the harvard ichthus » Volume 1, Issue 2

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market-place, and cried incessantly: “I am looking for God! I am looking for God!”

As many of those who did not believe in God were standing together there, he excited considerable laughter. Have you lost him, then? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? or emigrated? Thus they shouted and laughed. The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances.

“Where has God gone?” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him – you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us – for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.”

Here the madman fell silent and again regarded his listeners; and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern to the ground, and it broke and went out. “I have come too early,” he said then; “my time has not come yet. The tremendous event is still on its way, still travelling – it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds require time even after they are done, before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the distant stars – and yet they have done it themselves.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Gay Science”

***

Given the current state of American culture, it may seem that such melodramatic reports of God’s death are much like those of Mark Twain’s demise: greatly exaggerated. We just witnessed a presidential election pitting Altar Boy against Born-Again, in which each candidate seemed bent on proving the veracity of John Knox’s old dictum: “One man with God is a majority.” Indeed, in some ways, God seems to be more popular than ever. American churches are filling up faster than contractors can build them, movies about crucifixion have become Hollywood blockbusters, and even Ashton Kutcher wears T-shirts declaring that Jesus is his homeboy. Superficially, at least, it seems very difficult to make the case for God’s death: if anything, he seems to be quite spry in his old age.

But perhaps Ashton Kutcher’s wardrobe is not the best place to look for the Almighty. God, if he is real, should surely have more impact on our lives than that. He should be more than an idea that stubbornly clings to the minds of the backwards and the uneducated; he should be more than the organizing principle behind presidential elections and shiny new suburban megachurches. These things, finally, prove very little about God. For many of us, the words of Nietzsche’s madman hit home, far too close to our hearts. Many of us are no longer sure about God anymore. Our families are, but we are not. We have grandfathers that were preachers, uncles and aunts that were religious leaders, mothers and fathers with faith that can move mountains, even brothers and sisters who love the Lord with all their hearts, but to us, the faith of our fathers no longer makes any sense. At times we wish—no, we long—that it would, but it does not. God is intangible, ineffable, inscrutable, and perhaps even impossible. We go home for Christmas, and sit next to our grandparents in church, and wish that the joy they so earnestly feel and the faith they so deeply possess could be ours. But it is not, and we fear that it can never be. The madman speaks to our hearts, for we know what it is that we have lost, and despair of ever getting it back.

The main character of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Notes From Underground felt much the same way, for he struggled with the same dilemma that many of us know all too well: how, in a rootless world where we feel as if we are straying as through an infinite nothing, we are to face life. How, without God, are we to go on? The intensity of the underground man’s struggle can be felt from his very first words to us: that he is “a sick man… a spiteful man.” For page after page of impassioned narrative, the underground man breathlessly pours forth his invective at the world, screaming laments about the pointlessness of it all, all the while knowing there is no one at whom to scream. Perhaps better than any other book, Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground gives us a portrait of what it is to live without God. We are told, in fact, by the author that the underground man, though a fictional character, “not only may, but indeed must exist in our society, considering the general circumstances under which our society was formed… He’s a representative of the current generation.” While these words were of course penned not in 21st century America but in 19th century Russia, they may indeed have a great deal of applicability to our own time. It may be true that the underground man is, as he himself asserts, someone who has “only taken to an extreme that which you haven’t even dared to take halfway,” and when we find him at the end of his Notes, twenty-four years old and standing alone in the wet, dreary snow of St. Petersburg, we may find more of ourselves standing there with him than we had ever dared to dread.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. The underground man, as Dostoevsky implies, did not go underground, as it were, by his own volition: he was driven there. Something, he asserts, about modern society made him possible, and in fact necessary. He is, he tells us, a “representative of the current generation.” Dostoevsky is pointing us towards something radical, something drastic, that shook at the roots of the underground man’s world, and that by implication has shaken the roots of our world as well. If you are clever, you will have already figured it out—he is pointing to the massive changes in European thought that occurred in the 19th century, such that prior to 1859, the underground man’s existence would not even have been possible, but afterwards, was made necessary. Since these changes have much to do with the nature of our own society, and since many of the questions that they raise remain current today, it is worth our time to briefly look back at how the underground man found himself where he was.

The world that gave birth to Dostoevsky’s underground man and Nietzsche’s madman was something altogether new in European history. The idea of God had long been the capstone of Western thought, which since the conversion of the emperor Constantine had been popularly expressed through the Christian religion. As the intellectual historian James Turner points out, the very idea of atheism would not have made sense to the average European man or woman for over a thousand years. God was, so to speak, a part of the air they breathed. Even when they were not particularly pious (and many Europeans were far from holy), they regarded God and his Church as an essential part of their societal fabric. Europeans were possessed of a sense of place, the importance of which Romano Guardini explains: they looked up at the stars, and knew that they were God’s stars. They looked around at the world, and knew that it was God’s world. They looked at themselves, and knew that they were God’s people. Their lives were endowed with purpose; their actions had eternal import; their souls were immortal. They knew that life at times may not make sense, and indeed, often would not: wars raged, plagues ravaged, and thieves plundered throughout their difficult lives. But suffering was eventually to be redeemed; in fact was redemptive, for so it had been made by Christ’s suffering on the cross. In this world they would have trouble, but they did not fear, for they knew that Christ had overcome the world. By faith, they were sure of what they hoped for, and certain of what they did not see; this defined their lives, and anchored their world.

But as beautiful and as comforting as all this was, it was not to last. Changes came to the European psyche, which were to forever change the way in which they saw the world and their place therein. In the High Middle Ages, the theological certainty of St. Thomas Aquinas had reigned supreme: all truth was God’s truth, and all the world was God’s. By the 19th century, however, the rigid proofs and postulates of Aquinas had long been a thing of the past. The Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution had all burst upon the scene with their freewheeling, freethinking ideas. Religious doctrines were no longer secure, and even God’s existence was very much in doubt. Rival philosophical schools had for centuries attacked each other’s pet proofs of God’s existence, with the ultimate effect of dismantling all but the biological argument from design. This line of reasoning for a time seemed secure, as even the most inveterate atheist could be silenced by simply pointing to the apparent providential design of nature.

The publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, however, dealt this argument a fatal blow. God was no longer necessary to explain the origin and intricacy of nature, with the result that God was no longer needed to explain anything at all. God was not even needed to explain the human soul—Herbert Spencer, in his widely influential Principles of Psychology, asserted that our minds were nothing more than stimulus-response machines created by the process of evolution. Evolutionary psychologists confidently stated that our so-called “souls” were really nothing more than physical functions caused by simple chemical reactions. It is difficult to underestimate the seismic shift represented by all of these changes—the idea of God, which had been the capstone of Western thought for centuries, was suddenly gone. No longer were the stars God’s stars; no longer was the world God’s world; no longer were we God’s people. Our lives were not endowed with purpose; our souls were not immortal, nay, did not even exist; and God, who had benevolently watched over us all these long years, was dead. And so it was, finally, that in the latter half of the 19th century, an entire culture strove to come to grips with the death of God. Many wondered, as did Nietzsche’s madman, if all of Europe was now “straying as through an infinite nothing.”

This was the new world about which the madman prophesied; this was the world that drove the underground man underground. Those who heeded the madman’s words struggled to redefine the very foundations of their lives: if we were not made by God, then why were we made? If the cosmos itself is purposeless and our very existence no more than happenstance, where does that leave us? Do our lives have meaning? Can we invest our lives with moral purpose without a transcendent moral standard? Do any of our choices even matter? Indeed, can we even speak of “choice” and human emotions like “love” in a mechanistic universe, where our “souls” are no more than highly advanced stimulus-response machines? All of these questions troubled 19th century Europe, as indeed they trouble many of us today. Dostoevsky, in his Notes from Underground, does not offer us answers: rather, he presents to us a man who attempts to live his life in the face of the unanswerable. It is because of this that the underground man, like Nietzsche’s madman, hits us where we are: the answers to these questions are so far beyond our ken that, indeed, “we must ourselves become gods” to answer them. The underground man knows they are unanswerable, and given the death of God and of the soul, is concerned only about finding a way to live. In the end, is it possible at all? This is the ultimate question that the underground man sets out to answer, and so with the same question in mind, we turn now to him, to find out, as it were, if life underground is worth the living.

***

When first we come upon the underground man, he has been living in self-imposed exile for twenty years, alone and unemployed in a squalid apartment on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. He is quick to tell us that he was not always this way; that at one time he was employed as a civil servant, and before that a student. But no longer: now, he is alone. He quit work years ago, since he had been given a small inheritance and did not see the point in it, and avoids all but the most superficial human contact. It is tempting to write him off as a lunatic—his frantic prose does not always seem like that of a sane man (as we understand sanity), and it is at first difficult to understand why he has chosen to live a life of solitude. It becomes clear, however, when we listen to him carefully, that he is not in fact a madman. Rather, he is completely sane: his life in the underground, miserable as it may be, is driven by his unshakeable belief that life is pointless. For the underground man, life cannot possibly have meaning unless we are endowed with the ability to make free moral choices, and to have those choices correspond with transcendent values, like love. But both of these things, he believes, are not possible, given the death of God and the human soul. Some people may not realize this, he says, but for those of us who know that free will is an illusion and love a farce, there can be no other choice than the underground. We are mice, and not men, he argues, and so cannot honestly, without denying our conscious knowledge of the futility of life, live anyplace other than a mouse-hole.

Central to the underground man’s despair is his belief in what he calls the “wall.” The wall, he writes, consists of “the laws of nature, the conclusions of natural science and mathematics. As soon as they prove to you, for example, that it’s from a monkey you’re descended, there’s no reason to make faces; just accept it as it is.” The mechanistic universe of Darwinism, he believed, left no room for free choice. “Science itself” has taught man, he tells us, “that in fact he possesses neither a will nor a whim of his own, that he never did, and that he himself is nothing more than a kind of piano key or organ stop; that, moreover, there still exist laws of nature, so that everything he’s done
has been not in accordance with his own desire, but in and of itself, according to the laws of nature.” Since God did not endow us with souls, and since our minds (as Spencer was to point out later) are nothing more than highly evolved stimulus-response machines operating by means of chemical reactions, the underground man was unable to conceive of free choice. In theory, then, man’s desires and actions could be predicted “according to these laws, mathematically, and will be entered on a schedule… so that there will be no actions or adventures left on earth.” This “wall,” the underground man believed, was completely destructive of our humanity, which to him only made sense in the context of free choice. “Man needs only one thing,” he asserts, “his own independent desire, whatever that independence might cost and wherever it might lead… What is man without desire, without will, and without wishes but a stop in an organ pipe?” It is for this reason that the underground man calls us “mice,” and not men. While the uneducated “men of action” act as if their choices matter, we who are conscious know that they do not. We know, he tells us, that they are not really even our choices at all, and so we are robbed of the ability to have and act upon independent desires and wishes, which of course are essential characteristics of personhood.

Furthermore, given the excision of free will from humanity, the underground man believed that altruism was, as a result, impossible. Although we appear, at times, to act out of love for our fellow man, these actions are illusory. According to Darwinian evolution, all organisms act out of a selfish desire for their own preservation, disregarding the interests of others. Acts that appear to be altruistic are not, since they are actually done in the expectation of receiving personal benefit somewhere on down the road. As the underground man noted, referring to this doctrine of natural science:

As soon as they prove to you that in truth one drop of your own fat is dearer to you than the lives of one hundred thousand of your fellow creatures and that this will finally put an end to all the so-called virtues, obligations, and other such similar ravings and prejudices, just accept [it]…

The “so-called virtues” did not make sense to the underground man, for science had given them definitions far, far different from their traditional meanings. Concepts like friendship, compassion, and love were rendered meaningless to him: if people could no longer truly care for one another, what good was friendship? And if science had reduced love to a transactional relationship, what was the point in pursuing it? What does love matter if we can no longer truly love one another? This, finally, is what drove the underground man underground. He could not “conceive of love in any way other than a struggle… it always begins with hatred and ends with moral subjugation.” The underground man knew that this was not love; it was power, and he found himself, in the end, unable to live without love.

His last chance at love came from an unlikely place: a brothel. Fresh from a humiliating encounter with his friends, in which he had destroyed every shred of respectability he had left to him, he stumbled into a brothel from the cold St. Petersburg night in a frenzy, bent on taking whatever pleasure he could from whomever he could find. It is there, in that place, that he met Liza, a young woman with “something simple and kind in her face.” He did not talk to her for the first two hours, and in fact made a point of not looking into her eyes, but when the time came for him to leave he found that he could not. His feelings towards Liza, which at first had been based upon nothing more than a naked desire for power, had turned into shame. “I’d suddenly realized,” he tells us, “how absurd, how revolting as a spider, was the idea of debauchery, which, without love, crudely and shamelessly begins precisely at the point where genuine love is consummated.” They begin talking, haltingly at first, in what is, for him, a rare attempt to show kindness towards another human being. The twenty-year-old Liza soon reveals that she has been separated from her parents, and was forced to work in the brothel to make ends meet. As a result, she is sick, and depressed. Sick and depressed himself, the underground man empathizes with her, almost despite himself.

This commendable goal, however, quickly metamorphoses into his old habits of relational subjugation. He soon writes that “it was the sport that attracted me most of all. Something had suddenly caught fire in me, some kind of goal had ‘manifested itself’ before me.” Forgetting his good intentions, he brings her dormant fears to the surface and presents himself as a sort of personal savior, inviting her to his apartment, ostensibly with the magnanimous goal of removing her from the squalor of the brothel. Realizing his subjugation fantasies, he imagines telling Liza that “you’re mine, you’re my creation, you’re pure and lovely, you’re my beautiful wife.” Even as his desire for power comes to the surface, however, one can detect an undercurrent of something else: perhaps affection, perhaps compassion, or perhaps even love. After he leaves the brothel, he muses that “she really did interest me,” and wonders if maybe “it wasn’t only the sport” that had attracted him. In the interval before their next meeting, he works himself into a frenzy, warning himself that at their next encounter he’ll “once again put on that dishonest, deceitful mask,” then countering immediately with the objection, “Why deceitful? Yesterday I spoke sincerely. I recall there was genuine feeling in me, too…” The tension between his desire for love and his belief that it does not exist builds before their next meeting, giving him one final chance to reject his philosophical beliefs and accept the love that he so desperately desires.

When Liza appears on his doorstep, he is immediately ashamed of himself and bursts into tears. After regaining his composure, however, he launches into a tirade against her, telling her not quite truthfully that he had only seemed to care about her, and had only “craved the sport.” He ends in tears, calling himself “a scoundrel and a bastard,” and screams “Why are you here? Why don’t you leave?” But instead of taking offense or becoming angry, Liza instead embraces the underground man and weeps with him. Taken off guard, he stammers out “They won’t let me… I can’t be… good!” and collapses in hysterics.

The selfless act of Liza represented the last best chance for the underground man to understand love: it was a gift, it was completely undeserved given his actions, and, as a pure action, it came without any of the philosophical baggage of language that might have served as a detriment. Because it was selfless, it was an act of love, but also because it was selfless, he could not understand it. “After all,” he tells us, “I couldn’t live without exercising power and tyrannizing over another person…” Finally unable to understand love, he reverts back to his old methods of relational subjugation, having sex with Liza out of nothing more than a desire for power, once again feeling only “hatred” and “revenge.”

We are not told what awful thing he does to Liza; we only know that a mere fifteen minutes later she is sitting on the bedroom floor, her head leaning up against the bed, and sobbing. “She fully understood now,” he writes to us, “that I was a despicable man, and, most important, that I was incapable of loving her.”

This finally is the end of life for the underground man: he could not understand love, and so he could not live life. He “could no longer love,” he explains, “because for me love meant tyrannizing and demonstrating my moral superiority… all my life I could never even conceive of any other kind of love.” He had grown, he says, “unaccustomed to living life… real life oppressed me, so unfamiliar was it, that I even found it hard to breathe.”

Liza left his apartment, with one last long, sad look back at her almost-lover, and walked out into the snowy winter night. The underground man could not even let her go without one last, terrible cruelty, which he tells us came “not from my heart, but from my stupid head.” To drive home the (false) notion that he had never loved her, he thrust a five-ruble note into her hand as she left; the old exchange of the brothel; the only exchange he ever understood. Not able to look her in the eyes, he turned and let her walk away—no last looks, and no last goodbyes. But even then, his heart cried out one last time, rebelling against the “wall” of science that would not let him feel. He ran out into the cold St. Petersburg night, crying her name, frantically looking for her footsteps in the dim and dusky light. But it was not long before he stopped. Although his “heart was being torn apart,” he knew that he could never love her; that he would surely grow to hate her, even “perhaps as soon as tomorrow.” He could not understand love, and so knew that he could never love another human being. In the last glimpse we get of the underground man, we see him walking slowly back to his apartment, the wet snow of St. Petersburg falling all ‘round him, his heart made cold and his soul made dead. We are told that he retreated then into the underground, for he was unable to live the life of the living. He speaks to us from there, crying out that he is not the only one who dwells under the earth:

We’ve all become estranged from life; we’re all cripples, every one of us, more or less. We’ve become so estranged that at times we feel some kind of revulsion for genuine ‘real life’… we don’t know ourselves. What concerns me in particular, is that in my life I’ve only taken to an extreme that which you haven’t dared to even take halfway; what’s more, you’ve mistaken your cowardice for good sense; and, in so deceiving yourself, you’ve consoled yourself. Just take a closer look! Why, we don’t even know where this ‘real life’ lives nowadays, what it is, and what it’s called… We’re even oppressed by being men—men with real bodies and blood of our very own. We’re ashamed of it; we consider it a disgrace and we strive to become some kind of impossible ‘general-human-beings.’ We’re stillborn; for some time now we haven’t been conceived of living fathers; we like it more and more. We’re developing a taste for it. Soon we’ll conceive of a way to be born of ideas. But enough; I don’t want to write any more ‘from Underground…’

***

The underground man is different, profoundly different; so different as to be unsettling. We look at him, and turn away, for he shows us something we do not want to see—in the end it is not his otherness that unsettles us, but instead his sameness. He struggles with the same questions that we struggle with, faces the same existential crises that we face, and yet while we live here in the aboveground, with our schoolwork and friends and hopes and dreams, he dwells in the underground, without friends, without purpose, and without love. This unsettles us, because we do not want to end up where he is. We are afraid to look deep down into the recesses of our souls, for fear that we shall find there only an abyss.

The abyss, however, is what the underground man shows us. Emptied of freedom and robbed of love, our souls have been replaced by nothingness. Life has become impossible: the abyss has bored into our very souls, emptying them of all that once had made them human. We are not men: we are mice; we are organ stops; we cannot love, and we cannot live. Faced with the abyss, the only option left for us is the retreat underground, to dwell under the earth among the shadows of men who once were alive. We cannot fulfill the prophecy of the madman, he tells us: God has died, and we cannot replace him. We are doomed, like Sisyphus, to forever roll our stones up the mountain, but we cannot smile. What is the point? And how can we smile, when we know what it is that we have lost? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves?

The underground man cannot give us an answer, because he does not have one. The world in which he was born did not give him one, and neither can the world of today. Spencer has been replaced by new apostles, and our souls still dwell beneath the earth. There are some who do not heed the cry of the madman, and refuse to stare into the abyss, but for those of us who do, there can be no solace on this earth. God is dead, and we have died with him.

Our hope, if it is to come, must come from beyond this earth. God has died here, but there may yet be a chance—oh, and if there is only a chance!—that he is still living elsewhere. Faith, if it is possible, may yet save us. Dostoevsky speaks of this in his masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov: the good priest, Father Zosima, is asked a question that many of us know all too well:

You see, I close my eyes and think: if everyone has faith, where does it come from? And then they say that it all came originally from fear of the awesome phenomena of nature, and that there is nothing to it at all. What? I think, all my life I’ve believed, then I die, and suddenly there’s nothing, and only ‘burdock will grow on my grave,’ as I read in one writer? It’s terrible! What, what will give me back my faith? Though I believed only when I was a little child, mechanically, without thinking about anything… How, how can it be proved? I’ve come now to throw myself at your feet and ask you about it. If I miss this chance, too, then surely no one will answer me for the rest of my life. How can it be proved, how can one be convinced? Oh, miserable me! I look around and see that for everyone else, almost everyone, it’s all the same, no one worries about it anymore, and I’m the only one who can’t bear it. It’s devastating, devastating!

And Father Zosima, old and full of wisdom, replies:

No doubt it is devastating. One cannot prove anything here, but it is possible to be convinced… by the experience of active love. Try to love your neighbors actively and tirelessly. The more you succeed in loving, the more you’ll be convinced of God and the immortality of your soul. And if you reach complete selflessness in the love of your neighbor, then undoubtedly you will believe, and no doubt will even be able to enter your soul… I am sorry that I cannot say anything more comforting, for active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams thirsts for immediate action, quickly performed, and with everyone watching… whereas active love is labor and perseverance, and for some people, perhaps, a whole science. But I predict that even in that very moment when you see with horror that despite all your efforts, you not only have not come nearer your goal but seem to have gotten farther from it, at that very moment—I predict this to you—you will suddenly reach your goal and will clearly behold over you the wonder-working power of the Lord, who all the while has been loving you, and all the while has been mysteriously guiding you. Forgive me for not being able to stay with you longer, but I am expected. Goodbye.

Works Cited:

1. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes From Underground. Trans. Michael R. Katz.
New York: Norton, 2001.

2. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa
Volokhonsky. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002.

3. Guardini, Romano. The End of the Modern World. Trans. Elinor C. Briefs. Wilmington:
ISI Books, 2001.

4. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York:
Random House, 1974.

5. Turner, James. Without God, Without Creed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1985.

Jordan Hylden ’06, Editor-in-Chief, is a Government concentrator in Currier House.

The Preaching of the Passion

Margaret Maloney — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 05:11:47 +0000

The Seven Last Words from the Cross.
Preached at the Memorial Church, Good Friday, 2002

The Preparation

Good Friday is meant to be an interruption, to intrude upon our routine, and to transform that routine. Thus, from wherever we were and from whatever we were doing, we have come in the middle of the day, in the middle of the Yard, to this church to keep the holy Three Hours with our Savior on the cross. The image of the disciples falling asleep in the garden is compelling, as are Jesus’ poignant words to them, uttered not so much in rebuke but in sadness: “Could you not watch with me one brief hour?” We know that first the disciples will fall asleep, that then they will fall away and deny that they knew Jesus, and then run away in fear into the darkness and into the night; and why not? It is a fearsome thing to witness these things: the agony in the garden, the betrayal, the cross itself, and the grim business of execution. We should not be too hard on the disciples, although it is tempting for us to be so at this time of year. Who of us would have done better, would have been braver, would have stood the test, would have said, “I know that man.”? They stand in for us, and we should not condemn them.

The physical sufferings of our Lord upon the cross, so visible, graphic and grim as they are, are merely the outward symbols of the equally powerful interior struggles between God and all that conflicts with God, in that battle that we know only too well which rages both in the world and in ourselves. The struggle of these three hours is not just that of Jesus, long ago and far away, for we are not just voyeurs, bystanders, lookers-on from afar; that struggle, if we are really truthful, is really ours between the easy wrong and the difficult right. That struggle is ours between our own sense of good and the palpable sense of evil. That is our own personal battle between sacrifice and selfishness, between what we want to do and what we feel compelled to do, what we dare not do, and what we ought to do. On Good Friday we are meant to see in stark reality, stark relief, and in human form the great drama of our redemption played out in the Passion, with no punches pulled. The story is our story, the suffering is ours, it is done for us, it is done in us.

People will often ask, perhaps even some of you, what it is from which we are being saved, what is this ‘redemption’ all about, what struggle does the cross represent for ur? Couldn’t we have a nicer symbol, an easier one, a better one? The Muslims have the crescent, the Jews have the Star of David; why for us a cross, a sign of punishment and pain?

The cross is the place where our better nature struggles for a purchase against our lesser nature. By it we are reminded that goodness comes at a price, and that its price, like that of freedom, is eternal vigilance. We are saved in the struggle from ourselves, from that part of us that would make us less that God wants for us; we are saved in the struggle for that part of us that we truly want for ourselves because it is what God wants for us. On the cross we see Jesus make that struggle clear for us on our behalf. His death reminds us of our own death, for they both are inevitable. His struggle reminds us of our own, for they are both unavoidable. We watch not as disinterested spectators and not even as though we know how the story ends, but as self-interested parties for whom something great and good has been done. We stand in the presence of something awful—that is, full of awe—and of something terrible, something reverent, something powerful.

So, unlike the disciples we stay, and we stay awake. We do not sleep, for we know that in this is made life and made more of life than of death, more of hope than of fear. By this suffering we are saved to live a life beyond the cross, yet the only way beyond the cross is to go through the cross. That is what we do today; that is why we are here today.

In the cross of Christ I glory,
Towering o’er the wrecks of time;
All the light of sacred story
Gathers round its head sublime.

The First Word

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. ” (Luke 23:32-38)

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” This is the combination of ignorance and forgiveness, for Jesus asked his Father to forgive those who mocked them, who crucified him, who ridiculed him and humiliated him because they were ignorant. They did not know what they were doing, and the theory would be that if they did know what they were doing they wouldn’t do it; but they did not, and so they did it.

This is the context of this first word, this word of forgiveness. It is astonishing, this concept, this act of forgiveness, as astonishing now as it was then, that in the face of such violence, terror, and atrocity, in the face of something so ‘in-your-face’ as the crucifixion of another human being, we begin not with a word of condemnation or of judgment or of justice but with a word of forgiveness. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” This was an astonishing thing to say then, for why would one paint the suffering Jesus as a forgiving Jesus? Does it mean that we are to make light of the violence done to him? Does it mean that in forgiving we are also to forget? That really cannot be the case because we are here to remember, and what we remember first of all is this act of forgiveness. Was this violence just a matter of excessive or misplaced zeal on the part of those who did Jesus to death? Were they just trying to do the right thing to prevent heresy or treason, sedition or violence? We think of that ancient time as a living culture of justice, violence, and revenge. How then do we reconcile Jesus’s extraordinary act of forgiveness in the midst of such a culture?

What used to be an abstraction has become painfully real to us now, in contemporary times. We live in just such a climate of blame, guilt, and victimhood; and living in conversation with forgiveness appears to have added tensions to it. People say that if you forgive too quickly you have added violence to the victim and you absolve the perpetrator. Think of the current priest scandal among our brothers and sisters in the Roman church. There is a frenzied culture of accusation, blame, and guilt, the violence of which is almost equal to the enormity of the original crimes. There are sounds of Madame de Farge’s knitting needles, there are the voices of our ancestors in Salem, and nowhere has there yet been a word of forgiveness. We have accepted the culture of guilt and blame, villainhood and victimhood. Jesus’s words would be regarded by lawyers these days, rushing in to manage the show, as too little too late, inadequate and unacceptable. I can write the columns in the Boston Globe myself.

Consider the recently entered class-action suit for reparations for slavery, managed in large part by some of my close friends and colleagues in this University. The merits of the case notwithstanding, the notion of forgiveness as the moral response to an unpalatable situation is untenable by the prevailing standard of the modern world. Consider the climate of accusation against plagiarism in high places by historians well known and regarded by so many of us. The cry, as in the other two instances, is not, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” but rather, in the words of the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, “Off with their heads!”

Now, every one of you here will be able to make an impassioned, airtight case as to why forgiveness in each of these current incidences that I have cited is inappropriate or premature or unacceptable. In any and all of the aforementioned cases, logic, law, and even the moral case will argue that forgiveness must be a secondary and not a primary enterprise. There must be, in the language of the Roman church, an “act of contrition;” there must be statements of confession. You will argue for justice, compensation, unfinished business, fairness, and it will all make sense. You will have no trouble squaring it, and yet, at the foot of the cross, those who do Jesus harm do not confess that they are doing the wrong thing. They have no doubts, they make no acts of contrition, they offer no apology, and yet in the absence of any and all of that, Jesus forgives them. Ignorance may be a mitigating factor, as they say in the law, but they also say that ignorance is no excuse. That is why today, as two thousand years ago, Jesus’s words of forgiveness in the face of enormous iniquity and violence are as extraordinary, confrontational, stunning, and inexplicable now as they were then.

It is not, however, the enormity of the crime or its stark ugliness that compels our attention; it is the enormity of the grace that allows for forgiveness as the first and not the last act of conscience, that allows for forgiveness and not vengeance. These become the first of the last words of Jesus. Thus his first word has as its focus not what is done to Jesus but rather what Jesus does to those who do him harm. It is because of who he is that allows him to do what he does from the throne of the cross, for to forgive is to exercise the power of love, and to exorcise the powers of evil. The image of the weak and the broken, helpless Jesus on the cross is confounded in this very first word by this act of power—the power to forgive, the power to love. That is what Jesus does today on the cross. It is the first word that we remember from his lips. It is the first of the lessons we are meant to learn, that the only power that we have, the only power that is real, the only power that endures, the only power that transforms and transcends is the power to love, and that power is made perfect in what and whom we forgive. This is the first word, and this is the chief lesson of the cross. If we take no other word from this Friday, and from that Friday so long ago, it is the word that the power to love is expressed in forgiveness. It cannot be taken away, and it lasts forever. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

The Second Word

“ Today thou shalt be with me in Paradise.” (Luke 23:39-43)

“Today thou shalt be with me in Paradise.” Promises, promises, promises; “I never promised you a rose garden…” goes the song, and yet, Jesus does. He promises Paradise. Paradise is a splendid garden. If the first word is a word of forgiveness, which is hard to hear, the second word is a word of promise, which is a delight to hear. “Today”—now, immediately—“thou shalt be with me in Paradise.”

Promise presupposes forgiveness. Jesus forgives as a principled action. It is in his nature to forgive; he has the authority and power to forgive; and forgiveness under these circumstances may seem almost an abstraction, but here, in the second work, we move from the principle to the practice, from the abstract to the real. The principle becomes concrete, up close, and personal, for here is a real sinner. There is no ambiguity about it. The thieves are both up there because they are receiving the due rewards of their sins, not as a miscarriage of justice, not as anything out of order. They acknowledge who they are and they are acknowledged for what they are, and so this is real sin, and real sinners, and a ‘real situation,’ as we might say today.

Jesus responds to that real situation not with an abstract dissertation on justice or with warm tender sympathy to the situation in which they find themselves; he responds to it with an immediacy that is stunning, refreshing, and unorthodox. Consider the scene. The criminals affirm their identity and even confirm it, at least in the face of the first criminal, who taunts Jesus. “If you’re so smart, how come you’re up here with us? If you are as powerful as they say you say you are, why don’t you get yourself and us out of this mess?” That is not a moment for existential doubt. That is the moment for assessing the real limits of the circumstances and seizing, as it were, for the last time, your best opportunity of taking your best shot.

The criminals know enough to know who Jesus is and what Jesus can do, and the second criminal is far more astute than his fellow convict, and certainly more astute than those who are putting Jesus to death. Think of that second criminal, who says, “We are here because we deserve to be, but this man has done nothing amiss.” In all of the gospel narrations he addresses Jesus as ‘Lord,’ not as ‘Hey, you!’ nor as ‘Jesus of Nazareth,’ nor as ‘Master,’ or ‘Teacher,’ but as ‘Lord.’ He knows who he is. “Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

How do we know the second criminal knows who Jesus is? We know because he addresses Jesus by his title of sovereignty, and he asks of him what he knows Jesus can deliver. It is impossible to imagine Jesus overturning the forces of the law and of nature in the fashion of an American movie, summoning his strength, coming down from the cross, taking it as a weapon, destroying at several strokes the legions of people before him, rescuing the good prisoner, leaving the bad one up there, and going off into the western sunset. Clint Eastwood could do that, but not Jesus. Nor does the criminal ask him to do that; the criminal asks him to do what the criminal knows only he can do, “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

Another thing to focus our attention is that the criminal is facing in the right direction, which is to say that he is not obsessing about the past: “How did I get up here?” “My bad family,” “My unfortunate youth,” “The bad company I kept,” “The bad job I had…” He is not focusing on the past, and nor is he, like his friend, focusing on the moment: “It hurts up here,” “This is humiliating,” “This is embarrassing,” “This is likely to come to a bad end,” “How can we get out of this?” That is not where his attention is: his attention, and thus his words, are, “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.” His eyes are towards the future, and it that he becomes, in my opinion, an ensign for the church. He becomes our figure because he tells us what we ought to be doing and where we ought to be looking. The church loves to obsess about the past, for either we are overcome by it or seduced or enchanted by it, but we are very much people of the past. For those of us who aren’t people of the past, however, we choose to describe ourselves as being ‘relevant,’ ‘with it,’ and we’re obsessed with the moment, concerned about tomorrow’s headlines and today’s troubles and how we manage in the here and now. “Don’t give me any of that pie-in-the-sky stuff, give me what I need right now! Forget the past!”

The second criminal is rightly situated toward the future, where we ought to be. There is nothing in the past for any of us, nothing, and the present, as we all know, is miserable enough. The only hope there is for us is in the future, and this man kept it. “Remember me when you come into your kingdom… I know that there is more than these three grim hours up here on this hill; I know that there is something more than my present humiliation, my present degradation; I know that there is something more even than my death, which is just hours away, and I know you know it too, Jesus, so when you come to that place which is beyond all of this and towards which all of this has been leading, when you get there, Jesus, not on a cross but on a throne, remember me, bring me into your future.” That is an act of courageous faith, not only in Jesus but in the future that allows the thief to make his bold claim both on Jesus and on the future. It seems to me that of all the ideas communicated on this day, the notion that our future is destined to be better than our past because in the center of our future is Jesus, and that therefore we pray to him to remember us, is the word of courageous faith in the face of great difficulty, darkness, and doubt.

What does Jesus do? Jesus doesn’t say, “There, there, there, it will be all right, just hold on a little tighter.” He doesn’t say that; he says, “Today”—now, this instant, as soon as I’m there—“you will be there also.” Jesus also claims lordship of the future. Having trouble with the historical Jesus? That’s okay. Having a little trouble with Jesus right now? That’s understandable. Jesus is in the future waiting for us. His claim is on that time, and therefore if we claim him, we claim that time. “Lord, when you come into your kingdom…” When the world sees who you really are, and when the time is not simply time spend but time now enjoyed, when you get there, remember me. Find a place in your kingdom for me. Take me along with you; I can put up with anything if I have the promise of your presence in the future.

It’s all right to be forgiven, but it’s much better to be taken along into the land of light and promise. So, in this little dialogue we have almost all that we need to know. “Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom;” and “Today you shall be with me in that kingdom, in Paradise.”

The Third Word

“Woman, behold thy son… Son, behold thy mother.” (John 19:23-27)

“Woman, behold they son… Son, behold thy mother.” If the first word is one of forgiveness and the second is about promises, the third must be about families, for families are full of the need of forgiveness and defined by promises. In certain Christian circles there is often a great deal of talk about what are called ‘family values,’ and most of us think that we know what that phrase means, for better or for worse. Usually it means the kind of family we are used to. If yours is a sweet, wonderful, loving family of sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles all happily gathered around the festive table, that is what ‘family values’ means to you. If yours, however, is like most families—slightly mixed-up—full of the ‘fun’ in ‘dysfunctional’—that is what ‘family values’ are to you. If you are in the process of creating a family out of the ruins of families and societies, that is what ‘family values’ are to you.

In our American experience, our idealized ‘Norman Rockwell’ experience, some version of the nuclear family, with Mum and Dad and the kids is what we have in mind; and for many the whole experience of Christianity is family-centered, family-oriented and driven, and at its best is a wonderful example of both the human and the divine family. Yet Jesus himself, if we read scripture without even a great deal of care, tends to be rather hard on the family into which he is born, and on the family as the basic unit of faith. He is very hard on his own parents. Remember, when he leaves them in the temple when he is twelve years old, because he can have far more interesting conversations with the doctors and theologians and philosophers than he could possibly have with old, boring Mum and Dad, and they get so upset, and send out a search party; and finally, when they find him, what is the exchange? Mary says, “You have worried your father and me to death.” She does not say, but comes pretty close to saying, “You wicked, naughty boy;” but Jesus replies, “Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?” Not about Joe’s business, but about “my Father’s business.” That is rather a dicey family dynamic.

When Jesus becomes a famous teacher and preacher, he tells people to leave family behind and follow him. A man says, “I must bury my father,” and Jesus says, “Leave your father; let the dead bury the dead.” When people ask him about his brothers and sisters, he says, “My brothers and sisters are those who do the will of my Father,” and so on and so forth. This is not a ‘sit-around-the-family-hearth’ kind of family image. Thus, what we find in this third word is Jesus redefining the concept of family: what it is, who belongs, and what it does. It should not surprise us that here on the cross, in this third word, having forgiven, having made an enormous promise, he now reorganizes human affections. He redefines human relationships, creates a new family, and in the center of it is to be the remembrance of him. This is a family that is made not by blood, not by the old way, but by love and care: that is the new way. “Woman, behold thy son… Son, behold thy mother.” Surely this is providing for the necessities of those who depended on him, the mother upon her eldest son, the beloved disciple upon his dearest friend on earth, both of whom are now deprived of the center of their lives. They are now encouraged out of that sorrow, out of that loss to do a new thing, to become the object of love each to the other. This is a new series of relationships into which those who love Jesus are now to enter. The best way to love Jesus, whom we cannot see, is to love those whom Jesus loves, whom we can see. That is not a difficult theological proposition, though it is very humanly difficult to achieve. It is so much easier to love in abstraction those who are far away and far removed than those who are at our own tables and doorsteps. The favorite child, it is said, is the child furthest away from home.

So, Mary, who loses her first-born son is given a new son, John. The love she would have lavished upon her own son, Jesus, she is now to lavish upon John. Her need to love is fulfilled in one who now needs her love. As a footnote, I would fathom that John would be easier to love than Jesus, an easier son to handle; and that John, the disciple whom Jesus loved and therefore the one likely to suffer most acutely the pain of his loss, is given Mary to love, to look after, someone on whom he can focus the reservoir of his affections. It is easy and tempting to sentimentalize these arrangements made at the foot of the cross, easy to think that this is just so much social engineering on Jesus’ part—one more act of interfering, creating new family dynamics—but I see it differently, for I recall, as you do, as I invite you to do, the new commandment that Jesus is recorded as giving on the night before he was given up for the cross, a new social order he introduces. “A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another as I have loved you; even so love ye one another.”

Could it be that the commandment of Thursday night is fulfilled in its first instance by this new arrangement of love and affection, where Mary and John are bidden to love one another as Jesus loved them? If that is the example given at the foot of the cross to those two who love Jesus and will see him no linger, then they become the example for the rest of us, that we are to love one another as Jesus loves us, and after the example of St. Mary and St. John, extend, reform, revise, and redefine our family so that within it and beyond it we may show the love which Christ commands on Thursday and commends on Friday. “Woman, behold thy son… Son, behold thy mother.” In this is the law of love fulfilled.

The Fourth Word

“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:45-49)

“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Those of you with an architectural eye and those of you with a sense of literary construction are aware that the fourth word is the keystone, or lynchstone, that holds together the whole arch of these seven words. One, two, three… five, six, seven: what holds them together is this fourth word. Remove the keystone from any architectural structure based upon an arch of this sort, and the whole thing comes tumbling down; and you cannot construct such an edifice without having a good, solid keystone in place. So, is it not something of a paradox that this keystone of faith, in this great arch of these seven words from the cross, is a word of doubt? These are not words of the strong hand of affirmation or the glue of conviction, nor of any of the other structures that we would expect for a credible God to make as a credible witness at a moment like this, but these words have been variously styled by the commentators and historians as a “cry of dereliction,” “the words of abandonment,” “the sense of loss,” “the words of doubt.” “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

I think there is a good lesson for us to take from this, for this word reminds us that faith is not possible in the absence of doubt. Faith does not banish doubt, doubt is not the opposite of faith; and just as light makes sense only in the context of darkness and sound only makes sense in the context of silence, so too does faith express itself only in its relationship to doubt. Thus, in that upper room on the road to Emmaus, when Thomas says, “Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief,” we tend to thing of poor Thomas as hedging his bets, trimming, being cautious, prudent, a thoughtful Yankee covering all possibilities. If we look at that more carefully, however, we get something of a hint of the sense of the relationship for which I am trying to speak in this fourth word, that it is the context of unbelief and uncertainty that provides for the reality of certainty.

All of us know, who have ever attended a Good Friday service here or elsewhere, that this fourth word does not appear out of nowhere. It comes from Psalm 22, and we all know that and we all know that Jesus knew that. Any good Jewish boy would have known his psalms, known that there is a psalm for every condition under the sun, for every conceivable human emotion from elation to depression, and that everything in between is contained in one or more of the psalms. Press ‘Grief’ and you get Psalm 22; press ‘Contentment’ and you get Psalm 23; press ‘Elation’ and you get Psalm 51. You can do the whole syllabus of the psalms, which are way ahead of us in pointing out what we need to press for our condition; and so if you are in extremis, as Jesus most certainly was, he would not have pressed the wrong button. He would not have pressed Psalm 150—“Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!” He pressed Psalm 22—“My God, if you’re anywhere, why are you not here, now?” This is where you are needed.

So, it is that statement of abandonment that his people have always known that allows him ultimately to call upon the faith which his people have also always known. Jesus invokes Psalm 22 to ask the great question, “Where is God when I need him?” It is a natural thing to do, and we have all done it and do it all the time. We regard God, in many ways, as a spare battery. When we can function perfectly well on our own we do, but when we have need for extra resources, when we find our own resources thin, it is then that we say, “God, where are you?” Remember those questions on September 11th, this last fall, asking, in light of our great trauma and terror, “Where was God when so many innocent lives were lost and so much dreadful damage done?” The ‘cry of dereliction’ is the human response to the sense that God has left us to our own devices, thus making us the laughingstock of our enemies. When it appears that God is going to allow our enemies to laugh at us is when we become most angry at God. It does no good for me to know that God is real and present, for that little secret between God and me is all right, but why, God, don’t you tell them that you are real, and that I know it? That’s the transaction that leaves us feeling abandoned and neglected when it doesn’t take place.

If we want to know how it feels to be humiliated by an absent God, recall the experiences of the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel in their competition with Elijah and the God of Israel. All the priests dance around and cavort to get Baal’s attention, to get him to answer by fire, but nothing happens. “Call him louder,” says Elijah, taunting them; and to add insult to injury the Hebrew tells us that, “Peradventure he is sleeping, or else on a journey.” This last phrase, “or else on a journey,” in English doesn’t do justice to what the Hebrew says, because in Hebrew it is a great insult, saying in essence, “Perhaps he is on the john.” That is what it is saying—that your God is too busy on private business to come out and help you when you need it. The priests of Baal are embarrassed and humiliated, and their God fails to deliver.

So, too, are we embarrassed and humiliated when our God shows human weakness in asking the terrible question, “Where is God?” This is not how we imagine our heroes and mentors to behave. When Jesus cries out, however, as he does here, he is not simply quoting scripture, he is confirming for us that the struggle in which he is engaged is real. This is no pantomime, this is no tableau, no pageant; this is the reality of doubt contending with faith upon the cross. This is a real battle, not an imaginary or an ordinary battle; it is a kind of doubt that lives in a creative tension with faith, and it reminds us that we are alive. Like pain it reminds us that we are alive, both to God’s presence and to God’s absence. How can we miss that which we do not know or have? Louis Untermeyer, a generation ago, put it this way:

Ever insurgent let me be,
Make me more daring than devout:
From sleek contentment keep me free,
And fill me with a buoyant doubt.

It is the “buoyant doubt” if Psalm 22 and this fourth word that holds the great arch of faith together. This fourth word is a buoyant and not a despairing doubt, for in the absence of God we are reminded as never before of the reality of the presence of God. You cannot miss that which is not. You do not call for that which does not exist. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

The Fifth Word

“I thirst.” (John 19:28-29)

“I thirst.” When I was a boy and attended, as I did nearly every year, the three-hour Good Friday service that moved among our churches in Plymouth, Massachusetts, conducted by the local Council of Churches, I remember that the Order of Service carried for each word a description of that word for our focus. This was over fifty years ago, and I can still remember how the fifth word was listed: it was described as ‘human need.’ I think I understood that, I think that from the heights of theological abstraction we came to the moment where the crucified one and his needs were made real. It is not now the sovereign Christ who hangs on the tree, as it was in the first and second words; this is the human Jesus, whose needs we recognize and can identify, so I think I understood what they meant when they described this fifth word as ‘human need.’

As I have thought about it over the many intervening years since, I think that this word has a double meaning, almost like a two-sided mirror, for it is at the same time both the most physical word and the most spiritual. When we are tempted, as we frequently are on Good Friday, to tidy up the crucifixion because it is too unsightly a scene to view unaided, and when we try to make it bearable for our sensibilities; when we are inclined by allegory, symbol, and metaphor to spiritualize out of existence the cruelty and crudity of the cross, this fifth word comes to remind us of a real, profound, and physical need. Crucifixion is a terrible way to go, it exhausts all of the physical capacities of the body and it exaggerates the sense of thirst. “I thirst” reminds us of that physicality, the aggravated anxieties and tortures of an inhumane form of execution which, alas, in those days was not all that unusual.

So, this word of suffering is meant to drive home to us that the suffering is real, and what is even more cruel is that it is used as an occasion to add to the torment of the one dying. The vinegar on the stick is used not to slake the thirst of the one being crucified; we are told by the commentaries that it is a form of perverse smelling-salts, a stimulant to keep the crucified one awake and not to allow him the dignity of losing consciousness—to keep him awake so that he can experience and suffer pain. To offer the vinegar, therefore, as a palliative to thirst, is literally to add insult to injury. It is meant also for us, strangely enough, to have the same effect. It is meant to keep us conscious and awake and on edge, feeling what is going on, keeping us acute, alert, alive—a kind of unguent designed to hold our attention. When Jesus says, “I thirst,” we are reminded that he is deprived of the dignity of human kindness. He is deprived of the humanity that has been taken from him be degrees, and by implication what is taken from him is also taken from us. We too are deprived and dehumanized by even our historical participation in this spectacle. One cannot watch violence and not become violated and a part of the violence. Once we observe the violence and attempt to do something about it we are violated and part of the violence, the problem and not the solution. This is why so many of us are opposed to capital punishment, for it not only dehumanizes the victim, no matter how sanitary and salutary the means of taking another life, but it dehumanizes and punishes all of us who take part in it, in whose name it is done. The cries for justice and revenge are not worth the price we pay for participation in our own dehumanization and that of our state, our culture, and our society. What is denied Jesus is also denied us: it is real and material depravation.

Then, just as we revel in the physical and material nature of it all, that which is really real, we are reminded that to thirst, biblically, is to yearn, to long for, to seek after that which truly satisfies that which we truly need and truly lack. We recall where the psalm reads, “My soul is a-thirst for God;” we remember where Jesus, in his teaching on the Mount, says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled”—‘blessed,’ properly translated, meaning ‘happy,’ and therefore it is good and happy and joyous to thirst after righteousness. “Shall be filled” sounds as though one is sated, but what it means is that one is satisfied, has a sufficiency, has all that one requires and could want. To thirst, therefore, is to long for the only one thing that can satisfy our thirst. No substitute will do, nothing else will do. You know what it is to thirst for a glass of lemonade on a hot summer day in the country. You can taste the thirst: a Coke won’t do, iced tea won’t do, ginger-ale won’t do, even cranberry juice won’t do. The only thing that can satisfy the thirst is the thing that you thirst for, and it is better to go without than to have anything other than that which satisfies.

We thirst after God because there is a thirst for God, a desire for God placed within us by God which only God can satisfy. Nothing and nobody else will do. Money won’t do—nice to have it, but it won’t do. Sex won’t do—nice to have it if you can, but it won’t do. Even love is lovely to have, but it won’t do. Our soul is athirst for God. It is best put by St. Augustine in his famous prayer, “Thou hast made us for thyself and our hearts are restless”—thirsty—“until they find their rest”—thirst quenched—“in thee.” It is in this sense of thirsting—thirsting for the goodness of God’s people, thirsting for the love of God’s people, thirsting for the desire of God’s people—that this fifth word is also to be seen. There is the real physical thirst which reminds us that this is not a pageant, and there is also the longing, this sense that Jesus expresses on our behalf, that he too thirsts for the living God. In that sense we look forward to the satisfaction, the quenching, the filling of our thirst not with vinegar on a stick but with a cup of salvation.

The Sixth Word

“It is finished.” (John 19:30)

“It is finished.” This sixth word is a word of achievement. One traditional way of reading it is as a moment of surrender and capitulation. Surrender, as we know, is not necessarily the same thing as defeat, and some defeats could be avoided if a surrender took place in a timely fashion; and the difference between a good general and a bad general is the one who knows that. Surrender may be just the most appropriate strategy which avoids a defeat; we are defeated by others, defeat is an external, overwhelming, compelling enterprise, but in exercising our final sovereignty, surrender, we offer up ourselves. To know when to surrender, when to give up, is a moment of mature wisdom, a moment of insight, one might say a moment of grace. As the old song goes, in another, quite ungraceful setting, “You’ve got to know when to hold, you’ve got to know when to fold.” In evangelical piety there is much talk about the moment of surrender, the moment when you realize that the time has come to yield all that you have and all that you owe to Christ. It is time to give up fighting against him, to stop being Jacob wrestling with God. It is time to give up rebellion against his love, time to give up resistance to God’s appeal, time to say, “Here I am, I surrender all, take me, I’m yours.” That spiritual moment of surrender when it comes is anything but defeat, and can be seen as a sense of victory. Think of the young man pressing his suit to the young woman of his dreams. She rebuts him, she repels him, she plays him along, she ignores him, she plays with him until finally not able to resist him any longer, she surrenders and accepts his proposition. That is not defeat, that is victory, at least for him!

So, in the sense of giving up, we offer this not as a words of defeat but as a word of achievement; and in the religious tradition, when that moment of surrender comes you literally feel all of the burdens, all of the inhibitions, all of the things that have been weighing you down, leaving you: you surrender, and all of the chains are dropped. In one sense, when you surrender you expect to be locked up, but here when you surrender you are liberated, you are free, and everything falls and disappears. Everything that held you back, inhibited you, is removed, that which hung like a cloud over you is dissipated, and all is gone in the moment of surrender. It is not that you can finally relax; it is that you are finally embraced, and are free to embrace.

In our piety we may express it differently, but I suspect that we pray for that moment in our lives when we feel sufficiently serene, calm, and perhaps even enough in control to let it all go, and “let God,” as they say. Let him in, get it out, give it up, let him have you, and when you have that moment, that experience when you feel that all of this stuff that has clung so closely to you like sin, and as Paul describes it, you feel it moving away and you suddenly recognize that you have won, you have been claimed, you have been brought back, brought home. This is another way of reading this word, “It is finished.” I have finished what I have begun, I have done what I was meant to do, I have done the task. We all know what a wonderful sense of achievement there is when we have a list of things to do and check them off and look at the list as done. One of the cheapest and greatest thrills in life is to have a list of things done. “I did that, I accomplished that, I achieved that!” It doesn’t matter that there will be another list tomorrow or that there will be some lists which will be impossible to achieve—this I have done!

What was it that Jesus was meant to do that is now done that he can now say, “It is finished.”? Was it simply to endure the cross and the suffering and to say, “I’ve done it, I’m about dead, it’s over”? Surely there must be more to it than that. Part of the answer comes in the hymn by Mrs. Alexander that we’ve just sung, “There is a green hill far away, without a city wall…” It was written for children in a book of her hymns that put the Christian doctrines into language that children could understand. As a child I couldn’t understand it, it wasn’t that clear to me, and still to this day I see a green hill far away that does not have a city wall. That’s what I thought it meant, and perhaps you think that that’s what it means. That is not what it means. It means that there is a green hill far away outside a city wall. On one thing she is perfectly clear, and I understood it, thank God: “There was no other good enough to pay the price of sin/ He could only unlock the gate of heaven, and let us in.” This is the doctrine of atonement, this is what Jesus did, this is why Jesus died, only he could do it and he did it for us. The doctrine of the atonement is a little heavy to take up at this hour of the day but we cannot neglect it for it describes what it is that Jesus has finished on the cross, his work on our behalf. Its purpose is meant to explain that Jesus’s death is not an accident without meaning, it is not a tragic miscarriage of justice, he is not an unwilling victim picked up along the side of the road. Rather, just as our creation is a mysterious but purposeful manifestation of the love of God, so is the atonement, and so is the death of Jesus on our behalf on equally mysterious manifestation of God’s love for us. “There was no other good enough to pay the price of sin/ He only could unlock the gate of heaven, and let us in.”

This is the point that St. Paul makes when he writes that God commended his love for us while we were yet sinners, Christ died for the ungodly. While we were yet estranged from God, Christ died for us; while he was being nailed to the tree by the very hands of those who nailed him, he was dying for them, and for us. Could it be that what Jesus was meant to demonstrate for us, and achieved or finished on the cross, was not the act of his death along, but the manifestation of God’s love? What is finished here is not the death of Jesus, but the mission, the enterprise of life and love which he was sent to accomplish. He has, in Paul’s words, “fought the good fight,” he has finished the fight of faith, he has finished what only he could do. It is an achievement, and like the great achievement which preceded it, when God saw all that he had done, he rested, and said, “This is good.”

The Seventh Word

“Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” (Luke 23:46-49)

“Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” At the end of this long day, this ordeal at noon, how strange it is to speak at the end of confidence, but I am persuaded that that is exactly the sense in which we are meant to understand this seventh word. “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit” is an act of confidence, a summing-up. True, Jesus doesn’t use the word ‘confidence,’ the word is not recorded in any of the synoptic gospels, but the word he does use expresses confidence. “Father, into they hands I commend my spirit.” Remember at the fourth word, when all was dark and drear, and Psalm 22 kicked in with all of its pity and pathos, we spoke of “My God, my God!” as invoking the psalm in formal speech addressed to the great and absent one. Notice here, however, a slight change in nomenclature. As the end comes in sight he addresses the great one as “Father,” a term of intimacy. That is how he taught us to pray, “Our Father…” It is a term of proximity and familiarity. So the first sign of confidence, I argue, is the very word with which he begins this final sentence. “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” He has confidence in the one who holds his life, past, present, and future, and he knows that one not as the unmoved mover, not as the ground of being, not as the author of our past, present, and future design, but as “Father.” We should never fear to say that word, nor should we ever be inhibited by addressing God as Father, for it is that address of confidence with which Jesus concludes his earthly ministry.

Not only is the use of the title “Father” a sign of confidence, but it is what that sign conveys: it tells us that these are words of trust. He trusts the Father sufficiently to say to him, “I give you my most precious possession, me, my life. Father, into your hands I commend my spirit. I give you myself, and I do so because I trust you, and I trust that you will know what to do with me.” Think again of the symmetry. The penitent thief trusted Jesus, gave himself into Jesus’s care, and Jesus commended him into Paradise. Now, five words later, it is Jesus who trusts the Father and entrusts himself into his father’s love and care. I trust you, and I trust you will know what to do with me.

Who of us, when we come to the end of the road, would not be grateful to be able to say that? “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit. I do this because I trust you and I trust you will know what to do with me.”

There is a moment of calm serenity and confidence breaking in here. All of the noise, all the confusion, all of the palpable, visible agony, all of the sense of dreadful occasion that has consumed our attention for the last two hours and six words is now dissipating, and there arises like a bright light shining through the clouds of the perfect storm this eye of serenity and confidence. That’s what this seventh word is—quiet, calm, confident, and the climax of a great and terrifying drama. It is like that moment at the end of a great piece of music, at the end of a magnificent blending of sound and passion and energy when the last note from the chorus and orchestra has sounded, the conductor has brought his hands down, and there follows a moment of utter silence in the hall. You know what that moment is in Sanders Theatre or in Symphony Hall, when the absence of sound between the end of what is and what is about to be is poignant and poised—before some idiot in the third balcony loudly yells “Bravo!” too soon and ruins it all. We recognize that moment; and that is the seventh word.

Those of us privileged to be in Holy Orders have seen it in other places as well. I have seen it at the bedsides of the dying, both of those dear to me and of those whom I hardly knew. There is, attending the dying, around the bed for a while, whether at home or in the hospital, a great flurry of activity. The medical people, the nurses, the doctors, the friends, and the family are all there hoping, urging, hoping against hope, until it becomes clear that this is one battle that we are not going to win, in the conventional terms of winning. First the doctors leave, for they have other battles to fight, then the nurses go to help, then the technicians make the final adjustments and off they do. The rest of us are left standing there. There is the heavy breathing, the restlessness, the turning, the anxiety of the onlookers, the panic, in some cases, of the dying; and then, usually in the dying themselves, there comes an imperceptible moment of resignation, surrender, even of confidence—that still small voice of calm in the middle, where the center is now in the breath, the life, the heartbeat of our dying friend in the bed. More often than not I have seen the dying somehow compose themselves, although not verbally, in such a way that in their confident going they give confidence to those who came to give confidence to them. We think we are ministering to them, but at what was once upon a time called a ‘good death,’ it is their confidence in releasing themselves from the claims of life that ministers to us, that allows us confidence to let them go. “I am willing to commend my soul to the Father because I trust the Father and I trust that he will know what to do with me.” It is an act of autonomous, confident dignity; and such is how I imagine the impact of the seventh word of Jesus from the cross, and such is how I pray I may go when my time comes.

We know what is to follow, we have read it, we know the script, we have seen the play before, with the earthquake, the rending of the veil of the temple in twain, the harrowing of hell, all the phenomena of nature upside-down and in an outrage. We know that that is about to happen; but for this moment, at the eye of the perfect storm there is Jesus, who concludes in confidence. Could it be that it was this seventh word, this sensation, this extraordinary juxtaposition of serenity in the midst of all the violence that perhaps inspired the Quaker poet Whittier to write the lines we all love so well?

Drop thy still dews of quietness
Till all our strivings cease;
Take from our souls the strain and stress,
And let our ordered lives confess
The beauty of thy peace.

Perhaps this is the seventh word.

Breathe through the heats of our desire
Thy coolness and thy balm;
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire
O still small voice of calm!

“Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit…” because I trust you; and because I trust you will know what to do with me.

The Conclusion

The language of Good Friday is borrowed language, for our own language is inadequate. Our words are inadequate to describe what God has done for us in the full and sufficient sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, or to describe or understand what it is that we know to be so. That is why theology, unlike science, is filled with metaphors, symbols, poetry, music, art, and illusions that point to a reality beyond what we can see, and to a truth beyond our powers to prove. We will never be able to explain the mystery of the cross either to ourselves or to those who neither know nor believe. The normal persuasive powers of language that work their effects in the courts and lecture halls, and on the political platforms, and the logic that goes with them, do not work here. You know that if you have ever tired to explain to someone the mysteries of our faith; and that is why, when all is said and done, Good Friday is not an explanation or a phenomenon to be fully understood—which would be like asking someone to explain the Grand Canyon or to understand a glorious sunset. Those can perhaps be described or analyzed in terms of their technical truths or constituent parts, but their essence is to be experienced, admired, and enjoyed, not explained or understood.

Thus, today, at the foot of the cross, at the end of the day, the end of the week, the end of the passion, and the end of this service, we stand in silence. There is no language left, only gratitude that God should care enough to send the very best for our poor sakes. We pray on Good Friday for everyone, for our brothers and sisters in the world, whom God loves and whom we must love. We pray for the Jews, that they might forgive our harm to them in God’s name, and we pray for ourselves, that we might remember them as yet God’s chosen and beloved people. We pray for the Muslims and all others who are one with us in God’s creation, though separated from us in practice and experience by the divisions of this sadly divided world. On this day we pray for all Christians, but most especially today we pray for our Catholic brothers and sisters around the world and in this archdiocese: for the pope, for the cardinals, bishops, priests, deacons, and people, and most especially we pray for our cardinal, Bernard. We pray for healing, for forgiveness, and for the renewal of the spirit of Christ in the service of his church. We pray not least of all for ourselves that, unworthy as we are, we may receive generously and gladly God’s gift of himself to us in Jesus Christ, to whom be all honor and glory, thanksgiving and merit now, and for all eternity. Amen.

The Reverend Professor Peter J. Gomes is the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church.

Waiting on Tables and God’s Call

Mattie Germer — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 05:10:57 +0000

How to listen for and answer God’s vocational call for your life

I am a waitress. With a Harvard degree. Given the seeming incongruity of these two facts, often times I’m embarrassed to tell my former high school and college classmates what I’m doing. To mitigate my feelings of occupational inadequacy, I often qualify my explanation by saying that I’m planning to “eventually” go to graduate school, or that I’m waiting tables while I figure out what I’m “going to be when I grow up.” I seem to have to justify my current job choice all the time, because whenever I meet someone new or am catching up with an old acquaintance, the simple question “So, what are you up to?” is always understood to be about the other person’s current employ.

As an alumna of a prestigious university, I always assumed that my degree, if not simply my intelligence, would afford me a certain degree of career autonomy. I could do what I want to do, be what I want to be. Isn’t that why my parents, numerous scholarship funds, and I paid such an exorbitant tuition for four years? I imagine you might have the same assumption, since we Harvard students are explicitly and implicitly told things like that all the time—we will be the captains of industry, the movers and shakers, the who’s-who, and all those other pretentious clichés. We are the cream, and we are destined to rise.

Christians at Harvard are not immune to this type of thinking. We repeat Luke 12:48 like a mantra: “Much is required from those to whom much is given, and much more is required from those to whom much more is given.” (1) We seem to think that to “waste” our 1600 SATs and our 140+ IQs working in jobs that lack prestige and profit would be shameful, if not sinful. God has given us intelligence, we tell ourselves, and we are to use it to be fruitful for his kingdom. But what if God has things in his plans for us that don’t include doing OCS recruiting or taking the LSATs or graduating summa? I don’t mean this to demean those who are in fact called to be stockbrokers and Supreme Court justices and Nobel-Prize-winning professors—God assuredly does call his people to serve him in those capacities. But we limit God when we fail to admit that he also might call us to serve him in other ways that have lower profiles, are much less prestigious, and are certainly less lucrative.

In our society, we have taught children that, when asked what they “want to be when they grow up,” they are to reply with the job they hope to have. This sort of implication is simultaneously misguided and accurate. The average person spends about as much time each week laboring as sleeping, and certainly more time working than playing, relaxing, watching television, reading, praying, going to church, or even bonding with loved ones. In that respect, as far as our temporal commitment goes, we are our jobs. This clear connection requires then that our jobs reflect the people we are. One best-selling author explains it this way: “Who you are is more important than what you do. The goal is to bring what you do in alignment with who you are, so you don’t end up being someone you don’t want to be.” (2) In short, we must be intentional in selecting and shaping our jobs because otherwise they will shape us, and not always in uplifting ways.

If we are to be deliberate about our vocations, I believe that there are four steps we all ought to pass through as we attempt to understand our callings in life. First, we must come to understand our collective identity as children of God. Secondly, we must develop and embrace our self-identity through an honest and forthright examination of our talents and passions. Thirdly, we must explore realms in which our gifts can bless the world and glorify God. Finally, we must learn to be patient, for God’s timing is often very different from our own.

Who Are We? Discovering Our Collective Identity

As religious people, we often speak of figuring out our career path as finding our call, or our vocation. The two words mean the same thing: the word “vocation” comes from the Latin “vocare,” which means “to call.” The essential idea, of course, is that God calls us to be someone or do something. As Christians, we believe that God, through Christ, and with the power of the Holy Spirit, has a plan for us. In turn, since a paying job is such an integral part of our earthly work, we come to see our career path as the whole of our vocation. Unfortunately, this is a shallow and incomplete understanding of what it means to be called by God. We are first called to be, and then called to do. (3)

The timing implied in this statement means that we should probably figure out who we are before we can figure out what we should do. Our identity as Christians, and ultimately, as human beings, is two-fold: there are certain things about us that are true of every single person ever created, and then there are things that are exclusive to ourselves. It is the former category that comprises what I will call our “collective identity.” The Bible tells us that we are children of God, created in his image, loved dearly and desperately by him, who, because we aren’t perfect (a.k.a. gods ourselves), are in need of redemption. In the ubiquitous bestseller The Purpose Driven Life, Rev. Rick Warren explains that all people are first and foremost “planned for God’s pleasure” and “formed for God’s family” in order to “become like Christ.” (4) These “calls” on our lives apply universally, and are the simple, yet profound, spiritual truths that should be the core of our identity. All human beings are children of God designed to praise and serve God. We are called to be His disciples. We are called to be instruments and conduits of His love.

Unfortunately, we have a tendency to believe that if something is universal, it must be less important (or at least less definitive) than something that applies specifically to us as individuals. We think that these ideas are too common, too ordinary, and simply too unexceptional to merit much of our attention, especially when it comes to figuring out the specific career that we are called to. When we allow ourselves to think this way, however, we are wrong, for two main reasons. First, the radical nature of the universal Christian identity is inherently so profound that it is impossible for it to be “common.” Think about it: the one, true, omnipotent and omniscient God, who created the world, loves you. Even in this great wide world full of people, God loves you specifically, and has a plan for your life. Second, the inability to recognize our status as a loved child of God can impart a sort of spiritual anxiety that will paralyze any attempt to discover existential meaning, let alone professional meaning. In other words, if you fail to own and accept this universal component of your identity, you will be left searching for love, meaning, and truth that only God can provide. No job, however exciting, fulfilling, or lucrative, can fill the chasm left in the human soul when God’s everlasting design is ignored or forgotten.

A good example of this is St. Augustine of Hippo. St. Augustine is among the most influential of the Church fathers, but he wasn’t even baptized until he was thirty-two years old. His life before that was not empty; he was a prominent and well-respected professor of rhetoric. However, his acceptance of his identity as a child of God completely changed his perspective. At nineteen, as Augustine later recounted, he had “first begun to search in earnest for truth and wisdom,” but at thirty still found himself “floundering in the same quagmire.” (5) At the time, he rationalized his lack of progress by telling himself that “it would need little effort to win a position of some standing in the world, and what more could a man ask?” (6) The problem, Augustine eventually came to realize, was that although he was already a man of some standing, he was still floundering. Augustine’s life changed once he got right with God, but not before, and the lesson he learned is just as true for us today: without a solid grounding in faith, as believers chosen and justified by Christ, all our striving will ultimately be unfulfilling.

Who Am I? Accepting Your Personal Identity

It is only, then, by building on our communal existence as children of God that we are able to discover our personal identity. It is obvious that each person is created uniquely, and given gifts, talents, and passions that further define and refine his or her selfhood. In other words, each person is “shaped for serving God” and “made for a mission.” (7) While there are many ways to explain personal identity, Rev. Rick Warren has developed a useful framework to explain what we should examine in ourselves when attempting to discern God’s specific call on our lives. According to Rev. Warren, God SHAPE’s us in five ways in order to equip us to do the things He wants us to do: by means of Spiritual gifts, Heart, Abilities, Personality, and Experience. (8)

I don’t want to turn this into a self-help article or a “how to get a job” advice column. I’m sure most of you reading this have taken at least one personality test and/or skills indicator exam in your lifetime. If not, go on-line or head over to OCS—it will do wonders in helping you understand your temperament and talents. These tests won’t be a magic machine that will spit out your perfect job, but understanding your strengths (and weaknesses) will allow you to have a more complete picture of yourself, which will lead to a well-formed personal identity. While our skills and personalities explain the ways we interact with your surroundings, spiritual gifts are the ways in which we are inclined to interact with God, and in turn, the world. Some listed in the Bible are serving, teaching, encouraging, contributing, leading, and being merciful. (9) Like understanding your personality and abilities, there are also many books and on-line resources that will help you gauge your spiritual gifts.

Equally important is taking time to examine your experiences. Look at the things you have gone through that have helped to define your outlook on life and your perception of what is most important in the world. One author suggests that we look to the pureness and innocence of our childhoods to help us discover who we are and how that speaks to our ideal careers. (10) Ask yourself: when you were little, what did you love more than anything? What felt most natural for you to do? What sorts of activities did you gravitate towards back when your understanding of goodness was unmarred by the sometimes-negative influences of the world? Another author suggests remembering the ten happiest moments in our lives. (11) Ask yourself: where were you? What were you doing? Who were you with? What about the memory brings you the most joy? If you are honest with yourself, you will probably see some sort of link between the events. If you seem to like singing, but you only enjoy doing so with groups, it may be because you actually enjoy fellowship more than singing.

Beyond those cheerful reflections, however, I encourage you also to carefully examine your sufferings. Those who have lost a loved one to a devastating disease are often the most dedicated to finding a cure. Those who have overcome depression often make the most compassionate counselors. Those who have struggled through poverty can feel the most complete solidarity with the underprivileged. What have you seen, felt, and known that has made you weep? Perhaps God will use those experiences to allow you to bring healing to yourself and to others.

So, What To Do? Moving From “Being” to “Doing”

Our personalities, gifts, and experiences allow us to understand the ways in which we see the world, and in turn will help us figure out how we can take those things that we are and translate them into what we will do. What we do, then, should not create our identity, but serve to reflect that identity. Our vocation functions to marry our universal identity with our particular being. Paul, writing to the Corinthians, acknowledges this individual component when he says that each person should “lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him, and to which God has called him.” (12) We are not all called to be pastors or missionaries, or doctors or lawyers. You have a special niche in which God will use you.

But how do you translate your identity into action? The link between the two was best expressed by a man who himself vacillated between several so-called “careers.” After graduating from Princeton, Frederick Buechner taught English at a boarding school in New Jersey, then left to be a full-time novelist. While living in New York City writing books, he converted to Christianity, went to divinity school (in his thirties), and then became the preacher at Exeter. While his definition of vocation is a bit long, it is full of insight:

“Vocation … means the work a person is called to by God. There are all different kinds of voices calling you to call kinds of different work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of society, or the Superego, or Self-Interest. By and large a good rule for finding out is this: The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you most need to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you’ve presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing cigarette ads, the chances are that you’ve missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you’re bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a) but probably aren’t helping your patients much either…The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” (13)

Accepting Mr. Beuchner’s advice is one thing, but figuring out exactly how our gladness intersects with the world’s hunger is a bit more difficult. Gladness can mean many things. But, gladness is not synonymous with talent, and this is a crucial lesson for very gifted people to learn. All people have many talents. Your “gladness” likely will employ one or more of your stronger talents, but we must remember that simply being good at something will not necessarily make us joyful.

Gladness is fulfillment. This, however, is not to say that our true callings will offer us complete peace. It does not mean that we will always go to work with silly grins on our faces. Challenges will come, they will help us grow, and ultimately, they will teach us more about our characters and about the character of God. The gladness that Mr. Beuchner speaks of is the place where we feel whole; where our sorrows and our happinesses are fused together and synthesized into a feeling of completeness within ourselves, with the world, and with God. While this may not be fully attainable, we must strive towards it and rejoice at every fleeting glimpse of it.

Some would dispute the notion that personal gladness should be one of the primary components in understanding God’s call for our lives. A number of people who write about vocation, particularly those who write about being called to the ordained ministry, a religious order, or the international mission field, speak as though we should only be concerned with what we perceive is God’s will, not what we feel. I disagree. We are not called to carry Christ’s cross, but wear his yoke, and He tells us that his “yoke is easy” and his “burden is light.” (14) Life will bring suffering, yes, but it is not wimping out to use what the Lord has given us to spread love and happiness in the world while still being personally joyful. As Thomas Merton puts it, “Unnatural, frantic, anxious work, done under pressure of greed or fear or any other inordinate passion, cannot properly speaking be dedicated to God, because God never wills such work directly.” (15)

Additionally, since few of us will ever see a burning bush like Moses or hear the voice of God like Paul, I believe that the primary means by which God will speak to us is though our hearts. This, of course, does not mean that if we feel like the ideal life would consist of lounging by the pool drinking margaritas, we should then assume that this is God’s call for our lives. We must always be careful to filter our feelings and emotions in order to know if they are from God. If a feeling is from God, it will be in line with the person we know Jesus Christ to be, as revealed through the Bible and through our understanding of theology. Moreover, our feelings are likely inspired by God if their fulfillment would bring to us and to others what Paul called the “fruits of the spirit”: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. (16)

These “fruits of the spirit” can help us discern whether or not our potential vocations tap into the “world’s great hunger.” If in our work we help to bring about a world in which there is more love, more joy, and more peace, then we are in line with Mr. Beuchner’s definition. This can be on a personal level, in a small group, or on a local, national, or global level. Some needs of the world are obvious; workers that directly aid the poor, the oppressed, the outcast, and the victimized surely fill deep needs. But those who offer companionship, hospitality, comfort and hope to the emotionally broken and the spiritually needy also bring much needed wholeness into an often-empty world.

I am inspired by the story of Warren Brown. (17) A George Washington University graduate with multiple degrees, including a master’s in public health and a J.D., Mr. Brown did what most anyone would consider important work: he prosecuted medical fraud and malpractice cases for the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C. He was good at his job, but he wasn’t happy. After years of suffering through a job he hated, he realized that he could bring more joy to people in his life though his baking. It might not have had the gravitas of being a lawyer at HHS, but he made people smile. He inspired them. He helped them express their love for others. He saw that there was a “society-wide hunger for anything genuine and authentic,” and he helped to fill that gap. While baking cakes might, by some definitions, not seem important, Mr. Brown’s shop (which he named “Cakelove”) enlivened a D.C. neighborhood and brought a sliver of kindness to a slice of society. When asked how he justifies his career choice, Mr. Brown says that he thinks “the world would be a better place if more people let themselves be energized by their natural enthusiasms.” (18) Mr. Brown is more right than he perhaps knew: the word “enthusiasm” comes from the Greek words “en theos,” meaning “God in us.” (19)

But When? Just a Little Patience

As Mr. Brown discovered, vocation is a life-long process. It is not something that we figure out when we graduate from college for the rest of our lives. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has determined that the average person will have more than ten different jobs during their prime working years. (20) People change, industries change, circumstances change, and needs change. What does not change is God and His sustained and permanent call on our lives to follow him, serve him, and spread love in the world.

Encouraging or not, the Bible is full of delayed vocational gratification: the most obvious story is probably that of Joseph. (21) If you don’t know the story (think Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, people), let me refresh your memory. Joseph was the spoiled kid of Jacob (aka Israel) and Sarah. Joseph’s ten older brothers resented him for many reasons: not only did he get great presents from Dad (like the aforementioned Technicolor dreamcoat), he also had the audacity to tell them that he had a dream in which he was their king and they his lowly subjects, who would one day bow before him. As brothers are wont to do, they ganged up on Joseph and decided to kill him. (Isn’t the Bible great?) But, when they realized that they could make some quick cash by selling the little punk into slavery, they decided to do that instead.

While he was a slave in Egypt, Joseph was imprisoned after being falsely accused of trying to rape his boss’s wife. In jail, Joseph became known for his ability to interpret dreams, so when Pharaoh had a bad dream, he asked him to come to the palace and figure out what it meant. As it turned out, Pharaoh’s dream predicted a seven-year period of plentiful harvests, followed by a seven-year famine. Pharaoh was able to save grain during the fat years to make it through the lean years, and thus saves Egypt from ruin. So impressed was Pharaoh that he made Joseph his second-in-command.

The famine came, and Joseph’s family, back home in Israel, were desperate for food. They heard that Pharaoh had planned ahead and was selling his extra grain, and so they made the trek down to Egypt. Joseph, after testing his brothers to see if they felt bad about selling him into slavery all those years ago (they did), tearfully revealed to his family that he was their long-lost brother. They all (you guessed it) bowed at his feet, just like his seemingly arrogant dream of decades ago had revealed. Of course, his brothers were all horribly apologetic, but Joseph said to them, “Don’t be angry with yourselves that you did this to me, for God did it. He sent me here ahead of you to preserve your lives… to keep you and your families alive so that you will become a great nation.” (22)

Joseph was seventeen when he was sold into slavery, the age most of us were when we were beginning the application process to Harvard. We were concerned with football games, prom dates, and, yes, getting good grades. I’m sure most of us had hopes and dreams about what we were going to be when we grew up. I bet Joseph had similar plans—he probably planned on having a wife and kids, of owning his own parcel of land, and about having his own herds of cattle. He didn’t plan on spending the next decade or so in prison. But God had a plan, and God used the horrible experiences in Joseph’s life to bless him, save his family, and ultimately, glorify God.

Like Joseph, we need to let ourselves live our lives as God allows them to unfold. We must operate according to God’s time, not the world’s time. No other generation has been so simultaneously blessed and cursed by instantaneity—we can download virtually any song, buy any product, find any fact, or communicate with anyone with a just a click of the mouse. In our world, patience is not regarded as a virtue, but as a weakness. And, when patience is encouraged, we are told to wait, at the most, a few hours for an e-mail reply, a few days for a response from a job interview, or maybe a few months for a grad school admissions response. Waiting decades for an answer from God? Forget it.

Fortunately, patience is more than just waiting. It is painful for ourselves and disrespectful to God to behave as though a portion of our life is a “holding pattern” until God reveals his glorious plan to us. As the late Catholic spiritual leader Henri Nouwen explained:

Active waiting means to be present full to the moment, in the conviction that something is happening where you are and that you want to be present to it… Patient living means to live actively in the present and wait there. Waiting, then, is not passive. It involves nurturing the movement, as a mother nurtures the child that is growing in her. (23)

Joseph didn’t sit idle in prison. While he could have simply given up, he used his God-given gift for dream interpretation to aid his fellow prisoners. The Bible also tells us that the Lord “granted him favor in the eyes of the prison warden,” which led the warden to place Joseph “in charge of all those held in the prison.” (24) His willingness to accept his circumstances, while still employing his talents and passions, allowed the next phase of God’s plan to come into effect. Like Joseph, we need to trust in God, follow our hearts, use our gifts, and seek our bliss, all while making the best of our circumstances. That is true patience. You might graduate from Harvard without a clear sense of your vocation, as I certainly did. But my heart told me that I loved to wait tables, and I am grateful that I followed that call.

Enjoy the journey

At the risk of sounding pedantic, I will leave you with a list of things I pray for, which you in turn can use as you too embark on your vocational journey. First, don’t fall into the trap of taking a job only because your parents want you to. Even worse, don’t take a job because your parents once aspired to it themselves—never live someone else’s deferred dream. (25) Don’t take a job just because you admire someone who has it. Don’t take a job just because you “always” planned to do it. Don’t take a job just because you “want to try it,” even though you can’t stomach the idea of actually doing the work. Don’t take a job just because you will make a lot of money, so that you can “do what you want in your free time.” Don’t take a job just because it will make you feel important, famous, or useful. Don’t be afraid to try new things. Never become complacent. If you find, in your current job, that you dread waking up in the morning because you know that it means going to work, start looking for a new job. We will all have bad days at work, but if the misery persists, leave. Life is too short and too precious to hate what you do all day long.

Yes, I am a waitress, but I am confident that what I am doing now is working towards fulfilling God’s plan for my life—my vocation. I am, most definitely, still accepting and understanding my identity. While the four steps I have developed in this article are not necessarily sequential, it is imperative that you accept God’s love and your identity before you will be able to succeed in any career. I am working on my relationship with my God and myself in ways that are essential if I am to become the woman He wants me to be. Waiting tables gives me flexibility in my schedule to be involved in my church, travel, spend lots of time with friends, read lots of books, and take care of myself.

Beyond the ways in which time outside of my job makes me happy, the job itself brings me much joy. I love serving others, literally. I thrive on the smiles I receive from a table when I make their special occasion just a tiny bit better by suggesting just the right wine or by offering a unique dessert. Serving God means serving others, sometimes literally. Besides, the hospitality industry is a wonderful place to connect with people about the big questions in life. I have found that, in an office setting, it is nearly impossible to talk about love, faith, and meaning in a substantive way. But after a long night on your feet, over a chilled glass of pinot grigio, chatting with your co-workers about what matters in life is effortless. The social component of my job feeds me, even though I don’t have as much money as I’d like, and even though I miss the intellectual banter of Harvard sections and dining halls. I don’t think, at this point, that God is calling me to be a waitress for the rest of my life. I do, however, know that right here, right now, at my church, at my restaurant, with my friends, and in my struggles, I am where God wants me to be. More importantly, I am who God wants me to be, and I look forward to hearing from him about the next step in my journey.

1. Translation of Luke 12:48 from the New Living Bible.

2. Bronson, Po, What Should I Do With My Life: The true story of people who answered the ultimate question (2002, New York: Random House, rpt. 2003), 25. (emphasis original)

3. The source of this revelation is difficult to pinpoint, as many Christian authors agree with this assertion. I did however, find much clarity and wisdom about this point in Richard Nelson Bolles’ career workbook What Color is Your Parachute? (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2003 ed.), 308-327.

4. Bronson, 7-8.

5. Augustine, Confessions, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin, 1983), 126.

6. Augustine, 127.

7. Warren, 8.

8. Warren, 236.

9. Romans 12:6-8 (New International Version)

10. Jones, p. 43.

11. Smith, p. 41.

12. 1 Corinthians 7:17 (NIV)

13. Beuchner, Frederick, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC. 1973, New York:Harper Collins, rpt. 1993), 118-19.

14. Matthew 11:29

15. Merton, Thomas, New Seeds of Contemplation (1961, London: Burns and Oates), 16. Qtd. In Smith, Gordon, Courage and Calling (1999, Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press), 83.

16. Galatians 5:22-23 (NIV)

17. Bronson, 39-45.

18. Warren Brown, qtd. in Bronson, 45.

19. Bolles, 310.

20. No author given, “Frequently Asked Questions” U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. [online-web] Retrieved October 26, 2004 at http://stats.bls.gov/nls/nlsfaqs.htm.

21. The story of Joseph can be found in the Bible in Genesis, Chapters 37-45.

22. Genesis 45:5-7 (NIV)

23. Nouwen, Henri J.M. “Waiting for God.” From The Weavings Reader, Ed. John S. Mogabgab. 1993, (Nashville: The Upper Room Books), no page given. Retreived electronically at http://www.bruderhof.com.

24. Genesis 39:21-22 (NIV)

25. Adopted from Jones, p. 34-38.

Mattie Germer ’03 is a graduate in Government from Kirkland House.

On Life and Stem Cells

Editors — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 05:09:00 +0000

We are told in the Gospels that Christ, one Sabbath day, entered the synagogue to find a man with a shriveled hand. Some onlookers wondered what Christ would do, for it was unlawful to do work on the Sabbath. Reading their hearts, he asked them, “Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?” Answering his own question, Christ said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” When he did, it had been completely healed.

Christ meant his message to be painfully clear: when faced with morally difficult questions, our answer should always be the same: to do good, not evil, and to save life, not kill. We as Christians, and indeed, we as thoughtful people, should always endeavor to keep Christ’s principle foremost in our minds when faced with problematic situations. But would that our decisions were always so simple as Christ’s in the synagogue: far too often, this world jumbles together the good and the evil, the saving and the killing, until all our best intentions seem muddied and confused.

Such unfortunately is the case with stem-cell research, and we are in the middle of it here at Harvard, whether we like it or not. This past April, the University with great fanfare unveiled the new Harvard Stem Cell Institute, which has since then already become a center for cutting edge stem-cell research in this country. Only a few weeks ago, Prof. Douglas Melton, who is co-director of the Institute, requested permission to clone human embryos for research purposes. It is not certain that the university’s ethical review board will approve Prof. Melton’s request, but should they do so, Harvard will be the first institution in the country to clone human beings. Whatever this means, we are in the thick of it now, and with stem-cell researchers around the nation determined to move forward with their work, the issue will not go away anytime soon.

What does it mean that we are on the cusp of cloning human embryos for biomedical research? For that matter, should we be troubled that already Harvard has created seventeen new stem-cell lines, which required the destruction of numerous human embryos? It is not immediately clear what these developments mean, and reasonable people are by no means agreed that we should regard them as troublesome. Quite the contrary, many on this campus are heralding these developments as great victories for science and for humanity, signaling as they do the possibility of an exciting new era of regenerative medicine. For them, the hope that the lame might walk and the blind might see is cause for great celebration, and opposition to this great new discovery is simply incomprehensible.

Much of the debate on campus has taken this tone, pitting the forces of hope, science, and progress against the legions of fear, religious dogmatism, and conservatism. But surely, this issue is not quite so simple as that. Science, we should always remember, is not an unqualified good. It was not all that long ago that some scientists thought themselves free to conduct experiments (ranging from the demeaning to the horrific) on minorities in the name of the “greater good.” The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, for example, remains a horrible blight on this country: hundreds of black sharecroppers were allowed to die (some as recently as 1972) so that government researchers could observe the effects of the disease when untreated by modern medicine. We would do well to keep in mind, as science moves forward, that progress is not always progress in the right direction. If science is to advance, it must do so within an agreed-upon moral framework.

Knowing this is supremely important when considering the pros and cons of stem-cell research, for the tremendous promise that the technique holds makes careful deliberation difficult. Stem cells are unique in that they possess the potential to grow into a variety of other types of cells, and scientists believe it may be possible to use them to develop new cells that may then be used to replace diseased human tissues. If these scientists are correct, stem cells may usher in a new age of regenerative medicine, dramatically reducing the impact of disease and raising life expectancies. Given these prospects, the excitement about stem cells should come as no surprise.

But of course, if that were all there was to the debate, there would be no controversy. Unfortunately, the issue is much thornier than that. Adult stem cell research is universally regarded as morally acceptable, but embryonic stem cell research is much more problematic. The process of obtaining embryonic stem cells requires the destruction of human embryos; there is no way around it. These embryos may either be “spares” from IVF clinics, or human clones made specially for the purpose in laboratories. The question, then, becomes: is it morally permissible to destroy human embryos for research purposes? Is it ever morally permissible to conduct research that depends upon the exploitation and destruction of nascent human life? On the other hand, given the terrible suffering this research may alleviate, can we morally decide to stand in the way of something with such great promise?

It all comes down, in the end, to the moral status of the embryo. If the human embryo possesses a moral standing equal to all other human beings, all such research is categorically immoral. No matter what benefits the research might confer, it is wrong to exploit and destroy one class of human beings for the good of another. If the human embryo possesses some sort of intermediate moral status, however, a wide range of policy positions is possible. And if the human embryo possesses no significant moral status at all, then embryonic stem cell research is a nearly unqualified good. A thoughtful response to this question means taking each of these positions seriously.

There are many who hold that human embryos possess no special moral status, and should be regarded as little more than microscopic clumps of cells. Their argument depends on a definition of human personhood which regards biological development as meaningful with respect to personhood. Although we regard newborn infants and the elderly as possessing equal claims to personhood, regardless of their great developmental differences, these commentators find certain points of human development to be crucially meaningful boundaries. Some locate the crucial boundary at the development of recognizably human features; some at the capacity to feel pain; and some at the development of the “primitive streak,” a cellular formation which occurs at the 14-day mark. While these commentators disagree on the precise moment at which the fetus should be accorded full human status, they all agree that before that point, the embryo should be regarded as no more than an clump of cells.

Others, like Harvard professor Michael Sandel, disagree with this analysis. While Prof. Sandel would agree that personhood can be defined with respect to human development, he would disagree that human embryos before that point possess no moral status whatsoever. Instead, these commentators argue that this position undervalues nascent human life, which they say possesses an intermediate yet significant moral status. This position takes seriously the humanness of the embryo, recognizing that it represents a human life which has not yet developed many features that are characteristic of full personhood. While this position emphasizes the difficulty of drawing definitive lines, oftentimes its adherents will point to the 14-day “primitive streak” as a significant developmental marker. As this position does not define embryos in their earliest stages as fully in possession of personhood, it allows for the possibility of embryonic stem-cell research. Prof. Sandel is in favor of such research, although he cautions that a proper respect for nascent human life requires careful regulation. Others who hold this position argue that a proper respect for nascent human life is not consistent with the systematic exploitation and destruction of such, no matter how carefully regulated.

A third class of commentators, including Princeton professor Robert George, asserts that it is impossible to define human personhood with respect to form or function, arguing instead that personhood must be defined with respect to what kind of entity we are. Prof. George points out that “a human embryo is a whole living member of the species Homo sapiens in the earliest stage of his or her natural development… the embryonic, fetal, infant, child, and adolescent stages are stages in the development of a determinate and enduring entity—a human being—which comes into existence as a single cell organism and develops, if all goes well, into adulthood many years later.” These commentators emphasize that human embryos possess the genetic blueprint for self-directed growth and, if allowed to develop naturally, will without fail become adult human persons. This position holds that it is impossible to define personhood with respect to developed characteristics since those characteristics are possessed in widely varying degrees. For example, they would say, it is inadequate to define personhood with respect to mental function, since that would make the intelligent more human than the less intelligent, and especially more human than the mentally handicapped. The same argument, then, applies to the ability to feel pain (for not all people can), the possession of recognizably human features (for some are disfigured), and other such characteristics. Precisely because, then, it is impossible to draw significant moral boundaries anywhere else, we must draw the line at conception. This position, obviously, precludes the possibility of embryonic stem-cell research.

Simply reviewing these positions, unfortunately, does not give us a definitive answer. Indeed, we on the editorial board of the Ichthus thought it fitting to review them all because we ourselves are of several minds. Some of us, as Christians, believe on religious grounds that life begins at conception, settling definitively the debate. Others of us are not so sure, noting that the Bible is not a science textbook and so does not necessarily provide moral clarity on this issue. Religion aside, all of us agree that the arguments heretofore presented possess great persuasive power and deserve our careful consideration. These questions, unfortunately, have no easy answers, and reasonable people can and do disagree about the best way forward. Knowing this, however, we do agree that the lack of serious debate about stem-cell research here at Harvard is disturbing. While reasonable people disagree about the merits of such research, the issue is undebatably debatable, and we feel that it is simply unacceptable to allow the destruction and cloning of human embryos on this campus to go forward without such debate. As Christians, we set before us Christ’s command to do good, not evil, and to save life, not kill. Our strongly held belief in the sanctity of all human life drives us to seek a moral solution to this dilemma, holding ever before us our twin duties, both to protect all human life and to love and care for all who are living. It is our sincere hope, and indeed our fervent prayer, that thoughtful people on this campus will join together with us in earnestly seeking the moral path forward.

Sins of Omission

Benjamin and Heather Grizzle — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 05:08:47 +0000

At present, one of the most pressing issues for many Christians is the churches’ stance on homosexuality and the “inclusive” or “exclusive” theologies that attempt to inform that stance. With regard to this issue, many conservative Christians have taken an “exclusive” position, claiming that the homosexual lifestyle is wholly incompatible with Christian morality. In some cases, as has been claimed, homophobia is precisely the root of the conservative opposition to “inclusive” theologies. Regretfully, many conservatives are as ready to use Scripture to force LGBT individuals out of their churches as their predecessors were to enslave Africans and subordinate woman using the same. In response, theological progressives remind us that we should always be suspicious of a “Christianity” that is quick to pass judgment, preferring a Christianity that errs on the side of acceptance.

Over the past two decades, a position of growing strength in many denominations has favored re-evaluating the church’s stance on issues of gender and sexuality. This camp, which has at times been called “revisionist,” maintains that God continues to be active in the world in such a way that God’s Revelation to humankind becomes more complete with the passage of time, and thus doctrine must be revised accordingly. Great victories have been won by these thinkers, an example of which was the ordination of women. Of late, revisionist efforts have focused on blessing the homosexual lifestyle, and thus many LGBT Christians found a hero in Gene Robinson, who was consecrated the first openly gay bishop last year and as such shepherds the Episcopal diocese of New Hampshire.

Bishop Robinson took part in the well-attended panel discussion “Gays and God: Being LGBT and a Person of Faith” at Harvard’s JFK Jr. Forum on September 21. He articulated his position passionately, saying that the Church should be a place welcoming to vulnerability and arguing that condemnations of any specific lifestyle prevent individuals from being honest about the persons God has created him or her to be. Most salient to the current debate, however, was Bishop Robinson’s upholding of the authority of Scripture as the standard for Christian morality. Bearing this claim in mind, he explained how each of the seven passages used by conservatives to assert the sinfulness of homosexual intercourse was actually better interpreted in such as way as to be irrelevant to the conversation. Again, his comments were passionate and compelling, and I left with much to consider about my own position on the divisive issue.

But of all that was said, one comment was essential to the future of the church. With respect to the conservative bishops who claim that his ordination represented a break with 2000 years of scriptural interpretation and church tradition, Bishop Robinson said, “I wish they would at least be open to the possibility that they might be wrong.” Indeed, openness to this uncomfortable position must be the starting point for any thoughtful Christian, for decisions motivated by our own prejudices are inherently sinful and must be avoided at all costs—particularly those decisions that relate to God and others’ access to Him.

Because of the importance of those decisions, they have usually been made (at least in the Episcopal Church) on the basis of recourse to scripture, tradition, and reason—often referred to as the “Anglican Tripod.” The theory behind the Anglican Tripod says that, given any decision, first consultation must be made to Holy Scripture. If the text is ambiguous or silent, then church tradition is consulted. If tradition is also unclear, then the decision is made on the basis of reason, though informed as best as possible by scripture and tradition. In the case of homosexual “exclusion”, Bishop Robinson and those of like mind have argued that the Scripture is practically silent. Further, because the tradition has dealt with interpretations of homosexuality that are inaccurate—revisionists remind us that the capacity for a lifelong, monogamous homosexual relationship was not recognized until relatively late in the twentieth century—a new, more reasonable theory regarding homosexuality must be developed. Further, in accordance with other accepted mandates of the church, the revisionists say that homosexual individuals can best be encouraged to live Christianly when offered the full means of grace found in such sacraments and ordinances as the Eucharist and Holy Matrimony.

While not everyone in the church agrees with this position, the statement has been maintained by some—Bishop Robinson an important exception—that any opposition to this reasoning can only come as a result of homophobia. However, this assertion is entirely untrue: Not only are many conservatives thoughtful and articulate in objecting to “inclusive” theologies, but they do so on grounds they consider to be foundational to Christianity.

One such foundational issue at stake for conservatives regards the interpretation of Scripture. As Bishop Robinson made clear during the discussion, all sides recognize the Bible as absolutely authoritative for Christians. But conservatives do not agree with the use of the Tripod as the rubric for interpretation. Instead, conservatives assent to a model sometimes called the Anglican Tricycle: Scripture is the big wheel in which the deposit of faith is vested, and tradition and reason are the smaller wheels used only to clarify the meaning of otherwise clear Scripture. This position is maintained because conservatives believe God’s Revelation is not continual but rather was made complete by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Further, conservatives maintain that the answer to human problems cannot come from human beings, but rather must come from outside the human system—that is, from God. Because reason is tied to humanity, and because tradition can be merely reason repeated, conservatives reject these as legitimate sources for the answers to existential questions. Rather, because these answers must come from outside of ourselves, we must look to Scripture as the source of God’s answers. Though many maintain the ambiguity of Scripture, conservatives believe there is no issue on which the text cannot be a vehicle for God’s guidance, and, because tradition and reason are not necessarily part of the outside-of-self-Revelation, recourse to any extra-biblical source must inherently involve ignoring the testimony of the faith once delivered to the saints.

But more than Biblical interpretation, the issue of ultimate importance for conservative Christians is that of the position of human beings before Almighty God. Christian theology has always been guided by a low theological anthropology, meaning that Christians do not believe humans are capable of earning a place in Heaven by their actions, however virtuous those actions may be. Conservatives maintain that an individual must present his or her entire self to God in a spirit of full contrition, first confessing to be intractably sinful and wholly incapable of change and then relying on God’s grace alone to afford a place to stand in the Divine presence. From the conservative perspective, maintaining that any part of oneself is not sinful—for instance, one’s sexuality—would be tantamount to confessing God as the Ruler of one’s whole life, with the exception, that is, of the one “safe” place that needs no confession. To conservatives, this would be as senseless as electing Ronald Reagan President of the United States while keeping Jimmy Carter as President of Georgia: irrespective of the sinfulness of the area one holds back, so doing is an affront to God, for God’s reign in the Christian’s life must be total or not at all. Any attempt to remain ruler of any portion of one’s own life completely precludes the possibility of God’s rule. Because conservatives maintain that no aspect of human life will be free from God’s divine judgment at the last day, they maintain that arguing otherwise would be a direct violation of the commandments given in the perfect Revelation of Jesus Christ, not to mention a profound disservice to the world they have been called to serve. Conservatives believe they have been given a message from God to offer humankind, and that altering the message is in no one’s best interest. Most importantly, however, conservatives maintain that any heightening of the aforementioned theological anthropology will diminish the profundity of Christ’s self-sacrifice on the cross. Because conservatives believe that the cross represents the extreme measures that God has taken to shower love on humanity, they refuse to allow the importance of this seminal event to be denigrated in any way. If in resolving “to know only Christ and Him crucified” they must offend reasonable human sentiments, they are willing so to do.

As an aside, it is important to mention that the question of “choice” is irrelevant from the conservative standpoint. Most conservatives, following Martin Luther, believe in “the bondage of the will,” which means that they consider no human able to “choose” anything about himself or herself, virtue or vice, and therefore whether one has “chosen” a lifestyle has no bearing on one’s fundamental need to repent entirely for one’s perfect sinfulness before an perfectly Holy God.

From the conservative position, these points are not peripheral. Many have claimed that conservatives should hold their tongues and allow individuals to make their own decisions about “non-essentials” in the faith. Indeed, many in the Episcopal Church maintain that the issue of homosexuality and ordination is “adiaphora”—literally, “that which does not matter.” But, from the conservative position, these “non-essentials” have overwhelming and undeniable significance for those issues that are, in fact, essential.

Admittedly, conservatives have sinned enormously by tolerating the type of homophobia that says the only homosexuals worthy of mention are those who commit suicide to be free from their guilt. The burden is on the conservatives to foster a church environment in which homosexuals truly are welcome. But the distinction between “welcome” and “affirmed” must be maintained: Everyone is welcome, but welcome only to repent at the foot of the cross. If that position is ever revised, then conservatives will consider themselves to have been the victims of exclusive theology.

Jeffery David Dean ’06 is a Religion concentrator in Adams House.

Gays and God: What’s at Stake for Conservatives

Jeffery David Dean — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 05:07:24 +0000

Jeffery David Dean ’06 is a Religion concentrator in Adams House.

Jesus Walks With Me

Jacob Bryant — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 05:06:39 +0000

College Dropout. By Kanye West. Roc-A-Fella Records, 2004.

In his debut album The College Dropout, Kanye West lays down prophecy about shallow American materialism and still-entrenched racism with one breath and “sets the party off right” with the next. By doing so, West evades pigeonholing from all sides: from the very first track, he refuses to only “write something that . . . will make the kids start sharing candy and stuff,” instead filling his album with biting criticism of the societal injustices and the sins of the hip-hop industry. A few beats later, he invites “all the girls [to] pass the weed to ya m*******n man.” West won’t let himself be confined to any single role, like the uplifting good guy, party boy, or social critic. Evading these clichés, West is left to define himself, which is what strings a topically diverse album together. Stepping out from behind the turntables, West tells his own story—in one track, dissecting low expectations for black teenagers and criticizing institutional prejudice he experienced at the Gap, and in another, thanking his family and looking desperately for Jesus while confessing his own fears after a near-fatal car crash last October. West pays tribute and looks ahead, combating racism while admitting his fears, ultimately turning for help beyond himself. Dropout, which has been called the best hip-hop album of 2004, is spiteful, refreshing, hilarious and convicting. Most of all, it is honest, and this honesty gives West’s critique bite and his cause hope.

From the first beat, Dropout is clever and defiant. The album opens with a skit in which a teacher asks Kanye to write a graduation song that the “kids will love,” to which he responds with the biting track, “We Don’t Care.” The chorus, sung by a children’s choir, is as catchy as it is wry: “All you people that’s drug dealing just to get by/ Stack your money till it gets sky high/ We wasn’t supposed to make it past 25/ Jokes on you we still alive.” Himself a college dropout, West uses a series of skits and the cover art to frame the album as a commentary on the educational system, criticizing what people expect to get from education and the disconnect between what is taught and what is learned. Railing on an education system that he sees little benefit in when “racism is still alive… they just be concealing it,” West wonders about the value of school when you can make more money dealing drugs than “working nine to five.” Typically, though, he bounces back with “You know the kids goin’ to act the fool/ When you stop the programs for after school,” twisting Ludacris’ own line back on itself. West worries about the fate of urban schools as they lose funding and decries a culture of violence and consumerism. He places blame implicitly on the government but brings this back on himself when “n**as can’t make it to ballots to choose leadership but we make it to Jacobs and to the dealership.” So is Kanye a scholar or a player? As he tells it, he’s the “first n**a with Benz and a backpack”.

This isn’t the only dichotomy that West bridges. First, at the most basic level, we see his attempt to bridge the gap between producer and emcee, which is something that is rarely done well. Sometimes you’re left wondering: is this really West’s album? The list of featured guests reads like a who’s-who of hip-hop: Jay-Z, Twista, Talib Kweli, Ludacris, Common and Mos Def, all artists for whom Kanye laid beats before his own record deal (a journey he chronicles in a lengthy rap/monologue, “Last Call,” the album’s final track.) On many of the tracks, he leaves the serious rapping to his guests, admitting that he can’t do it “fast enough” on the track “Slow Jamz,” as he turns it over to Twista. Still other tracks are based mostly on looped R&B clips from other artists. Recognize the singer/song writer on “All Falls Down”? It’s Lauryn Hill; West sampled a hook from her MTV Unplugged album and allows it to act as the driving force of the track, musically and lyrically. While Hill’s own album was musically frustrating (though lyrically stunning), looped atop West’s beat she sounds more herself, more the Lauryn Hill of The Miseducation, the Fugees and even Sister Act II. For West, this is business as usual, making other artists sound better than they can make themselves sound—not because he manipulates their styles, but because with West they find their own voice.

But West’s own rhymes sound really good. On “Never Let You Down,” Jay-Z starts off rhyming about gaining status and power, only for Kanye to one-up him with a better-rhymed, show-stopping attack on racism and meditation on death. And these meditations resonate because, as the album’s dichotomies and contradictions emerge, above all, we see West’s fundamental honesty. He is honest about where he is—about his fears, his struggles, and his hopes. Only West will criticize materialism while acknowledging his own guiltiness, or fear the decaying world around him but wonder what makes him good enough to judge it. On the track that starts with the Lauryn Hill clip, “All Falls Down,” he implicates consumerism as a manifestation of black self-hate rooted in a history of white oppression (“We shine because they hate us . . . things we buy to cover up what’s inside/ Cause they make us hate ourselves and love their wealth”), but includes himself in the same process. Even his production style, mostly featuring other artists and drawing them to artistically higher levels, feels humble. None of his criticism feels aggrandizing because West is most critical of himself.

As such, West is positioned to comment—some have said prophesize—about a wide range of issues. “Spaceship”, a low-key funk track about wanting to escape the working world (on a spaceship) follows the gospel hymn “I’ll Fly Away,” a spiritual about flying away to heaven to escape from the pains of the world. With these tracks back-to-back, West links the legacy of slavery to present-day corporate enslavement (“this grave shift is like a slave ship”), fighting back against the two-faced treatment he received (being questioned for stealing and then proudly displayed as the token black employee) at the Gap. The Marvin Gaye sample that the song uses and the doo-wop style in which it is sung promote the connection back to the civil rights movement, to Motown, and to slavery, whose legacy lingers. And on an album that begins as a commentary on the educational system, the ending to “Family Business,” the last real track, where a child suggests “lets get Stevie out of jail,” builds an implicit connection between a failed education system and incarceration. Racism is “alive, they just be concealing it,” says West, not from distant observation but from personal struggle.

So where is the solution to all of these societal injustices that West points out? Resolution is elusive, he says, but in “Jesus Walks” he brings responsibility back to us: “We at war with terrorism, racism, and most of all we at war with ourselves.” West avoids only blaming a legacy of oppression for his present-day problems. Instead, West places the responsibility for fighting the “war” back on “ourselves.” In this, West moves beyond the role of biting critic or lamenting victim, towards resolution. Knowing the task will be difficult, he asks only that “Jesus walk with me,” and by doing so communicates a vital, honest spirituality. Here too, West is humble—he doesn’t ask for blessing, for favor, or for escape, but only that Jesus would walk alongside him. Asking only for this, West captures the simple power of Christ’s presence that many of us lose sight of: hope, he says, is simply knowing that Christ is with us. So while the tempests of the world rage around us—failed political, social and education systems, debilitating racism, violence, and pain—Christ can be our peace. This peace, West says, is not available only to him, but “to the hustlers, killers . . . drug dealers, victims of welfare… Jesus walks with them.” His message, finally, is universal. Here, too, his honesty rings out, as he cries: “I want to talk to God but I’m afraid cause we ain’t spoke in so long.” Honest about where he is, where he needs to be, and Who he needs to get him there, he prays to “see Thee more clearly/ I know He hear me when my feet get weary” and invites his listeners to do the same. Jesus meets us where we are, says West, and his presence brings assurance in the face of turmoil. And change will come, West challenges us to believe, if we start the change in ourselves, and if Jesus walks with us as we go.

Jacob Bryant ’07, Books and Arts Editor, is a Social Studies concentrator in Adams House.

Evolution Under the Microscope

Chiduzie Madubata — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 05:05:51 +0000

Uncommon Dissent. By William A. Dembski (ed.). ISI Books, 2004

Have you ever met Ken Ham, president and founder of Answers in Genesis International? No? Well, really you must meet him—allow me to introduce you. Mr. Ham got his start in Australia twenty-five years ago, working for a fledgling organization called the Creation Science Foundation. As his reputation grew, he began accepting invitations to give talks in the United States. Mr. Ham found himself to be even more popular here than in his native Australia, and in 1986, he decided to move to the United States to work for the Institute for Creation Research. Mr. Ham soon moved to Kentucky, where he and several colleagues started up Answers in Genesis, an organization dedicated to the notion that the earth was created 6,000 years ago by God during the six literal days of Genesis. Since then, Answers in Genesis has grown rapidly, and is today a large, multinational organization with operations in much of the English-speaking world. Today, Mr. Ham is one of the most popular Christian conference speakers in the United States. His syndicated radio program, Answers with Ken Ham, is broadcast on hundreds of stations worldwide, and his brand new $25 million-dollar “Creation Museum” is currently under construction near Cincinnati, Ohio.

There. Now you two have been introduced. I’ll just bet that you haven’t met anybody quite like Ken Ham before. I’ll also bet that you think Ken Ham is off his rocker. But, although I imagine you’re a bit shocked by my description of Mr. Ham and his organization, you probably aren’t too taken aback. “After all,” you probably think, “that’s what all those nutty creationist people are like.”

That, however, is not quite fair, either to Mr. Ham or to scientists who object to evolutionary theory. Mr. Ham is by all accounts a nice person, albeit somewhat misguided. But more importantly for our purposes, Mr. Ham is really not representative of scientists who object to evolutionary theory. Many scientists would have you think so—according to a popular textbook, Molecular Biology of the Gene, scientists’ objections to evolution are “based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles.” But although that may be true of Mr. Ham, it is no longer true of a growing number of reputable scientists, both religious and irreligious, who object to Darwinian evolutionary theory on scientific grounds.

William Dembski’s new book, Uncommon Dissent, gathers into one easy-to-read volume the best of those objections from a wide array of respected academics. Dr. Dembski, a professor at Baylor University, asserts in his book that “dissatisfaction with Darwinian theory is reaching critical mass.” While that may or may not be true, his book at the very least signals that serious objections to Darwinism are here, and they are here to stay. Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins memorably said that those who object to evolution must either be “ignorant, stupid, insane, or wicked,” but the objectors in Dembski’s volume come across as none of the above. Rather, their objections are for the most part quite reasonable, grounded as they are in sound science and having nothing to do with religion.

Three objections brought up in Uncommon Dissent particularly deserve our attention. First, Prof. Michael Behe of Lehigh University notes the existence of what he calls the “irreducible complexity” of the living cell. According to Dr. Behe, irreducible complexity exists when cellular machines must possess all of their components in order to maintain functionality. In these sorts of machines, the removal of any single component would render the entire machine worthless. Behe points to the complexity of flagella, which rotate in order to produce mobility for cells, acting much like miniature outboard motors. As Behe explains, “forty different proteins are required for a functional flagellum,” so that the absence of any single protein would prohibit the flagellum’s functionality. Irreducibly complex machines like the flagellum pose a serious problem for Darwinian evolution, which requires that each component of the flagellum would have to appear in succession, with each modification being beneficial to the cell in some way. No empirical evidence has been shown to explain what pathway the flagellum could have taken to evolve on its own.

Second, recent advances in genetics have become increasingly problematic for evolutionary theory. As every tenth-grader knows, evolution requires that all organisms descend from a common ancestor, creating a vertical succession of related species. New evidence from genetics, however, does not confirm the Darwinian paradigm, and instead shows that species are related through a complex series of interconnected “webs” or “nets” that are both vertical and horizontal. These sorts of horizontal relationships between species challenge the popular notion that all organisms descended from a common ancestor. Other discoveries in genetics have also muddied the Darwinian waters, notably the apparent bias shown by organisms toward the deletion of certain portions of DNA. Numerous studies have been done on the phenomenon of horizontal gene transfer, which typically increases the size of the genome. However, some bacteria have been seen to undergo horizontal gene transfer without a change in genome size. This can only occur when certain portions of bacterial DNA fall away when the bacteria reproduce, indicating a non-random bias toward deletion of DNA. This apparent non-randomness is of course problematic for orthodox evolutionary theory, which holds that all genetic changes are random.

Third, new findings about the complexity of proteins also cause problems for the Darwinian model. Biologists have long thought that single proteins acting in isolation perform specific functions within cells. New work has shown, however, that the process is not quite so simple. To the contrary, most cellular functions are instead carried out by highly complex protein machines. Again referencing Dr. Behe’s irreducible complexity argument, it is difficult to see how these complex machines could have been created by random processes. Each protein must have been individually beneficial in order to be produced, but no evidence shows how any single protein could have been useful by itself.

These arguments, as we have seen, have nothing to do with “religious dogmatism,” but instead are reasonable scientific objections to evolutionary theory. Those who object to evolution, however, must do more than pick holes in the Darwinian thesis—any sustainable objection must also deal with the positive arguments made on behalf of evolution. The authors of Uncommon Dissent do this as well, meeting head-on many of the strongest arguments in the Darwinian arsenal.

For years, one of the greatest puzzles for evolutionists was the origin of life. Evolution might be able to explain the great variety and complexity of life, but it could not account for the fact of life itself. How could living organisms emerge from non-living matter? A 1953 experiment by the biologist Stanley Miller showed that amino acids, which are necessary for building organic compounds, can be created in conditions that were thought similar to those found soon after the Earth’s formation. Since then, evolutionary biologists have pointed to Miller’s experiment as evidence for how life emerged from the legendary “primordial soup.” Those who object to evolution, however, find Miller’s account unconvincing. Amino acids do not simply and spontaneously form organic proteins—they must join together in a very specific way, and then must interact with each other in order to be functional. To complicate the matter, genetic information must be created and passed along to offspring. Simply put, there is an enormous gap between amino acids and the first living cells, and Miller’s experiment does not explain how that chasm might be crossed. Most honest biologists, indeed, will agree that the origin of life is a mystery which evolutionary theory does not adequately explain.

Perhaps the most visible argument for evolution is the fossil record. It seems like every other day, paleontologists make news for finding new “missing links” in the fossil record. When one digs deeper, however, the real story does not live up to the hype. When Darwin wrote his Origin of Species, he predicted that the fossil record at that time was incomplete, and that paleontologists would no doubt find countless intermediary organisms. His prediction, however, has not come true. Decades of work have failed to find the predicted transitional forms, leading some biologists, like the late Stephen Jay Gould, to revise dramatically their notions of evolution. Orthodox evolutionary theory, however, can account for life’s complexity and diversity in no other way than by millions of years of gradual change. This gradual change is simply not evident in the fossil record, and events like the Cambrian explosion (the sudden appearance in the fossil record of numerous different species with no apparent common ancestor) are highly problematic for the Darwinian paradigm.

By and large, then, Uncommon Dissent is successful in its goal: providing reasoned, scientific objections to evolutionary theory. In contrast to Ken Ham’s religious dogmatism, Dr. Dembski and his colleagues provide strong arguments against evolution that committed Darwinists should take seriously. A major weakness of the book, however, and of the larger movement of which it is a part, is the lack of an alternative system with which to replace evolution. In science, it is not enough to simply poke holes in a reigning theory. In order to affect a paradigm shift, one must be able to show that the existing data fits better in some new theoretical framework.

This has not been done. While the arguments set forth in Uncommon Dissent are no doubt powerful, they do not go far enough towards constructing a coherent alternative theory. Rhetoric does not a scientific theory make. However, there may yet be hope for Dembski and his fellow travelers—their arguments, while coming at evolution from many different angles, share something in common. Each argument essentially points to the inadequacy of time plus chance as a causal factor—in some way, they allege, design must be present in order for life as we know it to have emerged. It is possible that this central assertion might be able to integrate itself with current evolutionary theory. As it now stands, this admittedly seems like an unlikely proposition: evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins regularly assert (quite heatedly) that design theory is not science, and furthermore can never be science. Scientists like Dr. Dembski are regularly placed in the same category as Ken Ham and his $25-million-dollar Creation Museum; dismissed as religious dogmatists whose ideas are not worthy of debate. This response seems extreme, especially after one carefully considers their reasonable objections to Darwinism. Such heated responses are due, however, to a foundational principle of modern science: that all science must be done under the presupposition of philosophical naturalism. Essentially, this means that scientists cannot look at the stars and, instead of carefully examining how they might have come into being, throw up their hands and exclaim, “God made them!” In most cases, the assumption of philosophical naturalism has led to great discoveries and the unraveling of mysteries once thought to be impenetrable to human reason. The assumption, however, can be carried too far. From the assumption that any given phenomenon has a natural cause, one can easily begin to assume that all phenomena must have natural causes. This is what modern biologists have done, by asserting that any theory which includes design is not nor ever can be science. Design, to them, is too close to suggesting a divine Designer, which under the presupposition of philosophical naturalism is not scientific. But surely, a framework which states ex cathedra that God is unscientific is unsatisfactory. The existence or non-existence of God has nothing to do with sound science (as it is a non-falsifiable proposition), and should not be treated as such. Scientists should be free to integrate design into the evolutionary framework, and should not be expected to make judgments about its existence. That, in the end, is a matter best left up to the philosophers and theologians. Sadly, given the current state of things, it does not look as if modern biologists will admit their overreach anytime soon. Until they do, however, and until they give arguments like those found in Uncommon Dissent the credit they deserve, the contemporary debate about evolution will continue to generate too much heat, too little light, and far, far too many Creation Museums.

Chiduzie C. Madubata ’06 is a Biology concentrator in Mather House.

Somewhere East of Eden

Michael Cover — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 05:04:12 +0000

Garden State. Dir. Zach Braff. Big-Time Theater Company, 2004.

And when you stare persistently into an abyss, the abyss also stares into you.

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Plot: An actor in his mid-20s returns home after years away from his family for his mother’s funeral; confronts past.

So runs Zach Braff’s (Scrubs, NBC) screen-writing and directorial debut. New York Times writer Stephen Holden has dubbed it both the Graduate of 2004, due to its similarities to the 1967 classic and its melancholy pop soundrack (featuring Coldplay, the Shins, Frou Frou, and, fittingly, Simon and Garfunkel) and, alternatively, the anti-Graduate of 2004 due to its surprising optimism, a feature normally absent from depictions of suburban malaise. An anonymous reviewer, less generously, calls the film “existential angst for the Saved by the Bell generation.” But while some may see it as little more than a canned coming-of-age spin off, Braff’s film should be applauded for (quite literally) exploring new depths in the genre.

Right up front, both Braff and Natalie Portman present characters who are refreshingly real. The actors take risks to look into the fragile psyches, and dare I say souls, of our generation. What they unearth is very interesting; still, characters don’t make a movie. The real appeal of the film comes from its mythos, or if you prefer, storytelling.

This may seem a surprising statement, since plot is the one element ostensibly absent from Garden State. Andrew, Braff’s character, drifts through the film from party to kitchen table, graveyard to bathtub, and moviegoers are left with little thread with which to weave a coherent story. But wandering and homecoming comprise the second oldest myth in the Western canon. One word in Greek expresses both those ideas: nostos. By Andrew’s random shuffling through scenes, Braff presents his protagonist subtly as a suburban Odysseus. Other films, like American Beauty, have managed similar modernizations of myth, but Garden State exceeds its predecessors by challenging our culture rather than acquiescing to it. It touches on the greatest of all mythic themes—rebirth.

One of the trademarks of the Saved By The Bell generation has been its tolerance of an increasingly liberal sexual ethic, especially in the realms of television and entertainment. Sex, separated from its God-given purpose, has become an anesthetic; a means of numbing the deep emptiness that consumer materialism creates. Garden State recognizes this void, and challenges it by placing at the climax of Andrew and Samantha’s (Portman) relationship not a sex scene, but a fully clothed embrace. Both are sitting in a bathtub, where it would have been easy enough to follow the soul-bearing conversation with a little undressing, but Braff makes the choice to have Andrew fall into Samantha’s arms and say, “I feel safe with you.” He presents a picture of intimacy and real knowledge of another human being that many only dream of having.

In the same scene, Braff reveals his understanding that home itself, as we know it as children, must inevitably disappear. “Maybe families,” Andrew says to Samantha, “are just groups of people who are in love with the same imaginary place.” Braff has made a critical observation about the Western nostos: there is no coming home, only back again.

But Andrew’s sentiment, well guided as it is, leaves something wanting. Shouldn’t the desire for home have some real fulfillment? Garden State falls short of providing an answer, but then, what more can be expected of it? It is, at its heart, a secular myth. And though it contains splintered reflections of the truth (as Tolkien often said), it cannot provide any real answers.

A case in point is the “scream scene,” which, if you hadn’t guessed it from the movie posters, is the climax of the film. Three lost young adults, wearing trash bags to fend off the rain, stand on top of a tractor in the middle of a dump, which is supposed to be a garden, and stare into a chasm which they’ve been told is infinite, trying to make some sense out of the suffering in their lives. Mr. Braff has read his Nietzsche. But instead of peering wordlessly into the abyss, the three boldly scream in the face of nothingness, defying it with some unfounded hope that there is more to life than this. Joseph Campbell would likely point out that the presence of the cave and the rain makes this a rebirth scene. But where was the baptism? They were wearing plastic bags. And what good does a scream do when the abyss echoes back? The only thing this scene says for sure is that we are somewhere east of Eden.

The Christian who sees this film has a special obligation to respond to it. It is the cry of our age: that it does not want to accept consumerist sexual idolatry and nihilism, but has no other answers. “Maybe,” we must say, “there is one who has gone into the abyss before us. Maybe there is one who has brought us back. And maybe, families are just people who are all in love with the same real place that none of them have ever been to before.” Such has always been the case for people of faith. As it is written in the letter to the Hebrews:

“They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one.”

Michael Cover ’04 is a Classics graduate from Currier House.