I-YOUniverse

It’s freaky (at least some people will think so) to make friends with the dead. You could say that’s what I’ve been doing over the past few months, reading up on Charlie Andrews (1871-1940), friend of Gandhi, British missionary and consultant at large on problems of race and labor relations in India, Africa, the South Pacific, and South America.

He has so much to teach us.

Missionary with an Unusual Vision

His father belonged to a Christian cult characterized by speaking in tongues and keen anticipation of the Second Coming of Christ, but Charlie studied at Cambridge with some of the best biblical scholars of the age. Knowing the critical study of scripture, he chose to go into the Anglican ministry.

But even early on, phrases in the creed about the damnation of the lost troubled him deeply.

He went to India, where he taught at St. Stephen’s College. He had a deeply caring nature, and found himself welcome in corridors of British power as well as the hearts of Indian colleagues and the lowliest of Untouchables. He pressed the college to elect an Indian president, rather than an English one.

He became an early ally and lifelong friend of Mohandas Gandhi, spending time in his South African ashram. Charlie wrote several books introducing Gandhi to the West.

Facing the Problem of Racism

The issue of race prejudice troubled him deeply, whether in India, Africa or the United States. He found himself identifying strongly with the Indian people, eventually leaving his mission appointment, a decision he explained like this:

It was the inner moral beauty of India, which I was seeking to know at first hand. I could see it and almost grasp it. Sometimes I could instinctively recognize it in human faces I met. But at Delhi [seat of government and of St. Stephen's College, where Andrews taught] I could never fully comprehend it. There I was in constant revolt against the narrowness of government control of education: I was also in revolt against much that has rightly been called “foreign mission work.” For I had no wish to be “foreign” any longer; rather, I longed to be bound up with the life of India in every respect. If I were to find Christ truly in India as the Son of man, then I must live and move among the people of India as one of themselves, and not as an alien and a foreigner.

C.F. Andrews, What I Owe to Christ (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1932), p. 241.

Ministry of the Written Word

During the 1930s Charlie continued to be a negotiator, teacher and writer while living in England and in India at Santiniketan “Abode of Peace” the ashram of his friend the poet Rabindranath Tagore (who won the 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature for his poem Gitanjali). Among many other books, articles and pamphletts, Charlie wrote an account of his faith What I Owe to Christ, an exposition of John 13-17 entitled Christ in the Silence, of the Lord’s Prayer Christ and Prayer, and of The Sermon on the Mount.

He came to believe, as Tagore said, that the West had sold its ideals (to give just one example) in the scramble for Africa in the mid to late 1800s, and in the continuing war-lust and greed of the Great War and its aftermath (the buildup to World War II). He struggled against giving allegiance to the tribal god of parts of the Old Testament and instead gave his life to the universal Christ, who taught, “Love your enemies.”

I wonder what Charlie would think about the world situation today. Surely he would rejoice with India, as it stretches and grows, but I think he would worry that it may adopt Western practices of hurry and greed and lose its soul. He would without a doubt condemn the war in Iraq.

He Being Dead yet Speaketh

Jesus said, “[God] is the God not of the dead, but the living.” Henri Nouwen in his book Our Greatest Gift writes that at death our spirit is released from the local limits of the physical body, and is free to commune with those who love us. I’ve found this profoundly true with family members. I find it also true of those I read, like Charlie Andrews, whose life of love for friends, whole nations, and the world, continues to speak today.

The used book bug’s bit me. It’s such fun to find classic books, and get them at a bargain.

Sandy, who opened the package containing the book Christ in the Silence, called out, “Hon, this book is signed.” I checked it out eagerly. I compared the signature Charlie to the known signatures of letters in the archive at mkgandhi.org, and it appears to be a match.

The dedication reads, “To George with much love from Charlie, July 9, 1933.” The impress visible in the lower right corner reads “Chapel Cottage, Iden Green, Benenden, Kent.”

I fall in love with an author. I discover somebody I like and for awhile there’s nothing, nobody else in the world for me but them. At the moment it’s C.F. Andrews. I want to get in his skin and understand what empowered this somewhat neurotic Victorian clergyman to become a labor negotiator and spokesman for the Indian people, wherever they were in the world.

So I purchased What I Owe to Christ, 1932, the external story, and Christ in the Silence, 1933, the internal account of his spiritual life, one through Amazon Marketplace and one through eBay. I’d hoped the latter might give me a glimpse into the synthesis of Christianity and Hinduism that he achieved. Though he is cordial toward Hinduism, he writes as an orthodox Christian in these works.

Christ in the Silence is an extended meditation on the Farewell chapters of the gospel of John. It’s almost as if you get there through Charlie Andrews’ pen.

I know there’s a lot of sappy theology in my head. But, if God wanted to send me a PostIt that read “I love you” I can think of few things he could do that would mean more than putting a signed work of C.F. Andrews on the spiritual life in my hands.

I confess I gobbled it up in two days. Now I’m reading a page or paragraph at a time.

BTW, if you know anything about the persons and places mentioned above, drop me a line, will you? Thanks.

I noticed C.F. Andrews, the Anglican missionary, friend of Gandhi, in the film about the great Indian leader. What struck me was his ability to get past the racism of his day and recognize in Gandhi the extraordinary leader he was, even before his world-wide fame began.

There’s a striking scene in the film where Andrews is preaching in South Africa, and several people walk out, but one woman listens with shining eyes to his defense of satyagraha, soul force, civil disobedience.

I’ve now read two biographies The Ordeal of Love by Hugh Tinker (1979) and Charles Freer Andrews by Benarsidas Chaturvedi and Marjorie Sikes (1950).

I’ve hunted down a couple of Andrews’ own works, but I’m going to take a break and finish Anglo-Saxon Spirituality before reading them.

(It’s a severe discipline to finish a book, which is not unlike a death to me.)

What strikes me most about Andrews is how contemporary he is. He was truly multicultural, almost becoming Hindu, certainly becoming Indian. He identified a key issue of his day as racism. So long as the church remained the White Church, its future in India was limited. He likened treatment of blacks in America to the untouchables in India.

Another striking thing was his concern about economics and labor. Without portfolio except his own personality and experience, he became a labor negotiator for Indian people throughout the world.

Through prolific writing he interpreted Gandhi and Christ to the world.

He commanded the respect of Indian nationals as few British, perhaps no other British person, did. This was in no small measure because of his pastoral concern. No one was beneath his compassion. He often emptied his pockets for the beggar in the streets, and lived with few possessions.

Today missionaries are often dismissed as imperialistic. No one who gets to know Andrews will ever be able to make that statement again, without holding him up as an exception.

The Indian friends had two nicknames for him. One is Deenabandhu, friend of the poor. The other, based on his initials CFA, is Christ’s Faithful Apostle.

He’s worth using Interlibrary loan if your local library doesn’t have a biography. I recommend the earlier one Charles Freer Andrews. It’s much more personal and readable, though it may not be quite as willing to expose his few weaknesses.

If you know him, or get to know him, I’d love to hear from you about him.

I’ve found four references to Jesus of Nazareth in I and Thou:

• Jesus and love (not a feeling): his response to a demon-possessed man, to the beloved disciple; his bold risk “nailed his life long to the cross of the world…to love man” (pp. p. 66-67).
• The craving for redemption grows until “assuaged by one who teaches men to escape the wheel of rebirth, or by one who saves the souls enslaved by the powers into the freedom of the children of God” (p. 104)
• In the company of Socrates and Goethe is Jesus’ I-saying, the I of the unconditional relation in which a man calls his You “Father.” (p. 116)
• The gospel of John is the Gospel of pure relationship. “The father and son being consubstantial-we may say, God and man being consubstantial, are actually and forever Two, the two partners of the primal relationship.” (pp. 132-133)

Bare Essentials

Kyrios Christos!

If I strip Christianity bare, what’s left is the cry of the martyrs: Jesus is Lord. Close at hand is the history and experience to which the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament writings bear witness. But at the irreducible core is my experience of the Risen Christ:

You ask me how I know he lives-
He lives within my heart.

My spirituality for the past 20 years has centered on loss:

• loss of the mainstream Southern Baptist identity in which I was reared
• loss of the local church in a crucible of racism and parochialism
• a pastoral counseling residency which I would describe as a shamanic initiatory rite of being “cut up, cooked, and eaten”: loss of self, an internity of which my teaching colleagues were unaware

Anabaptists

Not surprising, then, in the years since to find myself drawn to the Anabaptists of 16^th century Europe, slaughtered by the tens of thousands for their simple insistence on adult baptism, symbolizing soul competency and liberty.

My church history course labeled these forebears as the radical reformation, and moved immediately to the English Baptists of the 17^th century.

But I’ve been drawn to these men and women who carried lists of scriptures in their boots and bore witness to the living flame of God’s love in their lives and deaths.

The Jesus whom they worshipped as Son of Man, Son of God, Savior, and the exemplary human Jesus of I and Thou are light years apart.

Spirit, which Buber conceived of as existing in between I and You, person and person, human being and God, is light years removed from the Holy Spirit of the New Testament.

How do I reconcile these two very different viewpoints?

Where does Jesus fit in

No need to. Buber wrote as a Jew, and as a Jew viewed Jesus in purely human terms, although his conception of Jesus is quite lofty. Jesus is one of humanity’s great religious founders of culture like the Buddha, one of history’s great philosophers like Socrates and Goethe.

Jesus also boldly risked loving humanity itself, and is an exemplar of the I-You relationship with God as of Father and son. There is not a hint of the Trinity. Spirit is not person, but the in between of an actual I-You relation.

The Jesus of the New Testament is not merely human, however exemplary he might be; he is God made flesh. You can’t work him into Buber’s ideas in some nifty fashion. But, as God-become-human he enters the human condition and relates to human beings as one among us.

However you fit the Logos and the man from Nazareth and the Risen Christ with Buber’s eternal You, Jesus is able to sympathize with our weaknesses from inside our skin.

That changes everything.

Round 1

The sacred is here and now. The only God worth keeping is a God that cannot be kept. The only God worth talking about is a God that cannot be talked about. God is no object of discourse, knowledge, or even experience. He cannot be spoken of, but he can be spoken to; he cannot be seen, but he can be listened to. The only possible relationship with God is to address him and be addressed by him, here and now-or, as Buber puts it, in the present.

I and Thou, Prologue by Walter Kaufmann, pp.25-26.

We must learn to feel addressed by a book, by the human being behind it, as if a person spoke directly to us. A good book or essay or poem is not primarily an object to be put to use, or an object of experience: it is the voice of You speaking to me, requiring a response.

Prologue, p. 39

Who cares about Buber?

Like many today Martin Buber longed to release religion from institutionalism, to free God from theologians.

He stood apart from other Zionist leaders of his day by advocating an Arab state in Palestine.

Because he wrote prolifically about many subjects, people viewed him as a representative Jew in the 20^th century. His ideas about dialogue continue to wield a huge influence.

From wordslinger to I-YOUniverse

When I began this blog as “wordslinger,” an image from a poem I wrote in  college, I discovered there are dozens, perhaps 100s of “wordslingers” out there. So I tried “wordsLinger” which puts a different spin on it, the lovely sense of words leaving an afterimage like the flash of a camera does. It didn’t make that much difference, however. I wanted something unique.

I wrote something about speaking my words into the ether and stumbled on the idea of “e-thou” a play on “I-Thou” of course. Being a 60s child, I had taken part in encounter groups and sensitivity training, so “e-thou encounter” came easily to mind. I liked the assonance of thou and -coun-.

But people stumbled over it. I had to spell it, spell it again, then explain it. Although I liked it, I decided it might be dated. In a post on suffering I coined the word “YOUniverse” to celebrate God’s presence in the cosmos.

From there it was a short hop to “I-YOUniverse.” In the new translation of I and Thou, except in the title, I-You has replaced the older form.

Absorbing I and Thou

For a buck I had picked up a used paperback copy  of I and Thou, 2nd ed., translated by Ronald Gregor Smith (NY: Scribner’s, 1958). The brittle binding and stiff paper suit it.

The first owner underlined the first 34 pages copiously but left not a mark on the remaining 100 pages. I assume she gave up, having read more than I did.

When I started e-thou encounter, though, I felt an obligation to get past the jargon stage of I-It or I-Thou. If I named my blog for Buber’s thought, I ought at least to know it.

Encouraged by reviews of the new translation as being superior to the first, I ordered my copy from Amazon and, when it arrived, dug in. I was going to master this book!

It’s not a book you master, though. It masters you.

Wrestling at the Jabbok

 I read it half a dozen times, baffled by some passages. Kaufmann generously footnotes the German vocabulary, which helps you appreciate the verbal fog. Buber, like Shakespeare, could not pass up a good play on words, no matter what the context.

 Then, I caught myself striving to manhandle the book. Damn it! I was going to know this book inside and out.

I understand how to use knowledge as power. Except for writing a dissertation, I completed work on a Ph.D. in Hebrew and Old Testament.

Buber, like the wrestler at the fords of the Jabbok, refuses to be mastered.

Round 2 coming up! 

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2008

There’s still the OG, GOG & MAGOG BLOG to write someday. But this one will do for now-jlh

This is not a war story. It’s about George Bush and Al Qaeda, Iraq and America, Israelis and Palestinians; it’s about the Shechinah God’s glory in exile, how a Jew wrote about the Shoah, and how you and I deal with evil in our own heart.

But all the conflicts of Gog and Magog arise out of those evil forces which have not been overcome in the conflict against the Gogs and Magogs who dwell in human hearts.

-Martin Buber, For the Sake of Heaven, (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1945), p. 284.

Martin Buber’s novel For the Sake of Heaven, alternately titled Gog and Magog, is set during the Napoleonic wars. In understated narrative it relates the conflict between two Hasidic rabbis, the Seer and the Yehudi. It causes me to reflect on conflict in my personal history.

Conflict ministry ain’t what it’s cracked up to be

During my pastorates I lived on a first-name basis with conflict. At the denominational level, I finished three years of graduate study in Hebrew and Old Testament at Southern Seminary in 1979, the year conservatives announced a 10 year plan to gain control the Southern Baptist Convention by winning the presidency each year. The president appoints trustees of boards and agencies. In 10 years conservatives replaced trustees representing a broad constituency with those who represented only fundamentalists. Depending on your viewpoint, you call this the SBC controversy or takeover or conservative resurgence.

I only went once to the Southern Baptist Convention meeting-in Dallas in 1985. That year, a massive 45,000 messengers attended. The fifth year of the takeover, moderates at last had realized what they were losing and mounted a challenge. Dr. Charles Stanley, pastor, First Baptist Church, Atlanta, presided. On Tuesday morning the crucial vote for president occurred. At 6:00 a.m. thousands of messengers jammed the halls of the Tarrant County Convention Center, waiting more than two hours for the doors to open.

Someone began to sing. Amazing Grace, What a Friend We Have in Jesus. For two hours thousands of voices filled the building with sweet harmony. But, once the doors opened, from the moderates’ viewpoint at least, hardball politics governed the meeting. Of course, conservatives report events much differently.

My wife Sandy and I met Hollie and Janell Atkinson from Texas and sat with them through a Convention totally controlled by conservatives. We wept. We never went to another annual Convention meeting.

Escape to Virginia, bastion of liberty

In 1989, the year conservatives completed this plan, my family and I had moved to Virginia, the state widely regarded among Baptist moderates as least likely to fall to fundamentalist control. For 10 years I pastored a small congregation near Richmond. The controversy raged on at the state level of the denomination. Blow-by-blow descriptions absorbed many pastors meetings: what the fundies did, what the liberals did, what the fundies did back, what the liberals did back. After a year or two, I stopped going.

The controversy was personal. My family were Baptists the way people are Catholics or Jews. It’s engraved in my DNA. I was a Ph.D. candidate at Babylon the mother of harlots, Southern Seminary in Louisville. The year the SBC banned ordination of women, my wife Sandy was ordained at St. Matthews Baptist Church, where her uncle had pastored, her father was married, and her grandparents were baptized. (Her uncle refused to attend.) I wrote curriculum for the Baptist Sunday School Board. The man who installed the modem lines connecting my computer with the BSSB warned me against writing liberal lessons!

Unless you’ve had surgery without anesthesia, you can’t comprehend the pain. One aged matriarch described it as “an unending funeral.” But most ordinary Baptists didn’t know or care what the brouhaha was all about.

Conservatives used to invite liberals to become Methodists or Presbyterians or other liberals.

Exit to Babylon

In the film Places in the Heart, Mose, a black itinerant, teaches a widow woman how to bring in a crop of cotton, in fact the prize-winning first bale. When the KKK shows up, a blind man identifies them by voice and stops a lynching. The widow returns from a dance to find Mose about to leave. “I best be gettin’ along , ma’am, before they come back,” he says. “Guess I got a little more attached to this place than I thought.”

Baptist preachers used to joke: “if the Convention ever splits, I’m going with the Annuity Board.” Some years ago, I transferred 30 years of retirement savings from the Annuity Board. But the joke puts its finger on what really fueled the SBC Armageddon: who owns the billions and billions of dollars worth of assets-the schools, the seminaries, the boards and agencies. My mother and dad gave sacrificially to SBC causes for a lifetime; they considered it giving to the Lord. How could I let people whom I viscerally despise steal what my family helped to build?

I realized that my folks gave to the Lord. The SBC assets belong to the Lord, not to conservatives, not to liberals, not to me. The Lord can do as the Lord pleases with them.

As X-rated as it gets

In the novel the Seer viewed the Yehudi as his enemy. The Yehudi had a vision of a woman swathed in the black veil with bare feet. Apparently, for a Hasidic rabbi, that’s as X-rated as it gets!

The woman spoke: “I am weary unto death, for ye have hunted me down. I am sick unto death, for ye have tormented me. I am shamed, for ye have denied me. Ye are the tyrant, who keeps me in exile.

“When ye are hostile to each other, ye hunt me down. When ye plot evil against each other, ye torment me. When ye slander each other, ye deny me. Each of you exiles his comrades and so together ye exile me.”

[The woman raises her veil and asks:] “When shall I find rest? When may I go home?”

(p. 229)

In returning and rest

Spoiler: The Yehudi gave his life for the Seer and for the woman, the Shechinah in exile. I won’t pin it down with an exact quote, but Buber believed that each of us can redeem evil by teshubah (from the root shuv, often rendered repent), by returning, by using the evil impulse the yetzer ha-ra for good.

For thus said the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel: In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength. Isaiah 30:15 (NRSV)

Buber’s story of two rabbis, far more alike than they are different, challenges me to find the evil impulse within me; and to deny that within which divides the world into people of God versus Gog and Magog.