Awe and wonder, gratitude, inspiration

Surrender’s Blessings

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Though we’d just met when hospital orderlies called us each from waiting room to preop,  she and I agreed: We didn’t want to go. Trained by a culture that prioritizes control over surrender, I asked my orderly, “What if I don’t go?” My new friend concurred: “We’re going on strike.”

Yet off we went to surrender our markers of control: wallets , rings, watches, glasses, clothes. Control was reduced to fumbling with a hospital gown to preserve dignity–barely.

Control had worked during the 40 years cardiologists reported, “Maybe someday you’ll need your aortic valve replaced, but probably not until your 60s, and maybe never.” Now an echocardiogram had shifted “maybe” to consulting a surgeon.

Still I pursued control. I doubled exercise, enhanced nutrition, lost more weight. Maybe I could still strengthen my heart enough to  skip surgery. I felt ever better; a painful challenge if forced into surgery would be relinquishing pre-surgery well-being.

Then another echocardiogram. The valve was leaking badly, its shrinking surface area raising pressures that would eventually destroy my heart. Mortality odds were soaring; maintaining control by resisting surgery would do me in. Any vestige of control now meant choosing surrender.

I grieved this into the final hours. Still, due less to strength of character than to bleak alternatives and a hospital system that sucked me into its inexorable protocols, surrender I did.

I most strongly felt the surrender as not just forced but ultimately embraced after tearful goodbyes to spouse, daughters, siblings gave way to the anesthesiology fellow pushing my stretcher with wheels as balky as some shopping carts down lonely halls. I apologized for her having to explain “He had a lot of good-byes” when an operating room phone call asked why we were late. Gently she told me, “It was moving to see the love.” It’s time to yield to care like this, I thought.

Such kindness was underscored as we reached the operating room, an efficient team inserted IVs, lines, whatnots, and that syringe slowly pushing in to take consciousness. All team members used my name and gave their names. They honored me as person with feelings and fears.

What a gift when offered to one on the cusp of being chilled 10 degrees below normal, chest sawed open, heart stopped, blood and breath circulated by machine, the symbolic and in many ways literal seat of being to be held in a surgeon’s hands as aorta is clamped off,  diseased valve removed, new valve sewed in. Would a clot break loose? Warmth ever return? Heart restart?

Then puzzling light and shadows. I remembered the man born blind reporting, after Jesus healed him, seeing men like trees walking. Through ICU windows I was glimpsing midday sun on hospital buildings.

Though pain and recovery lay ahead, I had awakened to so many gifts: discovering that the feared breathing tube had already been removed, that my incision had been minimally invasive, that I was . . . alive! My mind seemed still mine. The stuffed narwhal my granddaughter had given me, matching her own so we could together be comforted, was tucked in beside me. Love filled the room—first as compassionate staff cared for me, then as loved ones arrived.

Many of the effects of surrender in this context were so intense as to be almost mystical beyond words, but truth-telling does require reporting that not all was peaches and cream. After catheter was first removed a combination of anesthesia aftereffects and my reaction to lost privacy completely froze my bladder. This continued for so many hours that if I had not surrendered to some, shall we say, very direct interventions, what I had always anxiously assured my spouse could happen on too long a plane flight would have happened: something would have burst.

But let me ask you, if you had trouble managing some of your affairs in public and you were told somebody always had to be with you, what would  you do?

Or suppose you at last negotiated that you would be allowed to try by yourself so long as you stayed near the call button. By now even the most rules-affirming staff–who were, after all, just trying to obey the rules to keep the patient safe–realized creative alternatives must be sought. Then suppose every time you started to unfreeze you could hear your heart monitor, wi-fi carrying it out to main hall and nurses’ station for all to enjoy with you, beeping and cavorting with every move while you waited for someone to race in and code  you. What would you do?

Well, what I did was this: I yielded to catheterization whenever the freezing had gone on too long to remain unaddressed. And I turned to my post-partum daughters, who had in total delivered six babies and had learned, I now began to grasp in fuller ways by far than before, what it means to give up all privacy and bodily control. Minute by minute and hour by hour–thank you dear children–they coached me through.

Frozen body functions remained, however, far outweighed by learning like never before the power of being cared for in body and spirit. One nurse, sensing the exhaustion Joan and I were feeling due not only to recovery intensities but also constant night interruptions and noises, proactively conceptualized the entire night so she could structure it to give us the longest periods of unbroken sleep.

Another night, Eun-Hui and Bryna needed to take extra care of the endless array of wires and tubes attached to me and into me, into my chest, arms, carotid artery, and even, I was intimidated to learn, the very core of my heart. There at 3:00 a.m. they stood on either side of me, Eun-Hui supervising as each took turns checking bandages, adding ointments, in a few wonderful cases taking this or that out for good.

Off to my left,  an utterly worn-out alien slept on a fold-out chair. It was my poor spouse, ears muffled in noise-canceling headphones, each eye looking like a magnified fly’s eye under a black mask. A nurse herself who had once cared for people in my situation, knew the dangers, and had endured months of worry long before the traumas of supporting me through surgery, now she could rest into the gift of other nurses taking over. She particularly deserved that after the first night, when with no place in to stretch out while I was in intensive care she had slept sitting straight up except with head bent onto my bed.

So now on both sides of me for over half an hour Eun-Hui and Bryna painstakingly worked. Carefully, gently, skillfully, they created what came to seem to me a holy time, a period of understanding as well or better than I ever had in worship the healing effects of the laying on of hands. When they were done, Eun-Hui asked how I was doing then as they turned to leave of all things thanked me, adding with a smile, “You were a very patient patient.”

I realize, with sorrow, that millions who deserve it don’t get such care, including as overseen in this case by a surgeon whose colleagues kept volunteering that I was in world-class hands. I realize as well, after starting to see the enormity of the claims my bills are making on Medicare, that anyone who thinks the challenge of health-care costs is solved simply with hard work and personal responsibility has not tried having a heart valve replaced in the U.S. health system.

So I am profoundly thankful as I remember those hospital days, just three but with effects that shaped not only my body but also my spirit for the rest of however many days I still have. I feel grief for a culture that shapes me and us to learn so  much more about control than surrender. And I feel sheer gratitude at having been invited to learn that surrender offers not only curses but also mystic blessings.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column.

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, Church structures, Doubt, Faith, formation, Future of the church, Mennonite, Mennonite church, worship

Enriched by the Churched and A-Churched

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When I became a seminary dean in 2010, polls were showing that membership and participation in traditional Christian denominations was falling. As the decade proceeded, the unraveling gathered speed. In an October 17, 2019 update, Pew Research Center reported that “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace.” Across some 10 years, the percentage of Americans who describe themselves as Christian is down some 12 percent to 65 percent. Meanwhile “the religiously unaffiliated share of the population, consisting of people who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or ‘nothing in particular,’ now stands at 26%, up from 17% in 2009.”

In recent years I’ve left to others the challenges and opportunities of running seminaries during such a time as this.  This has given me more energy to focus on the reality that this isn’t just an institutional matter; it’s deeply personal. When I was growing up I don’t recall knowing anyone in my immediate circle of loved ones being other than Christian and a regular churchgoer. Now the majority of my friends and family are what I might describe, respectfully, as “A-churched” in the Greek sense of “A-” pointing to an absence of.

As Pew indicates, and whatever the trajectory may become in future decades, for now this trend seems only to be strengthening among those I love. It has perhaps also intensified as political polarization separates Christians into camps who can only shake their heads in disbelief that the other camp could be understood to be truly Christian.

This came to mind as I was discussing with one of my pastors participating in a ritual of congregational healing in preparation for treatment of a leaking aortic valve. At the same time, my wife Joan was working out logistics of an informal ritual with a circle of her friends who had supported one of their group also needing heart treatment. They were now offering this ritual to me.

I value both settings, I realized. As one formed in the church before I even knew who I was, I continue to experience the power of a community gathered in Jesus’ name in hopes of offering to each other and the world at least glimpses of being the Body of Christ.

And as one who has personally spent periods traveling through many of the “A-” dynamics of our age—A-theism, A-gnosticism, A-churchgoing—I also was moved to envision support organized not against but outside of traditional congregational structures.

I‘m grateful that at the moment I’m not responsible for envisioning how this plays out institutionally, as congregations, church schools, denominations, and faith traditions wrestle with what it means to thrive—or not—amid current trends. My time of institutional leadership as the trends gathered force showed me I didn’t have failsafe initiatives.

But as I ponder the personal dimensions of all this, I do draw some inspiration from simultaneously experiencing the power of both formal and informal communities of care. When I discussed some of this with Joan, she reported wondering how even informal communities of healing will continue to be available, given how often they spend capital inherited from formalized faith settings.

Joe Hackman, the pastor who helped shape the Salford Mennonite Church ritual before he shifted roles to MennoMedia, saw connections with Joan’s feedback. He noted that

For spirit and the spiritual, we have been able to rely on the deep spiritual wells of our grandparents, but once those wells are depleted and we have not created our own wells, there’s nothing to pass on to our children other than moral values.  Maybe that’s enough, but I’d like to think we could pass on something more.

So  I hope instead of pitting them against each other, as we sometimes do, we can be flexible enough to learn about the gifts of each type of community. I hope we can be enriched by comparing and contrasting the life stories that cause each of us to navigate joys and dangers of being churched, A-churched, both, or more.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column.

God, grace, inspiration, love of God

Hemmed in by God’s Love, a guest post by Jen Kindbom

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Caffeine is a mixed blessing for me. It gives me the laser-beam focus especially handy in creative endeavors (such as writing these words) or monotonous tasks (such as grading hundreds of papers). Not only that, it almost instantly relieves those headaches that a couple of Aleve, a nap, and a big glass of water just won’t touch.

But caffeine also makes me jittery, shaky, and paranoid. For example, I distinctly recall sewing in my attic and fearing acutely that at any minute I would be arrested and hauled off to prison–for what offense, I do not know. How to express my relief when I realized it was no accidental crime haunting my conscience, just the frozen mocha. . . .

Then I think of Psalm 139, which I’ve studied with my first-year character ed classes for the past six years or so. Psalm 139 conveys the depth of God’s love for God’s people on a very personal level. We see God’s hand upon each of us at our very core. We see God’s knowledge of each of our thoughts before we’re aware of them, and—one of my favorite images, particularly as one who sews—we see God’s love hemming each of us in. There’s no escaping a good hem.

I find it particularly comforting that the message of this psalm is not one of conditions. The words do not say “You perceive my thoughts from afar and abandon me when they’re too much.” The words do not say “You love me unless my thoughts are off the deep end irrational, or too fast for me to keep up with.” The words do not say “You hem me in until I’m afraid and I can’t quite pin down why.”

No.

They say “You hem me in, behind and before.”

When children are overwhelmed by questions that seem too big or even too irrational, loving and thoughtful adults at their best respond kindly to them. So it is with God, so we see in the psalm. What if it rains inside? What if the house blows away? What if there’s a bee in the field?

Imagine these are your thoughts, as they have certainly at times been mine. Imagine God putting tender hands on each side of your face, kissing your forehead, and then taking your hand and walking with you, listening as we talk it out, answering your questions in ways that acknowledge that to you, the fear is real and also that you are safe. In that moment—as in every moment—God hems you in. God hems me in, behind and before.

The psalmist prays for God to search me and us, to know our anxious thoughts, caffeine-induced or otherwise. He prays for God to let us know of any offensive way within me and you—not to condemn us or to add a brick to the wall between us and God but because God knows the possibility of an unhurried mind. And God desires that for each of us: thoughts and a mind at peace in the hem that is God’s love.

—Jen Kindbom, an Ohio-based writer, teacher, and designer, is author of Cadabra (DreamSeeker Books, 2015)  (2015) and the chapbook A Note on the Door (2011). Her poems have appeared in Adroit Journal, Connotation Press, Literary Mama, and other journals and anthologies. Jen is interested in lifting the veil of poetry for her students, and pursues ways to integrate poetry and creative writing into her high school English classes.

God, inspiration

Brightly Beams the Mercy

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When I was growing up in Mexico, son of missionaries who saw Jesus as light to share with those they believed lost, I listened for endless hours as around and around on the Wollensak turned the tapes on which Roy, Stateside supporter, had recorded countless gospel songs.

Amid culture-shock-related traumas, those songs saved my life. When little else brought comfort, those tapes assured I was tenderly watched over as the storm passed by, hope whispered, I walked in the garden or talked in the fields, or rested, with the Lord my shepherd, beside the still waters of peace.

The day would come when many of the lyrics, more passionate about saving inner souls than bodies lost to injustices shattering communities, would trouble me. When HIV-AIDS struck so hard in one context that funerals for those lost to it became a weekly ritual, a worship service enveloped in gospel lyrics sung as if souls sailed serenely on while bodies shipwrecked in storms of oppression and rejection unsettled me.

Yet I recall loved ones for whom gospel song metaphors motivated  soul salvation and inviting compassion for human sisters and brothers drowning in life’s daily wreckages.

I wonder what such loved ones, mostly gone, would make of today’s Christians who love old or new gospel songs but now mesh saving the lost with policy cruelties. If you’re not the right kind of good Christian American, whatever must be done to you to keep me safe just must be done.

Even this doesn’t entirely shock: I’ve never made sense of a loved one who so nurtured my love of gospel songs that to hear her favorite ones stirs tears. Lovingly she’d minister to prisoners’ souls. And passionately she’d preach, this Mennonite follower of the Jesus whose love for enemies she did embrace, that their bodies should be executed.

I don’t know how to navigate such complexities as cruelty becomes an ever more popular go-to across political and theological viewpoints. But recently I stumbled across a gospel song that encouraged continuing to seek light. “Brightly Beams Our Father’s Mercy,” by P. P. Bliss, was supposedly inspired by evangelist D. L. Moody’s story of a ship that wrecked in a terrible storm. The captain could see the lighthouse, but with lower lights meant to reveal harbor channel hazards extinguished, disaster still ensued.

Though my boyhood self had loved that song, when the algorithms of Spotify threw out almost miraculously a version by The Lower Lights band, I heard it afresh.

For Bliss, the lighthouse beams God’s mercy. But humans also must “trim your feeble lamps,” those lower lights along the shore for which the “eager eyes” of sailors fainting in the angry billows “are watching, longing.”

Yes, the focus remains on spirits and sins. Yet in The Lower Lights version I also seemed to hear the metaphor spreading to bodies and communities the tendernesses, the compassions, the divine mercies we humans are to share as well as experience. I could imagine trimming harbor lights not just to beam out our own visions but also to illumine safe harbor for each other. It seemed fitting, then, to learn that many Lower Lights band members have connections with a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints that some who love P. P. Bliss would reject.

How do we get theologies just right? I still don’t know. But I yearn with soul and body for faith expressions reaching beyond cruelty to blend harbor lights with Mercy brightly beaming.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column.

 

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, human finitude

Good Job!

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The going was slow, but I was meditating on how fit I felt compared to when I started biking again the week before.

Some sort of whooshing commotion blew by on my left. Before I knew what it was I heard “Good job!” On she sped. When I crested the hill, she was already far ahead, bike light flashing in the distance like a rocket’s red glare.

How to feel? Affirmed? Ashamed?

Just a week before I had had an appointment to make sure I understood Medicare. Just the day before I had checked our online phone account to see why our landline had been ringing almost, it seemed, every minute. I found some 40 calls. Most were marked “Spam?” and followed by variations on the word Medicare. Many want to benefit from my aging body even as I need to make sure to handle insurance carefully, since my heart may need a new valve.

Good job. I pondered again how to feel. I was certainly tempted to pedal harder and prove how wonderfully I was retaining my youth no matter my body’s age and condition.

I thought about a generation earlier encountering Carl Jung’s idea that an aspect of the first half of life is developing ego, skills, mastery. Key to the second half is falling into soul and spirituality, with ego taking a servant role.

I thought about Jesus and his teachings that to gain our lives we have to give them up, that except a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies it can give no fruit, that the first shall be last and the last first, that rather than amass power for its own ego-driven sake, a true leader kneels before those served and washes feet with a towel.

When I was younger I did seek to live out such insights of Jung and Jesus. But the paradox of pursuing this while developing a career and presence in the world posed complexities and confusions about how to integrate ego with soul. So many of the tasks of life’s first half run more with the grain of ego—its inclinations simultaneously bolstered by a culture idolizing the pursuits of wealth, status, privilege, and power which are ego’s delights. Now Christians court presidents and even Anabaptist-Mennonites long committed to basin and towel are often concluding the time has come to claim our places at the tables of influence and preeminence.

I thought about the final years of my parents, who though passionate Christians and believers in the teachings of Jesus found it hard (as do I) to embrace the reality that at the end there is no reprieve from the body’s failings.

Good job! I decided to smile. I decided to embrace the encouragement. Oh, I’ll still bike and walk and hope doctors and medicines keep me young-ish and vigorous for years yet. But maybe my cyclist encourager generously intuited that in fact at this stage being a failure in contrast to her cycling prowess is nevertheless a success.

You’re getting old, I hear her say. You’re falling behind the younger pack as it becames ever clearer that, as Psalm 103 reminds, we bloom like flowers of the field then vanish with the wind. Still you’re climbing on. Good job, Michael!

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column.

family relationships, formation, grace

Connecting Our Souls’ Carabiners

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“Dad,” said the brilliant negotiator, “you have a choice. If you agree to listen to what I’m doing in college without judging or punishing me, I’ll tell you the truth. Or I’ll just lie about what I’m really doing. Which do you prefer?”

That story has so shaped our relationship over the decades and still so informs my thoughts and feelings about accountability, human relationships, and moral formation that I often return to it. Should I have found some different solution? Should I have explored consequences for this brazen acknowledgment of readiness to lie?

As my daughter’s phase of family building suggests she may someday face that riddle, I remember my mother watching me, her once argumentative teenager, parent my children. When Mom witnessed a trying interchange I’d see a sweet but sly smile. She was sinfully enjoying watching the son once sure he knew more than she confronting daughters confident they knew more than he. If my daughter faces her own reckoning with “or I’ll lie to you,” what should she do?

I‘ll have to let her cope while I smile. Yet maybe she should conclude, as did I, that she has been outfoxed. One reason I didn’t call my daughter’s bluff was that it was no bluff.  She really would hide what she was up to.

I grasped this from knowing her but also myself: I had done the same thing to my parents, if less courageously. I simply invented something like a five-year statute of limitations:  Here’s what was going on then that I didn’t want you to know, like the time I stole a banana when I was a boy in Mexico City, ran across the busy street to throw the peel in the grassy median strip, forgot to check traffic on the way back, got hit by a Jeep but not tragically so, hence pretended running happily on was just my James Bond-esque style.

But a key reason I accepted my daughter’s deal was that I loved her. I loved that teenage mix of bravado and precisely the openness of soul that had led to her to offer terms that would let her stay open.

The years to come were challenging. I’d wrestle with okay, now I know this. Now what? How to honor the bargain when some choices  terrify me and could  lead to bad things that underdeveloped frontal cortex isn’t fully grasping?

I stumbled onto two responses: One was if you do X or Y, dear daughter, other authority figures may impose unhappy consequences; keeping me in the loop won’t spare you. The other was to repeat, in so many conversations such as that classic one over chicken and pasta, that like mountain climbers supporting each other, my rope is clipped to your soul no matter what rock face you climb or cliff you fall off.

What I could glimpse then but more clearly years later is what a gift she gave us both. Social and church glues fail as angers and alienations sever us from each other’s hearts. Rising anxiety, depression, suicide intersect with cruel social media and political worlds that encourage being the best—how many likes do I have?—or one-up: No, I won’t seek the Light with you; I’ll exploit your weaknesses to impose my ways. Mutual-accountability ground between whatever feels good and zero tolerance shrinks.

What if instead we connected the carabiners of our souls to confront life’s mountains and cliffs with ropes clipped together?

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column.

beauty in blemishes, inspiration, popular culture, Teachings of Jesus

Oatmeal

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Oatmeal. When I was a child I liked cooked oatmeal. Then when I grew up, to echo the Apostle Paul, I put away childish things. Every now and then my spouse Joan, an oatmeal fan, would urge me to consider the possibility that Paul wasn’t speaking in 1 Corinthians 13 of putting away oatmeal. I resisted.

Then the cholesterol test. Not terrible but high-ish, I still think probably, as I told my doctor, due to weeks on the road and too much rich eating. Still the test unsettled me.

I watched Joan cook oatmeal. Hmm. Worth trying? Even as a grownup should I take the advice we give children, try it you’ll like it? Yes.

Wow. Steel-cut oatmeal. With raisins. Some brown sugar. Milk. Wow. I had let glitz and glamor and shiny-object foods overwhelm an humble wonder. Now I find it hard to get through the night while awaiting another oatmeal breakfast.

Then next I was going to criticize the focus on beautiful everything Instagram offers. Along with millions of us, I’ve been unsettled by ways social media appears to be distorting our lives. I’ve barely explored Instagram, but I do know you don’t post photos to Instagram without running into filter options that allow automatically making a picture look better than it is. This struck me as a metaphor for how our sensation-loving culture pursues image over reality.

And oatmeal seemed to me to symbolize the antidote. You can’t get much more basic than oatmeal. It is what it is: a beige-ish concoction whose texture vaguely reminds me of old paint going lumpy. We need to live more beige-ish, lumpy lives of not chasing the latest latest shiny shiny. This is the Jesus way.

But then I used what was once the latest shiny but now feels more like a water supply company though with more worldwide networked power for good or ill—Google. To make sure Google agreed with my view of oatmeal’s humble role I looked up . . . “oatmeal on Instagram.” The very first articles that came up had titles like these: “Oatmeal Has So Much Instagram Clout Right Now” and “Sorry, cereal! Oatmeal is the Instagram-worthy breakfast of choice right now.”

Just minutes from being eaten as soon as this crazy (and unfiltered) photographing is done: real oatmeal cooling quickly in a non-artisanal bowl from a mass retailer whose wares a real Instagram influencer would be too embarrassed to use.

I was stunned. When I started this post, I thought I was a pioneer, with oatmeal as prism for exploring society possibly a stroke of inspiration from above. I thought oatmeal would be of no interest to the way-cool people, like the ones I read about this morning, who can make tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars by being Instagram “influencers” paid to oh-so-authentically feature products we all ignore if pushed on us through oh-so-inauthentic ads.

Yet instead of being counter-cultural, instead of being faithful to Jesus against seductions of the day, I am just one more schlub who missed the tiny sidetrail of Jesus’ narrow way and with the zillions of us am on the broad path that leads to destruction.

Actually I’ve seen no evidence that oatmeal leads to destruction except if you eat too much and put on it precisely what I like to put it on it. Oatmeal really is good for you. It really does help lower cholesterol and more.

Now what? The only thing I know to do is let oatmeal lead the way. I am as ordinary as I thought oatmeal was. Sometimes even the broad way has its merits. And maybe it’s okay for the beige-ish lumpy things to have their occasional day.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column. He emphasizes that the photos in this post are of a real, authentic bowl of oatmeal prepared for an actual breakfast rather than to influence Instagram fans.

 

 

family relationships, justice

Popsicle Sticks That Heal

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Decades ago, discovery of a murmur alerted me that my heart will always require monitoring and more of it, plus potentially treatment, as I age. Recently while grandchildren raced hither and yon, seemingly oblivious to grown-up realities, some of us adults pondered the latest data, which was not awful but did fit the forecast trajectory.

The next morning Maya, age three, approached with a Popsicle stick. “PawPaw,” she announced, “this is to check you out.” Stick placed on back. “Lift your neck, PawPaw.” Stick under chin. “Now I check your heart, PawPaw.” Stick on chest.

“How is my heart?” I ask.

“It has problems, PawPaw.” Her brother, age six, agrees. “Yes, his heart is broken.”

“Can it be fixed?” I ask.

“Probably not,” he pronounces, with perhaps a tad less concern than I might have wished, given the verdict.

The stick comes back to the chest. “Let me check it again. Yes, PawPaw, your heart is broken,” Maya confirms with heightened confidence. Despite its gravity, there is something oddly healing in the care with which she offers her diagnosis. 

I was struck that from somewhere, almost just out of the air, these two had plucked awareness of factors they had seemed, if you watched them casually, oblivious to.

This reminded me of my own lingering images from when I was their ages. Though who knows how accurate my memories are, they do point to picking up all kinds of cues from the grownups even as they seemed to have little idea how carefully I was paying attention to their conversations for clues as to how life is put together.

I glean from all this several takeaways. One is that often children, whether consciously or perhaps at some barely aware yet meaningful level,  are likely dramatically more affected by their contexts than adults with our faded memories of those days sometimes realize. This means it matters tremendously to their and our well-being how we build and manage the settings that shape them.

Another is that children deserve for us to treat them more gently  than we often do now in our culture. Their entire beings are vulnerable, open, ever questing. They deserve shelter from the cruelties, crises, and sometimes catastrophes surrounding and even crashing down on them.

This makes me think that even as “helicopter parenting” is to be resisted, parents who seek to buffer children from cell phones, social media, the digital pixels ceaselessly streaming from endless channels to endless devices for decoding them know what they’re doing.

It also makes me think this: There is something primally wrong with concluding that instead of prioritizing treating all children tenderly, churches, communities, or entire countries can be justified in inflicting another round of trauma on them. It can’t be right to wash our hands of their needs by blaming adults in their lives for having the temerity to flee the broken hearts and communities that launched them in search of something better.

And it makes me think that Christians who believe God wants us to support those who lie, boast, mock, ridicule, pursue self-aggrandizement and personal wealth at the expense of their larger communities and nations have some reflecting to do. Can a God thought to favor those who so flagrantly live against God’s ways, who create for children and so many of us settings of endless turmoil and trouble, really be squared with the God visible through Jesus in Matthew 19? There Jesus orders adults trapped in their too-often cruel priorities not to deport but to learn from the children who use Popsicle sticks to pursue the healing the adults so often make impossible.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column.

Doubt, Faith

The Death of Faith? Or Faith as the Backbone of Hope? a guest post by Peter Dula

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Thirty years ago, the great American poet, A. R. Ammons, gave a reading down the road at Washington and Lee University. Christian Wiman, now a poet but then W&L economics major, describes it like this: “Ten minutes into his reading he suddenly stopped and said, ‘You can’t possibly be enjoying this,’ then left the podium and sat back down in the front row.

No one knew what to do. Some people protested from the pews­–we were in a place that had pews­–that they were in fact enjoying it, though the voices lacked conviction and he didn’t budge. Finally the chair of the English Department cajoled the poor poet into continuing. Ammons mumbled on for another fifteen minutes before the cold mortification of the modern poetry reading, and the beer-lacquered bafflement of the press-ganged undergraduates, did him in. “‘Enough,” he muttered finally, and thudded his colossal body down beside his wife like the death of faith itself.” (pp. 5-6, He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art)

I am a teacher of theology and philosophy, a reader of fiction and poetry. It has also been my dumb luck to have faked my way through over 8 years of chairing a Bible and Religion department. So when Wiman, one of the greatest contemporary theological interpreters of the word faith brings up its death in a context which runs together the humanities, university students, and a department chair all sitting in a church, I feel like someone has hacked into my mind. The mind of someone whose doubts about vocation, church, university and God, when they arise, as they sometimes do, usually arise together in a tangled mess (which I suppose suggests either a failure of compartmentalization or mild depression).

What can Wiman mean when he says that Ammons sat down like “the death of faith”? Was Ammons losing faith in poetry, asking himself, mid-reading, whether poetry still matters? Or in himself as a poet, worried that he was too cerebral to ever be as popular as, say, Frost. Or was he just losing faith in himself as a reader?

I confess I looked up Youtube videos of Ammons reading to see if we could simply blame this on his lack of personality. But while he is no Amiri Baraka, he didn’t seem to me any worse than your average great poet.

Or is it just that, like most of us on occasion, he has lost faith in those “beer-lacquered press ganged undergraduates.”? Nietzsche famously quit his university post because he found it absurd to demand philosophy of himself or his students at particular hours of the week. Philosophy, he insisted, cannot be scheduled, and hence can have no home in the university. Just so, maybe Ammons’ doubt is not about poetry but about whether the university constitutes a livable habitat for poetry.

But I am avoiding the point. If Wiman had described Ammons’ despair as the death of faith, period, then we might reasonably be invited to speculate, as I am, about faith in this or that. But he describes it as the death of faith itself. That last word is what stops me in my tracks because I think it must mean all of these things, the death of Ammons’ faith in poetry, himself, the students, the whole thing.

The eleventh chapter of Hebrews says that “faith is the substance of things hoped for.” Substance is a philosophical term usually related to other philosophical terms like being, essence, and accident, terms, you may be thinking, that are all the justification needed for our culture’s marginalization of philosophy.

But if you can be patient for two more minutes, I am wondering, What kind of stance is a sub-stance, a standing from below, an under-stance?

Understanding is a puzzling word. Say that our chemistry faculty here at Eastern Mennonite University understand chemistry. Why does our language encourage us to picture chemistry as a weight that they must bear up under, or picture them as the tent poles to chemistry’s canvas? Is that related to the way that, for our students, they stand for, that is, represent, the discipline of chemistry, as if on a witness stand?

If I do not yet understand understanding it may not be possible for me to understand how faith understands hope, stands under hope: hope, say, that the humanities still matter, that my prayers get past the ceiling, that my lectures are not just bottles to the sea, that I will die before the small tuition-driven liberal arts college dies, that Mennonite Church USA is at least one member of the body of Christ. Faith is the sub-stance of hope means faith is the backbone of hope, the skeleton that gives shape to hope’s flabby flesh, keeps it from declaring “enough” and collapsing back into its chair with a thud.

Or is that not yet quite right? If you’ll let me chase this rabbit into one more thicket, is it rather about the way hope stands? As if faith names the correct posture of hope, not slouching, but also not quite upright? Not faith standing under hope but hope itself when it is, as it were, sitting?

A few days ago, weeks after Wiman’s Ammons story had left me so unsettled, I came back to the book. And it turns out that Ammons also came back. Two chapters later Wiman writes,

The day after Ammons gave his disastrous reading, he squeezed absurdly but cheerfully into a student desk and tried to convince ten un-awed undergraduates of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s greatness as a poet. . . . All I remembered of the hour was the poignant incongruity of that towering, ungainly, large-spirited man trying to convey with words and gestures the pinpoint specificity of a poem.

–Peter Dula is Associate Professor of Religion and Culture, Eastern Mennonite University, and author, Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology (Oxford, 2011). Before coming to EMU in 2006, he was the Mennonite Central Committee Iraq Program Coordinator. This post first appeared in a January 2019 newsletter reporting on Haverim, an EMU alumni groups supporting the Bible and Religion Department. He co-edited the Cascadia book Borders and Bridges.

human finitude

When We Need the Blind Spots

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In a prior post (“Seeing with an Injured Eye”) I told of pondering my blind spots after an eye injury created flashes and floaters my brain needed to learn how to filter out. As I wrote, it didn’t occur to me to ponder the reverse–what about if we couldn’t stop seeing everything in front of us?

That thought hit me when pondering eyesight factors, literal and symbolic, with a friend who had also just experienced a vitreous detachment. I had been focusing on the realization that if brains filter out symptoms of such eye damage, this means we see only in part, only what our brain lets through its filters.

But then I was reminded that this ability of the brain to filter is also nearly miraculous, a healing power indeed. Any of us who have permanent visual disturbances know how challenging they can be. I don’t fully know what some sufferers experience, but I do know that it was a blessed relief when my brain mostly did away with my conscious awareness of floaters and flashes. Until then, particularly as my eyes first adjusted to them, there were times I found them nearly unbearable as they blocked my easy access to the visual world, dancing ever more prominently across the landscape the more I tried to ignore them.

Once when as a young seminarian I presented a colloquium paper, a professor asked if I saw any value in ability to be in denial. Given that my paper highlighted the power of openness, I saw little in denial to appreciate.

Maybe his question was more important than I could acknowledge back then. Imagine being confronted endlessly with raw reality, unfiltered, unsimplified, its floaters and flashes insisting on being seen no matter how this overwhelmed us.

Imagine never being able to deny our mortality, our vulnerability to being hurt or worse, emotionally or even physically, at any given moment. Imagine never been able to forget, even for brief moments of respite, that the same is  true for our loved ones and our happiness hangs every second by a thread.

Imagine remembering with each breath and bite that the poisonous byproducts of what we make and eat and consume are everywhere. Imagine constant awareness that the judgments and criticisms of others we often luxuriate in are not a one-way street. A grandchild once told me, “PawPaw, you would not want to be inside my brain; it’s scary in there.” Imagine if we all were exposed all the time to each other’s “scary in there.”

Or imagine if we could look straight at God’s face. According to Exodus 33, when Moses pleads with God to “Show me your glory,” God speaks of allowing God’s goodness, name, graciousness, and mercy to be shown and proclaimed but not God’s face, “which you cannot see and live.” It’s not that God is insensitive to the human longing to see glory; God promises to hide Moses in the cleft of a rock under protection of the divine hand while passing by, “then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.” Blind spots, then, are perhaps even God’s hand protecting us from seeing God’s face while allowing us, through the floaters and flashes, a glimpse of God’s back.

So I want to be regularly aware of how often my brain creates blind spots by editing out reality. I also want regularly to be grateful not to have to handle every moment of every day the unfiltered actualities whose glory could even kill me and us.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes the column “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which publishes many of his Kingsview & Co posts.

Extending DreamSeeker Magazine through posts from Michael A. King and guests