Seeking the Good at the End of the World (Homily for Advent 1)

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Extra! Extra! Read all about it.
SUN GOES OUT!
STARS FALL FROM HEAVEN!
THOUSANDS FAINT FROM FEAR!

On the first day of the Christian Year, do we break out the champagne and shout “Happy New Year.” No we do not. What we say is, “The end is near!”

We don’t get all Fundamentalist about it. We don’t walk around wearing signboard warnings. We don’t declare a fixed date for the end of history. We prefer to keep our end time theology more metaphorical than literal. Worlds end all the time. Personal worlds. Public worlds.

Still, this year, from Gaza and Ukraine to Washington, D.C., the end of the world feels closer to being literal than any other time in my 80 years on the planet. To borrow some lines from W. H. Auden’s Good Friday poems, lately it feels as if the world we know has been “wrecked, / Blown up, burnt down, cracked open, / Felled, sawn in two, hacked through, [and] torn apart.”

For Christians, the end of the world should not come as a total surprise. Every gospel on the First Sunday of Advent includes a forecast of the apocalypse—the end of the world as we know it. It’s not that uncommon, actually. Who has not experienced apocalypse on a personal level—the exit from childhood, the loss of a job or a loved one, a scary diagnosis? And throughout history, apocalyptic episodes have periodically disrupted the stability of humanity’s collective life: the fall of empires, economic crashes, military invasions, revolutions, authoritarian nightmares, environmental crises, and the like.

In the Humphrey Bogart movie, Beat the Devil, a ship is floundering on a stormy sea. In his typical wise-cracking manner, Bogie says to a panicky passenger, “What have you got to worry about? We’re only adrift on an open sea with a drunken captain and an engine that’s liable to explode at any moment!”

A crewman chimes in: “Perfectly ordinary situation. It happens every day.”

Like it or not, we’re all on board that sinking ship at the close of 2024, praying desperately with the Psalmist, “Save me, O God! The water has risen up to my neck; I’m sinking into the mire” (Psalm 69:1-2) Perfectly ordinary situation. It happens every day.

Angel blowing the 2nd trumpet as the sea swallows ships and sailors (Revelation 8:8). The Apocalypse Tapestry of Angers (1373-1382). Photograph by the author.

When I was younger, I had a crushing experience of my personal world coming undone. A spiritual director summed up my situation as being washed overboard into a wild sea, where I’m flailing to keep my head above water.” “Sounds about right,” I said mournfully. “Well, congratulations!” he told me. “You’re exactly where you need to be.” I had to laugh at the aptness of his metaphor. My apocalypse had indeed revealed the unsustainability of my former state, even as it hurled me into the formless chaos from which my new world would be born.

Saint Michael weighing souls (c. 1180), Saint-Trophime, Arles, France. Photograph by the author.

Apocalypse can be an unwelcome judgment on the way things are. It weighs the world in the scales of justice and finds it wanting. The judgment is not punitive, simply accurate. As a 14th-century English poem on the end of the world put it, the apocalypse judges “without revenge or pity.” It just tells it like it is. Still, it’s a hard thing to face the truth about our flawed condition. However, the end of an old reality can also be life-giving, freeing us to discover a better version of self and world.  

But where can we put our feet when the ground is crumbling beneath us?  We stand on God’s word, God’s promise, God’s hope. “Heaven and earth will pass away,” Jesus says, “but my words will not pass away.” Let the Savior’s words guide us. Let them encourage us. As he told his disciples,

“When the chaos comes, keep your heads high and stand your ground. Your liberation is on its way.  Don’t be distracted by thoughtless living, or get weighed down with worry,” he says. “Be alert at all times, and pray that you’ll have the strength to get through all this craziness.” [i]

This is my 55th year of preaching in Advent. It’s my favorite season, so rich with resonant and stirring themes: endings and beginnings, light and darkness, waiting and preparing, watching and hoping, expectation and, in the end, marvelous birth. But this year Advent feels decidedly more urgent and more serious to me than ever before. We aren’t just reading about a people who sit in darkness. We are those people.

We could weep and moan about being stuck in this particular moment in history. But what if the Lord of history is telling us, “Congratulations! You are just where you need to be—in the wild baptismal sea of rebirth. Come, take up your cross. Following me is about to get really real and really intense. Costly? Yes. Suffering? Yes. Dying? Yes. Rising? Yes! Start to live the risen life like you mean it!

Okay, Lord. But what exactly is that going to entail? This question came up when I ran into friend from church on the ferry last week. “What are we supposed do if they begin to round up the most vulnerable in our midst?” she asked. “Join hands to block their way with our bodies?” The strangeness of such a hypothetical even being asked in our peaceful corner of the world prompted a helpless shrug.

Seeking some guidance from my library, I pulled out a book published a few years ago: The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis. The author, Alan Jacobs, examins the responses of Christian intellectuals to the violent chaos of the Second World War. What did some of the most articulate of God’s friends have to say about being faithful in a dark and dangerous time?  

When the war broke out in 1939, Anglican poet W. H. Auden put the case bluntly: We must love one another or die. A year later, he wrote New Year Letter (January 1, 1940), a long poem considering “what is possible and what is not” in such a time.

Most of the poem is addressed to Elizabeth Mayer, a supportive maternal figure who was a key source of peace and happiness in Auden’s life.

We fall down in the dance,” he wrote. “We make
The old ridiculous mistake,
But always there are such as you
Forgiving, helping what we do.
O every day in sleep and labour
Our life and death are with our neighbor.

In other words, we are all in this together. The end of New Year Letter is addressed to God, asking for divine help in making a better world, since we humans are too muddled to do it on our own.

“Send strength sufficient for our day,” he wrote. “And point our knowledge on its way.”[ii]

His friend C. S. Lewis worried about the Church endorsing the violence in its prayers. On September 10, 1940, he wrote to his brother, “In the litany this morning we had some extra petitions, one of which was ‘Prosper, O Lord, our righteous cause.’ I ventured to protest against the audacity of informing God that our cause was righteous—a point on which He may have His own view.” [iii]

Lewis preferred the wartime collect of Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury who made the first Book of Common Prayer. During hostilities with Scotland in 1548, Cranmer wrote this extraordinary collect:

“Most merciful God, the Granter of all peace and quietness, the Giver of all good gifts, the Defender of all nations, who hast willed all men to be accounted as our neighbours, and commanded us to love them as ourself, and not to hate our enemies, but rather to wish them, yea and also to do them good if we can: … Give to all us desire of peace, unity, and quietness, and a speedy wearisomeness of all war, hostility, and enmity to all them that be our enemies; that we and they may, in one heart and charitable agreement, praise thy most holy name, and reform our lives to thy godly commandments.” [iv]

In other words, in times of conflict, Christians must take care not to mirror the violence we oppose. We must find a way toward peace and reconciliation. But what if there are no good choices available?

The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew how bitter conflict corrodes the human heart. In a 1942 letter to fellow members of the German resistance, he wrote:

“Unbearable conflicts have worn us down or even made us cynical. Are we still of any use? We will not need geniuses, cynics, people who have contempt for others, or cunning tacticians, but simple, uncomplicated and honest human beings.” [v]

In the desperate hope of derailing the Nazi horror, Bonhoeffer reluctantly joined a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. The plot failed and he was executed for his role in it. A new film about him depicts him going to the gallows confident in his own purity of heart, but the fact is he never stopped feeling guilty for his participation the way of violence. He felt corrupted by the whole milieu of bloody conflict: shooting, wrecking, bombing—none of it is untainted by evil.

Simone Weil, French philosopher and activist, agreed that everyone is a victim of war. No one involved in the application of force escapes its toxicity. “To the same degree,” she said, “though in different fashions, those who use it and those who endure it are turned to stone.” When the Second World War started, Weil warned that

“We should not think that because we are less brutal, less violent, less inhuman than those we are confronting, we will prevail.” We must find a way, she insisted, to exercise the opposing virtues.

In late 1942, when Weil was working in the London office of the French Resistance, she proposed a plan to parachute hundreds of white-uniformed nurses onto battlefields, not only to tend to the wounded but also to provide an image of self-sacrificial goodness in the midst of cruelty and violence. She herself wanted to be in the first wave of this non-violent invasion. In submitting her plan to the Free French authorities, she made a visionary argument:

A small group of women exerting day after day a courage of this kind would be a spectacle so new, so significant, and charged with such obvious meaning, that it would strike the imagination more than any of Hitler’s conceptions have done.” [vi]

Charles de Gaulle thought her quite mad, and her plan of course went nowhere. But her saintly resistance to the application of force was a bright candle in the wind of war.

I am moved by all the stories of faithful people trying to follow the light in an age of shadows. Their wsdom can guide us. Their endurance can encourage us.

Now saintly virtues may not be the way of the world, but as Thomas Merton liked to say, we are not called to be successful. We are called to be faithful. “Perfect hope,” he wrote, “is achieved on the brink of despair when, instead of falling over the edge, we find ourselves walking on air.” [vii]

Remember those old Sherlock Holmes movies with Basil Rathbone> In 1942, when the outcome of the war was still uncertain, Universal Studios modernized Holmes, recruiting the Victorian detective for the war effort in Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror. After a successful takedown of Nazi spies, Holmes and Watson walk to edge of Dover’s cliffs to gaze across the English Channel. Watson begins the conversation that concludes the film:

—“It’s a lovely morning, Holmes.”
—“There’s an east wind coming, Watson.”
—“Oh, I don’t think so. It looks like another warm day.”
—“Good old Watson. The one fixed point in a changing age. There’s an east wind coming, all the same. Such a wind as never blew in England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson. And a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind, none the less. And a greener, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.”

That bit of wartime propaganda, pep talk for a battered nation, came to mind as I pondered on today’s apocalyptic theme. “A cold and bitter wind … many of us may wither before its blast.” An accurate forecast. But beyond that, a glorious spring, when a “greener, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine.”

God, bring that day closer. In the meantime, we pray with Emily Dickinson (#131):

Grant me, O Lord, a sunny mind—
Thy windy will to bear!  

So—How exactly do we cultivate a sunny mind in a gloomy time? We’ve all been working that problem this fall. Over the past month, I’ve found myself focusing on three spiritual practices: Do not let your hearts be troubled … Don’t get lost in the dark … Remember beauty.

First thing: Do not let your hearts be troubled. Step away from the screen. Don’t obsess on worst case scenarios, fretting over every potential bad outcome. There are too many to count, and it will only discourage and exhaust you. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

As Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye reminds us, we must “Break the Worry Cocoon”—

To live with what we are given—
graciously, as if our windows open wide as our
neighbors’, as if there weren’t insult at every turn.
How did you do that? … 

How did you survive so much hurt and remain gracious,
… how did you believe,
then and forever, breaking out
of the endless worry cocoon,
something better might come your people’s way? [viii]

Second thing: Don’t get lost in the dark. Don’t get mesmerized by the horror. Evil is like Medusa’s face. Gaze too long and you turn to stone. How do we hate hate without becoming hateful ourselves? The rage provoked by repugnant beliefs, bad behavior and delusional assertions can become addictive. It feels good to denounce the deplorable scoundrels. It’s even entertaining to watch others do it. We think we are resisting evil, but our hate only serves to feed the beast.

Third thing: Remember beauty.

During the American Civil War, landscape painting was very popular. It offered tranquil scenes of an American Eden, unspoiled by the tragedies of history. There wasn’t the slightest hint of the violence raging in the land. When I was looking through reproductions of those works the other day, I was particularly struck by Alfred Thompson Brecher’s “Up the Hudson.” The broad river is absolutely still. The misty atmosphere glows with amber light. One tiny figure drifts quietly in his canoe. It is a picture of absolute calm and peace. I was taken by its beauty, but what really hit me was the year it was painted: 1864, the same year the painter’s brother died in one of the war’s bloodiest battles.

Alfred Thompson Brecher, Up the Hudson (1864).

And I wondered: Did Brecher paint it before or after he got the terrible news? I’d like to think it was after, as if the artist were resisting despair by pledging his allegiance to the harmonizing beauty of God’s creation, a beauty that transcends every evil.

Remember beauty. In October, 1967, 100,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in the nation’s capital for the first national demonstration against the war in Vietnam. I was there with a number of fellow seminarians. There were speeches and songs during the day, but around sunset about half the crowd marched across the Potomac to the Pentagon, which was surrounded by soldiers in gas masks holding rifles with fixed bayonets. They stood frozen like statues when young women stuck flowers in their gun barrels. I had a camera, and took some dramatic closeups of the soldiers.

Paratroopers guard the Pentagon during the first national protest against the war in Vietnam (Octobver 21, 1967). Photograoph by the author.

As the evening progressed, tensions grew, and a riot broke out, with lots of tear gas and hundreds of arrests. But I missed all that violence, because I had left early in order see the full moonrise over the reflecting pool in the National Mall. It was absolutely beautiful. I still have the photograph.

The full moonrise at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on October 21, 1967. Across the Potomac at this moment, demonstators are clashing with paratroopers at the Pentagon. Photograph by the author.

On that day I had done my part in a public witness for peace; but when night came, the very best thing I could do was to notice the beauty of the moonrise. I like to think that both those things got recorded in the Book of Life. Come, labor on; but don’t forget the Sabbath moments.

Dear friends in Christ, let us cast away the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Keep the faith. Fear not. Embody hope. Love one another. Trust divine intention. This is the holy work God has given us to do.

A few hundred years ago, Turlough O’Carolan, the blind harper and last of the Irish bards, was sitting in a tavern with his friend, the poet Charles McCabe. McCabe said, “Your music, sir, is grand and lovely stuff, but too light-hearted. This is a dark time we live in, Mr. Carolan, and our songs should reflect that.”

And the harper replied, “Tell me something, McCabe. Tell me this: Which do you think is harder—to make dark songs in the darkness, or to make brilliant ones that shine through the gloom?” [ix]

Provencal moon. Photograph by the author.

A homily for the First Sunday of Adven at Saint Barnabas Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.

The images of the Apocalypse are from the Tapestry of the Apocalypse in Angers, France. Originally 140 meters long, over time it has been reduced by a third. Woven in the late 14th century, it offers spectacular illustrations of the Book of Revelation.

[i] My free translation of Luke 21:28, 34-36.

[ii] W. H. Auden, New Year Letter (January 1, 1940).

[iii] q. in Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 10.

[iv] Ibid., 11.

[v] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “After Ten Years” in Letters and Papers from Prison (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010). Translated by Barbara and Martin Rumscheidt.

[vi] Simone Weil, quoted in Robert Zaretsky, The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 155.

[vii] Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island (206), q. in The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002), 213.

[viii] Naomi Shihab Nye, “Break the Worry Cocoon,” Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (New York: Greenwillow Books, 2022), 96-97.

[ix] From the play, O’Carolan’s Farewell to Music by Patrick Ball and Peter Glazer, on the California Revels CD, Christmas in an Irish Castle (2001).

Tending Faith’s Flame in the American Gloom

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Anonymous, The Descent from the Cross (detail), German c. 1500.

The evil and the armed draw near;
The weather smells of their hate
And the houses smell of our fear.

— W. H. Auden, For the Time Being

“ … because all you of Earth are idiots!”

— Plan 9 from Outer Space (Ed Wood, 1957)

How bad is it, anyway? In the first hours of the new Amerika last Tuesday, the original Planet of the Apes (1968) came to mind. Finding a half-buried Statue of Liberty on a deserted beach, space-and-time traveler Charlton Heston realizes he has not landed on some distant planet, but on his own earthly home, where humanity has evidently committed nuclear suicide. Literally pounding the sand, he cries out to his long-vanished fellow mortals, “You really, finally, did it! You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you! God damn you all to hell!”

A ruined earh: The final image of Planet of the Apes (1968).

In the Year of our Lord 2024, a decisive majority of Americans have chosen to blow up democracy, the rule of law, the common good, civil liberty, women’s rights, health care, international stability, public sanity, and our last hopes of staving off climate apocalypse. Did they know what they were doing? I confess to zero interest in their motivation at this point. Their decision, measured by its inevitable consequences, was neither rational nor moral. The harm it will do is immeasurable. Even if they thought they were trying to make a point about their personal economic pain, the mad embrace of a fascistic, unstable sociopath and the MAGA dream of demolishing the American experiment—not to mention the livability of our planet—will impose a price none of us can afford.

The American minority, meanwhile, has spent the past week trying to cope with the shock and the horror of the Antichrist’s second coming (I use that name not in a mythical sense, but in a moral one, describing the Trump who in every respect is against the way of Jesus).

Some have engaged in second-guessing the Democratic campaign, as if putting the argument differently could have penetrated the thick shields of delusion and hate erected by right-wing propagandists and their carefully crafted algorithms. Some have sought comfort in the long view, looking toward the distant horizon where hope and history will someday rhyme. Some see the moment as a sobering diagnosis of our national maladies, putting an end to further denial. There’s no use pretending we’re still healthy. Some are tuning out, or contemplating flight to saner climes. Some, sadder and wiser, are vowing to carry on the fight for the common good. God help them.

Marc Chagall, Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise (detail), 1961.

Many people have been passing poems around on social media, lighting candles of gentleness and peace for one another in this dark night. I have taken comfort in these tender gestures, offered like balm in Gilead for the sin-sick soul. But I also have found myself browsing post-WWII poems that register the shock of brutal conflict. “The Last War” by Kingsley Amis (1948) touched a chord in me with its opening line: “The first country to die was normal in the evening.” By morning it was disfigured and dead

The poem narrates a kind of Agatha Christie murder story in a country house. No one, in the end, survives the weekend. When the sun (the light of Reason? the eye of God?) shows up to survey the damage and “tidy up,” he is unable to separate “the assassins from the victims.” Sickened by the folly and horror of human self-destruction, the sun goes back to bed. The last two stanzas begin with the sound of gunfire and end with a deathly quiet:

Homicide, pacifist, crusader, tyrant, adventurer, boor
Staggered about moaning, shooting into the dark.
Next day, to tidy up as usual, the sun came in
When they and their ammunition were all finished,
And found himself alone.

Upset, he looked them over, to separate, if he could,
The assassins from the victims, but every face
Had taken on the flat anonymity of pain;
And soon they’ll all smell alike, he thought, and felt sick,
And went to bed at noon.

The sense of recognition I felt in reading the poem oddly eased my post-election malaise. Though I dwell in the valley of the shadow, I’m not alone. Like Dante in hell, I’ve got a good poet for company.

Virgil and Dante in the 8th Circle of Hell The Roman poet would guide Dante through the infernal regions until they found the way out.

Well, what now? If there were ever a time demanding religious imagination—the ability to see resurrection light even on Good Friday—this is it. Such envisioning will be one of the ongoing tasks of The Religious Imagineer. But we can’t just leap into Easter. We must first do our time at the foot of the cross, living in solidarity—and risk?—with the victims and the vulnerable, tuning our hearts to the bells that toll for every human tear:

Tolling for the luckless, the abandoned and forsaked,
Tolling for the outcast, burning constantly at stake …
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed,
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones and worse,
And for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe. [1]

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington. Prayers silent and aloud were offered here the night before and the night after the election.

I feel blessed to be in Christian community during this time of trial. It is better to hold hands than clench fists. It restores the soul to share our griefs and voice our hopes in sacred discourse and common prayer. Preachers are encouraging our renewed commitment to the Baptismal Covenant: to persevere in resisting evil; seek and serve Christ in all persons; strive for justice and peace among all people; and respect the dignity of every human being.[2] Pastors, meanwhile, are reminding us to love those who voted against most of those things.

(I confess to my own struggle with the Christly precept of loving the haters. Yes, we all fall short, but the so-called Christians cheering the triumph of our basest impulses are, IMHO, falling short with unseemly enthusiasm. As Henry James noted, “when you hate you want to triumph.”) [3]

Tom Tomorrow always nails it: MAGA House of Horror (October 28, 2024).

Many of us, like the desert monks of Late Antiquity, are feeling the need to go on retreat from the public square, to hush the noise and attend the still small voice of holy wisdom. Our spiritual practices seem more necessary than ever.

For me over the past week, that has taken the form of Daily Offices, running, watching the birds in the garden, reading Henry James, a Monteverdi concert, and a splendid evening of Balanchine works by the Pacific Northwest Ballet. I have also been fasting from political news, limiting myself to a small amount of reflective commentary from trusted sources. Such self-care through withdrawal from the fray is “meet and right so to do.” But unless we are contemplatives whose job is to provide for the rest of us what Jesuit activist Dan Berrigan called “large reserves of available sanity,” we can’t stay in the desert forever.

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann has responded to the election with a fine reflection on Elijah’s flight from the danger and exhaustion of public justice-making to the solitude and safety of the holy mountain. After a while, God tracks him down to ask, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”  

“Go back to your proper place; you can linger here in self-pity only so long and then you must remember your call and perform your responsibility.” So Elijah is freshly dispatched back to his dangerous work. He is dispatched by the one who has lordly authority for him. The only assurance he is offered is that there are others—7000—who stand alongside in solidarity.[4]

We are not alone. God is with us. The night after the election, some of our local parish church gathered for Evening Prayer, with generous pauses for quiet resting in the Divine Presence. When words fail, let silence speak. Afterward, we had a deep and earnest conversation about the effect of the election on our hearts, minds, and bodies. The empowering richness of that exchange, a gift of the Holy Spirit, raised us from the depths to remember our vocation as God’s friends: to plant the seeds of resurrection amid the blind sufferings of history.  

Henri Matisse, The Rosary Chapel in Vence, French Riviera.

Let me close with an encouraging story from the desert monks.

The disciple of a great old man was once attacked by the demons within him. The old man, seeing it in his prayer, said to him, ‘Do you want me to ask God to relieve you of this battle?’ The other said, ‘Abba, I see that I am afflicted, but I also see that this affliction is producing fruit in me; therefore ask God to give me endurance to bear it.’ And his Abba said to him, ‘Today I know you surpass me in perfection.’” [5]

Throughout this time of trial and affliction, God grant each of us, and our communities, the endurance to bear what we must bear, and do what we must do, that our lives may prove both faithful and fruitful in due season.

[1] Bob Dylan, “Chimes of Freedom,” from Another Side of Bob Dylan (Columbia Records, 1964).

[2] From the Baptismal Covenant, Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (1979).

[3] Henry James, The Ambassadors (New York: Modern Library, 2011), 427.

[4] Walter Brueggemann’s reflection on I Kings 19, “Beyond a Fetal Position,” Nov. 7, 2024 on Church Anew: https://churchanew.org/brueggemann/beyond-a-fetal-position

[5] Cited in John Moses, The Desert: An Anthology for Lent (Norwich: The Canterbury Press, 1997), 62.

Voting for the Light

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Pablo Picasso, La Minotauromachie (1935).

Picasso’s turbulent etching from the eve of the Spanish Civil War seems a timely image of my own country in this harrowing election season. The monstrous beast towers over his victim—the wounded female matador lying unconscious on the back of her tormented horse. From a high window, two other women, with doves of peace, witness the predator’s violence with both anger and sorrow. The cowardly male fleeing up the ladder takes no side, offers no resistance. Only the brave young girl, with her candle and flowers, stands firm against the Minotaur, whose hand tries to block the light of truth. Her calm and steady presence is unperturbed by the monster’s agressive rage. She knows something he will never understand. Even in the darkest hour, there is a light which refuses to be extinguished.

Here’s to the truth-tellers, activists, organizers, public servants, door-knockers, and phone-bankers whose candles shine so brightly in these challenging days. And for my own candle on Election Eve, let me offer the words of Abraham Lincoln, who summoned our better angels in his 1862 address to a divided nation:

“Can we do better?” The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

Fellow-citizens, we can not escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation … We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth.

Frederic Edwin Church, Our Banner in the Sky (1861), painted at the outbreak of the American Civil War.

Stumbling in the Dark

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Pieter Brueghel, The Blind Leading the Blind (1658).

Note to reader: This is a post from 2021, revised to include comments on the moral blindness of admitting fascism into our political life.

Jesus was walking out of Jericho, surrounded by a big crowd. Like all such crowds, it was a mix of the curious and the adoring. Jesus was at the height of his popularity. He stirred people’s imaginations and raised their hopes. The excitement was palpable. But amid all the festive clamor, a single shout brought this parade to a sudden halt:

“Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”
It was a blind beggar, sitting by the roadside.
His name was Bartimaeus.

“Shush,” people said. “Don’t make a scene.” 
But he cried all the louder: “Son of David, have mercy on me!”

And Jesus stood still, just the way the sun had stood still in the sky for Joshua in that same city of Jericho.

“Call him here,” Jesus said. And so they did. 
“Take heart!” they told him. “Get up. He is calling you.”

Immediately, Bartimaeus threw off his cloak, sprang to his feet, and came to Jesus. Then Jesus asked him a question that went straight to the point: “What do you want me to do for you?”

“Teacher,” he said, “Let me see again.”
And what Bartimaeus asked, Jesus granted.  (Mark 10: 46-52)

In Mark’s gospel, this is the last miracle performed by Jesus before he goes to his death in Jerusalem. It marks the fatal turning point between his ministry and his Passion. It is our Lord’s last act, his last word, before he begins the Way of the Cross.

To the world, that looked like the path to oblivion. But to those who have been given the eyes of faith, the Way of the Cross, as we pray every Holy Week, is “none other than the way of life and peace.”

And thus the healing of Bartimaeus is not just the story of one man’s good fortune. It is an invitation to each of us to perceive and receive the vision of salvation which is about to unfold. Mark is telling us that if you want to understand the Paschal Mystery of Passion and Resurrection, you need to open your eyes.

And notice that the climactic words of this story are not “he regained his sight,” but rather, “he followed him on the way.” Once you see what God is doing through Jesus, then it’s your turn to take up your own cross and follow. 

And yet, in the story leading up to this moment, even Jesus’ closest friends have suffered their own blindness. “Are your minds closed?” he chides them. “Have you eyes and do not see?” But they go on missing the point again and again.

To their credit, they continue to follow Jesus. They are drawn to him, they know something is happening here—but they don’t know what it is. “Do you not yet understand?” Jesus sighs. I’m sure he said this more than once.

And then, after repeated examples of the disciples’ blindness throughout Mark’s gospel, suddenly we hear a plaintive voice cry out from the crowd: “Jesus! Have mercy on me. Remove this grievous blindness.”

That’s our prayer too, isn’t it? 

Lord, take away our blindness. Help us to see.
And Jesus replies, “I thought you’d never ask!”

St. Gregory of Nyssa, in the fourth century, was one of many theologians who have shared Mark’s diagnosis of the human condition as one of persistent blindness.

“Humanity was created for this end, that it might see ‘good,’ which is God; but because humanity would not stand in the light, [in fleeing from the light] it lost its eyes… We subjected ourselves to blindness, that we should not see the interior light.”

In other words, we are all stumbling in the dark. That is the human condition, until God brings us into the place of clarity.

St. Augustine talked about the inner eye, our capacity to see the things of God, as “bruised and wounded” by the transgression of Adam and Eve, who, he says, “began to dread the Divine light [and] fled back into darkness, anxious for the shade.”

Refusing to stand in the light… subjecting ourselves to blindness. 
Is this what we do? Are we truly so “anxious for the shade?”

Arthur Zajonc is a quantum physicist who became fascinated with the literal dimensions of this question, examining case histories of blind people who recovered their sight. In his book, Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind, he tells of an 8-year-old boy, blind at birth from cataracts, who underwent surgery in the year 1910. When the time came to remove his bandages, the doctor was very hopeful. He waved his hand in front of the boy’s eyes, which were now physically perfect. 

“What do you see?” asked the doctor.
“I don’t know,” the boy replied.
“Can’t you see my hand moving?” said the doctor.
“I don’t know,” said the boy.

The boy’s eyes did not follow the doctor’s slowly moving hand, but stared straight ahead. He only saw a varying brightness before him. Then the doctor asked him to touch his hand as it moved, and when he did, the boy cried out in a voice of triumph, “It’s moving!” He could feel it move, and even, as he said, could “hear it move,” but it would take laborious effort to learn to see it move.

As that first light passed through the child’s newly clear black pupils, it called forth no echoing image from within. His sight, Zajonc tells us, began as a hollow, silent, dark and frightening kind of seeing. The light of day beckoned, but no light of mind replied within the boy’s anxious, open eyes.

“The sober truth” says Zajonc, “remains that vision requires far more than a functioning physical organ. Without an inner light, without a formative visual imagination, we are blind.” This echoes Augustine’s description of our “bruised and wounded” inner eye. What is it that makes us so unable to process what is before us, to see what is being offered to our open eyes?

The mystical Anglican poet Thomas Traherne framed an answer in the ornately vivid language of the seventeenth century:

“As my body without my soul is a carcass, so is my Soul without Thy Spirit, a chaos, a dark obscure heap of empty faculties ignorant of itself, unsensible of Thy goodness, blind to Thy glory.” 

And what are the causes of this abysmal state? he asks. He names several: 

“[The Light within us is eclipsed] by the customs and manners of [others], which like contrary winds blew it out: by an innumerable company of other objects, rude, vulgar and worthless things, that like so many loads of earth and dung did overwhelm and bury it: by the impetuous torrent of wrong; … by a whole sea of other matters and concernments that covered and drowned it…” 

“Contrary winds” blowing out the Light within us… being overwhelmed by “an innumerable company… of rude, vulgar and worthless things”… “the impetuous torrent of wrong desires” — does any of that sound familiar in this age of consumerism, social media, and widespread disinformation?

Not long after Traherne wrote those words, another English writer, John Bunyan, told the story of two pilgrims, named Christian and Faithful, who came upon Vanity Fair, a kind of shopping mall where all the transitory pleasures of this world were on seductive display.

“What will ye buy?” cried one of the merchants.
And Christian and Faithful replied, “We buy the truth!”

This was clearly the wrong answer, for the two pilgrims were immediately set upon, beaten, smeared with mud, thrown in a cage, and finally put on trial. The jury was rigged, led by Mr. Blind Man and Mr. Hate-Light. “Guilty,” they cried, and Faithful was put to death. But Christian managed to escape, and his journey into God continued. 

Bunyan’s allegorical constructs seem quaintly archaic today, but Vanity Fair is still with us, with its endless commodification of unsatisfiable desires. And Mr. Hate-Light is still at work, generating the ceaseless illusions and lies that blind us to the beauty of holiness, the beauty of one another, the beauty of loving community. 

I was born in 1944, 40 days after D-Day, and a few weeks before the liberation of Paris, when the evils of Nazism and fascism were on the run. Once and for all, we thought. But now, eighty years later, Adolf Hitler—Mr. Hate-Light himself—is making a comeback. And millions—millions!—of people are just shrugging their shoulders. So many of the children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the generation who shed their blood to stop fascist tyranny, seem kind of okay with the return of Mr. Hate-Light.

Lord have mercy, we are stumbling in the dark.

So what happens to Christian in Bunyan’s allegory? He escapes Vanity Fair, but he still has to pass through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where the light is so scarce, and the path so narrow, that he’s in constant danger of stumbling into the ditch on his right or the quagmire on his left. 

But Christian is not without hope in that dark valley. 
As Isaiah said, the God of light travels with us:

I shall lead the blind by a road they do not know… 
I shall turn the darkness into light before them, 
and turn the quagmire into solid ground.   (Isa 42:16)

All of us, deep down, want the light. All of us need the light. But sometimes we resist the light, or run away from it, or shut our eyes to it. There are things we’d rather not see, in the world or in ourselves. Illuminating our dark places can feel like a judgment, as if the light were accusing our shadows.

In Franco Zefferelli’s beautiful 1977 film, Jesus of Nazareth, we meet another blind man at the pool of Bethsaida in Jerusalem, but unlike Bartimaeus, he is deathly afraid of being healed. “Leave my eyes alone!” he shouts. “Stop touching my eyes!”

After analyzing sixty-six cases of blind people who had recovered their sight, Arthur Zajonc would concur with Zeffirelli’s portrayal of our resistance to having our eyes opened.

“The project of learning to see,” he writes, “inevitably leads to a psychological crisis in the life of the patients, who may wind up rejecting sight. New impressions threaten the security of a world previously built upon the sensations of touch and hearing. Some decided it is better to be blind in their own world than sighted in an alien one… The prospect of growth is as much a prospect of loss, and threat to security, as a bounty.”

In other words, opening our eyes to a more truthful clarity can be scary—no more fictions or illusions about the state of the world or the state of our souls. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us (I John 1:8).

Seeing—clearly and accurately—the fallenness of our broken world—and our wounded selves—is a painful revelation. Once we face facts, transformation is the only way forward. We must change our life. A new way of seeing demands a new way of being. We can either fight that divine summons, like the man in the Zeffirelli film (Don’t touch my eyes!), or we can jump up and embrace it, like Bartimaeus.

But it’s not just the wrongness of things which is hidden by our blindness. The truth is, there is also so much blessing and beauty in this world, eagerly waiting to be discerned and embraced.

And whatever our doubts and fears about losing our protective blindness, the beauty revealed will be worth the price. It’s the beauty of God’s future—what Jesus called the Kingdom. We often think of the Kingdom of God as impossibly distant, but it is possible to glimpse it even now, in this present age. We only need the eyes to see. 

Scaffolding on the west side of Notre Dame in Paris (October 2024).

Last week my wife and I were in Paris, and it was thrilling to see the cathedral of Notre Dame in the final stages of its resurrection from the devastation of that terrible fire in 2019. There are still giant cranes and some scaffolding present, and a construction wall continues to keep the public at a distance until the house of God reopens in Advent.

And even though we could not yet go inside, it was powerful just to stand in the parvis, the open space in front of Notre Dame, joining the thousands and thousands of people who come there every day to wonder at the marriage of human creativity and divine glory.

And what made it especially moving was the beautiful photographs displayed on the temporary wall surrounding the site. In stunning black & white portraits, we saw a representative sample of the many thousands whose labor, skill and love have brought the cathedral back to life: architects, engineers, artisans, restoration experts, carpenters, stone-workers, stained glass artists, roofers, electricians, cleaners, works managers, heritage curators, scholars, liturgists, theologians, and all the service people who fed the multitude every day.

Photo of restoration team member on the construction wall at Notre Dame.
Photo of restoration team member on construction wall at Notre Dame.

What we saw in those faces, and in the fruits of their labor, was the very best of humanity, working together to repair the world, redeeming beauty and hope from the ashes of destruction and despair.

But if you walk just behind Notre Dame, to the tiny tip of the Ile de la Cité—the small island on the Seine River where the cathedral stands—you will find some stairs, which take you down into a dim, tomb-like space. There you move through a narrow passage whose floor is inscribed with the words, “They went to the ends of the earth and did not return.”

This subterranean passage is faintly illumined by 200,000 tiny, lighted crystals, representing the 200,000 people deported from France to the death camps during the Nazi occupation of the 1940s.

It is a powerful memorial—and a painful reminder. For the mass deportation in France was not simply the act of bad Germans upon an innocent French population. It was the French police who went door to door, rounding up Jews and dissidents. And though there were many French people who resisted the evils of the Occupation, there were many more who turned a blind eye to the mass deportation. The legacy of complicity and collaboration would long haunt the postwar memory of France.

Lying in the very shadow of the glorious and aspirational cathedral, the Memorial of the Deportation stands as a warning to those of any country who want to believe that “it can’t happen here.”

Lord, remove our grievous blindness. Help us see the light.

There is a passage from Willa Cather’s novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop, which perfectly expresses the faith and the hope that we are not destined to remain in the dark—that we can, by God’s grace, recover the divine light within us. The novel’s protagonist, Jean-Marie Latour, a nineteenth-century missionary bishop to the territory of New Mexico, is discussing visions and miracles with his Vicar. 

“Where there is great love,” he says, “there are always miracles. One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love .… The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is about us always.”

Human vision corrected by divine love. 
How blessed are they who receive such a miracle! 

“Mercy, O thou Son of David, 
thus poor blind Bartimaeus prayed.
“Others by thy grace are saved,
now afford to me thine aid.”

“Lord, remove this grievous blindness,
let mine eyes behold the day.”
Straight he saw, and, won by kindness,
followed Jesus in the way.

The Joy of Letting Go — Spirituality in a Season of Change

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Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core …

— John Keats, “To Autumn”

October light! October color! Ripeness to the core! We share the poet’s pleasure in this season of earthly delight. But we know it will not last. As one of the earliest English poets put it over a millennium ago:

A little while the leaves are green;
then they fallow again, fall to the earth,
and die, turn to dust.

The falling leaf is an ancient trope for decline and fall, and we mortals tend to take it personally. “I have lived long enough,” lamented Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

… my way of life
Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have.

Yes, of course. We know where this autumnal existence is headed. Even the finest October day contains the seeds of melancholy. The cold and the dark draw near. But if we can take the long view, these too shall pass.

Pamela Steed Hill says this so poignantly in her poem, “September Pitch”:

Mama, the autumn is deep.
Its pitch is only beginning, and will brighten
before the end. Brighten
into darkness,
or into spring.

Here in America, the darkness is already here. As we approach the most consequential—and potentially catastrophic—election of our lifetime, we wonder whether our present world can in fact brighten into spring. If there ever were a time to keep the faith, it is now.

A few days ago I happened to hear on the radio a beautiful autumn song by Jennifer Cutting, encouraging us to move into the unknown with a trusting spirit, come what may.

To know the joy of letting go
The giddy flight of falling
Surprise at softly landing so
Among the leaves of autumn

And though the last refuse to fall
And cling for fear of changing
October overcomes our song
Among the leaves of autumn

O bitterness can shrivel dead
What gratitude made rosy
The brown leaves curl beside the red
Among the leaves of autumn

What was will never be again
What will be is uncharted
What’s now is change, so let’s begin
Among the leaves of autumn

I have set the song link between autumnal images, which I invite you to contemplate as you listen. Grace and peace to you in this season of change.

Photographs by the author.

“We are America!” — Poetic Voices of an Immigrant Nation

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Illustration by Shepard Fairey from a photograph by Delphine Diallo.

Last night, at a campaign rally in Pennsyvlania, Donald Trump told the crowd that immigrants are “changing the character of small towns and villages all over our country and changing them forever. They will never be the same … And I’ll say it now: You have to get ’em the hell out! You have to get ’em out … Can’t have it! They’ve destroyed us.” The MAGA mob responded with a chant that would make Hitler smile: SEND THEM BACK! SEND THEM BACK!

At the beginning of this century, the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago asked me to compile texts of the immigrant experience for a public reading in celebration of America’s rich diversity. I first posted these here in 2018. May these eloquent American voices remind us of our common origins as strangers and sojourners. In a country beset with what Canadian scholar Henry A. Giroux has called the “violence of organized forgetting,” remembering is a crucial act of resistance.

Sing to me, call me home in languages I do not yet
understand, to childhoods I have not yet experienced,
to loves that have not yet touched me.
Fill me with the details of our lives.
Filling up, emptying out
and diving in.
It is the holy spirit of existence, the flesh, the blood,
the naked truth that will not be covered.
Tell me everything, all the details – flesh, blood, bone.

– Lisa Kahaleole Chang Hall

From Asia, you crossed a bridge of land,
now called the Bering Strait, now swallowed
in water. No human steps to follow,
you slowly found your way on pathless grounds…
Travelers lost in time – walking, chanting, dancing –
tracks on mapless earth, no man-made lines,
no borders. Arriving not in ships, with no supplies,
waving no flags, claiming nothing, naming
no piece of dirt for wealthy lords of earth.
You did not come to own; you came to live.

– Benjamin Alire Sáenz

America is also the nameless foreigner,
the homeless refugee,
the hungry boy begging for a job,
the illiterate immigrant…
All of us, from the first Adams
to the last Filipino,
native born or alien,
educated or illiterate –
We are America! 

– Carlos Bulosan

She is the woman hanging from the 13th floor window
in east Chicago…
She sees Lake Michigan lapping at the shores of
herself…She sees other
women hanging from many-floored windows
counting their lives in the palms of their hands
and in the palms of their children’s hands.

She is the woman hanging from the 13th floor window
on the Indian side of town…
crying for the lost beauty of her own life.

– Joy Harjo

I am not any of the faces
you have put on me america

every mask has slipped
i am not any of the names

or sounds you have called me
the tones have nearly

made me deaf
this dark skin, both of us have tried to bleach…

– Safiya Henderson-Holmes

I know now that I once longed to be white.
How? you ask.
Let me tell you the ways.

when I was growing up, people told me
I was dark and I believed my own darkness
in the mirror, in my soul, my own narrow vision.

when I was growing up, my sisters
with fair skin got praised
for their beauty and I fell
further, crushed between high walls.

when I was growing up, I read magazines
and saw blonde movie stars, white skin, sensuous lips,
and to be elevated, to become
a woman, a desirable woman, I began to wear
imaginary pale skin.

when I was growing up, I was proud
of my English, my grammar, my spelling,
fitting into the group of smart children,
smart Chinese children, fitting in,
belonging, getting in line.

– Nellie Wong

These men died with the wrong names,
Na’aim Jazeeny, from the beautiful valley
of Jezzine, died as Nephew Sam,
Sine Hussin died without relatives and
because they cut away his last name
at Ellis Island, there was no way to trace
him back even to Lebanon, and Im’a Brahim
had no other name than mother of Brahim
even my own father lost his, went from
Hussein Hamode Subh’ to Sam Hamod.
There is something lost in the blood,
something lost down to the bone
in these small changes. A man in a
dark blue suit at Ellis Island says, with
tiredness and authority, “You only need two
names in America” and suddenly – as cleanly
as the air, you’ve lost
your name. At first, it’s hardly
even noticeable – and it’s easier, you move
about as an American – but looking back
the loss of your name
cuts away some other part,
something unspeakable is lost.

– Sam Hamod

I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin…
Of course, the name had been changed
somewhere between Angel Island and the sea,
when my father the paper son
in the late 1950’s
obsessed with some bombshell blonde
transliterated “Mei Ling” to Marilyn…
and there I was, a wayward pink baby,
named after some tragic
white woman, swollen with gin and Nembutal.

– Marilyn Chin

“This is my country,” we sang,
And a few years ago there would have been
A scent of figs in the air, mangoes,
And someone playing the oud along a clear stream.

But now it was “My country ’tis of thee”
And I sang it out with all my heart…
“Land where my fathers died,” I bellowed,
And it was not too hard to imagine
A host of my great uncles and -grandfathers
Stunned from their graves in the Turkish interior
And finding themselves suddenly
On a rock among maize and poultry
And Squanto shaking their hands.

– Gregory Djanikian

If I am a newcomer to your country, why teach me about my ancestors? I need to know about seventeenth-century Puritans in order to make sense of the rebellion I notice everywhere in the American city. Teach me about mad British kings so I will understand the American penchant for iconoclasm. Teach me about cowboys and Indians; I should know that tragedies created the country that will create me.

– Richard Rodriguez

Names will change
faces will change
but not much else
the President will still be white
and male
and wasp
still speak with forked tongue…
still uphold the laws of dead white men
still dream about big white monuments
and big white memorials
ain’t nothin’ changed
ain’t nothin’ changed at all.

– Lamont B. Steptoe

My dream of America
is like dà bính lòuh
with people of all persuasions and tastes
sitting down around a common pot
chopsticks and basket scoops here and there
some cooking squid and others beef
some tofu and watercress
all in one broth
like a stew that really isn’t
as each one chooses what she wishes to eat
only that the pot and fire are shared
along with the good company
and the sweet soup
spooned out at the end of the meal.

– Wing Tek Lum

today
we will not be invisible nor silent
as the pilgrims of yesterday continue their war of attrition
forever trying, but never succeeding
in their battle to rid the americas of us
convincing others and ourselves
that we have been assimilated and eliminated,

but we remember who we are

we are the spirit of endurance that lives
in the cities and reservations of north america
and in the barrios and countryside of Nicaragua, Chile
Guatemala, El Salvador

and in all the earth and rivers of the americas.

– Victoria Lena Manyarrows

We are a beautiful people
with African imaginations
full of masks and dances and swelling chants
with African eyes, and noses, and arms,
though we sprawl in gray chains in a place
full of winters, when what we want is sun.

We have been captured,
brothers and sisters. And we labor
to make our getaway, into
the ancient image, into a new
correspondence with ourselves
and our black family.
We need magic
now we need the spells, to raise up
return, destroy, and create. What will be
the sacred words?

– Amiri Baraka

Living on borders, and in margins,
keeping intact one’s shifting and multiple identity and integrity,
is like trying to swim in a new element…
There is an exhilaration in being a participant
in the further evolution of humankind.

– Gloria E. Anzaldúa

We are connected to one another in time and by blood. Each of us is so related, we’re practically the same person living infinite versions of the great human adventure.

– Maxine Hong Kingston

When both of us look backward…we see and are devoted to telling about the lines of people that we see stretching back, breaking, surviving, somehow, somehow, and incredibly, culminating in someone who can tell a story.    

— Louise Erdrich

I am a woman who wants to go home but never figured out where it is or why to go there…I have lost the words to chant my bloodline.    

— Lisa Harris

We are the sum of all our ancestors. Some speak louder than others but they all remain present, alive in our very blood and bone.      

— Lisa Kahaleole Chang Hall

I have the same name as 1 grandfather, 3 cousins, 3 nephews, and 1 uncle. The uncle disappeared when he was 15, just took off and caught a freight (they say). He’s discussed each year when the family has a reunion, he causes uneasiness in the clan, he is an empty space. My father’s mother, who is 93, and who keeps the Family Bible with everybody’s birth dates (and death dates) in it, always mentions him. There is no place in her Bible for ‘wherabouts unknown.’    

— Etheridge Knight

When the census taker, a woman of African descent…came to my door, I looked into the face of my sister….She did not ask me my racial background but checked off the box next to Black American/African American/Afro-Cuban American/Black African….

I met her eyes and said, “I’m not Black; I’m Other, Mixed, Black and White.” …She did not smile, smirk, or frown, but checked the box marked “Other,” and lifted her eyes quickly to mine again. I wanted to see her erase “Black.” She did not do so in my presence….

I had been focused on my personal freedom, on my right to define who I am, on my responsibility to my sense of self. The dignity of the census taker was not a part of my mental equation…

She thanked me. But the price of my self-definition had been the wall I felt I’d built between us before I ever closed the door.        

— Sarah Willie

I am not African. Africa is in me, but I cannot return…I am not european. Europe lives in me,  but I have no home there. I am new. History made me….I was born at the crossroads and I am whole.  

— Sarah Willie

Auntie Raylene, an accomplished chanter and dancer, told us about the necessity of remembering and honoring where we come from….During the question-and-answer session, a worried West African immigrant brother asked her, “But…what if our parents and grandparents refuse to tell us anything? They don’t want to talk about the old days. They are afraid. Or they don’t remember.”

She looked at him with great love and said, “Then you go back further, to the source,” and her hand swept back with assurance to the beginning of time, to the birth of life.

– Lisa Kahaleole Chang Hall

Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.

Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth….

Remember that you are all people and that all people are you.
Remember that you are this universe
and that this universe is you.

Remember that all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember that language comes from this.
Remember the dance that language is, that life is.
Remember.

– Joy Harjo

We the People art images are available here as free downloads. Shepard Fairey’s image of 12-year-old Menelik is from a photograph by French and Senegalese artist Delphine Diallo. The texts are drawn from several wonderful collections: UA:Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry , ed. Maria Mazziotti Gillan & Jennifer Gillan (Penguin,1994)… N: Names We Call Home: Autobiography on Racial Identity, eds. Becky Thompson, Sangeeta Tyagi (Routledge, 1995) … and another anthology which has vanished from my library and my memory, though I have traced original sources for most of its selections. In order: Hall (N 241), Sáenz (Calendar of Dust), Bulosan (http://bulosan.org/in-his-words), Harjo (UA 29-30), Henderson-Holmes (UA 60), Wong (UA 55), Hamod (UA130), Chin (UA 134), Djanikian (UA 215), Rodriguez (source unknown), Steptoe (UA 250), Lum (UA 322-23), Manyarrows (UA 330), Baraka (UA 155), Anzaldúa (Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza), Kingston & Erdrich (third anthology), Harris (N xv), Hall (N 241ff.), Knight (The Essential Etheridge Knight), Willie (N 276, 278), Hall (241ff.), Harjo (She Had Some Horses)

“No faith, no truth, no trust”—The Cost of Lies in American Politics

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Magnus Zeller, The Orator (c. 1920). The German painter foresaw the danger of authoritarians who prey on the emotions of the mindless mob.

The problem is, when you marry intelligence
To ill will and brute force,
People are helpless against it.

— Dante, Inferno xxxi [1]

On November 5th, Guy Fawkes Day, the citizens of Great Britain will celebrate the defeat of a conspiracy to overthrow the political order in 1605. Thirty-six barrels of gunpowder hidden beneath the House of Lords were discovered before they could blow King and Parliament to kingdom come, and the plotters were brought to justice.

Also on November 5th, the citizens of the United States will vote whether to thwart or assist the overthrow of their own political order. Democracy itself is on the ballot, and the party of insurrection is determined to blow it up. If the latest polls are accurate, they have a fair chance of success.

Seventeenth-century England and twenty-first century America are dissimilar in countless ways, but the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and the Presidential election of 2024 have one crucial thing in common: the toxic social effect of equivocation.

When the seventeenth century began, “equivocation” was a neutral, rarely used term for statements deemed ambiguous. But in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, it became a widespread byword for deceitful speech. The term’s sudden prominence was triggered by the discovery of the plotters’ handbook, A Treatise of Equivocation, which detailed various ways for persecuted Roman Catholics to lie under oath without endangering their conscience.

When Catholic worship and practice were being suppressed after the English Reformation, the Roman faithful needed to conceal from the authorities the presence of priests and the saying of masses in their private homes. If asked, they could equivocate: give ambiguous or incomplete answers, or practice “mental reservation”—speaking aloud partial truths, while retaining in their minds any bits which might get them into trouble. As long as you speak the whole truth in your mind, where God can hear it, leaving your inquisitor in the dark is not a sin. In other words, the Treatise argued, it is possible to lie without guilt.

In a time when Roman priests were being hunted down and threatened with prison or the gallows, such equivocation was understandable. We do not fault the Dutch family who lied about Anne Frank hiding in their secret annex. But as the Gunpowder Plot made clear, social stability was not a given in the early days of King James’s reign. However, neither factions, plots, religious difference or the clash of ideas seemed the greatest threat to common life in Britain.  The greatest threat was thought to be equivocation, the solvent of bad faith which dissolves communal trust. As an English court put it a few years after the insurrection was foiled:

“The commonwealth cannot possibly stand if this wicked doctrine be not beaten down and suppressed, for if it once take root in the hearts of people, in a short time there will be no faith, no truth, no trust … and all civil societies will break and be dissolved.” [2]

The Earl of Salisbury, responding to A Treatise of Equivocation with a book of his own, An Answer to Certain Scandalous Papers, warned against “that most strange and gross doctrine of equivocation,” which would “tear in sunder all the bonds of human conversation.” [3]

A similar anathema was issued from a London pulpit:

“He that lyeth doth deprive himself of all credit among men (for they will also suspect him to be a liar), so that he that once deceiveth his neighbor by equivocation, shall always be suspected to equivocate … If deceit by equivocation be used, then all covenants and contracts between man and man must cease, and have an end, because all men will be suspicious of one another … So, no commonwealth can stand, no civil society can be maintained.” [4] 

 The nightmarish world of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, written just after the Gunpowder Plot, dramatizes the dread of social disintegration, as even the more admirable characters find themselves “unspeaking” truth. “Fair is foul and foul is fair,” cry the weird sisters at their cauldron of deconstruction. Once language begins to mean anything and nothing, civil discourse is mortally wounded, and it is not just Macbeth who begins “to doubt th’ equivocation of the fiend / That lies like truth.” [5]

Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro notes that the moral chaos of the play is draining not just for the characters but for the audience as well:

“Equivocation makes following Macbeth’s dialogue a mentally exhausting experience, for playgoers—much like those conversing with equivocators—must decide whether a claim should be accepted at face value, and, if not, must struggle to construct what may be suppressed through mental reservation. But with equivocators, one never knows what, if anything, is left unspoken.” [6] 

In the American election of 2024, we are well acquainted with the fiend that lies like truth. “Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” cry the weird brothers Trump and Vance, poisoning our national speech and our common life like there’s no tomorrow. The lying is in their natures—it’s who they are: hollow men without principles, shapeless hulks of impulse and ambition. But their lying, a weapon as destructive as gunpowder, is also an instrument of power. If truth and trust can be blown to bits, the weird brothers will be free to soar beyond accountability into a realm of naked, unfettered tyranny.

It will not go well for them. As Dante assures us, the lowest place in Hell is reserved for the fraudulent, because fraud is the polar opposite of love. Love nurtures community. Fraud disintegrates it. Dorothy Sayers’ eloquent notes on Dante’s Inferno describe the bleak endgame for the ones who are only in it for themselves:

“Beneath the clamor, beneath the monotonous circlings, beneath the fires of Hell, here at the center of the lost soul and the lost city, lie the silence and the rigidity and the eternal frozen cold. It is perhaps the greatest image in the whole Inferno … A cold and cruel egotism, gradually striking inward till even the lingering passion of hatred and destruction are frozen into immobility—that is the final state of sin.” [7]

Gustave Doré, Dis frozen in the lake of ice (1861). Immobilized in the pit of hell, the prince of lies is trapped in wordless solitude, dis-connected from every form of relation.

The evils of Trumpworld have multiplied ceaselessly over the years: tens of thousands of unnecessary Covid deaths, families torn apart at the border, political violence, the abuse of immigrants and women, the corruption of the Supreme Court, the stoking of anger, racism and hate, the relentless erosion of social bonds, the corrosive degradation of the rule of law, et cetera, et cetera. And so much lying. J. D. Vance’s gleeful admission that he invented the terrible stories about immigrants eating pets is just the latest example of a shamelessly destructive addiction to untruth. These people don’t care how many people they hurt.

It’s exhausting. That too is part of the Trump/Vance strategy. We’re supposed to grow weary and discouraged in the face of their unrelenting and senseless chaos. I find an apt metaphor for this moment of American politics in Washington Irving’s account of a transatlantic voyage in the early nineteenth century. Traveling by land, he said, keeps us connected with a sense of where we are and where we’ve come from.

“But a wide sea voyage severs us at once. It makes us conscious of being cast loose from the secure anchorage of settled life, and sent adrift upon a doubtful world. It interposes a gulf not entirely imaginary, but real, between us and our homes—a gulf subjected to tempest and fear and uncertainty, rendering distance palpable, and return precarious.” [8]

Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream (1899/1906).

Irving’s harrowing journey took about as many weeks as we have left until the election. Sail on, friends, sail on. It is my hope that come November 5th, we will anchor once again in safe harbor, put the chaos behind us, and begin to mend the torn fabric of our common life.

In the meantime, citizens, we all have some serious work to do.

[1] Dante Alighieri, Inferno xxxi, 55-57, translated by Mary Jo Bang. Dante is explaining why the Creator made large creatures like elephants and whales, but abandoned the making of giants. Intelligence, granted too much size and power, could do great damage if corrupted.

[2] James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 158.

[3] Ibid., 173.

[4] Ibid., 177-178. John Dove, sermon at St. Paul’s Cathedral, June 1, 1606.

[5] William Shakespeare, Macbeth 5.5, 41-42.

[6] Shapiro, 185-186.

[7] Dorothy Sayers, commentary on her translation of Inferno, quoted in Helen Luke, Dark Wood to White Rose: Journey and Transformation in Dante’s Divine Comedy (New York, Parabola Books, 1989), 41.

[8] Washington Irving, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819-1820), quoted in David McCullough, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 12.

“This Is My Body”: What is the Olympics’ “Last Supper” Controversy Really About?

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Paolo Veronese, Christ in the House of Levi (1573).

“The image can be worn down to the point that it is almost invisible, it can be plunged into darkness and disfigured, it can be clear and beautiful, but it does not cease to be.”

— Saint Augustine

Four hundred and fifty years ago, Paolo Veronese painted his controversial version of the Last Supper for a Venetian monastery. It was hung in the refectory, where the monks could contemplate the sacredness of every meal in the artist’s image of the first eucharist. But when the censors of the Venetian Inquisition had a look, they were shocked to find the holy scene crowded with “buffoons, drunken Germans, dwarfs and other such scurrilities.”[i] Although Veronese argued that the invented characters were needed to fill the immense canvas (42 feet wide), and that Christ was safely separated from the more unseemly guests within the central arch, the Inquisitors were not persuaded. The disorderly and irreverent scene was antithetical to the purpose of religious art. It would produce distraction, not devotion.

Veronese was given three months to change the painting. Instead, he gave it a new title: Christ in the House of Levi. As Luke’s gospel tells us, Jesus was known for eating with “publicans and sinners,” so the switch of subjects from Last Supper to Levi’s party made the scandalous scene properly scriptural. The artist was off the hook, and the Inquisitors dropped their complaint.

The controversial tableau at the Paris Olympics.
Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper (c. 1495-1498).

At the Opening Ceremonies of the Paris Olympics, a similar controversy arose when a brief tableau of a pagan feast was taken to be a mocking parody of the Last Supper. The diverse figures standing behind the raised runway of a fashion show, grouped on either side of a central figure with a silver “halo”, evoked for some the well-known iconography of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. But instead of a male Christ, the central figure was a woman, flanked not by pious apostles but dancing drag queens.

The French Bishops’ Conference slammed the tableau as a “mockery and derision of Christianity.” Mike Johnson, the right-wing Evangelical Speaker of the House in the United States Congress, decreed the performance “shocking and insulting to Christian people around the world.” The event’s artistic director, Thomas Jolly, denied the Last Supper allusion. The scene was a pagan feast on Mount Olympus. The Olympics! Get it? The blue man sitting on a pile of fruit in the foreground depicted Dionysos, Greek god of wine and fertility. There was no intention to “be subversive or shock people or mock people,” Jolly said. [ii]

Jan van Bijlert, The Feast of the Gods (c. 1635-1640).

The true inspiration for the tableau, suggested its defenders, was not Leonardo’s masterpiece, but a seventeenth-century painting by Dutch artist Jan van Bijlert, The Feast of the Gods. There is a table with a central figure behind it, but it’s Apollo. And no one would mistake all those Olympian carousers for Christian saints. However, I do wonder. Was Bijlert’s table itself inspired by Leonardo’s, making his own pagan tableau a sly remix of the Last Supper?

Whatever the intention of the Olympic organizers, the negative outrage poses a critical question. What is the table fellowship of Jesus all about? Is it not an indelible image of divine welcome? If so-called “Christians” profess to be shocked at the presence of misfits and outcasts at God’s feast, are not they the true blasphemers against the Love Supreme?

The Last Supper has long been one of the most recycled images of Christian iconography. As a widely recognizable motif of human solidarity and divine gift, it is a visual code for what everyone longs to hear: Come in. Sit down. You are welcome here.

Homer Simpson and friends in the manner of Leonardo.
Two controversies in a single meme: Paris Opening Ceremonies and Cat Ladies.

Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters, manifesting the eucharistic dimension of every table, however humble, was inspired by the Last Supper paintings of Tintoretto (1518-1594) and Charles de Groux (1825-1870).

Vincent van Gogh, The Potato Eaters (1885). The lamp, borrowed from Tintoretto’s Last Supper, illumines this humble “communion” table with divine light.
Jocopo Tintoretto, The Last Supper (1592). The spiritual turbulence swirling through the room reveals the sacredness of the first eucharist. The untraditional angle of vision intensifies the moment’s dynamic power.
Charles de Groux, The Blessing Before Supper (1861). The Last Supper imagery in an everyday setting inspired Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters.

In recent decades, photographers have invited some surprising guests to the table, often with a subversive image of Christ in the middle. Nathalie Dietschy’s extensively illustrated book, The Figure of Christ in Contemporary Photography, provides a wide variety of examples, such as David LaChapelle’s Last Supper from his 2003 series, Jesus is My Homeboy. “If Jesus was alive today,” says the artist, “this is who he would be with. He was with the outcasts, the apostle. What would the apostles look like today? The apostles were not the aristocracy, they were not the well to do, they were not the popular people, they were sort of the dreamers, the misfits.” [iii]

David LaChappelle, Last Supper (detail). Part of the series, Jesus is my Homeboy (2003).

Raised a Roman Catholic, LaChapelle wanted to “rescue” Jesus from limiting stereotypes. He described his Homeboy series as “a personal attempt to say [to fundamentalists]: ‘you have ruined so much, but you are not going to take this.’” [iv]

Some of Dietschy’s other photographic examples of the Last Supper genre are Marcos López’s Roast Meat in Mendiolaza, with the central figure at the table stabbing a hunk of meat with a knife at an outdoor barbecue in Argentina … Rauf Mamedov of Azerbaijan having men with Down’s Syndrome reproduce the gestures of Leonardo’s apostles as they ask, “Is it I, Lord?” … Faisal Abdu’Allah, a Jamaican-born American, inserting his own blackness into the story with disciples of color, both men and women, dressed as rap artists or veiled and robed in traditional Muslim dress … New Zealander Greg Semu exploring the tensions between indigenous and colonial cultures in The Last Cannibal Supper … ‘Cause Tomorrow We Become Christians, where the artist himself, as the Christ figure, presides over a table laden with cooked flesh and a human skull, as his disciples, anxious about transitioning identity, look ill at ease … and a couple of Chinese artists filling the table with Red Army soldiers, or Chinese schoolgirls with identical faces.

Such revisions of sacred iconography can be challenging, bewildering, or even disturbing. And any erosion of the “aura” of religious symbols, especially in this secular age where technology’s infinite reproducibility of images has revoked all the Christian copyrights, is a subject worth thoughtful consideration. But the persistence of sacred tropes, even when trivialized or misappropriated, is itself a testimony to their power. The logic of the Incarnation means that the divine can become indistinguishable from the human, erasing the boundary between sacred and profane.

Brigitte Niedermair, The Last Supper (2005)

The Last Supper by Swedish artist Brigitte Niedermair in 2005 first appeared in women’s magazines as an ad for a contemporary clothing brand. Leonardo’s postures and gestures are explicitly performed, strikingly, by women. There is one enigmatic young man, with his bare torso turned away from the viewer. He seems bent in sorrow, perhaps foreshadowing the Pietà.

The image’s feminine casting created a stir, unnerving the patriarchal segments of the Church. It was condemned, even banned, in some Catholic countries. But others expressed understandable reservations concerning the slick commercialization of a sacred image in order to sell expensive clothing. The ad agency seemed taken aback by the objections. “We wanted to convey a sort of spirituality through this image,” they said. It was “an homage to art and to women.” [v]

A pair of Last Suppers, each set in the Middle East, demonstrates how critical context is to the reception of art. The current violence in Gaza endows them with a fresh layer of tragic intensity. Put next to each other in 2024, they touch a raw nerve. If only humanity could heed the divine commandment spoken at the original table: Love one another.

Adi Nes, Untitled (Soldiers series,1999).
Vivek Vilasini, Last Supper—Gaza (2008). From the series, Between One Shore and Several Others.

Adi Nes’s untitled photograph from his 1999 Soldiers series, by arranging fourteen men on one side of a table, invokes Leonardo’s iconography. The soldiers are conversing in small groups, but the man in the Christ position appears lost in his own thoughts. Nes, who himself spent three years in the Israeli Defense Force, has said that “all of them are Jesus, all of them are Judas.” All equally at risk, all equally in need of forgiveness and compassion. “I hope this isn’t their last supper,” he says.[vi]

A similar nod to Leonardo by Indian artist Vivek Vilasini, Last Supper—Gaza (2007), fills the table with Palestinian women, whose anxious and fearful eyes show the distress of living under constant threat. Is it I, Lord? Is it I who will betray? Is it I who will run away? Is it I who will die?

Yo Mama’s Last Supper (1996), by Jamaican-American Renee Cox, is one of the most controversial versions. It employs Leonardo’s canonical table image, but the apostles themselves, except for a white male as Judas, are black or mixed-race and not exclusively male. They all wear traditional biblical dress, except for Jesus, who is naked. Played by the artist herself, the Christ figure spreads her arms wide like the presider at the eucharist. A white shroud is artfully draped over her arms in the manner of crosses decorated at Easter.

There is no mockery in the image. It shares the solemn stillness of traditional religious painting. But in showing Jesus as a “triply marginalized figure due to race, gender and physicality,”[vii] the image aroused heated attacks. When it was first exhibited in New York in early 2001, Mayor Rudy Giuliani called it “disgusting, outrageous and anti-catholic.” William Donohue, President of the Catholic League, said that “to vulgarize Christ in this manner is unconscionable.” However, in a debate with Cox at the Brooklyn Museum, he admitted that “there would be no problem if you had kept your clothes on.” [viii]

Cox’s response to her critics was not apologetic. “An African-American woman putting herself in a position of empowerment seems to be a national threat,” she said. “I’m not taking a backseat. I’m going to sit at the head of the table.” As for the nakedness, she insisted it was not her intent to eroticize a sacred scene. “I chose to play the Christ figure in the nude because it represents a certain sense of purity. I come to the table with nothing to hide.”[ix]

Juan de Juanes, The Last Supper (c. 1560).
Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin, The Last Supper (1996-8). Part of the Ecce Homo series.

The Last Supper by Swedish artist Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin is perhaps the closest parallel to the Olympics’ notorious tableau. Modeled after a 16th-century painting by Juan de Juanes, it populates the table with transvestite disciples and a Jesus of uncertain gender, wearing high heels and holding up a makeup sponge instead of the sacred Host. Created by a lesbian artist raised in the Church, it was part of a photographic series, Ecce Homo, featuring biblical scenes with LGBTQ models.

The Ecce Homo photographs, unsurprisingly, created a furor in the last years of the 20th century. The fact that they were exhibited in churches rather than museums served to fuel the outrage. The propriety of untraditional visuals in sacred space is a particularly fraught question. Placing Wallin’s Last Supper above the altar of a Zurich church prompted vandalism and bomb threats.

While I do wonder whether the cognitive dissonance of Wallin’s image competing for attention with the actual sacrament would deepen or disrupt a worshipper’s ocular piety, the radical inclusiveness conveyed by Ecce Homo was a blessing to many. “Thank you for this wonderful representation of the life and deeds of Jesus,” someone wrote in the Visitors’ book at the Zurich exhibition. “Through it, I can now identify with them, today, in the 21st century. I pray for all those who are rejected by our society: ‘The Last shall be the first!’” [x]

That’s really what it’s all about, isn’t it? Who belongs at the table? Who is welcome at the table? The Opening Ceremonies controversy was not about Leonardo vs. Jan van Bijlert, Mount Olympus vs. the Upper Room, pagan vs. Christian, Jesus vs. Apollo. It was about who gets to sit at Love’s table. And for those who think that the Last Supper represents anything less than that: You are in for a surprise.

Lcve bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, obeserving me grow slack
From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked anything.
A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.

I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.

— George Herbert, Love (III)

[i] The Inquisition transcript: https://web.archive.org/web/20090929022528/http://www.efn.org/~acd/Veronese.html 

[ii] Yan Zhuang, “An Olympics Scene Draws Scorn. Did It Really Parody the Last Supper?”, New York Times, July 28, 2024. I can’t help noting that any such outrage from the Christian right in America rings hollow. They have lost the credibility to speak on behalf of the friends of God. Their shameful worship of a depraved, and hate-filled sexual predator, convicted fraudster and would-be dictator as an instrument of divine will has brought more disgrace to Christianity than a thousand pagan parodies.

[iii] Nathalie Dietschy, The Figure of Christ in Contemporary Photography (London: Reaktion Books, Ltd.: 2020), 123.

[iv] Ibid., 128.

[v] Ibid., 167.

[vi] Ibid., 110.

[vii] Katharine Wilkinson, The Last Will Become First: Liberation of Race, Gender and Sexuality in Renee Cox’s “Yo Mama’s Last Supper”, quoted inDietschy, 254.

[viii] Dietschy, 256.

[ix] Ibid., 256, 257.

[x] Ibid., 261.

Living the Dream: Thoughts at 80

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William Blake, Oberon, Titania, Puck & Fairies Dancing (1786)

“The tables outside the cantina were full of beautiful laughing men and women. I didn’t like the cantina at night: it was hard to book a table, and everyone who sat there looked on display, the women in their lovely summer dresses, the men with their hair oiled back on their heads, their tanned bare feet resting proprietorially on top of their Gucci loafers. One wanted to applaud them for presenting such a successful vision of life: you could almost believe they had lived their whole lives, had been reared and groomed from birth, for this one particular night: that this was the pinnacle, this golden summer evening they had all reached simultaneously.

“Yet it made me a little sad to see them there, laughing and drinking champagne, for you knew it was all downhill from here.”

— Peter Cameron, Andorra [i]  

The beautiful laughing men and women in Cameron’s cantina do not arouse our envy. Their self-display seems shallow, narcissistic and unreal. They appear ignorant of time. Golden summer evenings do not last forever. Having achieved the pinnacle, what Wallace Stevens called “the barrenness of the fertile thing that can attain no more,”[ii] they have nowhere to go but down.

The traditional lore of Midsummer Eve shares this suspicion. To mark the year’s longest day, bonfires were lit on British hilltops to assist and encourage the sun at the outset of its long inevitable decline into the winter dark. And “Midsummer Night”—blessedly short—was said to be a time of both mischief and danger, when chaotic pressures cracked open the stability of the world and wild spirits were abroad.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare explores these themes with a complicated plot in which the normal order of the world is unraveled for a night, and confusion rules until the dawn. Rulers find their commands thwarted. Lovers aim their desire at mistaken targets. The beautiful queen of the fairies falls madly in love with a low-born mortal who, by magic spell, has the monstrous head of an ass. Puck, the fairy trickster, multiplies the mischief by both design and error. And even words of dialogue take on altered and contradictory meanings.

All this takes place in an enchanted forest, a wild, liminal state outside the civilized order, where societal assumptions and rules are suspended or reversed, hierarchies are overturned, and identities become fluid and changeable. As Bottom says to Titania, “reason and love keep little company together these days.”

In Shakespeare, such liminal spaces serve a critical purpose. Their disorder offers a freedom to reshuffle and reconsider accepted realities, inviting transformation at both a personal and social level. Removed for a time from the customary rules and roles, characters discover new possibilities for themselves and society before returning to “reality.”

However, once you leave your given world for a time, you can never again accept its reality as absolute. You realize that there is more than one way to do both the self and the world. Any single version of reality is but an alternative. In this sense, life itself is but a dream. This refusal to absolutize the given world is the foundation of social justice: we can live better lives and make a better world. It also, however, can open the door to irrationality and madness, exemplified by the millions who live, happily and hatefully, in the fact-free world of American fascism..

At the end of Shakespeare’s play, Puck delivers an epilogue to the audience, those “who have slumbered here, / While these visions did appear.” It’s all been a dream, he assures us, as if we had never really crossed the boundary into the transformative space of a visionary world.

But can we be so sure? Have we not ourselves been touched, perhaps even transformed? Within A Midsummer Night’s Dream, there is a play-within-a-play (the comically performed tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe). The actors in Midsummer watch the actors playing actors in Pyramus, just as we the audience watch all these permutations from our safe position outside the “fourth wall” which separates the stage from reality. But are we so different from the players on the stage? As Shakespeare scholar Marjorie Garber writes,

“A play is a fiction, art is an illusion, ‘no more yielding but a dream.’ Can we be blamed if we wonder—now that we have been told that we are reality—when someone will wake and recognize that we are only a dream? Can we be blamed for looking over our shoulders, and wondering who is watching the play in which we are acting, while we watch, onstage, actors watching actors who play actors performing a play?” [iii]

Two weeks after Midsummer Eve, I saw a magical outdoor production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Bloedel Reserve, an Arcadian refuge of woods and meadows on my island. Beginning before sunset, it utilized the fading of the day to intensify our immersion into the dreamworld. By play’s end, it was almost night. The narrow path across a rolling meadow to the exit prevented an immediate return to reality. For a few precious minutes more we lingered in the dream, making our ghostly procession of shadows in the twilight.

Every play comes to an end. Every actor must make an exit. I have no plans to do so any time soon (God willing). There are more lines to deliver! However, since I begin my ninth decade tomorrow, time may not be on my side—but it’s on my mind.  

Medieval thinkers divided a human lifetime into “ages.” Some had just four: Childhood, Youth, Maturity, and Old Age. Isadore of Seville (c. 560-636) expanded that to six: infancy (up to 7), childhood (7-14), adolescence (14-28), youth (28-50), gravitas (50-70), and, for anything beyond 70, senectum  (the same root as senior and senility).

[Of course, senectum is a hot topic in this election year. Is the President too old to govern? Perhaps a better question would be: Why can’t the other guy act his age? As the Bible says, “Woe to you, land, if your king is a child!” (Ecclesiastes 10:16). But I digress.]

Bartholomaeus Anglicus, The Four Ages (1467-1475)

In this fifteenth-century illumination by Bartholomaeus Anglicus, the four ages of the human life-cycle stand in the same room, as if each of us is all the ages we have ever been. Childhood is clothed in red, the color of sanguinity (eager hopefulness). Youth is into fashion and sports, while Maturity dresses for battle. Old Age, warmly attired for the wintry years, glances back at all his past selves, hopefully with gratitude rather than regret.

Bartholomaeus Anglicus, The Seven Ages (1482)

A later image by the same artist depicts seven ages standing in two groups. On the right, Childhood plays with a stick and ball, Adolescence clasps his schoolbooks, and Youth carries a spear, perhaps dreaming of competitive glory. The first three stages of Maturity are not radically distinct from one another, but Old Age, shorter and bearded, is starting to separate his body from the group. Yet he still keeps an eye on the Child he once was.

Idleness, Dunois Book of Hours (c. 1439-50)

Time is a gift, and I am truly grateful for my years so far—the dreams as well as the realities. Je ne regrette rien. As for the road ahead (even if it’s all downhill), I wish not to be the man on the donkey, idly dozing along the pilgrim way. Like the figure gazing at the view from the bridge, I want to keep taking it all in. As an old man advised a younger friend in Henry James’ The Ambassadors:

“Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.”

[i] Peter Cameron, Andorra (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1997), 149-150.

[ii] Wallace Stevens, “Credences of Summer.”

[iii] Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All (New York: Anchor, 2005), 237.

Three-in-One : One-in-Three

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Lorenzo Quinn, Building Bridges (Venice Biennale 2019)

Sermon for Trinity Sunday 2024 at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington

From late autumn to late spring, Christian liturgy takes us on a ritual journey through the gospel narrative, from the Incarnation and Epiphany of Christ to the dramatic finale of Passion, Resurrection, Ascension and Pentecost.This great sequence concludes with Trinity Sunday, which serves as a kind of epilogue.

The abrupt shift from the engaging world of story to the tangled thicket of doctrine can be a bit of a shock. It’s like going directly from a seminar in English literature to a class in advanced calculus. Our hearts sink and our heads explode. But fear not. The Trinity is no dreary abstraction. Nor is it a matter, as Lewis Carroll might say, of believing three impossible things before breakfast. We are not here to solve once and for all the puzzle of Three-in-One and One-in-Three. We are here to adore the mystery.

The first Christians were not inventive theorists speculating about the divine nature of a generic God. They were the friends of Jesus trying to make sense of the concrete, experiential data of salvation, beginning with the dramatic biblical events they had lived through and continuing to unfold in the common life of their believing communities. Their profound experiences of Jesus and the Holy Spirit had shaken the foundations of their monotheistic faith, and they were trying to sort out the implications.

Jesus and the Spirit had done for them what only God can do: heal, save, sanctify—even vanquish the power of death. Did that make Jesus and Spirit divine? And if so, what did that multiplication of divine persons do to their belief that God was one?  Jesus had told them, “I and the Father are one.” But it would take centuries to agree on what he meant.

Without losing the unity of God, how could the early Christian community account for the divine diversity revealed in the saving activities of Christ and the Spirit?

Once they began to call Jesus Kyrios (Lord), which happened very early in their worship and their storytelling, traditional monotheism was radically destabilized. The growing perception of the Holy Spirit as a guiding and empowering presence of deity in their communities only compounded the problem.

There were various attempts to solve the issue by downgrading Jesus and Spirit to subordinate, derivative, or semi-divine realities, by no means equal to the eternal and uncreated God. Such “heresies” were popular with those who wanted to keep God simple. But “orthodoxy” was unwilling to deny the fullness of divinity to either Christ or the Spirit. For them the bottom line was this: 

Only God can save us. Christ and Spirit, in the biblical revelation and Christian experience, are integral and essential to salvation. Therefore, they must be “of one substance with the Father.” That is to say, the Persons are all equally integral to the divine reality: God above us, the source and ground of all being; God with us and among us, the companion who is our way, our truth, and our life; and God within us, the energy and vitality of our deepest self. As the theologians put it:

“The Trinity is an account of God that says these are [each] irreducible and indispensable dimensions of the same reality, not different ones, and yet each has its own irreducible integrity.” [i]

And so, a trinitarian faith became foundational for the Christian understanding of divinity: God in three persons, blessed Trinity. But the inherent tension between the one and the three remains to this day. Human thought and human language can’t quite manage to think both things at the same time. It’s like waves and particles. Gregory of Nazianzus, one of most influential shapers of the fourth-century trinitarian consensus, admitted the futility of trying to corral the mystery with concepts. He suggested that we just go with the divine flow:  

“I cannot think of the One without immediately being surrounded by the radiance of the Three; nor can I discern the Three without at once being carried back into the One.” [ii]

In an amusing caricature of crudely literal images of the Three-in-One, British theologian Keith Ward imagines three omniscient individuals trying to have a conversation:

“I think I’ll create a universe,” says one. “I knew you were going to say that,” says the second. “I think I’ll create one as well,” says the third. “Well, it had better be the same as mine,” says number one. “You already know that it is,” says number two. “I knew you were going to say that,” says number three.[iii]

If we have difficulty with “God in three Persons,” it is because we think of a person as defined by his or her separateness. I’m me and you’re you! We may interact and even form deep connections, but my identity does not depend upon you. I am a self-contained unit. You can’t live in my skin and I can’t live in yours. That’s the cultural assumption, which goes back at least as far as Descartes in the seventeenth century and continues today in such debased forms as rampant consumerism and economic selfishness, where my needs and my desires take precedence over any wider sense of interdependence, community, or ecology.

But what we say about the Persons of the Trinity is quite different. Each Person is not an individual, separate subject who perceives the other Persons as objects. The Trinitarian persons experience one another not from the outside, but from the inside. They indwell each other in a mutual interiority.

But if the divine Persons are all inside each other, commingled, “of one being,” as the Creed says, what makes each Person distinct? To put it succinctly: the Persons are distinct because they are in relation with one another. No Father unless there is a Son. No Son without a Father. No Holy Spirit without Father and Son.

As Martin Buber observed, we are persons because we can say “Thou” to someone else. To be a person is to experience the difference – and the connection – that forms the space between two separate subjects. My consciousness is not alone in the universe. There are other centers of consciousness: Thou, I… Thou, I… The fact that you are not I is what creates self-consciousness, the awareness of my own difference from what is outside myself.

If we apply this to the Trinity, we say that there are Three Persons because there is relation within God, relation between the Source who begets, the Word who is begotten, and the Spirit who binds the two together and moves them outward in ever widening circles.

These relations are not occasional or accidental. They are eternal. There is an eternal sending within God, an eternal self-giving within God, an eternal exchange by which God is both Giver and Receiver simultaneously. God is Love giving itself away – self-emptying, self-diffusing, self-surrendering – and in so doing finds itself, receives itself, becomes itself. A French mystic put it this way: “it’s a case of un ‘je’ sans moi” (an “I” without a me).

Wallace Stevens wrote a poem about the process of giving ourselves over to a larger whole. He called it “the intensest rendezvous,” where we find ourselves drawn out of isolation “into one thing.” He wasn’t writing about the Trinity, but his words come as close as any to describing the essential dynamic of the divine Persons:

       Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
      We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
      A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.[iv]

As Orthodox theologian John D. Zizioulas says in his influential text, Being as Communion, “To be and to be in relation are the same thing for the divine life … Therefore if Trinity is our guide, the most fundamental definition of being we can give is person-in-communion … The being of the one divine nature is the communion of the irreducibly different persons; the being of the individual persons is constituted by their relations with each other.” [v]

God is not a simple, static substance but an event of relationships. That’s why we say that God is love. “To be” has no ontological reality apart from “to be in relationship.” In the words of Anglican priest John Mbiti of Kenya, expressing the strongly communal mindset of African theology, “I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am.” [vi]

Each Person contains the others and is contained by them in a shared communion of self-offering and self-surrender. But that continuous self-offering is never a one-way transaction, either one of self-emptying or one of being filled. It is always both at once – giving and receiving – as we ourselves know from our own mutual experience of love at its best. 

Trinitarian faith describes a God who is not solitary and alone, a God who is not an object which we can stand apart from and observe. The Trinity is an event of relationships: not three separate entities in isolation and independence from one another, but a union of subjects who are eternally interweaving and interpenetrating

This divine relationality is not something which an originally solitary God decided to take up at some point. God is eternally relational. Before there was an external creation to relate to, God’s own essential self was and is an event of perpetual relation. There was never simply being, but always being-with, being-for, being-in. To be and to be in relation are eternally identical.

When the Bible says, “God is love” (I John 4:16), it means that love is not just something God has or something God does; love is what God is.

As John Zizioulas puts it, “Love as God’s mode of existence … constitutes [divine] being.”[vii] Feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson echoes this when she says, “being in communion constitutes God’s very essence.” [viii]  In other words, God is Love giving itself away—self-emptying, self-diffusing, self-surrendering—and in so doing finds itself, receives itself, becomes itself. The theologians of late antiquity borrowed a word from the arts to describe this process: perichoresis, which means to “dance around.”

Trinity is a dance, with Creator, Christ and Spirit in a continuous movement of giving and receiving, initiating and responding, weaving and mingling, going out and coming in. And while our attention may focus at times on a particular dancer, we must never lose sight of the larger choreography to which each dancer belongs: the eternal perichoresis of Three in One, One in Three.

As Jesus said, “losing” yourself and “finding” yourself are equivalent and simultaneous. In giving ourselves away, we receive ourselves back. This may be counterintuitive to the modernist mindset of autonomous individual self-possession, but it is the essence of communion: “a giving of oneself that can only come from the ongoing and endless reception of the other.” [ix]

If we had the space, I would invite you now to dance the divine perichoresis with your own bodies. We would join hands, circle round, spiral inward, weave in and out of the arches and tunnels of upraised arms, and manifest with our bodies the divine fullness of the Holy Trinity, which has been described as an “interdependence of equally present but diverse energies … in a state of circumvolving multiplicity.” [x] And thus we would, both symbolically and in fact, participate in the divine reality of “reciprocal delight” [xi] which transpires not only in heaven, but “on earth as it is in heaven.”

There are no spectators in the Trinitarian dance, which is always extending outward to draw us and all creation into its motions. As Jürgen Moltmann said, “to know God means to participate in the fullness of the divine life.” [xii] 

It’s not a matter of our trying to imitate the relational being of the loving, dancing God, as if we were inferior knock-offs of the real thing. God wants us to become ourselves the real thing. God wants to gather us into the divine perechoresis as full participants in the endless offering and receiving, pouring out and being filled, which is the dance of God and the life of heaven.

And while our dance with God has its mystical, mysterious, transcendent dimensions, it is also very concrete and specific to our historical life on this earth. The divine life of communion and self-diffusive love is the only antidote for the poisonous hatreds of this fearful age.

We know the yoke of sin and death,
Our necks have worn it smooth;
Go tell the world of weight and woe
That we are free to move. [xiii]

Because we ourselves are made in God’s image, who God is matters deeply, both for our own self-understanding and for our engagement with the world. The Trinity isn’t only God’s life. It is ours as well. It’s the shape of every story, the deep structure of the church, and the foundational pattern of reality.

Because God is communion, the eternal exchange of mutual giving and receiving, then God’s Church must live a life of communion as well. When Love’s perechoresis becomes our way of being in the world—as believers, as church—the Trinity is no longer just doctrine or idea. It is a practice, begetting justice, peace, joy, kindness, compassion, reconciliation, holiness, humility, wisdom, healing and countless other gifts. As theologian Miroslav Volf has said, “The Trinity is our social program.” [xiv]

The dance of Trinity is meant
For human flesh and bone;
When fear confines the dance in death,
God rolls away the stone. [xv]

The Church exists to participate in the liberating life of God, and to enable others to do the same. We exist to make divine communion not just an inner experience but a public truth. We don’t just feel God’s perichoresis. We don’t just feel Love’s eternal dance. We embody it. We live it. We show it. We share it.  

As the great Anglican preacher Austen Farrer put it so clearly a century ago:

“It is not required of us to think the Trinity.
We can do better; we can live the Trinity.” [xvi]

Photographs by the author.

[i] S. Mark Helm, The Depth of the Riches: A Trinitarian Theology of Religious Ends (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 132.

[ii] Gregory of Nazianzus, q. in Karen Armstrong, The Case for God (New York: Knopf, 2009). 116-117.

[iii] Keith Ward, God: A Guide for the Perplexed (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2003), 235.

[iv] Wallace Stevens, “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” Collected Poetry and Prose (NY: Library of America, 1997), 444.

[v] John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993), 46.

[vi] quoted in Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, The Trinity: Global Perspectives (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 352.

[vii] Zizioulas, 46.

[viii] Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (NY: Crossroad, 1993), 227.

[ix] Graham Ward, “The Schizoid Christ,” in The Radical Orthodoxy Reader, ed. John Milbank and Simon Oliver (NY: Routledge, 2009), 241.

[x] David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 2003), 114.

[xi] St. Athanasius (c. 296-373), a bishop in Roman Egypt, was a key defender of Trinitarianism. 

[xii] Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God, trans. Margaret Kohl (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981), 152.

[xiii] Richard Leach, “Come Join the Dance of Trinity.”

[xiv] Miroslav Volf, “‘The Trinity is Our Social Program’: The Doctrine of the Trinity and the Shape of Social Engagement,” Modern Theology 14, no. 3 (July 1998).

[xv] Leach.

[xvi] Austin Farrer, The Essential Sermons (London: SPCK, 1991), 78.