Two young women who run a Christian bookstore in the Midwest wrote me that they were concerned as to whether or not I accept Christ as my personal Saviour. Even when I assured them that I do, they were not at all convinced that I was one of them. And perhaps the Christ I accept, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, is different from the Christ they want me to accept. But God made us all in our glorious complexity and differences; we are not meant to come off the assembly line alike, each Christian a plastic copy of every other Christian.
This insistence on sameness engenders divisions within the body of Christ, battering it still further. I have a friend who is a fine writer, openly a Christian writer, who teaches at a Christian college with a fine academic reputation. This friend has for many years been attracted to the Roman Catholic Church. I had heard new rumours about his imminent conversion, and a mutual friend of ours said to him, “Madeleine tells me that you are about to commit an absurdity.”
And now that he has finally done what he considers to be going “all the way” as a Christian—he has become a Roman Catholic—I am not happy about his decision because it seems to me to emphasize the sad fact of a divided Christendom. I wish that his colleagues, instead of accepting his resignation, had gathered around him in love. I may feel that he has “committed an absurdity.” But to say who is more and who is less Christian is not my privilege. No one comes to accept Christ because of personal virtue or impeccable morals, or even conviction. “No one comes to me except through the power of the Holy Spirit.”
I accept Christ as my personal Saviour only because of this loving, unmerited gift of the Spirit. Christ within me and within all of Creation is what makes the stars shine at night and the sun rise in the morning. Christ was in the birth of my children and grandchildren, is in the eyes of my friends, in the blooming of the daffodils in the spring and the turning of the leaves in the autumn.
In my heart I understand the Christ given me by the love of the Spirit.
But it is not up to me to tell the Spirit where this love is going to blow. When Nicodemus came to visit Jesus at night, Jesus made it very clear to him that
“the wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but you cannot tell from where it comes or where it goes; so is every one who is born of the Spirit.”
Through the power and love of this Spirit I accept Jesus as my Saviour, the light of my life, and the light of the world. That is my affirmation and my joy.
In an interview in Christianity Today I was asked, “Are you a universalist?”
My reply is as true now as it was then. “No. I am not a universalist. I am a particular incarnationalist. I believe that we can understand cosmic questions only through particulars. I can understand God only through one specific particular, the Incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth. This is the ultimate particular, which gives me my understanding of the Creator and of the beauty of life. I believe that God loved us so much that he came to us as a human being to show us his love.”
We live in an open, interacting, creative universe, and to try to close it into a safe little system is a danger to ourselves and a danger to everyone we touch. But if we are willing to be a small part of a great whole, then we know that no part in the dance is too small, too unimportant to make a difference. We are all like the butterfly in the amazing, unexpected magnitude of our effect. Even when we feel most helpless, when events we cannot control or prevent pile up, even in our most bitter brokenness, we do have our role in the working out of the great plan.
May God, through the Christ shown us by the Holy Spirit, open our hearts in love.
Alleluia.
The Wednesday of Thanksgiving weekend, 1983, was cold in New York, and dark. But through the darkness came a sign of great hope.
One of the advantages of living largely on the crowded island of Manhattan is that people tend to come through the big city, and so I see many friends, either en route to another destination, or sometimes simply here for a few days in New York. The day before Thanksgiving, 1983, was such a day of friends, a day that made me more than thankful to be in the city.
At 12:15 on Wednesdays there is a communion service at the Cathedral of Saint John. It is held in one of the small chapels behind the high altar, and that Wednesday I joyfully found myself sharing bread and wine and prayer and friendship with a diverse group, from Korea, Minnesota, Illinois. After the Eucharist six of us went across the street to our favourite Hungarian restaurant for lunch.
On the Sunday evening before, all of us, in our various parts of the world, had watched the television movie The Day After, about the horror of a nuclear war. In his homily the minister who had celebrated the Eucharist had talked about the Christian response to the possibilities and impossibilities the movie depicted.
Actually I had (as it were) seen the same movie thirty years earlier, in the fifties, in black and white TV. It took place in a suburb of New York, rather than Kansas, but the general story line was the same: the dropping of bombs on the city with total death and destruction, and then the horrors awaiting those in the suburbs who had survived—radiation sickness, starvation, looting, and the shooting of and by those trying to defend their homes and their dwindling food supplies. Desperate, untenable awfulness. In his homily the minister had talked of the severe serenity with which the believer should meet anything, even this, and of God’s great and terrible gift of free will. How much does God interfere with our misuse of free will, we wondered? In that day’s mail I had received a letter with the question, “Is God going to allow us to blow ourselves up?”
Among the six of us was Mel Lorentzen, a teacher and writer from Wheaton. He told us a true story about his friend, the opera singer Jerome Hines. In 1961, Hines was in Russia, singing Mussorgsky’s great opera, Boris Godounov. Hugh and I saw a superb production of this opera in the Kirov theatre when we were in Leningrad. It was an opera I had always wanted to see, partly because of my mother’s recounting of the first time she and my father had heard it. When the great bells for the coronation music started, she said, they had stood up to see the orchestra, and the sound of bells was coming from two grand pianos, and their spines tingled. When Hugh and I stopped at Intourist in Leningrad and saw that Boris was playing that night, I let out an adolescent shriek of enthusiasm (something that evidently doesn’t often happen in Intourist offices) and we were given the Royal Box—yes, it’s still there! Although we shared it with several others.
So Boris has a special place in my heart.
Jerome Hines, who had learned the role in Russian, was to be the first non-Russian to sing the great opera in the original tongue.
At the close of the opera Boris has lost his crown and his throne, and the traditional ending is for Boris to roll from his throne in an anguish of defeat. Jerome Hines felt that Mussorgsky’s music did not justify this interpretation, that the music is triumphant and therefore Boris’s yielding of his power is part of that triumph, and he played it that way. The final performance in Moscow was to be televised, but at the last minute the singers were told that there would be no television cameras because Khrushchev was going to be in the audience.
Jerome Hines is a man of prayer, and while he was in Russia, prayer for Khrushchev had been foremost in his mind, not deliberately, but because the name Khrushchev kept being “given” to him. He sang superbly that night, and at the close of the opera, instead of the usual humiliating tumbling from the throne in defeat, he took off his crown and flung his arms heavenwards in triumph. The audience went wild with applause and cheers.
Khrushchev came backstage with an interpreter, to say how much he had enjoyed the performance, and as he was leaving, Hines said, in Russian, “God bless you, sir.” Khrushchev turned, looked him in the eye without answering, and left.
There is a mighty time difference between Moscow and Washington. It couldn’t have been too long after Khrushchev returned from the opera that night that President John F. Kennedy called Moscow. This was the time of the Cuban missile crisis, and Ke
nnedy gave Khrushchev an ultimatum—Get out of Cuba.
And the Russians withdrew.
What might have happened if Khrushchev had not gone to see Boris Godounov? If Hines had not turned Boris’s defeat into a triumph? If Hines had not said, from his heart, to the atheist head of an atheist country, “God bless you, sir”?
God, without interfering in human free will, was part of the story. The pattern was worked out through the music, through the singer, through the head of state, but without coercion. The opportunity was given, but it was not mandated.
This is for me a perfect example of how God calls us to write the story with him, lovingly, creatively, of our own free will.
God does not want us to blow ourselves up. He will not stop us if we insist on self-destruction, but every possible creative alternative will be offered us, and the Hines-Khrushchev story is only one example of disaster averted by love and prayer. It gives me great hope.
God sends angels in unexpected and mysterious ways. We children of the Highest are asked to be angels—messengers—whether we are aware of our role or not. We are called on to be angels not by God Out There, but by God In Here, with us, Emmanuel. May God continue to send angels. May we continue to hear, as Jerome Hines heard. And as Khrushchev, the God-denier, surely heard.
Was Jacob, wrestling with the angel, a stranger person to be grappled with by God than Khrushchev?
Jerome Hines was a universe-disturber, a creative universe-disturber. Hines could have played the role of Boris the traditional way, safely. He could have refused the arduous task of learning the opera in Russian. He could have shunned the risk of calling for God’s blessing on a man whom he knew denied God. He could have declined to pray for Khrushchev. But he took the risk.
If we refuse to take the risk of being vulnerable we are already half-dead. If we are half-dead we don’t have to starve with the people of Ethiopia. We don’t have to share the terrible living conditions of old people struggling to exist on dwindling social security payments in our overcrowded, hostile cities. We don’t have to smell the stench of filth, and disease, and hunger in the favelas and barrios.
We are not all called to go to El Salvador, or Moscow, or Calcutta, or even the slums of New York, but none of us will escape the moment when we have to decide whether to withdraw, to play it safe, or to act upon what we prayerfully believe to be right, knowing that with all our prayers we may be wrong, and knowing that we will probably be punished by those who do not want universe-disturbers to stand up and be counted.
Perhaps what we are called to do may not seem like much, but the butterfly is a small creature to affect galaxies thousands of light years away.
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Not all universe-disturbers are creative; not all are listening to God’s call. Many are destructively following the fallen angels, from Attila the Hun, to Hitler, to Farrakan, to rapists, and terrorists.
Jerome Hines was one of God’s angels. He did not go to Russia to be an angel. He went because he was an opera singer by training and vocation, and a man of prayer. God can use us wherever we are, in whatever we do. We do not have to do or be anything special in order to bring hope to the world. We may not even know when God has used one of us as an angel unaware, and that’s just as well. Our part lies in being open, not to God Out There, but In Here, with us, in us.
When we visualize God as being only up in heaven, and heaven as being apart from earth, we lose the immediacy of God as part of the story, part of our being, as intimate as was the angel who wrestled all night with Jacob and changed his story forever. God was not something apart from Creation, or apart from daily life, God was there, marvellously, terribly there.
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If God is in and part of all creation, then any part can be a messenger, an angel. Sometimes our very questions are angelic. Questions allow us to grow and develop and change in our understanding of ourselves and of God, so that nothing that happens, and nothing that science discovers, is frightening, or disturbs our faith in God.
Some scientists in their arrogance have done terrible things. But the great scientists are humble, and have imaginations as vivid as any poet’s—“The butterfly effect,” for instance. What a marvellous concept, and what a marvellous way of expressing it, and by a scientist, not an artist!
The quark, one of the smallest, if not the smallest, of our subatomic particles, is named from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. The world of subatomic particles is so extraordinary that even to contemplate it implies an open imagination.
We have discovered the world of subatomic physics because we have split the atom. This has revealed many things which are horrible indeed. A considerable number of scientists have repented of the use made of their discoveries. True repentance opens our eyes to the God who heals and redeems.
As a nation we have yet to come to terms with our fire bombs which destroyed German cities and their civilian population during World War II. We have yet to come to terms with having dropped not one, but two atom bombs, leaving the horror of death and radiation, maiming men, and women, and children who had nothing to do with battle lines. Part of our fascination with the atom bomb may be caused by our refusal, as a nation, to repent. We have yet to come to terms with Vietnam, and Lebanon, and El Salvador, because repentance is no longer part of our national vocabulary.
What would those who were responsible for the making of the automobile have done if some kind of prescience had shown them that the death toll from automobile accidents is already greater than the death toll of all of the world’s wars put together? What would the scientists working on the splitting of the atom have done if they could have foreseen Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Many of the scientists who worked on early fusion and fission were appalled at the gigantic Pandora’s box they had opened. A considerable number of those who had approached the work as humanistic atheists turned from their atheism to become deeply committed theists. A good many, not all, but a good many, looked at what they had unleashed and got down on their knees.
And the power of prayer is greater than the Pentagon. It is greater than the greed and corruption which can still conceive of a nuclear holocaust as survivable. It is greater than the bomb. It can help bring wisdom to our knowledge, wisdom which is all that will keep us from destroying ourselves with our knowledge.
In an accidental and godless universe, where the human race on this particular planet in this particular galaxy appeared by happenstance, there would be very little hope. But in a purposeful universe created by a caring, loving God, there is great hope that ultimately el’s purposes will be worked out in history.
My father was gassed in the trenches of the First World War because he would not let his men go where he had not gone first, and this concerned leadership spared the others from the gas. That war, which ended shortly before I was born, was closer to the old hand-to-hand warfare than the present impersonal ways of combat. Every year on Armistice Day, as it used to be called, the phone rang and kept on ringing, with one after another of Father’s men calling him to thank him, and to see how he was. These calls continued year after year, until his death. And that, to me is a sign of hope, as Jerome Hines is a sign of hope.
It is an example of community, of a community which lasted long after the physical proximity of those involved had been broken and they had scattered to many different parts of the world. But what had been the heart of that community still endured.
Quaker writer Parker Palmer says,
Most of us fear community because we think it will call us away from ourselves. We are afraid that in community our sense of self will be overpowered by the identity of the group. We pit individuality and community against one another, as if a choice had to be made, and increasingly we choose the former.
But what a curious conception of self we have! We have forgotten that the self is a moving intersection of many other selves. We are formed by the lives which intersect with ours. The larger and richer our community, the larger and richer is the content of self. Th
ere is no individuality without community.
That community of men calling my father, one after another, year after year on Armistice Day, told me a great deal about the individual person who was also my father.
The war in which my father served was followed by another war, and another, and it seems that war will never cease. We need—as a country, as individuals who cannot separate ourselves from either our country or the world—to face what we have done, and ask forgiveness. Forgiveness from God, from those we have hurt, and, what is harder, from ourselves. Then we may be able to regain a sense of wonder about our small planet and the fragile life it sustains, and once again become the good stewards God called us to be.
It is, as always, paradox. God will not force us, take away our free will, demand that we do the work of love like robots. We are free not to listen, to damn our enemies rather than pray for them. God will not intervene in our self-destruction unless we are willing. We will not hear God unless we listen. We can’t just turn it all over to God; it is up to us, too. And yet, we can’t do anything until we turn it all over to God. This turning it over is not a passive sitting back—an okay, you take care of it, Pop—but an active listening to the power of love, and a willingness to love our enemies as well as our friends. (“God bless you, sir,” Jerome Hines said, and meant it.)
It was easier for Esau to forgive Jacob for his treachery than it was for Jacob to believe in or accept Esau’s forgiveness.
When I walk my dog at night, the route on the way home takes me past a Buddhist temple with a terrace on which stands a huge statue of Saint Shinran Shunin, a Buddhist saint of the twelfth century. This particular statue was in Hiroshima when the bomb fell, and was sent by the Buddhists of that city to the Buddhists in New York as a symbol of forgiveness and hope. Each night as my dog and I walk by the great statue, the huge bulk of metal wearing a patina I have never seen on another statue, I say, “Good night, Saint Shinran. Forgive us, and help us,” and for me, at that moment, Saint Shinran is one of God’s angels. Am I worshipping a pagan saint? A lifeless hunk of metal? No! It is an attitude of heart, a part of turning to Christ.
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