celebratory purpose of our gathering and move toward empathy with the victims and their families. Then, as he spoke, his voice suddenly broke with emotion and he was not able to continue speaking. His performance fulfilled a traditional "confessional" function of prayer. "Like speech in general, prayer may on occasion have not only, and not mainly, the function of conveying information, but rather that of establishing or consolidating relationship through intensifying the 'presence' of one being to another."

Rev. Kathy Peters who was leading worship at that time informed the assembly that the speaker and his wife had once lived in Oklahoma and were personally acquainted with some who had been victimized in the blast. In that critical period of heightened and potent reflexivity, a move toward a new "reality" began and reached its climax in the "message in music". One worshipper noted that "he could see a change in the faces" of people sitting around him. We were on a threshold of some new mode of behavior, a "liminal, fluid mid-point"that would initiate "new" ways of speaking and acting confessionally within and against the proscribed "order of worship". Jeff Barnhart describes how a shift from theatre/entertainment toward ritual/efficacy occurred in his own performance approach. "Once I realized what was happening I said 'look, this is an opportunity to do something more important than provide variety, or just provide everybody with a chance to let loose, there is more import here'". I had to improvise a whole new approach."

In this incidence, a broken human voice was an avenue of the Spirit to "break" into an order and thereby establish a new meaning for the liturgical performance. The speaker's impromptu utterance and display of grief tightened the performance braid between "jazz music Sunday" and "National Day of Mourning". It was a new beginning. As Barnhart noted: "It set the stage perfectly. It was a genuine heartfelt reaction and emotion which then was the opening act" of a transformance. The space of the "eighth day" was now made "safe" for displaying emotions of "lament" in relation to "thanksgiving". It was a moment where the liturgical form was punctuated and became performance of resistance instead of preservation.

On the one side the flow of performance would resist "celebration" by remembering the victims of violence. On the other, it would resist the power of "death" by placing the accent on "Resurrected Presence". Our roles in performance began to change. From a local congregation celebrating its own traditions of worship after Easter, we became Christians who were theologically coping with a tragic act of violence in our global community.

FLOW AND THE PERFORMANCE OF RESISTANCE

As powerful as that moment of transformance was, it was a precarious one in the life of the liturgy. From here the performance could either move toward "death" by "killing the spirit", closing up the hole, and therefore preserving the integrity of the form. Or, it could resist "death" by moving toward a form of playfulness which bore the the weight of tragic images.

Like the progression in the jazz funeral, resistance to death was performed by acknowledging the meaningfulness of human emotional expression in speech and song. In the "Call to Worship" which immediately followed the break in the liturgical fabric, Pastor Hobbs stated this theme: "Wearing our emotions closer to the surface than usual, and with no disrespect for those who can only weep, we reach out in song and motion to acclaim that God is good, that God is for us, and that God can move us to embrace life and engage in deeds of kindness". This thematic through-line extended in the other public utterances in the liturgy. In the "Call to Confession and Unison Prayer", Hobbs read: "We are so cautious about expressing our love for you, O God, that we are in danger of stifling it. We know it in our heads, but we resist letting it move our emotions". And finally in the sermon, he warned against "locking out our emotions" in trying to reach for the "deeper truths that defy reasonable expression". Hobbs words did not simply talk about emotion they became vehicles for efficacious emotional expression.

In the songs that were selected for performance as a "message in music", the tempo moved from a slow rendition of "Amazing Grace", through a solemn "His Eye is On the Sparrow" and into a more upbeat improvisation on "Open Up Those Pearly Gates" and "When the Saints Go Marchin' In". Clearly the "Saints" was the emotional climax of the service as members of the congregation freely jumped up from their seats and literally danced in the aisles. A movement that began as an awkward, impromptu speech in a voice broken with emotion steadily flowed toward a climax as an ensemble performance of dancing, singing, and handclapping. It was a potent recreation of a theological construct: death wedded to resurrection.

Another way resistance to death was performed was through the use of traditional verbal and musical materials to address the mournful matters of the day. Silent texts that exist as words on a page or musical score can be described as "dead" in relation to speech. But when transposed for liturgical performance, "the Spirit gives life" to texts (2 Cor.3:6b) as they "speak" in new ways. Hobbs declared, for example, that his intention for his sermon shifted once he heard that President Clinton had named the day as a National Day of Mourning:

I had an opportunity. The intention was to introduce the particular part of the service. Before (the day was declared as Day of Mourning) I thought it was a good chance to go back again and say something about the evolution of New Orleans jazz. But when I looked at the Gospel for the day (John 20:19-31), it became very clear to me that here is a story, a story of Jesus' appearance to the disciples when they were in hiding after the Resurrection . . . this was a real opportunity to say something about that story and about the faith which is built around people who were fearful, were skeptical, and into the midst of them, somehow, in a way that was ultimately moving, comes the presence of Jesus through locked doors and barriers of skepticism, cynicism, and doubt, all of these things that prevent ourselves from being God's people.

Hobbs' sermon became a site where listeners could identify with some of the more shadowy aspects of faith. By acknowledging the situation of the biblical characters, he created the possibility for listeners to identify their own confusion and skepticism in the wake of a violent act. At the same time, however, the traditional story of Jesus' appearance to "Doubting" Thomas, creates the possibility for a new interpretation of the listeners' own situation. "Yet Jesus appeared to his frightened disciples mysteriously, through locked doors and thick walls and presented himself, offering encouragement."

In the same way, attending to the circumstances changed the way the musicians "used" their traditional material. Their performance of such traditional hymns as "Just a Closer Walk With Thee", "Blessed Assurance", "Amazing Grace" "His Eye is on The Sparrow", "Open Up Those Pearly Gates", and "When the Saints Go Marchin' In" had "a lot more soul" and made them "realize how important this music is" to others and to themselves. For Barnhart, having to keep the outbreak of violence in Oklahoma City before him helped keep him "from just going through the motions. It stripped us from what was too familiar and forced us to deal with things but in a joyful way. I felt like the 'preacher' for the day."

Christian liturgy in performance is a web of communicative practice that seeks brokenness of form and the tensive juxtaposition of the "ordinary" with the "holy". Liturgical criticism recalls points where the ritual fabric of worship is punctured by that which cannot be contained by ritual forms. The service at Spring Glen on the Second Sunday of Easter revealed how it is that liturgy aims to communicate. Every liturgy is precariously situated between the Spirit which gives life and the death that comes from maintaining integrity of form. Jazz music Sunday might have simply become "entertainment" on a "low" Sunday and not provided a means of ritually acknowledging the confusion, grief, and anguish of worshippers. Yet even a liturgical form designed to contain jazz broke open with an impromptu performance by a speaker in the congregation, and the performance flow moved toward efficacy.

Perhaps the experience is best summed up by one worshipper who, upon departing from the worship space, exclaimed: "Something happened here today!"

Richard Finley Ward is the Clement-Muehl Associate Professor of Communication Arts in the Divinity School of Yale University.

ENDNOTES

Dreaming of New Forms and Utterances: Seeds

Dreaming of New Forms and Utterances: Seeds for Ritual Reformation in a TV Culture

Scenario

It is Monday evening and the chairperson of the worship committee is driving to a meeting of that committee at her church. Let's call her Edith. Edith is feeling anxious about it because she anticipates a conflict between the new pastor and one of the members of the committee over worship formats and styles. The new pastor jokes that she goes "by the Book", stating in her initial interviews that she was a "biblical" preacher who was concerned about the congregation's lack of biblical knowledge. She also expressed her opinion that some of the newer "narrative" methods of preaching were too closely identified with the "entertainment" values of the dominant television culture. Edith also knows that the pastor is bringing a copy of the new denominational hymnal to the meeting because she believes that it "dresses up" the traditional forms of worship with new "inclusive" language and hymn selection.

On the other hand, Edith knows that one member of the committee is bringing magazines that advertise electronic products for "changing the way your church worships" through the use of video and light projectors, high-tech sound equipment, and even a glass pulpit! "Why can't we invest in this kind of thing?" he said to her on the phone, "We need to use this stuff to attract the members of the 'TV Generation'!" The chairperson anticipates an argument over which emphasis will dominate worship planning and performance: the church's adherence to the "book" for the sake of traditional theological values or acquisition of new technologies for meeting the tastes and expectations of an audience accustomed to television.

"Well", she thinks, "I asked for it!" Edith decided to accept this responsibility this year because she harbors her own concerns about her church's worship life and thinks this committee is a good place to ask: why does our worship seem to bore people? Some of her friends left to join a new "community" church which had simpler, more spontaneous styles of worship, enabled by sophisticated electronic equipment. Edith visited their worship service but came away feeling dazzled but not nurtured. She had not been able to distinguish between "worship" and the kind of formats she was used to seeing on television. She was also uneasy about this congregation's heavy emphasis on one's "personal" relationship to Jesus, on her secondary status as a woman, and narrow approach to social reform. Still, their style seemed to capture something she sought for her own church.

Ritual: Bane or Boon?

Let's break in to this scene for just a moment to make the first point of this article. The undercurrent beneath this lay woman's anxiety is something that perplexes many who read this: how does the church address the problem of "ritual boredom" which afflicts our culture? What is the role of telecommunications technology in this effort?

Ritual boredom is defined by Tom Driver as "a condition in which people have become fundamentally weary of the rituals available to them for giving their lives shape and meaning." And yet at the same time there is what Driver calls "ritual apprehension", a reluctance to claim "ritual" as a vital term in our vocabulary 1. For many, "ritual" represents the very thing we are trying to escape, that is, boring repetition which leads to a lifeless expression of faith. The purpose of this essay is to juxtapose "ritual boredom" within the culture shaped by telecommunications and formulate a response.

We could help people like Edith by releasing the word "ritual" from its negative connotations and clarifying some of its attributes. We do this to understand the impact that television is having upon our worship practices and take on the larger question of how we are to interpret our faith in our "electronic" cultural milieu. Ritual is best thought of by what it does rather than what it is. As human beings, we need rituals to mark time and space, to give order and pattern to communal life, and to teach us about our distinctiveness as a family, faith community, or culture. Rituals are forms of repetitive individual and collective behaviors that, over time, forge links between the "everyday" and the "extraordinary", therefore infusing human behavior with meaning. When the tension between the arcane and the sacred is too relaxed in ritual performances, the rituals themselves must be critiqued, modified or reinvented. For some, the edges of Christian liturgy are fraying and need the jolt of the new technologies to become enlivened. For others, the changes wrought by electronic media need to be resisted in order to deepen engagement with the faith tradition.

Such extremes are historically and theologically naive. Our liturgy is sacred ritual because it creates anticipation and receptivity to the Spirit of the Risen Christ in the experience of the participants. It uses "ordinary" materials such as fire, bread, wine, clothing, and books and proscribed words and gestures as its elements. We bring verbal forms, structures of meaning, objects and patterns of behavior, not to show God their elegant lines and shapes but to pray that God's Spirit will break them open and show us the backside of the Holy. Conceivably, "electronics" can be brought into worship along with any other ordinary object from our daily lives. The question is: can the object be "broken" open by God's spirit and disclose the Holy or does the object and its usage call attention to itself? Ritual performances that call attention to the objects themselves are in danger of losing their evocative power.

Print: A Stylistic Constraint on Ritual Speech

Speaking, of course, is an integral part of liturgical performance as is gesture and display. Its style ranges from the conversational to the formal utterance and even perhaps to the chant. Ways of speaking reflect the aesthetic and communicative values of both a particular congregation's culture and tradition; our language for worship is designed to link the vernacular with the formal.

The aesthetics, style and patterns of inflection that Anglo-Protestants use in liturgical speech are those of a "print" culture, that is, a culture whose primary form of communication is dependent on print. Speakers at the average Protestant worship service try to translate what is printed into sound with voices that are reasoned, deliberate, controlled, and detached. The great innovation of the printing press allowed everyone who could read to participate by providing book and page as a commonly held "script" for liturgical performances. One of the strengths we had as "reformers" was the imaginative incorporation of the technologies of print into our individual and communal ritual lives. The printed word became a pathway into our individual and corporate experiences of God. Telecommunications technology has released ways of speaking into our culture that are constrained by these same forms and structures shaped by print. Our ritual speech needs to reflect the animation, energy, and spontaniety that we have come to value, without an attitude of glibness and affect.

Television and Worship as Ritual Communication

What is conspicuously absent is imagination about how to escape our strict reliance on print and incorporation of television's communicative values into our ritual lives. Protestant theologians, deeply embedded in modes of learning shaped by print and silent, critical reading, are inclined to dismiss television as a serious force in culture because of an inadequate view of communication. Television has proven itself to be an agent of cultural transformation, not simply a tool for advertisers. Misunderstanding this has caused us to become blind to both the kinship and radical dissonance between two forms and fields of communicative activity--television and liturgical performance.

Television and the performance of a Christian liturgy are both forms of "ritual communication", that is, they are both complex processes of message-making that create, modify and transform a shared culture. "A ritual view of communication is not directed toward the extensions of messages in space, but the maintenance of society in time; not the act of imparting information or influence, but the creation, representation, and celebration of shared beliefs". The metaphor of "ritual" in the study of human communication displaces the linear "transmission" or "transportation" view of communication that developed in print culture. According to this latter view, "communication (is a) process of transmitting messages at a distance for the purpose of control. . . communication then is persuasion, attitude change, behavior modification, socialization through the tranmission of information, influence, or conditioning".2

One of the consequences of the "transmissions" view for the church is that it easily equates communication with technology or techniques for improving the capacity of "senders" to get their messages across to passive recievers. The subject of communication was therefore isolated or ignored by theology since the means of sending messages were taken to be theologically "neutral". The work of the theologian (when the transmission model was dominant) was to insure that the doctrinal content of the message was sound (an interesting play on words) regardless of whether the message was formulated as a sermon preached in the pulpit or on the air. Communication to print-based people means effectively extracting and lifting ideological content off the printed page and transmitting it through whatever media is available.

This is where we Protestants have contributed to ritual boredom in our culture. We are still working at ways to enliven printed matter through our voices and gestures when the culture-at-large has developed new aesthetic standards shaped by the electronically mediated "word". Media shapes the way we hear, feel, and understand, indeed our very consciousness. A generation of audiences reared on television is used to animation, emotional appeal, kinesthetic participation, narrative and dramatic structure, and skillful use of an "audiovisual" language.

Television is pervasive in our society and demands our attention. (Even when I have the television on as "background noise" I find myself drawn to what is on). In many ways, we have become a "captive" audience. We live in one media world and worship in another. How do we live and worship in such a strange land? If we "sing the Lord's song", can it still be accompanied by organ or even guitar? Or will it need to have a studio-produced soundtrack behind it in order to be heard? If we are to alleviate ritual boredom we will need to take the audiovisual language our culture now speaks into account. We need not develop liturgical amnesia to do so but certainly will have to emphasize narrative and dramatic elements of the rituals we have or invent new ones. We must also learn how to "demythologize" television by understanding its "religious" functions.

Television: Joy or Concern?

Back to Edith because now she has stopped at a traffic light and drums her fingers on the steering wheel. She happens to look at the car in front of her. A bumper sticker on it shouts "Kill Your Television!" She laughs with recognition. She just received an invitation from the school her child attends to participate in the "Week Without TV" campaign. The program asks parents to consider the power that television has in shaping family life and to reinstitute elements of choice for a family's time together. It would be nice, she thought, to recover some of the things that television had seemed to take away. Why was life without television, even for a week, so hard to imagine? What is it about television that held them captive?

On the surface, television seems to be a highly developed mechanism for delivering particular audiences to advertisers. Peter Horsfield makes this point. "Television is primarily a commercial activity . . . television has developed around advertising, the primary purpose being to gather as large an audience as possible to 'sell' to the advertisers."3

In return, advertisers provide programs that allow the viewer to escape into vicarious experience but perhaps most importantly, to reassure them of some degree of order and stability in their lives. The news comes on at a set time each day and night and a favorite program airs during particular (usually reliable) time slots. A viewer's leisure time might be ordered around the television programming schedule.

These aspects point to what William Fore and Gregor Goethals call the "hidden" role of television which is "to tell what our world is like, how it works, and what it means". Television not only transmits an advertiser's message but it provides the myths by which we live, reveals to us where power lies, and what is of value to the culture and what is not.4 Gregor Goethals amplifies Fore's point. In a ritually impoverished society, television lends ritualisitic elements by broadcasting civic ceremonies, sports events, and even commercial advertisements.5 Such programming provides the images and iconography by which individuals become connected to the shared values of our consumer culture. Fore confirms what we might already have suspected at times:

[Television is beginning to replace the institution that historically has performed the functions we have understood as religious. Television, rather than the churches, is becoming the place where people find a worldview which reflects what to them is of ultimate value, and which justifies their behavior and way of life.6]

The light changes and Edith passes the "Kill Your Television" car. She imagines herself gleefully dispatching the television set, thereby releasing herself from its hold once and for all! Yet, she also wonders if the driver's spiritual ancestors might have resisted the changes the automobile brought to society or decried human forays into flight? The automobile and later the airplane effected her culture in revolutionary ways. Her worship tradition certainly did not collapse as a result of these changes, though the structures of her "church life" were modified. As much as she would like to sometimes, she cannot make television disappear by "killing" it. So how does one live with television and in the kind of cultural milieu it has created? How does one worship with the television set "on" in our culture and consciousness?

Reclaiming What Is Not Lost: Strategies for Living While Plugged In I had the privilege recently to hear the South African playwright Athol Fugard speak to a group of students. He talked about what it was like to write and produce plays under apartheid. Fugard's work was considered illegal because his themes challenged the policy. He and his small company of black and white actors would rehearse and perform his plays whenever and whereever they could, always aware they could be raided by South African police, arrested and perhaps tortured or executed.

Internalization of the words became their defense. In order to survive, they had to change the relationship between paper and their speech. Playwright and performer alike learned all the words of the text so that, if the police came looking for a playbook, there would not be one. Since there was no "book", there was no evidence the officers could use to convict them of illegal performance. After the raid, these artists could resume their rehearsal. All the words were inside each of them, helping them not only resist the ideology of apartheid, but lending to their performance the authority of lived experience. Everyone involved with the play carried Fugard's words with them wherever they went.

Our cultural situation is certainly not as severe as Fugard's but his performance strategy is instructive to us. The power of television is found in both what it is and what it does. It is part of a complex system of message-making that relies on color, movement and sound, a high degree of participation of a listener, and a nearly universal presence that captivates our attention. More importantly, it is the primary conveyor of a consumer culture whose values system is radically dissonant from biblical faith. Bill Fore has identified its elements:

1. The fittest survive

2. Power and decision making start at the center and move out

3. Happiness consists of limitless material acquisition

4. Progress is an inherent good.

5. There exists a free flow of information. 7

So how do we perform worship in an electronically mediated environment who style and values are different from those in our "Book"?

It's time for confession. We Protestant Christians have to admit that we have exhibited triumphalist tendencies in our thought about television and it has cost us. The brief history of our Church's attempt to understand, much less, translate the gospel of Jesus Christ into the vernacular of television is characterized by failure. Television has a way of getting the kind of religion it needs to perpetuate consumer culture. What prevails on television is a "gospel" that affirms free enterprise capitalism and its material rewards. "Discipleship" becomes adherence to personal moral and behavioral codes and monetary support of the broadcasting "ministry". Our experiments with the "electronic church" should teach us that no medium is theologically neutral and will shape messages according to its own needs. A strategy based in triumphalism, that is, an attempt to "take over" the means of production "in the name of Jesus" has only led to a deeper bondage to production-consumption.

Triumphalism also takes another, more subtle form. It suggests that our gospel is somehow "above" television fare. Television vernacular, (as insufferably offensive as it can be), is not suitable for proclamation and therefore we have nothing to learn from it. If television cannot really be "killed" as a cultural force, then perhaps it can be ignored. Both forms of triumphalist thinking have contributed to our failure to discern what the church's role in an electronic culture seems to be.

This reluctance to translate the Gospel into the vernacular of television is well-founded, to be sure. The essence of Christian communication is responsiveness to the Spirit of God and service to human beings in their various needs. Its communicative motifs are interaction and embodiment. Television only provides the illusion of interaction and embodiment by providing vicarious experience. I stand with those who believe that the effort to "televise" the Gospel of Jesus Christ is misguided. Television too skillfully overcomes the existential dimensions of the Gospel by reducing it to information and extracts what little entertainment value that it can for its market value. Perhaps in the future, as television itself evolves into the Internet, we may discover speech forms that fit this medium. But in the meantime, our energy is best spent elsewhere. We need to take responsibility for our ritual lives by reviving, reclaiming, and restoring our ritual forms and if they are irrecoverable, create new ones. Television at present does not belong to us but to those mercantile interests that become increasingly hostile or indifferent to Christian faith.

Therefore, we need to learn to think as people "in exile".

The biblical story in its entirety is a juxtaposition of opposites: Captivity with Exodus, Crucifixion with Easter, Alpha with Omega. Triumphalism is juxtaposed with Exile. As Donald Rogers has suggested, we, as people of faith, "without having traveled, are now living as did the people of the Exile".8 Exile? Us? Why not us? Telecommunications technology developed so rapidly that it overwhelmed the critical skills we honed in our study of traditional, literary texts and left us bewildered, weak, and feeling powerless. Our failure to "read" television is why some of us are now called "oldline" instead of "mainline" and others of us find our faith virtually indistinguishable from consumer culture. Richard Goodwin, the lawyer played by Rob Morrow in the movie Quiz Show, speaks for many of us: "I thought we were gonna get television. The truth is television is gonna get us." The consciousness industry that owns television has "gotten us" by taking over the public spaces where the spoken word once flourished. Town greens, public squares, forums, amphitheatres, and churches have been displaced by cybercafes and cathode tubes. It is the place where public symbols and shared mythologies are broadcast, "heightening consumerism as our only shared value"10.

However, people in exile are not without spiritual resources. Like Fugard's troupe, we can benefit from internalizing more of our traditional material and weaning ourselves from the printed page. We can learn skills that will enable us to memorize and recite biblical stories in corporate worship and other gatherings, or at least read them aloud as stories, letters, poems, and other expressions of oral art. We can recover other oral traditions that have been all but lost in print culture.

While worshipping with some Appalachian Christians recently, I rediscovered the power of lining out hymns instead of singing from hymnbooks. The same idea can be incorporated in liturgical performance. A leader can teach a congregation a simple spoken response just as easily as "script" it on a page. While we may not be able to extricate ourselves from either our consumer culture or our heritage in print, at least we can begin to liberate ourselves from our reliance on books and paper in our worship by recovering skills of memorization, recitation, and narration. We can certainly begin to rethink our relationships to space and to paper. Paper should serve speech rather than speech serving paper. Spaces in our homes and sanctuaries can be reclaimed for new rituals, storytelling, and sharing.

These are only some initial impulses and inclinations, of course, and will not bring down the mighty consciousness industry represented by television; but they might help us formulate strategies for transmitting our tradition of faith to our children. Another spiritual resource is our collective memory of living through previous media revolutions. Exiles develop an acute historical sensibility. At first, the fledgling Christian church had to decide whether to translate their stories into writing for the purpose of preserving them for future generations of Christians. Later, as Christians became more powerful in the culture, they had to decide whether to translate the "holy" language of the Church into the vernacular, using the new technology of the printing press. In each era, the church engaged in a painful process of examining the relationship of the Gospel Jesus had entrusted to them with the culture in which it found itself embedded and the media forms that dominated. Mistakes were made but so were breakthroughs. Some institutions and means of proclamation and instruction dissolved and others were created. Our experience of finding "new wineskins" during times of media revolutions gives us reason to hope that we will develop liturgies which incorporate orality, print, and electronic media. According to Quentin Schultz, some church leaders are already doing this by introducing into worship the basic principles of narrative and drama: character, conflict, plot and setting 11. Preachers have been exploring these concepts and techniques in crafting sermons. Perhaps now worship leaders need to think with them about liturgical structures in the same way.

Dreaming the Dream of Ritual Reformation

This is what Edith is daydreaming about as she arrives at church for the meeting. She has caught a glimpse of new possibilities for worship in her community. What if the Book and the new electronic technologies were somehow to collide and break each other open? What if the verbal icons of tradition and the images of the electronic culture were to dance together instead of fight one another? Would that not revitalize ritual life? Less paper, more spontaniety. More sacrament, less talk. More story and drama, less information. Aggravate the tension between the dominant culture that threatens to captive, and the biblical promise of freedom in Christ. Demythologize the captor's slickly produced story and learn to retell biblical ones as rank amateurs.

A seed of faith has just been sown in Edith's daydream. She plans to share it with her friends at the meeting. Pray that her dream is God's and that it will become our own.

Notes

1. Tom Faw Driver, The Magic of Ritual: Our Need for Liberating Rites that Transform Our Lives and Our Communities, (San Francisco: Harper, 1991), 7.

2. James Carey, "Communication and Culture," Communication Research (April 1975): 177.

3. Peter G. Horsfield, Religious Television: The American Experience (New York and London: Longman, 1984), 21.

4. William F. Fore, Television and Religion: The Shaping of Faith, Values, and Culture, (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1987), 21.

5. Gregor T. Goethals, in Religion, Television and the Information Superhighway: A Search for a Middle Way, Robert Lewis Shayon and Nash Cox, compilers (Philadelphia: Waymark Press, 1994), 41-42.

6. Fore, 24.

7. Ibid., 64-66.

8. Donald B. Rogers, "Maintaining Faith Identity in a Television Culture: Strategies of Response for a People in Exile," in Changing Channels: The Church and the Television Revolution, ed. Tyron Inbody (Dayton, OH.: Whaleprints, 1990), 148.

9. Gordon W. Lathrop, Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology, (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1993), 3.

10. Quentin J. Schultz, "The Place of Television in the Church's Communication," in Changing Channels: The Church and the Television Revolution, ed. Tyron Inbody (Dayton, OH.: Whaleprints, 1990), 31.

How To Be a Disciple

Being a disciple or apprentice of Jesus is a definite and obvious kind of thing. To make a mystery of it is to misunderstand it. There is no good reason why people should ever be in doubt as to whether they themselves are his students or not. And the evidence will always be quite clear as to whether any other individual is his student, though we may be in no position to collect that evidence and rarely would have any legitimate occasion to gather or use it.

Now this may seem very startling, even shocking, to many in our religious culture, where there is a long tradition of doubting, or possibly even of being unable to tell, whether or not one is a Christian. The underlying issue in that tradition has always been whether or not one was going to "make the final cut." And that has, in turn, often been thought a matter of whether God has "chosen you" and you are therefore "among the elect." Or else it is a matter of whether or not you have sinned too much, or are good enough. Needless to say, those would be difficult questions to answer with much assurance -- perhaps impossible to answer at all, because we are in no position to inspect the books of heaven.

It would take us far out of our path to enter into those hoary controversies. But fortunately there is no need. It is almost universally conceded today that you can be a Christian without being a disciple. And one who actually is an apprentice and co-laborer with Jesus in his or her daily existence is sure to be a "Christian" in every sense of the word that matters. The very term Christian was explicitly introduced in the New Testament -- where, by the way, it is used only three times -- to apply to disciples when they could no longer be called Jews, because many kinds of gentiles were now part of them.

Now, people who are asked whether they are apprentices of a leading politician, musician, lawyer or screenwriter would not need to think a second to respond. Similarly for those asked if they are studying Spanish or bricklaying with someone unknown to the public. It is hardly something that would escape one's attention. The same is all the more true if asked about discipleship to Jesus.

But if asked whether they are good apprentices of whatever person or line of work is concerned, they very well might hesitate. They might say no. Or yes. Asked if they could be better students, they would probably say yes. And all of this falls squarely within the category of being a disciple or apprentice. For to be a disciple in any area or relationship is not to be perfect. One can be a very raw and incompetent beginner and still be a disciple.

It is a part of the refreshing realism of the Gospels that we often find Jesus doing nothing less than "bawling out" his disciples. That, however, is very far from rejecting them. It is, in fact, a way of being faithful to them, just as chastisement is God's way of showing that someone is his child (Heb. 12:7-10). A good "master" takes his apprentices seriously and therefore takes them to task as needed.

A disciple or apprentice, then, is simply someone who has decided to be with another person, under appropriate conditions, in order to become capable of doing what that person does or to become what that person is.

How does this apply to discipleship to Jesus? What is it, exactly, that he, the incarnate Lord, does? What, if you wish, is he "good at"? The answer is found in the Gospels: he lives in the kingdom of God, and he applies that kingdom for the good of others and even makes it possible for them to enter it themselves. The deeper theological truths about his person and his work do not detract from this simple point. It is what he calls us to by saying, "Follow me."

The description Peter gives in the first "official" presentation of the gospel to the gentiles provides a sharp picture of the Master under whom we serve as apprentices. "You know," he says to Cornelius, "of Jesus, the one from Nazareth. And you know how God anointed him with the Holy Spirit and power. He went about doing good and curing all those under oppression by the devil, because God was with him" (Acts 10:38).

And as a disciple of Jesus I am with him, by choice and by grace, learning from him how to live in the kingdom of God. This is the crucial idea. That means how to live within the range of God's effective will, his life flowing through mine. Another important way of putting this is to say that I am learning from Jesus to live my life as he would live life if he were I. I am not necessarily learning to do everything he did, but I am learning how to do everything I do in the manner in which he did all that he did.

My main role in life, for example, is that of a professor in what is called a "research" university. As Jesus' apprentice, then, I constantly have before me the question of how he would deal with students and colleagues in the specific connections involved in such a role. How would he design a course, and why? How would he compose a test, administer it and grade it? What would his research projects be, and why? How would he teach this course or that?

That my actual life is the focus of my apprenticeship to Jesus is crucial. Knowing this can help deliver us from the genuine craziness that the current distinction between "full-time Christian service" and "part-time Christian service" imposes on us. For a disciple of Jesus is not necessarily one devoted to doing specifically religious things as that is usually understood.

To repeat, I am learning from Jesus how to lead my life, my whole life, my real life. Note, please, I am not learning from him how to lead his life. His life on earth was a transcendently wonderful one. But it has now been led. Neither I nor anyone else, even himself, will ever lead it again. And he is, in any case, interested in my life, that very existence that is me. There lies my need. I need to be able to lead my life as he would lead it if he were I.

So as his disciple I am not necessarily learning how to do special religious things, either as a part of "full-time service" or as a part of "part-time service." My discipleship to Jesus is, within, clearly definable limits, not a matter of what I do, but of how I do it. And it covers everything, "religious" or not.

Brother Lawrence, who was a kitchen worker and cook, remarks, Our sanctification does not depend upon changing our works, but in doing that for God's sake which we commonly do for our own. . . It is a great delusion to think that the times of prayer ought to differ from other times. We are as strictly obliged to adhere to God by action in the time of action as by prayer in the season of prayer.

It is crucial for our walk in the kingdom to understand that the teachings of Jesus do not by themselves make a life. They were never intended to. Rather, they presuppose a life. But that causes no problem, for of course each one of us is provided a life automatically. And we know exactly what it is. It is who we are and what we do. It is precisely this life that God wants us to give to him. We must only be careful to understand its true dignity. To every person we can say with confidence, "You, in the midst of your actual life there, are exactly the person God wanted."

The teachings of Jesus in the Gospels show us how to live the life we have been given through the time, place, family, neighbors, talents and opportunities that are ours. His words left to us in scripture provide all we need in the way of general teachings about how to conduct our particular affairs. If we only put them into practice, along the lines previously discussed, most of the problems that trouble human life would be eliminated. That is why Jesus directs his teaching in Matthew 5 through 7 toward things like murder and anger, contempt and lusting, family rejection, verbal bullying. This is real life. Though his teachings do not make a life, they intersect at every point with every life.

So life in the kingdom is not just a matter of not doing what is wrong. The apprentices of Jesus are primarily occupied with the positive good that can be done during their days "under the sun" and the positive strengths and virtues that they develop in themselves as they grow toward "the kingdom prepared for them from the foundations of the world" (Matt. 25:34). What they, and God, get out of their lifetime is chiefly the person they become. And that is why their real life is so important.

The cultivation of oneself, one's family, one's workplace and community -- especially the community of believers -- thus becomes the center of focus for the apprentice's joint life with his or her teacher. It is with this entire context in view that we most richly and accurately speak of "learning from him how to lead my life as he would lead my life if he were I."

Let us become as specific as possible. Consider just your job, the work you do to make a living. This is one of the clearest ways possible of focusing upon apprenticeship to Jesus. To be a disciple of Jesus is, crucially, to be learning from Jesus how to do your job as Jesus himself would do it. New Testament language for this is to do it "in the name" of Jesus.

Once you stop to think about it, you can see that not to find your job to be a primary place of discipleship is to automatically exclude a major part, if not most, of your waking hours from life with him. It is to assume to run one of the largest areas of your interest and concern on your own or under the direction and instruction of people other than Jesus. But this is right where most professing Christians are left today, with the prevailing view that discipleship is a special calling having to do chiefly with religious activities and "full-time Christian service."

But how, exactly, is one to make one's job a primary place of apprenticeship to Jesus? Not, we quickly say, by becoming the Christian nag-in-residence, the rigorous upholder of all propriety, and the dead-eye critic of everyone else's behavior. This is abundantly clear from a study of Jesus and of his teachings in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere.

A gentle but firm noncooperation with things that everyone knows to be wrong, together with a sensitive, nonofficious, nonintrusive, nonobsequious service to others, should be our usual overt manner. This should be combined with inward attitudes of constant prayer for whatever kind of activity our workplace requires and genuine love for everyone involved.

As circumstances call for them, special points in Jesus' teachings and example, such as nonretaliation, refusal to press for financial advantage, consciousness of and appropriate assistance to those under special handicaps, and so on would come into play. And we should be watchful and prepared to meet any obvious spiritual need or interest in understanding Jesus with words that are truly loving, thoughtful and helpful.

It is not true, I think, that we fulfill our obligations to those around us by only living the gospel. There are many ways of speaking inappropriately, of course -- even harmfully -- but it is always true that words fitly spoken are things of beauty and power that bring life and joy. And you cannot assume that people understand what is going on when you only live in their midst as Jesus' person. They may just regard you as one more version of human oddity.

I once knew of a case in an academic setting where at noon one professor very visibly took his Bible and lunch and went to a nearby chapel to study, pray and be alone. Another professor would call his assistant into his office, where they would have sex. No one in that environment thought either activity to be anything worth inquiring about. After all, people do all sorts of things. We are used to that. In some situations it is only words that can help toward understanding.

But, once again, the specific work to be done -- whether it is making ax handles or tacos, selling automobiles or teaching kindergarten, engaging in investment banking or holding political office, evangelizing or running a Christian education program, performing in the arts or teaching English as a second language -- is of central interest to God. He wants it well done. It is work that should be done, and it should be done as Jesus himself would do it. Nothing can substitute for that. In my opinion, at least, as long as one is on the job, all peculiarly religious activities should take second place to doing "the job" in sweat, intelligence and the power of God. That is our devotion to God. (I am assuming, of course, that the job is one that serves good human purposes.)

Our intention with our job should be the highest possible good in its every aspect, and we should pursue that with conscious expectation of a constant energizing and direction from God. Although we must never allow our job to become our life, we should, within reasonable limits, routinely sacrifice our comfort and pleasure for the quality of our work, whether it be ax handles, tacos or the proficiency of a student we are teaching.

And yes, this results in great benefit for those who utilize our services. But our mind is not obsessed with them, and certainly not with having appreciation from them. We do the job well because that is what Jesus would like, and we admire and love him. It is what he would do. We "do our work with soul [ex psyche], to the Lord, not to men" (Col. 3:23). "It is the Lord Christ you serve" (v. 25). As his apprentices, we are personally interacting with him as we do our job, and he is with us, as he promised, to teach us how to do it best.

Few have illustrated this better than Kirby Puckett, for 13 years center fielder for the Minnesota Twins baseball team. He had a career batting average of .318, made the All-Star lineup ten years in a row, and won six Golden Gloves for defensive play. He was one of the most loved men ever to play the game, and a well-known Christian.

Dennis Martinez, pitcher for the Cleveland Indians, once crushed the left side of Kirby's face with a pitch. Martinez assumed that Kirby would hate him. But when he had recovered a bit, Kirby called Martinez "my good friend" and blamed himself for not getting out of the way of the fastball. He was an outstanding community leader for good causes, and expressed his faith naturally in words that matched his life. Everyone knew who Kirby was trusting and why he would not hate someone who had injured him. He was living in God's world and relying upon it.

One who does not know this way of "job discipleship" by experience cannot begin to imagine what release and help and joy there is in it. And to repeat the crucial point: if we restrict our discipleship to special religious times, the majority of our waking hours will be isolated from the manifest presence of the kingdom in our lives. Those waking hours will be times when we are on our own on our job. Our time at work -- even religious work -- will turn out to be a "holiday from God."

On the other hand, if you dislike or even hate your job, a condition epidemic in our culture, the quickest way out of that job, or to joy in it, is to do as Jesus would. This is the very heart of discipleship, and we cannot effectively be an apprentice of Jesus without integrating our job into the kingdom among us.

If, as we have seen, a disciple of Jesus is one who is with Jesus, learning to be like him, what is the condition of soul that would bring us to choose that condition? What would be the thinking, the convictions about reality, that would lead someone to choose discipleship to him?

Obviously one would feel great admiration and love, would really believe that Jesus is the most magnificent person who has ever lived. One would be quite sure that to belong to him, to be taken into what he is doing throughout this world so that it becomes your life, is the greatest opportunity one will ever have.

Jesus gave us two parables to illustrate the condition of soul that leads to becoming a disciple. Actually it turns out to be a condition that we all very well understand from our own experiences. The parables also illustrate what he meant by saying that the "scribe" of the kingdom teaches from the ordinary things of life "things both old and new."

First, he said, "The kingdom of the heavens is like where something of extreme value is concealed in a field. Someone discovers it, and quickly covers it up again. Overflowing with joyous excitement he pulls together everything he has, sells it all and buys the field" (Matt. 13:44).

Second, he said, "What the kingdom of the heavens is like is illustrated by a businessman who is on the lookout for beautiful pearls. He finds an incredible value in one pearl. So he sells everything else he owns and buys it" (13:45-46).

These little stories perfectly express the condition of soul in one who chooses life in the kingdom with Jesus. The sense of the goodness to be achieved by that choice, of the opportunity that may be missed, the love for the value discovered, the excitement and joy over it all, is exactly the same as it was for those who were drawn to Jesus in those long-ago days when he first walked among us. It is also the condition of soul from which discipleship can be effectively chosen today.

Only with such images before us can we correctly assess the famous "cost of discipleship" of which so much is made. Do you think the businessman who found the pearl was sweating over its cost? An obviously ridiculous question! What about the one who found the treasure in the field -- perhaps crude oil or gold? No. Of course not. The only thing these people were sweating about was whether they would "get the deal." Now that is the soul of the disciple.

No one goes sadly, reluctantly into discipleship with Jesus. As he said, "No one who looks back after putting his hand to the plough is suited to the kingdom of God" (Luke 9:62). No one goes in bemoaning the cost. They understand the opportunity. And one of the things that has most obstructed the path of discipleship in our Christian culture today is this idea that it will be a terribly difficult thing that will certainly ruin your life. A typical and often-told story in Christian circles is of those who have refused to surrender their lives to God for fear he would "send them to Africa as missionaries."

And here is the whole point of the much misunderstood teachings of Luke 14. There Jesus famously says one must "hate" all one's family members and one's own life also, must take one's cross and must forsake all one owns or one "cannot be my disciple." The entire point of this passage is that as long as one thinks anything may really be more valuable than fellowship with Jesus in his kingdom, one cannot learn from him. People who have not gotten the basic facts about their life straight will not do the things that make learning from Jesus possible and will never be able to understand the basic points in the lessons to be learned.

It is like a mathematics teacher in high school who might say to a student, "Verily, verily I say unto thee, except thou canst do decimals and fractions, thou canst in no wise do algebra." It is not that the teacher will not allow you to do algebra because you are a bad person; you just won't be able to do basic algebra if you are not in command of decimals and fractions.

So this counting of the cost is not a moaning and groaning session. "Oh how terrible it is that I have to value all of my 'wonderful' things (which are probably making life miserable and hopeless anyway) less than I do living in the kingdom! How terrible that I must be prepared actually to surrender them should that be called for!" The counting of the cost is to bring us to the point of clarity and decisiveness. It is to help us to see. Counting the cost is precisely what the persons with the pearl and the hidden treasure did. Out of it came their decisiveness and joy. It is decisiveness and joy that are the outcomes of the counting.

What this passage in Luke is about is clarity. It is not about misery or about some incredibly dreadful price that one must pay to be Jesus' apprentice. There is no such thing as a dreadful price for the "pearl" in question. Suffering for him is actually something we rejoice to be counted worthy of (Acts 5:41; Phil. 1:29). The point is simply that unless we clearly see the superiority of what we receive as his students over every other thing that might be valued, we cannot succeed in our discipleship to him. We will not be able to do the things required to learn his lessons and move ever deeper into a life that is his kingdom.

The same lesson, with a different background, is taught in the last chapter of John, where Jesus is working with his chosen right-hand man, Simon Peter. Peter had had a disastrous breakdown in his allegiance, as we know. But Jesus knew his man. Jesus prayed for Peter that his faith would not disappear. And it did not disappear. But Peter needed to grow in clarity about where he actually stood.

Jesus uses a fine play on the words we translate "love" just to help him get that clarity. After their breakfast on the beach, Jesus says to him, "Peter, do you love me more than these?" Perhaps he was pointing to the boat and fishing equipment, which had been Peter's livelihood, or perhaps to co-workers, friends or family standing around. And he uses here a form of the word agape, for the highest kind of love. Peter replies, "Yes, Lord, you know I love you." But in his reply he uses the word philo, that is, love of friend to friend. Jesus tells him, "Feed my lambs" (John 21:15).

The exact exchange is then repeated, except now Jesus says, "Shepherd my young sheep." This is not wasted time and breath. You want to understand that Jesus is teaching, bringing his student to clarity and a decision based thereon. Repetition and rephrasing are a way of deepening impact.

Then a third time Jesus asks, "Do you love me?" But this time he himself switches to philo. In other words he accepted the level where Peter was. But Peter was grieved that he kept asking, and perhaps also grieved at his own lack of agape. He replies, "Lord, you know everything, and you know that I love (philo) you." He acknowledged with sadness that Jesus knew exactly what the quality and level of his love was.

But Jesus nevertheless charges him with the responsibility of feeding his young sheep. And then he also proceeds to explain to him that his calling will mean death by crucifixion in his old age. Peter was then in a position to make his choice. He made his choice, and he never again turned back. He embraced the treasure and understood what an incredible bargain he was getting, crucifixion and all. He lived his life "believing in him, exulting with unutterable joy filled with glory" (1 Pet. 1:8). Peter thus came to understand this to be the natural condition of the disciple's soul, though he knew from experience it does not come quickly or easily.

Given clarity about the condition of soul that leads to choosing discipleship, what are practical steps we can take to bring strongly before us the joyous vision of the kingdom? True, that vision can come to us at God's initiative, through experiences that may be given to us. In fact, God's initiative will always be involved, for to see Jesus in his beauty and goodness is always a gift of grace. And then, of course, there may also be a role that other people play. But these are factors over which we have no direct control. What we want to know is what I can do if I have come to suspect it would be best for me to apprentice myself to Jesus. How can we come to admire Jesus sufficiently to "sell everything we have and buy the pearl of great value" with joy and excitement?

Ask. The first thing we should do is emphatically and repeatedly express to Jesus our desire to see him more fully as he really is. Remember, the rule of the kingdom is to ask. We ask to see him, not just as he is represented in the Gospels, but also as he has lived and lives through history and now, and in his reality as the one who literally holds the universe in existence. He will certainly be aware of our request, just as you would be aware of anyone expressing his or her desires to you in your house.

We should make our expression of desire a solemn occasion, giving at least a number of quiet hours or a day to it. It will also be good to write down our prayer for his help in seeing him. We should do this privately, of course, but then we should share what we have done with a knowledgeable minister or friend who could pray with us and talk with us about what we are doing.

Second, we should use every means at our disposal to come to see him more fully Several things might be mentioned here, but there are two in particular, and they are keyed to one of the most well-known statements Jesus ever made. In John 8 he says to those around him, "If you dwell in my word, you really are my apprentices. And you will know the truth, and the truth will liberate you." As the context makes clear, he is saying that we will be liberated from all of the bondage that is in human life through sin, and especially from that of self-righteous religion. Positively, we will be liberated into life in the kingdom of God.

And what does "dwelling or continuing" in his word mean? It means to center our lives upon his good news about the kingdom among us, about who is really well-off and who is not, and about true goodness of heart and how it expresses itself in action. We will fill our souls with the written Gospels. We will devote our attention to these teachings, in private study and inquiry as well as public instruction. And, negatively, we will refuse to devote our mental space and energy to the fruitless, even stupefying and degrading stuff that constantly clamors for our attention. We will attend to it only enough to avoid it.

But dwelling in his word is not just intensive and continuous study of the Gospels, though it is that. It is also puffing them into practice. To dwell in his word we must know it: know what it is and what it means. But we really dwell in it by putting it into practice. Of course, we shall do so very imperfectly at first. At that point we have perhaps not even come to be a committed disciple. We are only thinking about how to become one. Nevertheless, we can count on Jesus to meet us in our admittedly imperfect efforts to put his word into practice.

Where his word is, there he is. He does not leave his words to stand alone in the world. And his loveliness and strength will certainly be personally revealed to those who will simply make the effort to do what his words indicate.

In these efforts to see Jesus more clearly we should not dabble but be thoughtfully serious. We should find a reliable and readable version of the four Gospels, such as the Revised New English Bible or the New Revised Standard Version. The Living Bible is also good, but it probably should be read with one of the other versions. If we can plan a week in a comfortable retreat, or at least several days, then we can read through the four Gospels repeatedly, jotting down notes and thoughts on a pad as we go.

If over a period of several days or weeks we were to read the Gospels through as many times as we could, consistent with sensible rest and relaxation, that alone would enable us to see Jesus with a clarity that can make the full transition into discipleship possible. We can count on him to meet us in that transition and not leave us to struggle with it on our own, for he is far more interested in it than we can ever be. He always sees clearly what is at issue. We rarely do.

There are a few other things we can do that will help us toward discipleship to Jesus -- not least, seriously looking at the lives of others who truly have apprenticed themselves to him. Often his radiance in such people gives us very bright and strong impressions of his own greatness. To look closely at a St. Francis, a John Wesley, a David Brainerd, an Albert Schweitzer or one of his many well-known Teresas, for example, is to see something that elevates our vision and our hope toward Jesus himself. We should, however, make sure to soak our souls in the Gospels before turning to lives of his other followers.

But the final step in becoming a disciple is decision. We become a life student of Jesus by deciding. When we have achieved clarity on "the costs" -- on what is gained and what is lost by becoming or failing to become his apprentice -- an effective decision is then possible. But still it must be made. It will not just happen. We do not drift into discipleship.

This may seem a simple point, but today it is commonly overlooked or disregarded, even by those who think of themselves as having a serious interest in Jesus and his kingdom. I rarely find any individual who has actually made a decision to live as a student of Jesus in the manner I've discussed. For most professing Christians, that is simply not something that has presented itself clearly to their minds. Current confusions about what it means, and the failure of leaders and teachers to provide instruction on it and to stress the issue of discipleship, make that almost inevitable.

But in the last analysis we fail to be disciples only because we do not decide to be. We do not intend to be disciples. It is the power of the decision and the intention over our life that is missing. We should apprentice ourselves to Jesus in a solemn moment, and we should let those around us know that we have done so.

In William Law's book A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, the author asks "why the generality of Christians fall so far short of the holiness and devotion of Christianity." To set the scene for his answer to this question, he raises a parallel question. Vulgarity and swearing was then an especially prominent feature of male behavior, even among professing Christians. So he asks, "How comes it that two in three of men are guilty of so gross and profane a sin as this is?" It is not that they do not know it is wrong, he points out, nor is it that they are helpless to avoid it. The answer is, they do not intend to please God in this matter:

For let a man but have so much piety as to intend to please God in all the actions of his life as the happiest and best thing in the world, and then he will never swear more. It will be as impossible for him to swear whilst he feels this intention within himself as it is impossible for a man that intends to please his prince to go up and abuse him to his face.

And it is the simple want of that intention to please God, Law points out, that explains why "you see such a mixture of sin and folly in the lives even of the better sort of people."

It was this general intention that made the primitive Christians such eminent instances of piety, that made the goodly fellowship of the Saints and all the glorious army of martyrs and confessors. And if you will here stop and ask yourself why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it.

Now perhaps we are not used to being spoken to so frankly, and it might be easy to take offense. But on the other hand, it could well prove to be a major turning point in our life if we would, with Law's help, ask ourselves if we really do intend to be life students of Jesus. Do we really intend to do and be all of the high things we profess to believe in? Have we decided to do them? When did we decide it? And how did we implement that decision?

Living with Alzheimer’s: Body, Soul and the Remembering Community

The way people deal with Alzheimer's disease is greatly influenced not only by theological beliefs but also by the nature of this particular illness, an illness that the late medical essayist Lewis Thomas in 1981 labeled the "disease of the century." One should not downplay the horrors associated with any illness. But Alzheimer's and other dementias are particularly pernicious.

Many illnesses deprive a person only of the present: one becomes ill, feels more or less miserable depending upon the nature and severity of the illness, seeks treatment, and recovers after a relatively brief period of time, suffering the loss only of that time when he or she was actually ill. Other incurable illnesses take away not only a person's present but also the future by prematurely ending the individual's life. Alzheimer's disease, however, robs the sufferer not only of the present and the future but also of the past as all memory of prior events, relationships and persons slips away.

Clearly, then, the concepts of time, memory and history are central in any theological consideration of this illness and its impact on those it touches. In contrast to the Eastern religions, which affirm the existence of an eternal world distinct from and even in opposition to the world of time, the Western religious tradition is based on the belief that the eternal has actively intervened in time. These interventions constitute a sacred history, the history of the mirabilia Dei, the "marvelous deeds of God," which lie at the heart of the faith that Christians affirm.

The prospect of losing memory, of no longer being able to recall this sacred history, creates a significant problem for such a belief system. Oliver Sacks, in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, quotes film maker Luis Buñuel's remarks on memory. Although he is speaking in a purely personal vein, Buñuel could just as well be reflecting the classical Western religious tradition:

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all. . . . Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.

Are human beings really nothing without memory? Or is there perhaps something more? Sacks later quotes a letter from A. R. Luria, a researcher famous for his work with amnesia patients.

But [human beings] do not consist of memory alone. [They have] feeling, will, sensibilities, moral being -- matters of which neuropsychology cannot speak. And it is here, beyond the realm of impersonal psychology, that you may find ways to touch [them], and change [them]. . . . Neuropsychologically, there is little or nothing you can do; but in the realm of the Individual, there may be much you can do.

If modern scientific medicine cannot speak on this matter, the question necessarily arises: How can the Western religious tradition help guide people through what many persons with Alzheimer's disease and their caregivers experience as, if not a dark night of the soul, a dark night of the mind?

St. Augustine refers to human beings as terra animata, that is, "animated earth." (I am indebted here and for a number of points that follow to Gilbert Meilaender's essay Terra es aninia: On Having a Life," Hasting Center Report 23 [July-August 1993].) This reference may surprise those who cannot see Augustine as anything other than the source par excellence within the Christian tradition of a Manichaean, Neoplatonic dualism that denigrates the importance of the physical body in favor of the soul. Augustine's language, however, should not come as a surprise to anyone who knows the Adam and Eve story, the second account of creation in Genesis 2, with which Augustine was clearly very familiar. (It serves as the basis for his interpretation of human sexuality--though what he did with the story in that regard is lamentable).

In fact, Augustine's discussion of this critical section of the Bible is the context in which he uses the phrase terra animata:

"To earth you will go" [Gen. 3:19] means, we may be sure, "On losing your life you will go back to what you were before you received life," that is, "when the breath of life has left you will be what you were before you received that breath (for, as we know, it was into a face of earth that God "breathed the breath of life" when "man was made a living soul"). It is tantamount to saying, "You are animated earth, which you were not before: you will be inanimate earth, as you were before."

What does it mean that when God created the human race the procedure of choice was the forcing of God's breath into a body fashioned from the earth?

Most fundamentally, it appears that the "breath of life" (in Hebrew, nishmathayyim) that God breathes into the man (ha-'adam) cannot be equated with the mind, the cognitive faculties, rationality, self-awareness or anything of the kind. Rather, it is exactly what the Hebrew says it is, the "force of life," vitality, the animating principle that turns what previously was simply terra, a lump of clay, into terra animata, living, breathing, animated flesh.

Only after the inspiration of this life force does the creature that God has fashioned from the earth become a "living being" -- a description, not incidentally, that is shared with the "creeping things" of Genesis 1:20 and the animals and birds of Genesis 2:19 and 9:15-16 that God creates in much the same fashion. It is clear from this common terminology that it is not human reason or cognitive capacity that constitutes the endowment from God that gives humans life and makes them more than mere bits of dirt.

Second, the later course of this idea in the Hebrew scriptures suggests that the living being that a human becomes through God's gift of the life force ceases to exist only when that person dies in the conventional understanding of the word, not when the person loses self-consciousness or the ability to make rational decisions. For example, in Genesis 35:18, Rachel's death is described this way: "As her life-force was departing (for she died). . ." (author's translation). Whatever God gives to humans that makes them living beings continues with them until they actually die, not merely until they lose their cognitive faculties.

This story of human creation as terra animata reflects and probably underlies the biblical view of human nature itself, a view that is quite helpful in dealing with the issues that Alzheimer's disease raises. Although the Hebrew scriptures use such terms as "flesh" and "spirit" ("body" and "soul"), they do not depict these as separate substances that only coincidentally or unfortunately cohere. This is the view most people today tend to assume when they hear such terms, and it is based on Greek ideas that have infiltrated Western culture. Rather, in the biblical view these two terms describe interdependent elements that together make up the human being, both of which are necessary for human existence.

The late Paul Ramsey put it well when he wrote that the human being "is an embodied person in such a way that he is in important respects his body. He is the body of his soul no less than he is the soul (mind, will) of his body." Instead of considering the soul (or will or personality) to be the "real" person, and the body to be something almost incidental that the person "has," it is more accurate according to the biblical understanding to say that human beings are bodies, that they are both animated, "ensouled" bodies and incarnate, "enfleshed" souls.

Thus the mental and physical activities of the individual are merely different manifestations of the same underlying "living being." The person does not have a body that is somehow fundamentally different from and even alien to the soul that exists within it, as if the "person" were more elemental, a distinct existent that is a possessor of the body. Rather the person is a body that is alive, animated by the life force that comes from God. In short, the "person" does not exist apart from the body, which is the outward manifestation of the total reality that includes it. (To get a feel for the point being made here, ask yourself, "Exactly what is it that I really mean when I use the word 'I'?")

In the original Hebrew understanding, then, the body cannot be seen as a prison from which the soul struggles to escape: a person simply perishes if body and soul are separated because what is usually thought of today as the soul is really just the principle of life itself -- that which makes the body alive. So inextricably are they united that when the life force departs, the body dies and nothing is left as a separate entity to pass on to another existence.

Christians of course believe that something does go on living after this life is over, but it is important to note exactly what it is that Christians affirm in this regard -- not the "immortality of the soul" (a rather Greek notion) but the "resurrection of the body" (a very Hebraic concept).

Why is this significant? If body and soul are inextricably linked to make up the human person, then the only eternal life possible must be as a body because there simply is no such thing as an independent soul that can exist disembodied. Embodiedness is essential to who human beings are because it is only as bodies that they exist. Attempting to describe exactly what that resurrection body will be like can be nothing but idle speculation -- no one can possibly know--but Christians do affirm that eternal existence with God will be in some kind of bodily form, not as ethereal spirits (see 1 Corinthians 15 for Paul's struggle with this issue).

What happened to this rather simple, straightforward biblical understanding of human nature? The main dismantler of this understanding was the philosopher René Descartes. He proposed that all reality is divided into two realms: res extensa, the world of bodies characterized by extension and rigid adherence to precise mathematical laws, and res cogitans, the world of unextended, thinking, spiritual substance that is independent of the first realm. Because living bodies are extended, they must be part of the res extensa. Animals are in fact machines or automata, totally determined by physical laws, and the same judgment applies to human bodies, at least insofar as those bodies function largely automatically and without conscious attention.

Descartes arrived at his dualistic view of reality via the method of universal doubt, in which the only thing unable to be doubted is the doubting self (hence his famous dictum, Cognito, ergo sum -- " I think, therefore I am" -- an identification of disembodied thought with "real" existence). This approach led to a dualistic view of human beings: the individual is composed of two substances, an extended machine for a body and an independent, unextended mind. One can easily guess which realm came to be seen as more important -- in fact, the only valuable realm.

If the body is regarded simply as a machine (even an amazingly complex one), it is proper for the scientific mind to observe it only from without, especially since Cartesian dualism suggests there is an unbridgeable gap between the observing mind and the observed matter. Thus today when minds observe a human "machine" that lacks the traits that such minds recognize as akin to themselves -- rationality, cognition, self-directed will -- and when those minds are predisposed to think the only valuable part of the person is precisely that which has been lost, it is not hard in the Cartesian scheme to take the next step and deny humanity to such an entity.

What is really at issue, then, is the question of what constitutes the person, the individual self. Meilaender observes that the prevailing dualistic view has entailed two questionable assumptions. The first is that humans exist in some kind of timeless, disembodied form that is the "real self," an essential "I" somehow separate from the body and all the experiences that that body provides. The second assumption is that there is one particular time in each persons life when "I am really I," a period toward which all that has gone before has pointed and after which all that follows is somehow less than the essential "I ," even to the point that that "I" actually is lost.

The problem with this understanding of personhood is that it separates the "person" from the biological nature or embodied self that is the only locus and vehicle for the personal history that constitutes living. It is interesting that an age that claims to have moved beyond metaphysics, that is almost universally characterized as materialistic and historical, has arrived at a concept of the person that is thoroughly divorced from both the material body and the history of that individual's life.

Indeed, it is rather ironic that a society that prides itself on its reliance on scientific method, that grounds its approach to truth in a reductionistic view that claims the only objective reality is the material, that has rejected the notion of timeless Truth in favor of relativity in nearly every aspect of human life one can imagine -- that such a society in effect disregards the material and historical (in this case human bodies and the events they have experienced that make up people's personal histories) in favor of some immaterial, essentialist notion of personhood. As Meilaender observes, "How wrong we would be to suppose that ours is a materialistic age, when everything we hold central to our person is separated from the animated earth that is the body."

Of course, human beings are not just bodies, but they are assuredly and undeniably that. Indeed, it may even be argued that the body is the most important of the aspects of personhood, at least as far as earthly life is concerned. That is, if a person's body is destroyed (or its vitality lost), no one would claim that that being is still a human person in the sense in which that term is normally used, that is, to denote someone who is automatically considered to possess a special value that cannot be wantonly violated, a being worthy of protection from harm, and so forth. To use a rather graphic illustration: few would claim that stabbing a corpse constitutes murder (though the case argued above is supported by the fact that even after the vitality of the body is lost, even after the "person" is clearly gone, the body still retains enough importance even in contemporary thought to generate the widespread feeling that it should be treated with respect -- witness the deep concern about recovering and identifying the bodies of victims of air crashes).

On the other hand, if that same person were to retain bodily integrity and vitality but to lose consciousness, rationality and the capacity to make autonomous choices, most people would simply take the commonsense position that of course this is still a human being even if some or even most of these capacities have been lost (though some people are beginning to argue there is no longer a human person at stake). Serious questions, not to mention criminal charges, would be directed toward the knife wielder.

Indeed, if memory is so important, one has to ask where those memories came from in the first place. And the answer is unarguable: they came from experiences that the person has had in and through his or her body. The body is the only avenue human beings have for interacting with the world and other people, and thus for creating memories and a personal history. Is it not curious that many people today are so quick to disregard this fact and to consider the "person" to be lost when the memories are lost, with no regard for the value of the organism that permitted those memories to be made in the first place or for the importance of that organism's ongoing personal history?

Quite instructive in this regard is a central doctrine that most Christians affirm every Sunday and that was part of Jewish belief in Jesus' day, namely, the "resurrection of the body." This idea, whatever one believes it to mean, is a ringing affirmation of the position just articulated. If the condition in which the believer is going to spend eternity with God is in some way embodied (though not necessarily in a physical body as experienced in this life), it is hard to imagine a stronger statement of the importance of this aspect of human nature.

If the body is important enough to be resurrected in some form for eternity, to be the apparently essential vehicle for that eternal relationship with the divine that lies at the heart of the Christian promise, it ought to be seen as fairly significant in this life. Because of the deeply rooted dualism described earlier, however, to the extent moderns believe in eternal life they seem much more comfortable with the idea of a disembodied immortal soul than a resurrected eternal body.

Whether that preference makes more sense or whether it is easier to conceive and to explain how such a thing might be, it certainly cannot be seen as more in line with the teachings of the basic documents of the Christian faith. Neither, incidentally, as Reinhold Niebuhr once pointed out, is there any more empirical evidence for it than there is for some kind of bodily resurrection.

The doctrine of the incarnation, the affirmation that in the human being Jesus, God is in some mysterious way directly present on earth, is the demonstration par excellence of the value of the body as an essential part of who human beings are. Though God could (and did) communicate with human beings in other ways, "when the fullness of time had come" God chose to assume human form -- to become embodied -- in order to redeem humankind. And it was quite important to the early church to make clear to all that this Jesus was "fully human," not just the "real" Spirit-God seeming to inhabit a body. When this view is taken together with the doctrines of creation and resurrection of the body, it is reasonable to conclude that even when rational function is lost, God may still value the human body enough to stay in some kind of relationship to it.

Perhaps Augustine's view of the terra animata, which is really just another expression of the biblical view of the human person as a psychophysical unity, is a more accurate reflection of the reality that human beings both experience in themselves and observe in others. The "I" is really the sum total of one's experiences, the natural history of a life, however long or short, that can be lived on this earth only in and through the body, in both its growth and its decline. Each human life consists of a story that began before that person was aware of it and therefore presumably can continue after he or she again ceases to be aware of it.

As Meilaender points out, even after a person ceases to be aware of her life story, that story continues physically -- in the body's ongoing ingestion and utilization of nourishment, in its struggles against injury and infection, and simply in the ongoing presence of the body that has always been the location of the "I" that loved ones and friends have known. It continues interpersonally in their ongoing interactions with the person, if only as his or her caregivers and even if his or her contributions to the relationship are limited or have ceased altogether. And it continues socially because that person does still occupy a place in the community, however limited (to put it crassly, someone's survivors cannot collect on life insurance or distribute the estate just because the person has lost his or her cognitive capacity). Thus even when one's rational capacities fade or fail completely, the "I" that consists of much more than those capacities continues to exist -- diminished, to be sure, but still worthy of the dignity and respect due to all those who are created in God's own image.

When one sees the word "memory" in connection with Alzheimer's disease, the obvious (and correct) assumption is that the patient's memory is at issue. After all, one of the worst aspects of this illness (many would say the worst) is that it robs its victims of their memory and thus raises the tough questions that have been explored here concerning personal identity and even personhood. So it is clearly appropriate to have concentrated up to this point on the impact of Alzheimer's disease on the individual.

But it is not just the memory of the person with Alzheimer's that matters. Throughout the history of the "peoples of the book," the collective memory of the community has been central to believers' self-understanding. Indeed, in certain periods this memory was probably more important than any sense of individual identity. In Christianity the central sacrament is precisely a collective remembrance of the life (and death) of one individual; in Judaism the key rite is a similar community recollection of the formative event for the covenant people, the Passover preceding the exodus.

It's appropriate to conclude with a brief consideration of the guidance that might come from a more corporate understanding of the word "memory" for dealing with those individuals who may be losing (or have already lost) theirs. It goes without saying that contemporary American society is very individualistic, almost certainly the most radically so in human history. At the heart of the American approach to life is the deeply held belief that each person is a discrete, self-sufficient monad whose greatest achievement is to "do one's own thing" according to the light of one's own reason (or often, it seems, one's emotions). This attitude is reflected, for example, in the fact that the key value for contemporary bioethics is "autonomy." Certainly one would not want to advocate the loss of individuality and autonomy--recent events in Eastern Europe and elsewhere seem to have demonstrated that human beings can have these values taken from them for only so long before they must demand them back. Nonetheless, many people today think the U.S. has gone too far in this regard.

Once again, a helpful corrective is to he found in the basic documents of the Christian faith, especially the Hebrew' scriptures. In ancient Israel, one of the reasons that the "elders" were so highly respected was that they were the depositories of the memories of the covenant people. The continued existence (or at least well-being) of the people depended on remembering that Yahweh had intervened in a unique way in history on their behalf and had given them certain responsibilities to fulfill. A particularly clear illustration is in Deuteronomy 32:7, when Moses takes the people of Israel to task for their faithlessness to the God who had been ever faithful to them: "Remember the days of old, consider the years long past; ask your father, and he will inform you; your elders, and they will tell you." Moses' emphasis is on the importance of the memories of the elders, who had lived long and experienced much (including frequently the "sacred history" itself). It is exactly these kinds of memories that are progressively lost in Alzheimer's disease.

Another responsibility of the elders, however, was to produce offspring and convey to them the memories of the people, which of course would then include the memory of those elders and their role in the history of the people. In short, if people today can overcome their sense of radical individualism enough to see themselves as truly part of the community then the community can not only remember them when they are no longer here but also can remember for them when they can not do so for themselves.

Caregivers can be not only givers of care but bestowers of a kind of immortality by recalling for others around them what the person with Alzheimer's disease no longer can recall in order to strengthen the remembering of that person and to keep his or her role in the story of the community alive in the corporate memory. In fact, many caregivers may miss out on an important opportunity in this regard. Because short-term memory seems to fade before long-term memory in those with dementia, many tend to recall and repeat stories and experiences from their distant past. The common reaction of caregivers is to get irritated and frustrated at hearing these "old stories" repeated. Perhaps those caring for the person should instead listen carefully to and even record these stories and learn from them. After all, many of the stories concern times when the caregivers were not around, and if they are allowed to be lost with the fading memory of the person with Alzheimer's disease, then that part of the family's and the broader community's history is gone forever.

In addition, caregivers need to record their own struggles, sufferings and triumphs, because those also are important parts of the history not only of the caregiver but also of the person being cared for. If they are lost, then that person is in a sense lost even more.

It is also possible to speak of God's memory in this light. Whether the individual remembers, or even when the community remembers for the individual, the Western religious tradition certainly affirms that God remembers. Some comfort, therefore, can be found in the fact that God's memory is unfailing, even if that of any given human being is defective or even totally lost. God never forgets.

Faith and Modern Humanity: Two Approaches

More often than we’re comfortable admitting, I think, we find ourselves feeling what many recent theologians say we should: a twinge of uneasiness at speaking of heaven outside of church; the sense that Jesus’ death and resurrection can’t quite be brought to bear on our daily routine, our social life, our moneymaking, our recreation; an inability to see with the heart the goodness of the Good News; a certain emptiness in our prayers. Our faith lacks the confidence, the clarity, the childlike enthusiasm which we seem to find in tile biblical writers and Christians in other ages of the church. What causes this condition in us? What is it that puts these brakes upon our faith?

This question has exercised many theologians in our time, and diagnoses of the complaint, along with prescriptions for its cure, have been legion. A diagnosis which some people find especially attractive is set forth starkly and forthrightly by Rudolf Bultmann. Another, powerfully contrasting with Bultmann’s, is embodied in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard, whose name has often been mistakenly associated with that of Bultmann.

Speaking Another Language

In a nutshell, Bultmann traces our uneasiness with New Testament Christianity to a fundamental flaw in the New Testament: the message is expressed in a "language which is not that of modern people and which, moreover, is basically incoherent. This language is not Greek or Hebrew or Aramaic. The fact that these languages are generally not understood by modern people is a problem quickly remedied by a competent linguistics scholar. No, the "language" in which Bultmann thinks the New Testament is written is one that most of us have never heard of unless we’ve read Bultmann: he calls it "mythology." We are a little surprised, perhaps, to find that in addition to Greek and Hebrew, St. Paul also spoke mythology. But according to Bultmann, it is because Paul did speak and write this language, so foreign to the modern world, that we today do not understand him and are unable to put his message into practice in our lives.

How did ancient People speak mythology, and what meaning were they able to convey by employing it? Roughly, Bultmann describes an experience something like this one:

In extreme situations the meaning of a person life as a whole can be called into question. I was a student when national guard troops shot and killed students on the campus of Kent State University. I remember vividly the attitude engendered in some, at least momentarily, by that event. They were already in opposition to the establishment’s conduct of the Vietnam war, but most of them still had plenty at stake in the American way of life: it provided them comforts, potential careers, values, ways of understanding themselves, which they were far from ready to give up.

But when the news arrived that this establishment had actually killed some of their fellow students, it was as though the whole system of values and expectations associated with their personal history as Americans was shattered; as though their past had fallen away, leaving them suspended in value-space, without the security of an "orientation." they also found, however, that this shattering of life’s old meaning was a cloud with a silver lining, so to speak. As they sometimes put it, they had been "radicalized." Precisely in the dying of the old self and its values, they found a freedom for ethical activities, and a resigned acceptance of whatever the future might hold for them -- a freedom and acceptance not possible for a person clinging tightly (and perhaps desperately) to his or her past.

Now Bultmann believes that the disciples had such an experience when they beheld, hanging upon the cross, the man in whom all their hopes had recently come to rest. In his death they experienced the shattering of their world; but at the same time they experienced a new freedom so radical that they came to speak of being given "new life," of being a "new creation."

If the biblical writers had stuck with metaphors like these, we would have no difficulty in understanding them, nor, perhaps, in gaining a freedom like that of the disciples when we confront the message that arose from their experience. Unfortunately the biblical writers did not use only metaphors to express their new self-understanding; instead, according to Bultmann, they spoke as persons of their time were bound to speak of such matters: they spoke mythology. To express the experience they had had in facing up to the cross of Jesus, they said, "Jesus was raised bodily from the dead, and sits at the right hand of God the Father"; they said, "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself"; they said, "Jesus is the Son of God"; they said, "Jesus died for our sins."

Help from the Demythologizers

Now these statements look as though they are about who Jesus is, or what he did, or what happened to him, or where he is. But in Bultmann’s view, they are not really about such things. They are examples of the language of mythology; they are a way (and indeed a very misleading way) of speaking about that experience of freedom which the disciples had when their master was crucified, and which modern people can have too. For ancient people, evidently, this was a natural way of speaking.

But, says Bultmann, modern persons hear these sentences in a very different way. It does not easily occur to us that this may be a way of speaking of one’s self-understanding. Rather, we immediately think that these must be statements about Jesus. And so we puzzle over them, and wonder just how what they say can be true, or we may even believe them (whatever that might mean). But in any case, we fail completely to understand them, because the form of expression is so very odd. Since we have no clue that the words describe the experience of radical freedom, they are utterly useless in helping us to have that experience.

The fault lies with the New Testament, which hides its own light under the bushel of a malformed language. And so, if we moderns are to share in the blessings of which the New Testament speaks, we need the help of someone who understands the language of mythology and can translate it into a language with which the modern world is familiar. We need a helper who can tell us the real meaning of expressions like "Jesus Christ," "resurrection," "God," "heaven" and "creation."

That helper is, of course, Rudolf Bultmann himself, along with all the other demythologizers of our time. So the cure for the modern person’s uneasiness with Christianity is a special technique, an operation to be performed by professionals upon the language of the New Testament.

I have argued in detail in a recent book (Rudolf Bultmann’s Theology: A Critical Interpretation [Eerdmans, 1976]) that Bultmann’s understanding of how language works is entirely confused, that the philosophy on which he bases his theology makes nonsense of the concept of humanity, and that his program of "translation" turns Christianity inside out. I shall not rehearse those arguments here. My present purpose is only to sketch roughly his approach to the problem of modern unbelief, and to contrast it with Kierkegaard’s. So let’s now have a look at Kierkegaard.

Armed Against the Spirit of the Age

In a nutshell, Kierkegaard traces our uneasiness with New Testament Christianity not to any deficiency in the New Testament, nor to any inadequacy in orthodox theology, but to a malformation of the "heart" of modern people. What is needed is not a revision of the language of faith or an updated "theology" but a reordering of our emotions, passions and attitudes such that we will have a use in our own life for the beliefs of Christianity and the language of Christian faith. The trouble with many of us modern people is that our most fundamental interests, the deepest motives of our lives, are not sufficiently congruent with the demands and blessings of the Christian gospel to make for that gospel a firm and welcome place in our hearts. Where we ought to be uncomfortable, namely with the ways of the world and the sin in our hearts, we find ourselves quite often at ease; and where we ought to be joyful and at peace, namely with Jesus and the prospect of his kingdom, we find ourselves often more than a little nervous and defensive.

Now since our difficulty with the gospel is not a technical one, but rather one which might be called "moral" or "psychological" or "personal," the task as Kierkegaard sees it will have to be one of addressing each sufferer individually. There is no way to cure the whole age at once, as there would be with Bultmann’s method. Each person who wishes to become a Christian must be led along his or her own path of personal growth. With this purpose in mind, Kierkegaard wrote a nontheological and largely nontechnical (though certainly not easy to rea~d~) literature aimed at the upbuilding of the Christian heart.

Kierkegaard was persistently aware, as few Christian thinkers have been, of the incompatibility of Christian attitudes with those we so naturally and easily learn from our social environment. Love of neighbor is very different from being a jolly good fellow. The peace which passes understanding is almost incomparable with the peace of having one’s house mortgage paid off. Knowing one’s sins to be forgiven is utterly unlike the easy forgetfulness of our guilt encouraged by popular psychology. Trusting in God has hardly anything in common with calculating the probabilities of a successful future. And in each of these cases the attitudes in question are not only different; they are also, in one way or another, in corn petition with each other. To be a Christian is to die to the world. (And so for a Christian, to become a worldling is to die to the Spirit of God.)

Kierkegaard’s literature takes constant account of the many ways Christians are daily seduced by influences they hardly recognize in their environment, and it points its arrows directly at the seduction. (By the way, Kierkegaard is clear that ensconcing oneself in a monastery or Christian ghetto is no protection against the world; for the world’s spiritual evil is no less virulent there.) Kierkegaard’s literature aims, to provide an antidote against the subtle poisons of the spirit of the age. It aims to drive a wedge between Christians and the world which is so close to them that they fail to see it and keep their guard up against it, And so Kierkegaard’s program is exactly the opposite of Bultmann’s: it is not to change the gospel to conform it to the spirit of the age, but to help individuals who desire a relationship with God to arm themselves against the spirit of the age.

Thinking About Ways of Thinking

How can Kierkegaard’s writings hope to serve the purpose of an antienvironment therapy for Christians? Kierkegaard observed that all peculiarly human attitudes depend on ways of thinking about oneself and the world; any attitude which we might call religious or unreligious, ethical or unethical, depends on certain concepts in terms of which we think about ourselves and the world. Now the most basic concepts which determine our attitudes often go unnamed and undescribed. They are like the spectacles hanging on our noses; everything we see and do may depend on them, but we seldom take a look at the glasses themselves.

But if some very basic attitudes which we have observed from our social environment are antagonistic to Christianity, then it may be that the only way we will be able to return to Christianity, or to become Christians in the first place, is to step back from our habitual ways of thinking about our affairs, and think about our ways of thinking. By doing this, we may get free from the environmental attitudes that hold us in bondage. It is precisely this thinking about our ways of thinking which an earnest reading of Kierkegaard’s literature leads us through. And it is in this way that his writings serve as a Christian therapy against our social environment. They cause us to know what our attitudes are, and to know also what other attitudes (notably the Christian ones) it is possible for us to take. This thinking about thinking fosters a kind of self-awareness without which our Christian development would be stymied.

Kierkegaard disclaimed all religious authority (even that of the preacher -- thus he refused to call his Christian addresses "sermons") and denied that he knew anything about God beyond what was revealed in the Bible. He did not produce a new theology. But though he developed no new theological concepts, he developed some concepts in ways they had never been developed before. The purpose of these concepts is therapeutic rather than informative. We do not need more information about God than is available in Scripture; what we need, rather, is to grow spiritually in such a way that we have a place for that information in our lives. Kierkegaard did not intend his writings to tell us anything new, but only to remind us of things we already know. He described himself as a poet in the service of Christianity.

Slaves to Social Context

The concepts which Kierkegaard employed in his therapeutic effort are such ones as "paradox," "the aesthetic" and "the ethical," "despair," "anxiety," "the individual" and "subjectivity." Existentialists such as Bultmann have largely misunderstood these ideas because, it seems, it did not occur to them that Kierkegaard might be doing something other than developing a latter-day theology or theory of humanity. But let me now say a few words about "the individual" and "subjectivity," to illustrate how these concepts work.

The Individual. Christians are always faced with the temptation to overrate the opinion of other human beings, and to try to be pleasing to other people, to the peril of their relationship with God (see John 5:44, Gal. 2:11 ff). If we desire the prestige which comes with wealth and ability and high position -- if we so desire it that we would be crushed were it denied us or taken from us -- then we are worshipers not of the true God, but of human beings. Kierkegaard thought that this tendency of the human spirit had become even stronger in the modern period, being encouraged by certain philosophic and scientific ideas, and perhaps by sociological factors. So throughout his writings, and in a great variety of ways, he elaborated his concept of the individual, of the person who is free to grow in Christian love, hope, joy and peace because he or she is not a spiritual slave to social context.

Kierkegaard is not gainsaying Christian fellowship or the church (though he is warning us against some pitfalls). He is not pushing rugged individualism, or capitalist economics, or existentialism, or romanticism, or any psychological theory. His aim, rather, is to make us aware of the pervasiveness and destructiveness of this attitude which is so fundamental to everything we do, so fundamental that we don’t even recognize it as an attitude: the worship of human beings.

The Theoretical Attitude

Subjectivity. Another attitudinal disease which Kierkegaard diagnosed in modern people is their tendency (one might almost say compulsion) to turn the most important thoughts into disinterested theoretical or historical knowledge. One can see this tendency at work in the modern seminary curriculum. The student comes to seminary with a passion for Christ and his kingdom, but after three years that passion has changed, subtly but definitely. One is still interested in Christ, but now one puts it differently: the student is interested in "Christology," or "the doctrine of the incarnation," or "the historical Jesus," or "the synoptic problem." The interest has shifted from a personal interest to a more academic one.

This theoretical attitude, which comes so naturally to modern scientific humankind, is likely to be far more destructive to Christianity than any attack that the atheists might launch, because it can cut the very heart out of the Christian life -- and in such a way that the individual does not at all think of himself or herself as having given up the faith.

Kierkegaard calls this attitude "objectivity," and its opposite "subjectivity." Subjectivity is not anti-intellectualism; it is not a belief that there are no truths or that we cannot know any, and not a theory of religion like that of Feuerbach or Bultmann. Subjectivity is a way of thinking which, unlike disinterested inquiry (i.e., "objectivity"), is congruent with ethical and Christian concepts.

The point of concepts like right and wrong is that 1 should distinguish right from wrong with a view to doing right and shunning wrong. Although I can theorize about right and wrong, I cannot only theorize and still remain an ethical person. There is an essential use for ethical concepts, and it is not that of disinterested inquiry, but the situation in which I passionately want what is right and hate what is evil; that is, the essential use for ethical concepts is subjective.

Subjectivity in relation to the gospel words about Jesus Christ is the attitude in which I accept him as my savior, in which I yield to him, trusting him for my relationship with God, in which I pray to him and organize my life with the end in view of pleasing him; objectivity in relation to him is the attitude in which I investigate him, or wonder whether what he said was true. It is easy to see that the correct use of the name Jesus Christ is a subjective one; if I am to become a Christian, at some point I must abandon the objective attitude.

Getting Spiritual Distance

By giving scholarly authority to some beliefs which modern people, in their complacency, are already overinclined to adopt, Bultmann’s work has encouraged self-deception and confusion in the church. To become free from his influence, it is important, I think, that theologians and pastors understand his work.

Curiously enough, that man who is sometimes said to be the source of Rudolf Bultmann’s ideas, Søren Kierkegaard, can be instrumental in liberating us from Bultmann’s way of thinking. For he can help us to get some spiritual distance on our cultural situation; he can increase our awareness of those aspects of our modern consciousness which cut the heart out of our Christian experience, and so help to free us from them; he can help engender in us a sense of humor about ourselves which comes from taking a less contemporary and more eternal perspective -- a perspective in which our love of God, our gratefulness to Christ and our concern for our neighbor will have a chance to grow.

Tempering the Spirit of Wrath: Anger and the Christian Life

Molly and Mort have been married since Monday. For months they have planned a honeymoon tour of Kansas. On Tuesday they got as far as Indianapolis. They bedded down in the Ramada Inn, and were set to make Topeka by nightfall on Wednesday. Molly has heard so much about Topeka. She is sure this is going to be a perfectly wonderful beginning to a storybook honeymoon. But now Mort, returning to the room, has a sheepish look on his face.

"What's up?" Molly asks. "Are we all ready to go?" "I'm awfully sorry," says Mort. "For safe keeping I set the keys to the rental car just inside the trunk while I loaded it. And you know when I next remembered they were there? It was the split second before I heard that trunk lid snap shut as firm and final as my decision to marry little Molly-melon." To hide his embarrassment, interrupt the line of vision between their eyes and protect himself from the emotion that he feels rising like a mighty tide in his sprightly bride, he approaches her for a kiss. (Mort, I might mention, is more mellow than Molly.)

Molly is in no mood for kisses, and becomes less so when they discover that the locksmith isn't available until 4:00 P.M. The hope of Topeka by nightfall is dead. Molly is mad. Not to be able to get to Topeka tonight is very bad. You could say she is frustrated: the circumstances are contrary to her wishes. You could also say she is disappointed: she was expecting something wonderful and now sees that it won't happen. But her emotion is more than irritation or disappointment. It is anger. In addition to seeing the circumstances as bad, she sees somebody as culpable.

Molly's anger is like a double spotlight: it shines on the evil that has befallen her, and it shines on the responsible and blameworthy originator of that evil, and his name is Mort. Mort appears as a bad agent, and not just a bad agent, but a responsibly bad agent -- a blameworthy one. And to be blameworthy is to be worthy of punishment. In Molly's anger, Mort appears to deserve to be hurt. And this means that she would like to hurt him, or at least would enjoy seeing him hurt.

Now this sounds nasty, and many people resist such a description. They say, "When I'm angry at somebody, I don't want to hurt him, nor would I enjoy seeing him hurt; I'm just angry, that's all." My point is not that whenever you're angry, you want to devastate the offender, murder him or see him subjected to excruciating torture. Molly wishes nothing of the sort for Mort. But she does want him to suffer. She would like to detect in him a little more anguish about closing the trunk lid on those keys. And chances are she will say things to him that are intended to annoy him and make him squirm. You needn't do physical harm to punish somebody. A dirty look, a slight snub, a little edge in the voice, the neglect of some little habit of kindness -- these are actions characteristic of anger, and they function as punishment. Of course, really big-time anger may lead to mayhem and murder.

I noted that Molly is in no mood for smooching. This could be explained as another way of punishing Mort, but I think there is more to it than that. A person we are angry at appears unattractive. Even if the person is somebody we love -- our spouse, our friend, our daughter, our father -- he or she looks for the moment like an enemy. Anger tends to push love to the side and obscure it. An important part of love is seeing what is good in the beloved, appreciating him or her, taking pleasure in his company, finding her to be lovely, wonderful, clever and sweet. But anger makes the other appear, for the moment, a bit repulsive, defective and deformed -- not the sort of person you would hug.

There is a gestalt drawing that nicely illustrates the relationship between love and anger. If you look at the drawing one way, you see an ugly old woman with a large nose and pursed lips. If you look at it in another way, you see a beautiful young woman with a little turned-up nose looking coyly away from you. This change is known as a gestalt switch: the perceived difference is a matter not of seeing different details but of seeing the whole thing ("gestalt") in a different way. There are two different whole pictures. The two views blot each other out: when you are seeing the ugly woman, the beautiful one is invisible, and when you're seeing the beautiful one, the ugly woman is invisible.

If you are able to see the drawing both ways, then any time you are seeing the ugly woman you are on the verge of seeing the beautiful one. All you have to do is switch gestalts. But some people are more inclined to see the ugly lady, and others more inclined to see the pretty one. You might say their gestalt switching has different default modes.

Molly's default mode with respect to Mort is firmly set on love. Her wonderfulness-gestalt of him is on a hair-trigger switch. She may be angry for a while, but her heart is disposed in such a way that his good qualities are insistent in her mind. The gestalt of Mort's ugliness quickly fades. But for the moment Molly's anger eclipses her sense of Mort's goodness.

I need to mention another mark of Molly's mind: in her anger, she sits in judgment on Mort. It is as though she looks down from a moral height on his blameworthiness. So her anger involves not just a view of him but also a peripheral perception of herself in which she sees herself as someone who is in a moral position to judge. We can see that anger is judgmental in this particular way by considering what happens to an angry person when she reckons seriously with her own blameworthiness. If it occurs to Molly that on Monday it was she who laid $100 on top of the cash machine in Wheeling and then drove 20 miles down the road before remembering what she'd done, her anger at Mort is likely to dissolve in a vision of moral equality. Serious reckoning with her own faults brings her down off the judge's seat.

The story of Mort and Molly illustrates four features of anger. Anger involves 1) casting blame on someone; 2) wanting that person to be hurt; 3) seeing the person as unattractive; and 4) seeing oneself as in a position to judge.

We now need to consider what is right and wrong about anger. If anger is ever to be right and fitting, two things must be true: first, that people are sometimes blameworthy, and their blameworthiness makes them unattractive and makes them deserve to be hurt; second, that somebody is in a position to judge. If this sounds harsh, remember that there are degrees of blameworthiness and degrees of anger: someone can be just a little bit unattractive, and for just a moment and in a particular context, and one can deserve to be hurt just a little bit. If anger is to be right and fitting, it needs not only to be in response to someone who is actually blameworthy and unattractive and who deserves to be hurt, but also to be limited to a degree of intensity that matches the case.

From first to last, the Bible affirms that anger is sometimes right and fitting. God's anger provides the clearest case of righteous anger. The prophets often report that God is angry and recount the hurtful things that he has done or threatens to do to the people who now appear repugnant in God's sight.

On several occasions Jesus displayed a similar anger:

Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand. And they watched him, to see whether he would heal him on the sabbath, so that they might accuse him. And he said to the man who had the withered hand, "Come here." And he said to them, "Is it lawful on the sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?" But they were silent. And he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, and said to the man, "Stretch out your hand" (Mark 3:1-5a).

Jesus is angry with those in the synagogue because of their flagrant disregard for what God cares about (the well-being of the man with a withered hand), their hyperconcern with less important matters and their willingness to "work" on the Sabbath themselves in the nasty business of pursuing Jesus' death. Jesus' anger is fully appropriate: the synagogue attenders are deeply blameworthy; they deserve to be hurt; and they are morally repulsive to anyone with eyes to see. Furthermore, Jesus is in a moral position to make the "judgment" that his anger expresses. Jesus is pictured as angry in other passages as well, but he is never pictured as angry about the kind of minor offenses and frustrations that anger most of us. The Bible proclaims not only that God is often angry, but also that God is perfect love. Indeed, his anger is based in his love. And it is because Jesus loves the man with the withered hand, and because he loves God and his kingdom, that Jesus is angry at those who would obstruct compassion and plot against his life. But Jesus also loves the plotters; he is strongly disposed to see the beauty and wonderfulness in these creatures of God. The switch on his love-gestalt has a hair trigger, so that with the first sign of true repentance his eye for their goodness will overwhelm his eye for their sin.

Because God can be angry, we know that anger can be right and fitting. But is the anger of ordinary human beings ever right and fitting? The biblical answer is that even though our anger is not necessarily sinful, sin is a constant danger where anger is concerned. Sin always lurks in the vicinity. The classic text is Paul's: "Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil" (Eph. 4:26-27). What on earth is human anger good for?

Biologists point out that anger is very useful as a signal to the offender. The anger of our fellows is like the sting of a hot pan: it is intended by our creator to elicit corrective action. Molly's anger tells Mort that he has done something offensive, and this is information he needs if he is to adjust his behavior in the future. A married couple who never show any anger are either perfect, which is unlikely, or they are not spontaneously communicating some of the things that are important to them.

Anger is a natural consequence of morally well-formed concerns. Consider a person who is completely disinclined to get angry. Nothing you can do will anger him. He's walking down the street with his old mother, and a couple of neighborhood knuckleheads walk up calmly, push her into the street and spit on her. She's rattled and weeping, and he says, "Aw, Mom, I'm sorry that happened, but quit complaining; that sort of thing happens all the time in this neighborhood." The son's failure to get angry at the knuckleheads probably signals a defect in his character. Maybe he doesn't care enough whether his mother gets humiliated; or maybe he's so cowardly that he'd rather condone the knuckleheads than arouse their wrath by condemning them; or maybe he doesn't have enough sense of his own dignity, and his mother's. Or maybe he doesn't have enough respect for the knuckleheads. He thinks: these are not responsible persons; they're just part of the neighborhood blight.

Anger expresses a sense of justice and a sense of being in the presence of responsible agents. In sinful human beings the sense of justice is often distorted, as in the case of a person who becomes livid when someone cuts in front of him in line; but people ought to have a sense of justice, and to have one is to be prone to anger.

So anger has some happy aspects: it is, ideally, a natural signal that somebody's behavior needs to be adjusted; it is a sign of proper moral concerns and of a proper perception of moral truths. A person who can't get angry is seriously defective. But, as the apostle's comment suggests, the problem with most of us is not that we are too slow to anger but that our anger tends to be sin and to spawn sin.

Molly's anger at Mort is to their marriage as salt is to a good meal: it's good, but a little goes a long way. If, instead of lightly salting your food, you sit down to a hearty bowl of salt tablets and wash them down with a couple of glasses of sea water, first you gag and then you die. The same thing happens to a marriage -- or any other relationship -- that overdoses on anger. The reasons for this should be clear. In the moment that Molly is mad, Mort's good qualities fade into the shadow, and she sees a repugnant and unlovely person whom she wishes to see hurt. Love, by contrast, is a perception of the goodness of Mort, whom she wishes to see happy. The relationship can stand moments of anger if they are followed by forgiveness -- feelings and expressions of love.

Molly is in a good position, because her love-gestalt switch is on a hair trigger where Mort is concerned. This is natural during the honeymoon. But it may come less naturally and take more effort afterwards, as Mort continues to be a little on the irresponsible side, and then is too mellow for her taste when she protests. The trigger on the love-gestalt switch may begin to rust a little, so she must force it, and oil it now and then with special kindnesses. The danger of letting the sun go down on your anger, again and again, is that the switch will get so stiff that anger becomes the default mode: what you are most inclined to see in the other is her blameworthiness, her unattractiveness, and that she deserves to be hurt.

The social dynamics of anger give the devil even more room for play than I have indicated so far. Perhaps our gestalt switches naturally find a default mode where they are most often set, but anger and love almost always have a context of personal interaction that encourages and tends to perpetuate the one setting or the other. Were Mort less mellow, he might respond to Molly's anger by getting angry himself and calling her childish or judgmental or coming up with something even more irrelevant and hurtful to say, like, "The whole idea of taking a honeymoon in Topeka is the stupidest thing I ever heard of. If I had married Helen Wessel I'd be headed for Paris right now." To put it mildly, this does not help Molly get over her anger and get on with her love. So she may take an equally creative snip at Mort's emotional jugular vein, and the two of them spiral downwards into that enmity and bitterness that the devil so adores. Temporarily, both of their gestalt switches are locked in the hate position. If this becomes an unbroken pattern with them, love will die.

The enmity between human beings that unchecked anger promotes is not the only way anger gives the devil working room. We saw earlier that when a person is angry she sees herself as in a position to look down in judgment on the one she is angry at. And we saw that when Molly is able to think of some offense of her own that is on a par with Mort's and to hold the two offenses in her mind, her anger is undercut. This judgmental aspect of anger means that if anger is practiced wholeheartedly and habitually, it can lead to a very distorted sense of one's status vis-à-vis other sinners and vis-à-vis God. It can seem to a person that he or she is really quite a bit better than other sinners and has a special moral alliance with God.

Molly's position of being just as blameworthy in her own way as Mort is in his is the position we're all in, according to God. Before God we all have such a blotchy moral record that we are hardly in a position to judge one another. Anger, especially if indulged in steadfastly, makes us into judges in a way that only God can be a judge. Remembering our own sin, and remembering that God alone is God, is a powerful resource for diffusing our anger and strengthening our love.

But now our thinking seems to have gotten us into a conceptual fix. If seeing oneself as in a position to judge the offender is a part of anger, and if we are never in a position to judge one another, how can human anger ever be OK? Instead of saying, "Be angry, but do not sin," shouldn't Paul have said, "Don't ever be angry, because 'Judgment is mine,' says the Lord"?

We must admit that the condemnation ingredient in anger always involves an illusory self-perception. But sometimes illusions are an inevitable part of our human situation and ones that we get around not by eradicating them but by compensating for them. The sun will always look to us as though it goes down in the west, though we know that the earth is just rotating in such a way that the sun is becoming hidden to our part of the earth. We need not be deceived or make any false inferences from sunsets as long as we keep our larger knowledge of the solar system in mind. If we never saw the sun as setting, something important would be lost from our lives.

In a similar way, it is useful and fitting, besides being unavoidable, for Christians to get angry from time to time. Recall the man whose mother was knocked into the street, who should rightly be outraged on her behalf as well as his own. And Molly, when confronted by Mort's delinquencies, need not always excuse them in light of her own failures. Sometimes she can see them in the more local and simple terms of Mort's responsible agency, his moral unattractiveness and his deserving to be hurt. It is true, after all, that Mort, and not she, performed this offense. But in the back of her mind should always be the catalog of her own offenses, forgiven by God, which she can bring into connection with Mort's. By being ever ready to add this information to her construal of the situation, she will be able to keep anger in its proper place so that it enhances, rather than erodes, her love.

The apostle Paul often lists things that are contrary to the Holy Spirit and the new life of the Christian. In a couple of these lists he mentions "anger and wrath" as belonging to the old self and needing to be "stripped off." In their place we are to clothe ourselves with such things as love and peace (see Colossians 3:5-17 and Ephesians 4:31). Since the apostle allows that proper anger in small quantities can be good, perhaps he is speaking here not of all instances of anger but rather of the vice of irascibility -- of being an angry sort of person. Molly's anger at Mort is just an episode of anger and does not by itself indicate a general irascibility.

What would Molly be like if she became an angry person? Let us imagine Molly after 20 years of indulging in anger. As Molly's children say, "Mom gets mad about everything!" Jeff is16 now, and when he cooks lunch for himself he sometimes doesn't clean up. This infuriates Molly. But the really infuriating things, like the way politicians play political games with the well-being of poor people's children or the way the rector speaks out of both sides of his mouth to members of the congregation, don't upset Molly at all. She gets mad only about things that affect her directly, and in those cases she's quite indiscriminate.

When Mort is late getting home from work and doesn't call, Molly exaggerates the offense, looking for the ways it was truly heinous and underhanded and irresponsible and despicable. She just hates it when Mort has solid excuses for his delinquencies, and does her best to refute them.

She likes to think of him, and all the people who offend her, as deeply culpable and completely inexcusable. Their good qualities become invisible to her. When she gets really mad, she would like to destroy people, or make them suffer agonies. She enjoys picturing her offenders as shriveled in humiliation for their offenses against her. If somebody points out that she too has failings, some of which are pretty similar to Mort's and the kids', she doesn't want to see the point and in fact doesn't see it. When Mort and Molly get into one of those spiraling exchanges of angry responses, Molly never takes the initiative to stop the cycle, but just plows ahead until either a relational disaster occurs or Mort takes responsibility for injecting an element of humanity.

Few things are uglier than a thoroughly irascible person, and it is clear why very early in the history of the church anger came to be regarded as one of the seven deadly vices. When it gets deep and pervasive in a life it really does kill love and everything lovely. What a miserable life this Molly has, and how she spreads sufering wherever she goes!

But, since Molly is a fiction of my imagination, I can jolly well imagine her any way I like. And so I say that Molly and Mort have a very different future. The nightmare of the irascible Molly is only a warning. The real Molly has borne, with her Mort, fruit of the Holy Spirit.

The real Molly does get angry, of course. Sometimes her anger is justified and sometimes it isn't. But Molly has the habit of monitoring her anger and bringing it into submission to God and to her love of those around her. When she finds herself spiraling downward into the bitterness of an angry exchange, she takes the initiative of saying a kind word, telling a joke on herself, offering a compromise or making a gesture of reconciliation. And the funny thing she's found is that taking the initiative in an intelligent way has not meant that others treat her like a doormat. On the contrary, over the years Mort and the kids have responded by following her lead, so that they too often take the initiative to stop the nasty spiraling.

One thing Molly asks, when monitoring her anger, is whether she is exaggerating the offense. If she finds herself "demonizing" the offender, she takes herself in hand and says, "Let's see if we can find extenuating factors. Were the kids tired when they became so whiny? Had I done something earlier that provoked Mort into that unkind word?" Sometimes her spirit resists hearing excuses on behalf of the offender, but she finds that if she presses herself just a little to search them out and hear them, they are really not so humiliating to acknowledge, and it's an exhilarating experience to see love emerging from the storm, the devil cramped in the straitjacket of the Holy Spirit.

The result of these disciplines, over time, is that Molly never feels so angry that she wants to devastate the offender. Even in the midst of anger, she remains quite open to perceiving his or her good qualities; the default mode of her gestalt switch has become more and more prone to the love position. And she seldom gets angry at all about merely trivial offenses against her own person; the anger she does feel is much more often occasioned by real cases of significant injustice.

A Pastoral and Theological Response to Losses in Pregnancy

Last year on Pentecost I baptized an infant named Diana Lynn. No one but her mother came to watch. Diana was stillborn. Her mother, a visitor in our city, had waited hours for the hospital staff to find a pastor who would help her hand her child to God. Baptism was what she specifically demanded, what she had been taught to value as the unique means of salvation in Jesus Christ.

Presented with the same pastoral need again I would not hesitate to respond again with baptism. Yet baptism hardly fits the situation of a child who dies at birth, for it makes the act seem like a magical trick that opens God's arms. It leads us to believe that the arms of Christ on the cross are not already opened wide enough to receive this little one.

In the book Baptism: A Pastoral Perspective (Augsburg, 1975) Eugene Brand encourages teaching about baptism within the context of the gospel's call to repentance and faith. He notes that people are always led astray when the discussion of baptism focuses on whether an unbaptized infant can be saved.

"To think that for lack of Baptism a child would not be saved is to posit the responsibility for salvation with the church. More seriously , it evidences a defective view of God's love and mercy, and the freedom of his grace. It is one thing to hear the gospel truly and then refuse Baptism; it is quite another to die before one even knows of Baptism or the gospel." [pp. 42-31.

In a short treatise called "Comfort for Women Who Have Had a Miscarriage," Luther wrote that the church might acknowledge the agony of parents who lose a child during pregnancy or at birth. He wrote in order that parents, especially mothers, might be consoled, and to help them see that miscarriage is not a sign of God's wrath. Luther also addressed the question of the child's salvation if it died before baptism, noting that though we cannot presume God's salvation of the child without baptism, we can pray earnestly and trust in God's mercy.

Because the mother is a believing Christian it is to be hoped that her heartfelt cry and deep longing to bring her child to be baptized will be accepted by God as an effective prayer [for the salvation of the child].... Whatever [she] sincerely prays for, especially in the unexpressed yearning of [her] heart, becomes a great, unbearable cry in God's ears [Luther's Works, vol. 43 (Muhlenburg, 1960), pp. 247-81.

Baptism is inappropriate in the case of a stillbirth to the extent that it, denies God's ability to be merciful and takes the sacrament out of its biblical context of a call to repentance and faith.

On the other hand, baptism is appropriate in the case of a stillborn child inasmuch as the church has no commonly recognized rite for acknowledging a loss in pregnancy. Parents who suffer a loss in pregnancy need to experience what is affirmed in baptism: (1) the child's uniqueness before God; (2) the child's belonging to the community of faith; (3) the church's recognition that the death of the child is a real loss; and (4) the support of the Christian community for Christian parents, in this case parents who have experienced a significant loss. In the absence of something more appropriate, it is understandable that some faithful parents who experience a loss in pregnancy will request that the child be baptized.

0n Pentecost evening, the day when the gift of the Spirit was given to the church, Diana's mother sat in silence in her room. Nurses ran around the hospital nervously. "She won't give up the baby," the head nurse said to the person who called me. You could hear the panic in her voice. Meanwhile, Diana's mother sat, alone and in silence, for more than three hours.

Pregnancy and birth have always involved medical risk. In 1900 one mother died for every 100 deliveries, and ten babies of every 100 did not reach their first birthday. In just 85 years medicine has made marvelous progress in reducing the risks of pregnancy, birth and the first year of life. Still, not all pregnancies end well. Today it is estimated that between 15 and 30 per cent of pregnancies end in miscarriage, and one in 80 ends in the birth of a stillborn child. Many couples experience a loss in pregnancy. Yet these parents often report that almost no one understands their loss.

The medical response to these parents, especially to the mothers, can be quite insensitive. The mother of a stillborn child may be given a room with a mother who has just had a healthy baby. In the case of miscarriage, the mother may be told that she was never pregnant, even in the face of confirmed blood tests.

When obstetricians were asked in a survey why they did not discuss the risks of miscarriage with their patients, they usually answered something like, "Most pregnancies turn out well, so why should I interfere with my patients' happiness and cause them to worry about something that won't happen?" Even physicians have trouble dealing with the fact that pregnancy can end in death rather than life. (See Rochelle Friedman and Bonnie Gradstein, Surviving Pregnancy Loss [Little, Brown, 19821, p. 30.) To medical personnel, these deaths can represent failure, even personal failure. To family and friends, they are a painful reminder of the frailty of life and of childbearing. Others may turn away to hide their own vulnerability. In the face of these responses parents often feel abandoned.

The church's response has not been considerably better. Diana's mother wrote, "We were told that it was difficult for the director of nursing to find a pastor willing to come out to baptize Diana. We do not know if it was because on Sunday evening most pastors are involved with their own congregations or if it was because the death of an infant is so hard to face. "She understood the church's vulnerability.

I recently spent roughly six hours in a Lutheran seminary library looking for resources about losses in pregnancy. I looked in the card catalogue under "Death" and was encouraged to discover that in the past decade the circle of what is written about death has widened. There are now books on hospice care, euthanasia, abortion, suicide, bereavement, dealing with children about death, and moral and religious questions relating to death. But after hours of searching I found only one brief paragraph about stillbirth, and nothing about other losses in pregnancy. What is the searcher to assume? That this is not a death? Not a loss? That is a silence more oppressive than that hospital corridor on Pentecost night.

I checked other entries- "Stillbirth," "Miscarriage," Grief," "Pregnancy" -- and journals of pastoral care and worship materials. In each case there wlittle or nothing on the topic, and the little was difficult to uncover. One work that deals directly with stillbirth and miscarriage was cross-referenced under "Fetal Death" and "Perinatal Mortality. "Such sterile medical language is another kind of silence. In our culture and in the church, there is a great silence on this issue. For parents who have lost a pregnancy or had a stillbirth, the church is often an alienating place.

However, several good secular books have been written in the past decade to assist parents who have experienced a loss in pregnancy. If the church is to break the crisis of silence and speak a healing word, it needs information about losses in pregnancy and about the pastoral needs of families who suffer such losses.

Miscarriage is defined as the loss of a child prior to the 20th week of pregnancy; stillbirth is the death of a fetus after the 20th week. The largest percentage of miscarriages are caused by genetic accidents over which no one has control. Infection, hormones, metabolic and environmental factors also contribute. Stillbirths happen because of disease in the mother, genetic abnormalities in the child or difficulties in delivery. But sometimes the cause of death remains unknown.

Most people assume that the longer the pregnancy before the baby dies, the greater the loss. Consequently, many believe that an early miscarriage is not a real loss. There are differences in the grief reactions of parents according to their particular circumstances, including how far the pregnancy had developed; but a study by sociologists Larry G. Peppers and Ronald J. Knapp revealed that a loss in pregnancy, whenever it happens, is mourned as a loss in its own right. Peppers and Knapp studied 100 mothers and fathers who lost a child through miscarriage, at birth or in the first 28 days of life. Nancy Berezin summarizes their results:

"They found no difference in maternal reaction (e.g., sadness, insomnia, guilt feelings) between mothers who had suffered early fetal losses and mothers who had suffered either a stillbirth or a neonatal death. However, the researchers found that the nature and intensity of grief were strongly affected by the inappropriate reactions of friends, relatives and caregivers [After a Loss in Pregnancy: Help for Families Affected by a Miscarriage, a Stillbirth or the Loss of a Newborn (Simon & Schuster, 1982), p. 191.

What then, are the pastoral needs of those who have experienced death when they expected life? Just as there are many different hopes, dreams and expectations related to pregnancy, there are many different reactions to a loss in pregnancy. Yet some general themes can be touched upon that those in the church should be aware of.

First, the loss is experienced like any other death. Says obstetrician Jan Schneider:

"Spontaneous abortion [the medical name for miscarriage] has frequently been assumed to carry little emotional impact. Many miscarriages are known to be caused by chromosomal abnormalities incompatible with life and medicine has tended to consider miscarriage as a pregnancy that never was. Yet to the mother, it represents a baby who will never be [quoted in After a Loss in Pregnancy, p. I I].

Miscarriage is often a loss that is invisible to others, and parents may have to struggle for the right to grieve the loss of this baby and the loss of their future with this child.

Second, with a loss in pregnancy, the emotions of grief are sometimes 'complicated by fears about the mother's life or health. Often parents worry about whether they will have trouble with another pregnancy. Some fear that they will never be able to have a child. Also, mothers often feel guilt over the death, worrying about what they did or failed to do. Well-meaning. comments during pregnancy like "You're working too hard" or "Don't walk too much" can return to haunt a grieving woman. Implicitly, the woman is blamed. Pastor and congregation need to communicate the fact that losses in pregnancy are not sins to be forgiven but deaths to be mourned. Anger at God is not unheard-of among us. We can help others to express their emotions, we can listen, we can share another's grief.

Third, there is a need to be sensitive toward the grieving parents as a couple. For some couples the tragedy is their first serious life crisis, their first grief experience, or the first time they have felt isolated from each other. Losses in pregnancy can cause difficulties in the marriage.

The loss affects both parents, yet fathers and mothers do react differently. Bonding with the baby during pregnancy is slower for men than for women, and fathers often experience the loss as a disappointment of what they hoped would be, whereas mothers experience it as a death of what already was. Also, fathers are frequently overlooked when sympathy is extended; they tend to be powerless spectators of the crisis and the medical response.

Fourth, parents have a need to understand the options before them. For many years it was taught that the best thing a parent could do after a loss in pregnancy was to forget it. "Go home and get on with your life," they were told . This advice sometimes included the admonition to have another child as quickly as possible.

Anyone who has studied grief knows how devastating such avoidance is. Ignoring death, using sleeping pills (a common prescription for mothers of stillborns), or having another child does not make the loss disappear. Healing comes only in grieving, remembering and then moving on. We need memories.

Recent studies suggest that seeing or holding a stillborn child helps parents accept the reality of the death. Of course, no parent should be forced to do something that she or he doesn't want to do. Many parents, however, take comfort in how normal their child appears or how peaceful he or she appears in death. Imagining is often worse than seeing and knowing.

Pastors who are called into the hospital early after a death or loss can help parents understand the decisions before them. What should be done with the remains? What kind of pathology reports might be useful (e.g., chromosome studies)? Would it be helpful to see the remains? What kind of worship service would be appropriate and comforting? Will there be a burial? What other things might aid in remembering? Would naming this child be a good idea? If needed, pastors can also provide support for the parents' dealings with medical personnel.

Finally, medical personnel who have repeatedly witnessed infant deaths and miscarriages need pastoral care. Chaplains in hospitals might well consider establishing continuing education programs for their staff who work in obstetrics. Pastors of congregations which include health professionals might consider gathering them together occasionally to talk about the emotional costs of their work and the resources faith offers in situations of death and grief.

There are specific steps the church can take to become a more hospitable place for parents who have experienced death when they hoped for life. To begin with, it should clarify its teaching about baptism. We need to communicate clearly the commands of Christ regarding baptism (cf. Mark 16:16 and Matt. 28:19) without giving the impression that God saves only the baptized.

The church should also make references to the losses of miscarriage and stillbirth part of the natural discourse of the congregation. Public recognition of this kind of loss makes grieving more acceptable and possible. Premarital counseling is a natural time to mention the possibility of difficulties in pregnancy. Sermon illustrations can use miscarriage or stillbirth as an example of loss or grief. (Sermons might also highlight the positive biblical images of adoption-e.g., the royal psalms and the adoption imagery at Jesus' baptism.) Intercessions for the grieving might occasionally include mention of parents who have suffered a loss in pregnancy, even when one is not aware of such losses that particular week. Also, church libraries could easily include a book or two on the subject, such as Berezin's After Loss in Pregnancy, or Miscarriage, by Sherokee Ilse and Linda Hammer Burns (Lakeland Press, 1985). Both are short, good, and easy reading. While being careful to respect the parents' need for privacy, the community of faith can publicly recognize the loss in the same way that it makes mention of other deaths and offers consolation.

Finally, the church should provide a rite for use at the time of stillbirth or miscarriage. The rite should be published where it is seen and discussed. When parents and pastors know that an appropriate rite is available, it will seem a natural choice and a comfort in the time of loss.

What is it that the community of faith wants and needs to affirm at the time of a stillbirth or miscarriage? It needs to affirm that this experience is not what God intends life to be for us, and to proclaim that in Christ, God reaches out to the suffering with comfort and healing.

A public rite provides a public means for the family and faith community to mourn its loss and to acknowledge the uniqueness of this child or this pregnancy. The public rite encourages parents to accept their loss and God's consolation rather than avoid it. It helps them to commend their child or pregnancy back to God. The rite should be brief, including words of comfort, a biblical lesson and prayers; it could easily expand into a full memorial service, with or without Holy Communion. It should be remembered that parents may not want a public worship service in the sanctuary. Allowing the parents to choose what is helpful for them assists them as they grieve.

One word alone does not traverse a void of silence. The silence does not exist simply because we haven't known that so many suffered with losses in pregnancy. It exists because these early deaths are particularly hard for us to face. They remind us of the vulnerability of life. If we in the church can be more public in facing these deaths, then together we can find ways to surround with care those who have experienced such loss, and help them remember and, in Christ, be healed.

On Providence and Prayer

The doctrine of providence is a kind of theological watershed separating Christians. On each side of this great divide people claim to have a better account of how God is present in the world. Each view , of providence, which also entails a corresponding approach to petitionary prayer, bears an insight that we dare not lose. But neither side alone is fully adequate to the witness of Scripture or to the evidence of our experience.

On one side there are Christians who are confident that God can and does intervene directly in the world for the sake of particular individuals as well as to direct the larger currents of history. Since we know God as a person, the argument goes, it is reasonable to presume that God's personal nature is reflected in the divine creation. We live in a world directed and controlled by a personal God who exercises providential care for nations and for individuals. If God's will directs even the flight of tiny sparrows, how much more does God care for human beings (Matt. 10:29-31).

God is the good shepherd who protects and heals individuals (Ps. 23) as surely as God directs natural and historical events to serve the divine purposes (e.g. Is. 40:21-24; Amos 9:7). Julian Hartt has summed up this classic position on providence this way: "Since God created the world, it cannot lack anything God intended for it to be and to have. The divine purpose and the divine management cannot be violated or even momentarily frustrated by the behavior, intentional or unwitting, of any part of creation" ("Creation and Providence" in Christian Theology, edited by Peter C. Hodgson and Robert H. King [Fortress, 19821, p. 120).

What we might call the evangelical understanding of providence, in which God is willing and irresistibly able to intervene on behalf of particular individuals in very specific ways, leads quite naturally to heightened interest in petitionary prayer. Prayer, according to this view; changes events and circumstances-not merely the one praying. Harold Lindsell, former editor of Christianity Today, has made the point clearly: "No one should succumb to the error of viewing prayers as a means of changing the individual and his attitudes rather than changing events, circumstances, and history itself Certainly 'prayer changes me' -- my outlook, orientation and my attitudes. But prayer also changes those situations and circumstances of life which are distinctly divorced from any change which. may take place in the individual who prays" (When You Pray [Tyndale, 1969], p. 11).

More recently, systematic theologian Donald Bloesch has explained that while "God's ultimate purposes, are unchangeable ... his immediate will is flexible and open to change through the prayers of his people." "A personal God, who loves and cares, can be solicited in prayer. Prayer can work miracles because God makes 'himself dependent on the requests of his children" (Essentials of Evangelical Theology [Harper & Row, 1978, vol. 2, p. 57, and Vol. 1, p. 31). No wonder belief in God's providential care as direct and specific for individuals engenders urgency and intensity in the actual practice of petitionary prayer.

This view of providence contains much that is appealing. It surely echoes important voices from Scripture that testify to God's ongoing involvement with the creation, and especially with the people of Israel and with those who follow Jesus. It helps us grasp in concrete ways the basic Christian affirmation that God cares for us and actively seeks our well being. It encourages us to place our concerns and needs before God prayerfully and boldly, assured that God is not indifferent to our plights and that requests made in good faith will be honored.

Yet the reality of innocent suffering has made sensitive people suspicious of this formulation of the doctrine of providence and the corresponding view of prayer. Some months ago Nashville newspapers gave extensive coverage to country-music entertainer Barbara Mandrell's auto accident, in which she suffered a broken leg but escaped serious injury. President Reagan's get-well greetings to, Mandrell exemplified the understandings, of, providence described above:. "God must have been watching over you." I wondered when I read that, as I am sure many others did, whether Reagan was aware of the implication of his statement: that God did not care providentially for the young man driving the other vehicle, who was killed instantly in the collision.

More generally, any case of innocent suffering (especially when hundreds, thousands, even millions are victimized) raises the, question:, what happened .to God's providential care? If God can and does respond to prayers by intervening directly in the world for the sake of persons and peoples, why do we run into so many situations in which God does not intervene to prevent evil? Though the comfortable are often tempted to project some correlation between human deserts and human suffering, we all know of enough exceptions to disprove that hypothesis. Can we speak credibly any longer of divine intervention in guiding either the course of, individuals and empires or the forces of the natural world?

The perception of innocent suffering is the chief factor pushing many Christians to the other side of the theological watershed. Even more than a world view shaped by Newtonian science, the magnitude of evil that falls upon individuals and peoples rules out for these Christians any easy confidence. in God's direct control of creation. They see the universe as self-sustaining, law abiding and religiously neutral. The sun rises alike on the evil and the good. The rain falls on the just and the unjust (Matt. 5:45). As Jesus tells us, God allows persons to suffer the violence of evil and the havoc of accidents without regard to virtues or vices (Luke 13:1-5). God is personal, but paradoxically has placed us in an impersonal universe. Religiously speaking, the best that can be made of such a world is to see it, as John Hick proposes, as a "vale of soul-making." God has a hands-off policy as far as human will and the course of nature are concerned so that we can become people who will freely choose to love the deity.

This rejection of the classic doctrine of providence entails a corresponding reduction of the place of petitionary prayer. We, not the causal structures of the universe, are changed by prayer. Robert A. Raines has suggested that prayer, instead of leading God to intervene in a problematic state of affairs, helps persuade us to be open to all individuals as Christ incognito. "Awareness that Christ lives in my neighbor, though unacknowledged by him, frees me from imperialism or proselytism. I am free to regard him as already loved and inhabited by Christ, a person from whom I may learn something new of Christ, one whom I am called to serve...Prayer is awareness of the potentiality for community which results from Christ's presence in every man and in me" (7he Secular Congregation [Harper & Row, 1968], p. 118). Prayer does not change things because God does not change things; rather, prayer provides us with the vision and strength to suffer with and for Christ in others.

Three problems with this perspective on providence are apparent. First, it does not do justice to those parts of the biblical witness that testify to God's active role in the lives of individuals and in the movement of history. Second, it comes perilously close to a deistic understanding of God and the world. God is removed from the field of action once the enormously complex system has been set in motion. Christ permeates the system, to be sure, but in a passive role-he is to be recognized as present in our brothers and sisters but he lacks causal influence. Third, this view of providence undermines the practice of petitionary prayers. Once you are convinced that pleas for divine aid are merely soliloquies that serve to clarify your own motives and perhaps to summon up your resolution to act, prayer as a genuine dialogue, a pleading before God, evaporates. Why bother to pray. for your needs and those of others -when you know that God does not care enough to do anything about those, needs ? Why not simply think them over by yourself?

Is there any way to understand prayer that can (1) salvage the essential insight in the evangelical view of providence that God cares for persons and peoples and actively seeks our well-being, and (2) escape the ruin that the fact of widespread genuine evil has brought upon traditional formulations of providence? If we hold fast to the biblical witness that God does care for us, individually as well as corporately, what must we infer about God and the world that would account for the fact that petitionary prayer sometimes seems futile?

One option would be to suppose that it only seems that God has not answered our prayers; God always answers, but frequently says No. There are times, perhaps, when that is the case. We do not always ask wisely, and God, to be truly loving, must then refuse our requests. But that explanation will not account for the many occasions when there can be virtually no doubt that our requests coincide with God's will. Surely, God intends children to be healthy and happy, yet our prayers for the deliverance of our children from injury or illness do not always bring deliverance. Should we suppose that God's perfect will is sometimes to wreak havoc and misery upon the innocent? There must be a better answer.

A second option would be to posit that God's power to answer prayer is self limited. God is capable of granting all our requests that are consistent with divine will, but God chooses not to do so. Why? Presumably because God is concerned with some higher good that can be achieved in the future only by means of some evil now. John Hick, for example, has defended such an explanation with considerable acumen in recent years. But this road leads to the conclusion that evil is only apparent, not genuine. It is rather like the prick of the needle in a vaccination against a dreadful disease: painful for the moment but necessary to and outweighed by the realization of a greater good. But such an account is persuasive only if one can agree that what seems to be evil is not genuinely evil. One has to agree that torture, rape, starvation, drug addiction and premature death are not genuine evils. Since many people cannot accept that God uses such peculiar, cruel means to achieve eventual reward, let us consider a third option.

Suppose that God's power to answer prayer is limited by the nature of things. That is, God is one agent of power in a world with a plurality of agents of power. In petitionary prayer, we as agents of limited power join forces with

the divine power. John Magee has captured an element central to this view of prayer: "Prayer is identification with the creativity of God. It is reverent participation in [God's] everlasting work. It is living at the growing edge of the universe, those living nodal points where the future is coming into existence. Prayer does not reverse the divine direction, but cooperates with it" (Reality and Prayer [Harper, 1957], p. 124). In petitionary prayer we are seeking to open ourselves and others to that power.

Since God does not have a monopoly on power, God's will-and consequently God's response to prayers consonant with the divine will-can be and sometimes is thwarted by the recalcitrance of non divine actualities, whether persons or cancer cells. In each moment, God offers the best real possibilities for the achievement of value that can be built upon the past. But God does not force the best on any creature. The divine power functions only as a persuasive lure, which can be ignored or rejected.

The highest achievements of value require a compatible positive response by many creatures. God surely intends, for example, for parents to be able to care for their young children, but that aim can be tragically thwarted by the driver who chooses to drink and then crosses the center line. God surely intends that every human being has enough to eat, but that intention can be tragically thwarted by a complex combination of political, economic, agricultural and military decisions. God cannot unilaterally direct the course of events, large and small. But God is involved in events, large and small, as one of the actors. To the degree that there is receptivity (conscious or subconscious) to the divine will, God's power-and our prayers that are consistent with God's will-are efficacious.

Why should we keep praying if God can be thwarted? Because God never gives up trying to redeem what has gone before, trying to offer to every creature the best possible future, given the choices already made. God's power is not irresistible in the short run, but it is inexhaustible in the long run. God's steadfast love endures forever. Providence, from this perspective, means that God cares about us personally and corporately and works tirelessly (but not unilaterally) for our well-being. Not everything that happens is God's design. But we can affirm with Paul that "in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose" (Rom. 8:28). The corresponding view of prayer makes sense of the biblical counsel to "pray without ceasing" (I Thess. 5:17).

Petitionary Prayer Reconsidered (Phil. 1:6)

Not many years ago there appeared in the spacious, and commonly specious, realm of how-to books one titled Pray Your Weight Away! I didn’t read it, but sometimes a book’s title tells everything one needs to know about both its author and its contents. A book titled Pray Your Weight Away! can be nothing other than an effort at snake-oil seduction of flabby-bodied and flabby-minded people who think of God as a senile Grandfather, by whose indulgent grace they can pray their weight away rather than dieting and exercising.

A good way to think Lentenly about prayer is to think through, as best we can, what the Lord requires of us -- if anything -- as a precondition of his granting our petitions.

Among the remembered prayers of the very wise and holy St. Thomas More is this: "The things, good Lord, that we pray for, give us the grace to labor for." A good example of somebody who understood this is a little girl whom Leslie Weatherhead mentioned in one of his early books. She was much troubled by the fact that her older brother trapped rabbits, and she had begged him in vain to stop. One night her mother heard her praying: "Dear God, please stop Tommy from trapping rabbits. Please don’t let them get trapped. They can’t. They won’t! Amen." Her mother, troubled and perplexed, asked, "Darling, how can you be so sure that God won’t let the rabbits be trapped?" The blessed child calmly replied:

"Because I jumped on the traps and sprung them!" Ex ore infantium. When I tell this story in sermons I see smiles. It is a charming story -- but not a cute one. It is a paradigm of Christian praying.

An ancient Hebrew legend (not in the Bible) tells us that God did not open up the Red Sea for the fleeing Israelites to pass through until one of them boldly jumped into the sea to lead the way. That man did his thing, as a prayer, before God did his thing as an answerer of prayer. It may be but a legend, but it is good sound Yahvism. The old saw that God helps those who help themselves is pagan and false, but like any heresy that is not a truth dislocated it is a truth with a falsifying twist. The truth is that God helps all those who, by starting the answer to their prayer themselves, make it possible for him to help them. Thus did that legendary Israelite. Thus did that little Christian lass. And it is the object of Thomas More’s prayer: that we may have the grace to labor for that for which we pray.

So you want to take off some pounds? (Never talk about "losing weight." Give yourself proper credit; say that you are taking off weight. Because you are. God and you together.) You may want to tell God that you’ve made this decision and would welcome his guidance. He might suggest through your good sense that you begin by talking to a good doctor or dietitian. As you diet you ask God for the necessary strength of will and the grace to persevere. Throughout the program, pray that prayer without ceasing. When you step on your scale and see that you weigh less, thank the Lord. If you feel quite jubilant about it, there’s no Christian reason why you shouldn’t exclaim to him, "We’re doing great, aren’t we?" Because you are -- God and you together. I can’t help thinking that Thomas More would approve of such causerie à Dieu. Theresa of Avila certainly would; she was, as Phyllis McGinley said of her, "God’s familiar." And Martin Luther. But we don’t need precedents or precepts from hagiography, since the Lord himself instructs us when we pray to say Abba, Father.

When you begin to pray for success in your weight reduction, you can think of it as God doing something not simply for you but in you. For this is the correct Christian understanding of prayer. When you perform an act of costly charity, it is God acting through you. It follows by analogical reasoning that if God gives you the grace to take off some pounds through diet and exercise, God himself is doing it.

Baron von Hügel spoke in a splendid phrase of how God openly crowns in us what he secretly initiates. He who begins a good work in us will carry it out, perform it (epitelesei) himself, says St. Paul (Phil. 1:6) It isn’t simply that he will "see us through" as we do it, he will do it himself in and through us. God’s grace working in us is not just some kind of strength or energy that God supplies to us from outside and above. Rather, it is God himself working in us and through us; and our exertions, with their attendant pains, if there be any, are simply our human reactions to, and sensations of, the divine working: ultimately, it is God who is praying, not we ourselves. Some great Jewish and Christian spiritual masters have been bold to say that God is prayer. That may be a dangerous phrase because of the ease with which it can be misunderstood, but it is not false. Therefore, if we are prudent, we will never ask God to do anything for us unless we are prepared to pay the price in our own blood, toil, tears or sweat -- one, some or all of these costly concomitants of the mighty workings of God in his grace -- for us, in us, through us.

Surely St. Thomas More’s is a right and godly prayer not only for Lent but for all seasons. And to it may well be added, with the same qualifications, this prayer by François Fénelon: "Lord, teach me to pray. Pray thyself in me."

God begins to pray himself in us when we begin to work out the answer to our prayer in junior partnership with him. And God with such a working-perspiring-praying partner is always a majority. St. Paul teaches that our sufficiency is in God. He might as well have said that God is our sufficiency. For that is what he eternally means, and what we have everlastingly to learn.