Six impossible things before breakfast

Winter under cultivation
Is as arable as Spring
     Emily Dickinson

Sometimes, a poem is worth more than a long sermon, both those we hear and those we preach! I thought of this when reading a story to a group of preschool children recently at Old South Church. They are so ready, these four- and five-year-olds, to be enchanted, to make believe, to fashion sometimes outrageous stories into their lives. I give them a simple opening, asking whether they’d ever seen a real owl, since I had brought one of my favorite story books, Jane Yolen’s Owl Moon, to read with them. As soon as the question had settled in their minds for a flicker of time, their story-telling began. “Oh, yes,” quipped one bright-eyed five year old with an utterly serious look on her face. “An owl once flew into my house and sat right on my head!” She pointed out the exact place among the curls as if I’d missed the story, looking to me for reassurance that I’d understood what had happened. “Oh, you’re lucky,” I said, “I’ve never had an owl come into my house.” She gave me a curious look as if to say, “Well, why not? What’s wrong with your house?” And I knew in my own way what she did in hers: that magic can happen everywhere if you’re ready for it – if at times in an imagining that carries us beyond the only real toward the truly important. And which is better? The children don’t wonder, even if we adults are often hard-pressed to say.

We critical thinkers and hardened realists make the crucial work of imagining harder when we ask, “Really? Could that really have happened?” The children’s answer in such cases is usually “But it did happen; I just told you so!” And we begin to realize what they seem to know naturally, which is that it did somehow happen; it all depends on our readiness to risk “making believe,” our vulnerability to story. In our maturing years, we unlearn our natural capacity for the risk that imagination entails. We convince ourselves that the “real” is what is verifiable: we believe – and it is finally a matter of belief – that only the things we can touch and taste, see and hear, are truly real.

It is probably no wonder, then, that Jesus seemed to prefer children’s company to that of the stubborn, uncomprehending adults around him. For the children came to him as they always do with bright questions and an often absurd willingness to believe. After all, they were after the truth of story, story that mattered, story that made them larger and truer and more real. In their susceptibility to enchantments of one kind or another, they delight us, allowing us to indulge in a share of their fantasy. We delight in their capacity to make believe, these natural storytellers, without assuming them to be liars. The children in Jesus’ life and in ours are quite unlike Lewis Carroll’s skeptical Alice who regretted that “one can’t believe impossible things,” and more like the Queen who quipped that Alice must not have had “much practice”: “When I was younger,” she recalled, “I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

The imagination always stretches “the real” for the sake of some larger and, we might even say, truer truth. It lures us to see our world, to frame our lives, in more generous ways. The real question before us as adults is not whether what we believe is impossible, since the things worth giving our lives to are generally impossible or at least improbable – like love for the enemy or generosity toward the stranger. No, the deep question is a different one: whether our beliefs finally matter for the sake of others, whether they are true for the life of the world.

Jesus chided the disbelieving disciples: “Let those who have eyes to see, see.” The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas captures this point in a different way: “Ethics is the spiritual optics,” he suggests. That is, what we see depends upon how we look, and how we look has to do with what we desire to see. Our desires, like our beliefs, are the cradle of our morality, the heart of ethics. They invite us toward the good like wagers that call us to risk what might seem impossible – like mercy for wrongdoers, and forgiveness for our debtors – but is the only real path toward the greater good for all. Like “winter under cultivation” which, the poet reminds us, is “arable as spring.” Of this truth, or their imagining of it, the children are quite sure.

Mark S. Burrows
Theologian in Residence, Old South Church (Boston)
Professor of the History of Christianity,
Andover Newton Theological School

The Dream of a King

The New Year is now upon us, and this year the news is full of commentary, predictions, and broodings about the presidential primaries. Even in Europe, where I spent the last few weeks, the papers and television news programs have been saturated with this story: first with Iowa, which the Germans describe as the state with "more pigs than people," and then New Hampshire, with "Super Tuesday" waiting in the wings. I cannot remember this level of interest, excitement, and fascination in the early stages of the primaries. In point of fact, I’ve become accustomed to facing a high dose of cynicism or indifference in myself and among friends and colleagues upon entering this season, which usually seems closer to carnival than debate. But this year is different. There is a note of expectancy in the air. The taxi driver who picked me up at Logan airport, despite the late hour of night, wanted to hear my point of view, and offer his, about what was happening. He was as surprised to learn that Europeans – among others in our world – were so attentive to this story. I told him that beneath the buzz of interest guiding the “wise men” and women who had come "from the east" to find where this story was leading was not the light of a single star, whether in the skies or among the candidates, but rather the desire gathered in a single watchword: hope. The hope for change; the desire for a different path of leadership; and, yes, the yearning for deliverance from the grinding burden of war.

Now, the biblical text that probably will not be read in these post-Christmas weeks, one that rarely makes an appearance in pulpit sermons and is kept out of the lectionary cycle by those in charge, is the terrible story of Herod’s rage as reported in Matthew 2. 16 – 18. As Matthew recounts these events, Herod, ever the astute tactician, schemed to kill Jesus in order to assuage his political fears. As earlier in this account, Joseph finds guidance for his path in a dream: an angel warns him to flee to Egypt in order to avoid the wrath that was to come. And come it did: Herod had all the "male children in Bethlehem and in that region who were two years old or under" killed, thereby fulfilling the ancient prophecy in Jeremiah: "A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation. . ."

I thought about this scene when confronted, in a German newspaper last week, with a photograph of an Iraqi woman carrying a child killed in an episode of roadside violence. Her grief, immense and overwhelming, needed no commentary; her face told the story of the tragic and devastating effects of this war. With Rachel, she wept for her own child and for the other children, "refusing to be consoled, because they were no more." Who among us would be less distraught, in such a case – whether in the streets of Baghdad, Dorchester, or in our own neighborhoods?

One can only hope that Jeremiah’s poignant prophecy might get a rest in the years ahead. That we could find, as a nation, the moral courage to address violence without recourse to vengeance. That we could overcome our cowardice in the face of the national gun lobby, and enact legislation to ban handguns from the streets of our cities and towns. That we could invest as much energy and resources in genuine peacemaking as we do in sustaining the vigilance of our war-readiness. And, yes, that the moral and political commitments of the current crop of presidential candidates might remember that retaliation is not leadership, and vengeance no way to address the very real fears that have been cultivated in the current political climate of the nation – even if such strategies offer an immediate promise of security, whether real or imagined.

I suspect, though, that the image of mothers weeping over lost children killed in the path of war and street violence will continue with us. Our human appetite for killing is a perverse habit at least, an obscene addiction at worst.

Most of us will not have the gift of such timely dreams as Joseph’s to keep the children out of harm’s way. But we have other public dreams living in our memory, and in these weeks we will once again give our attention to those voiced by one of our nation’s wise men: a prophet named King, whose voice still rings in our national consciousness. As we celebrate his legacy and speak of his dream again this year, may we discover not only the burden but the blessing of what it means to live in communities of respect across the textures of our differences. Perhaps even finding ourselves emboldened to action by the ancient story of Rachel and the "slaughter of the innocents" in Bethlehem, as the story is called – or, in one of the many updated accounts of violence that our world continues to offer as "news," when we see the faces and hear the anguished stories of the many grieving mothers who still weep for the lost because "they are no more."

Professor Mark S. Burrows
Theologian-in-Residence at Old South Church
Professor of the History of Christianity at Andover Newton Theological School