Fears that Bind and Blind

Each week during this sabbatical year, I’ve led the “Friday story circle,” reading a picture book with the five-year-olds at Old South Church’s preschool. They are a group still articulate with wonder, and vulnerable to the unexpected, unclear about the boundaries we finally learn as we negotiate adolescence between the imagined and the real. They want to know, every week, if the stories “really happened,” budding critical historians as they are. And yet they still know to “dwell in possibilities,” to recall one of Emily Dickinson’s felicitous phrases as “a fairer house than prose.”

This past week, I read a book based on a true happening. The “facts” of the story are told in many newspaper reports from the time, about the sighting in the waters off Gloucester in 1817 of an enormous sea serpent. People came from all around to observe this creature – curious onlookers from nearby towns and villages and even zoologists from as far as Boston. How does one take such an account and make it into a story? Ah, here’s the magic: M. T. Anderson creates an account of this event as told from the vantage point of a young boy of seven or eight years old, and illustrator Bagram Ibatoulline captures the feeling of the times with marvelous images. The book is entitled The Serpent Came to Gloucester (2005).

What happens in the book is that the young boy comes to realize that the serpent is not a threat, but really just playing in the water, and the townspeople, at first apprehensive, overcome their fear and come to enjoy watching the great beast cavorting in the harbor. But over the long, cold winter, when the serpent had gone in search of warmer water, the men decide they would have to kill it if and when it returned in the spring – which, of course, it did. The final episode of the story tells of their hunt.

While they gathered to go out in ships to try to kill the serpent, the little boy went, too, following them out in his little rowboat so that he could try to warn the playful beast to dive into the depths and avoid their hunt. As he tells the story, “I whispered, ‘Beast, sink. Stay down in the drink.’” But his warnings come to no avail: the men finally harpooned the serpent, but after a furious fight found that they’d only landed a huge mackerel by mistake.

The story ends many years later, when the boy had become an old man, and found himself reminiscing about the great serpent and its mysterious and beautiful ways with his young grandson. This of course is how stories live best – not on the printed page or lost in old books but in imaginative and colorful retelling that carries them from generation to generation. “And when your son asks you in time to come, ‘What is the meaning of [these things]?’ then you shall say to your son. . .” (Deut. 7. 21). Remembering stories is one of the ways every culture renews itself, and conveys the meaning of its life to those whose experience is shaped by such memories. In religious communities, we call it “tradition,” and it is what family reunions are made of: the inevitable embellishing is part of telling the “real” truth that cannot be known by fact alone.

I talked with the children as we read this story about how it is that we are sometimes afraid of things we don’t understand – like a sea serpent that appeared suddenly and without precedent. Such things that are different than what we are used to, or that come from unfamiliar places, things that may seem to us wild and unmanageable, can worry us. And it takes courage to find out whether they really are threatening, or just different than what we are used to. How we learn to live together, creatively and constructively, depends on just such wisdom and trust which refuses to vilify what we do not understand or cannot control. We know this in our personal lives, and see it acted out in the rituals by which tribes and nations maintain unity through shared fears and hostilities. Fear like love is what binds – and sometimes blinds – us.

This story reminds us that curiosity about the unknown is often what opens new doors for us, leading us to meet unexpected challenges and experiences with creativity and compassion. Such mysteries may often seem menacing, but they may also be the opening to adventures we’d never imagined – if we remember that new circumstances call for new empathies.

Mark S. Burrows
Theologian-in-Residence at Old South Church (Boston) and
Professor of the History of Christianity at Andover Newton

Disorientation and Hospitality

There is something in us that doesn’t like to be lost. We want to know where we are, and how we can get “home” again. We’re afraid when we get disoriented, which in its literal root means: “un-east-ed,” confused about the oriens or “rising sun.” Can anything good come of such experiences? We all remember times when we were lost, and I mean really lost. Where we lost our bearings, and couldn’t find the right path. Of course, sometimes, we’re “lost” without even knowing it, simply because we don’t really know where we are going. A familiar episode from the classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland recounts such an experience. You will perhaps recall it. The scene opens with the image of the grinning Cheshire-Cat sitting up in tree, as Alice wanders by. She has lost her way, and implores the Cat for help:

“Cheshire-Puss,” she began, rather timidly . . . “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where –” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“—so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

There it is: if we don’t know where we are going, we are in one sense “lost” and it doesn’t matter which way we go. We’ll get “somewhere,” if only we keep pressing on. For this quandary, accurate maps or even the newest satellite-guided technology, a GPS device, won’t help us. A map will be useless if we don’t know where we are and can’t orient ourselves. And a GPS device can only tell us where we are and how we can get “there,” but can’t suggest where we should go. That still depends upon our initiative, our creativity, our sense of purpose, our mission – which is to say, our understanding of the destiny toward which God is calling us.

I have the feeling that this is something of the predicament we find ourselves in as a church. We’re not necessarily lost because we’ve become disoriented; we have maps that chart the territory, but we don’t necessarily know where we are, and we’re often quite unsure in such a quandary where we ought to go. And, for those churches that have something like a GPS device, telling us exactly where we are, the question is still whether we know where we’re heading. In such a case, the Cheshire-Cat’s advice is provocative: yes, we’ll surely get “there,” wherever that is, if only we “walk long enough.” And so we try the same familiar things more earnestly, or we try any number of new ones – but still without a clear sense of why, or toward what end.

Pentecost is a long season, the season we have come to call “ordinary time” in the church’s liturgical calendar. It is the time when we hear the ancient question Peter asked of Jesus, “Quo vadis” (or, “Where are you going?”), as one asked of us. Where are we going? This will necessarily “disorient” us, as it did the first gatherings of those who followed the Prince of Peace in Jerusalem two millennia ago. It may even call us to turn aside from the path we find ourselves treading, in order to find the way through that “straight and narrow” gate. And sometimes, this is the nudge we need to discern in the signs of these times where the unsettling call of God might be leading us. Disorientation is sometimes nothing more or less than a confusion; sometimes, however, it leads us into the realm of creativity – reversing the plight of Babel and opening us to engagement with others we’d not prepared for or expected.

In the United Church of Christ, this season marks the beginning of what our church leaders have called a “sacred conversation about race” in our nation. For those remembering the story of the first Pentecost, this will seem a familiar tale: these early disciples found themselves gifted with an ability to understand and speak the languages of those “others” gathered in Jerusalem for the festival, so that together they might together testify to the Spirit’s presence. And this means for us, as for these first followers of Jesus, abandoning the safety of the familiar, a holy disorientation. It will mean coming out of hiding in the “familiar” places where we live separate lives, and bearing witness to the Spirit’s urging to do a new thing. It will mean listening to others tell of their own experiences of mercy, and opening ourselves to finding their hospitality as the sure gift of the Spirit’s presence.

These times call for nothing short of courageous and humble hearts in going forth on this journey in which it does matter which way we go – at least, if we hope to follow the Spirit’s wild and faithful ways, which call us into the creative disturbance that marks Her presence. On this way, we will surely come to know the risks involved in sharing life with others whose languages and ways are different from our own. In the hospitality we receive and offer, may we also know the Spirit’s blessing of creative and adventurous communion.

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

The Place Where the Spirit Erupts

"The call of beauty – of the sort of beauty that grips our sight to the point of sometimes closing our eyes shut – summons our voice to speak, that it may be heard within our voice as a call and therefore actually be seen. This voice, our own, the human voice where we listen forever to what beckons to us, is the very place where Spirit erupts into the world."
Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Call and the Response

Pentecost is almost upon us. In my early years of ministry, this festival meant enduring the good intentions of a director of Christian education, who always arranged for a large pan cake to be baked for the occasion – “HAPPY BIRTHDAY CHURCH!” – though we never punctured it with the thousands of birthday candles needed for historical accuracy. Imagine trying to light such a multitude, an act the local fire marshal would have scorned. And the task of blowing them out would demand something akin to “the rush of a mighty wind [which] filled all the house” where the earliest followers of Jesus had gathered in the Acts account!

One year, this director organized a dozen doves to arrive in cages, and they coo-ed through the entire service until the benediction when we released them from their forced captivity. We all stood on the front lawn of the church and watched, spellbound, as these gentle birds rose like white streaks high into the sky before gladly escaping over the horizon. Most years, though, the sanctuary was filled with clusters of helium balloons, meant to be launched at the end of worship; of course, some inevitably escaped prematurely, to the evident delight of the children, rising to the ceiling of the sanctuary where they lingered awkwardly for a few days before slowly descending. We always had birthday banners and clowns and . . . well, you get the idea. Perhaps you’ve been an accomplice to such crimes of frivolity, too.

The up side of the giddy party atmosphere was the delight it brought to the children, whose faces shown with excitement and wonder that church could be fun. The down side was that, given the festivity of it all, the radical, dangerous, and even subversive nature of the church’s origin and mission was lost in clouds of confetti and the cavorting of clowns.

This is not to say that Pentecost should be a dreary day marked by ponderous sermons and humorless worship. But I wonder what might happen if we paused, as congregations gathered to celebrate this day, and considered how these ancient stories might call to us with an invitation of another sort. What would it mean to take seriously the witness from the ancient prophet Joel whose words Peter spoke among those gathered in Jerusalem for this Jewish festival, remembering God’s promise to “pour out my Spirit upon all flesh” such that the young shall see visions and the old dream dreams, an outpouring that led female and male slaves to prophesy that “the day of the Lord” had come? What would happen if we listened to the voice of the poor, the disenfranchised, speak to us of what justice requires in these times? How might we hear the visions of the young who are calling us to risk change for the sake of this and future generations, and the dreams of the old who warn against what they know of war’s reckless violence? Such pressing themes hardly lend themselves to the frivolity of birthday cakes and balloons, clowns and doves.

In fact, scientists among us who are reading the “signs” of these times are prophesying in their own way and with an equal solemnity, meaning to awaken us to the dire ecological threat we face – together with all living creatures and things sharing this vulnerable planet. In their own way, they bear witness to the psalmist’s refrain, “Thou hast made known to [us] the ways of life” (Ps. 16. 11, cited in Acts 2. 28). Theirs also is a voice responding to the call of beauty, in all its sanctity and vulnerability.

When Peter’s long sermon was finished, full as it was of warning and invitation, those who were listening asked of him and the apostles a simple question: “What shall we do?” Will we, too, gather to consider how to live faithful to this “call of beauty,” recognizing how our shared future with all living things calls us to see that we hold “all things in common” (Acts 2. 44)? How might this Pentecost be a day, in our churches, when we commit ourselves to heeding “the call of beauty” that rises from creation, which “summons our voice to speak” – to see visions, to dream, and to prophesy for the sake of future generations?

Balloons may awaken us to the delight we long to hear in children’s laughter, and the release of doves remind us of the freeing power of wind and spirit. But this Pentecost, cake and clowns alone will not do. Alongside celebration, the earth’s fragile and vulnerable beauty calls out to us, asking of us a different response than acts of frivolity. With those first followers of the risen Jesus gathered in Jerusalem, will we find that “the human voice where we listen forever to what beckons to us, is the very place where Spirit erupts into the world”? Will we see the church as the place of this eruption, heeding the Spirit’s call, and becoming Her voice? What shall we do?

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