You discover the less confident man in letters to his friend and biographer Eberhard Bethge. In these letters he speaks of being unable to catch his breath, reciting hymns and scripture to gain composure; of suicidal thoughts, once; of sexual longings, although this discussion is highly intellectualized; of being tempted to sleep late, rather than rise on schedule, do calisthenics, and write.

Throughout the world there remain prisoners of conscience. I pray for them. I pray for their release. I pray for a better world.

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The death of Osama bin Ladin. I support the President’s decision to get him, and applaud the courage of the SEALs and others involved.

Our Neighborhood MeetUP viewed a film on the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran pastor who collaborated with German leaders seeking to kill Hitler. Bonhoeffer wrote extensively about the Christian life, including Discipleship and Life Together, a description of daily life at an illegal seminary in Nazi Germany.

Discipleship is primarily an exposition of the Sermon on the Mount.

Bonhoeffer faced an impossible choice: either the defeat of his nation or the destruction of Christian civilization. He found that traditional ethics could not guide him. Therefore, he threw himself on the mercy of God and did what seemed right to him in the situation where he found himself.

Many Christians who lived in countries under the heel of Nazi Germany faced similar dilemmas. The ten Boom family of Holland also compromised traditional Christian values, such as obeying the laws of the state, always telling the truth, and so one— in order to achieve a higher good, resistance to tyranny and rescue of its victims.

In light of such historical events, a lot of Christian discourse today strikes me as irrelevant. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of persons die of preventable causes. Global warming and other ecological issues call the future of the planet into question. People of all faiths have more in common with each other than with people who share language, nationality, and other factors but lack a common worldview.

It’s time to rethink many of the basics. I’m looking forward to reading Rob Bell’s new book Love Wins. I understand Bell tackles many of these questions.

Commenting on “Blessed are the peacemakers,” he states: “Suffering willingly endured is stronger than evil, it spells death to evil.” (A Testament to Freedom, p. 317)

I keep always in view this icon:

Christ the Redeemer by Andrei Rublev, ca. 1410

In his book To Behold the Beauty of the Lord Henri Nouwen commented that the damage to the icon (by the preeminent Russian iconographer) symbolized for him the suffering of the Lord.

In reading a book for my Sunday School discussion group (via Skype!) I came across the notion of “a mellow spirit” being one of the pillars of healthy spiritual life. I like it. We can become so overwhelmed with the sunami of sorrow that we cannot let go and simply be in the joy of the Lord.

For me, though, it’s not mellowness that I lack. It’s willingness to deny self, take up the cross, and follow. So, I’m praying in the simple everyday things I will obey. Bonhoeffer insists “Only the believers obey and only the obedient believe.”

God help me to Trust and Obey!

The idea of Resistance is fascinating to me. I’m reading a second time Dorothee Soelle’s masterwork The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance (2001). She begins with a quote from Rumi

Why, when God’s world is so big,
did you fall asleep in a prison,
of all places?

I admit feeling terrified of being swallowed alive by “the big machine,” our culture, which with its mass media dulls our senses and silences the whispers of the still small voice that is God’s Spirit within.

Mohamed Bouazizi  a 26-year-old university graduate without a steady job immolated himself in Tunisia when police confiscated the fruits and vegetables he was selling without a license.

How does he fit the stereotype in Western media of youths named Mohamed?

In the democratic West we seldom see the suffering of people like him. They have to set themselves on fire to get a few moments of our attention.

The death knell is sounding for our consumer-based economy because we’re soon going to consume all there is. This, while billions—billions with a B—lack basic necessities of life.

What can one person do? How can humankind be my family in reality, not just in ideal?

These are questions I ask myself.

Written in 1941, it tells the story of Father Francis Chisholm, a Scottish Catholic who turns poverty and tragedy into a life of beauty in the service of the poor and of the Chinese people.

Jesus promised Peter the keys of the kingdom (Matthew 16.18). Cronin contrasts the worldly Anselm Nealy, who rose to be bishop of Chisholm’s home, with Chisholm, bent and battered by the rough and tumble of life in the interior of China.

It belongs with other books such as Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, and Georges Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest.

What makes a good priest? Denominations and Christ answer differently.

Chisholm utterly fails to meet expectations. His conversion rate is lowest in the Mission Society. By the way he refuses to pay “rice Christians,” starving people who profess faith for a stipend. Yet at the end of his tour, the prominent Mr. Chia becomes a Christian, having watched the priest through long decades.

Some of the novel’s clearest preachments espouse pacifism and tolerance. Yet when a war lord threatens the people seeking refuge in his mission, Chisholm arranges for the destruction of his armament, causing the deaths of dozens of his soldiers.

The book is not the first rank of great literature. Often, Cronin uses characters’ letters or journals to pry open their thoughts, while greater ambiguity and tension might have been created otherwise. His depiction of Chinese characters relies too much on stock images of the simple child-like soul addressing its European Master, or the inscrutable mandarin.

What is first rate, however, is Cronin’s grasp of what makes a great pastor and Christian. Here his instinct is unerring.

If only Keys of the Kingdom were required reading for every member of every pulpit committee!

I wanted to read a biography of Wesley in honor of the church I attend, and am growing to love: Trinity United Methodist, Richmond.

Nobody with an ounce of psychological savvy can read Wesley’s life without realizing the man had an obsessive-compulsive disorder. His relations with women were disordered, and the celebrated sibling relationship with Charles doesn’t stand up well under scrutiny.

All that said, you can only praise Almighty God who worked such a mighty miracle through this life, “a brand plucked from the fire.”

A story my wife’s colleagues tell sums it up. “He was cracked!” someone says. “It doesn’t matter if he was cracked,” comes the reply, “just that light shines through the cracks.”

All of us who belong to denominations that trace heritage back to persons like Luther or Wesley, however, would do well to remember Paul’s caution to the church at Corinth:

¹²What I mean is that each of you says, ‘I belong to Paul’, or ‘I belong to Apollos’, or ‘I belong to Cephas’, or ‘I belong to Christ.’ ¹³Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?

(1 Corinthians 1 NRSV)

The writing is good enough; the story, absorbing.

Sattler, a Benedictine prior at St. Peter’s in the Black Forest monastery, apparently opted out of his vows sometime in 1524/25. Arnold Snyder, Mennonite professor, documents that the invasion of the monastery by German peasants in rebellion may have tipped the scales for Sattler. His influence on the Schleitheim Confession here. Though he left the order and married, he carried with him the determination to follow Christ which lies at the heart of the Rule of Benedict.

I found myself weeping through the final chapter,  Sattler’s martyrdom. He was tortured and burned alive; his wife, drowned in May, 1527, three years at the outside since their conversion to the Anabaptist way of following Christ.

I’m reading Luther, but I keep getting pulled away to these early Anabaptists. I’m finishing Synder’s dissertation on Sattler, available free online here, which sheds light on Sattler’s intellectual and spiritual roots.

Thousands of Anabaptists died for their beliefs in the 1500s. One account is The Martyr’s Mirror here.

What started my delving into these folks was two things:

1. the loss of my own theological home Southern Baptists as they existed before the Church Struggle of the 1970s and 1980s, and the sterile hypocrisy of the Christian Right to which the SBC belonged; and,
2. my finding Early Anabaptist Spirituality in the Classics of Western Spirituality series.

These people were on fire with God’s Spirit, and by the thousands from illiterate peasants to learned former priests gave their lives.

What turned them on—that depth, that 110% uncompromising no holds barred take over of being by the Christ, is still available to us.

The doctrinal quibbling of the 16th century is gone for good, I hope. Maybe all who love the Christ will be one family on earth at last.

But the fires that flared up in those hearts still lights the world today.

“Life without Principle” Collected Essays and Poems. Library of America. p. 365.

Just finished reading Gone with the Wind. It was impossible to  put down. Although I knew the story from the film, I found myself day after day reading from early morning until late at night.

Why?

It’s so breathtaking. The characters are alive: Scarlett, Rhett, Ashley, Melanie, Mammy. Who doesn’t know these people and care about them, whether liking or disliking them?

What a blunder it’s been to live in the South for 20 years without reading this book.

The film (to be shown on TCM tonight) has all the action sequences and much of the dialogue. I held my breath at the end, waiting for Rhett’s immortal line, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

Minus “frankly,” it was there.

What the movie doesn’t have are Ashley and Rhett’s indepth analysis about the dream of the Old South that still lives in many hearts today, like Scarlett’s ill-fated obsession with Ashley. It doesn’t have the explanation of “gumption,” which author Margaret Mitchell once said was the theme of the book.

It doesn’t have the stunning racism of South and North, such as the frequent linking of even beloved Mammy and Uncle Peter with monkeys and apes. Mitchell has Rhett explain the Klan as rising up to protect Southern womanhood from free issue “niggers” [sorry!] or as disappearing when Southern Democrats discovered party politics were more effective against Yankee depredations.

I understand Southern attitudes toward the North better, and see more clearly and painfully the burning, looting and desecration perpetrated on the prostrate South.

The only book more prevalent on Southern shelves than Gone with the Wind is the Bible. Baptists and Methodists have flourished, churches on every corner. Yet the only positive recourse Scarlett ever had to the Bible was to hide money in it!

The family Bible recorded births, marriages and deaths. But other than that, Scarlett’s only thoughts of God were rare fears of judgment that she quickly explained away, or bargaining prayers to save someone she needed (not loved) from dying.

I know Scarlett well. Several very like her served the churches I pastored. Whether or not God’s love ever succeeded more than Rhett’s, or like his simply wore out, is God’s call, not mine.

Many people, South and North, operate on grasping gumption, like Scarlett’s, that fierce anxiety that drives acquisition, terror of the wolf at the door—or the blue coat or Scalawag or free issue “nigger,” or wet back or Muslim terrorist (or to hark back to Nazi propaganda “Jew”) whoever it is that looms Dark in our deepest fears. 

They operate on  gumption, not grace. Their pious claims notwithstanding, they know little of the mind of the One who being in very nature God thought equality with God not something to be grasped. (Philippians 2.6)

Sometimes I feel that fear myself, and pray for grace.

Please God, one day (who knows how far in the future) may the hate, suffering, obsessions and fears be Gone which this novel portrays with the accuracy of an anatomist’s scalpel.

The question is, what else will the hurricane that finally blows them away destroy as well?

It’s an easy read, the story of a college professor Kate, her senior colleague Martin, and a student Erin. About to get tenure, Kate is invited to apply for a one year professorship at a seminary; if she accepts, however, she’ll have to reapply for her position and may not get it. She and Martin had a brief affair years ago, which ended abruptly. Erin is part of a conservative Bible study cell, pressuring her to drop Kate’s liberal class.

Author Borg uses the characters’ class lectures, sermons and meditations to put forth his progressive views, namely that since the Enlightenment Christianity has changed. The Enlightenment in the 17th century saw the rise of science, in particular Newtonian physics, and called into question such things as the miracles and the creation accounts. Borg offers an alternative vision which sees the miracle stories as symbolic.

He emphasizes the point that something may not be factual, but nevertheless true; he quotes Thomas Mann, who said, “Myth is the way things never were, but always are.” For those who find the word “myth” scary because it often is used in the sense that something is false or made up, rather than real or true—I define “myth” as language about truth which cannot be put into words.

Kate gives a lecture in which she references a study of the word “believe” over time. Before the 1600s “believe” almost always had a person as a direct object; after, it often had a statement as direct object. Believing moved from meaning “committed to” to meaning “agreeing with, giving assent to.”

We see the difference in the idioms “believe that” and “believe in.”

• I believe that Hitler lived.
• I believe in Jesus Christ.

Borg points out an old form of the word was something like “belove.” That still survives, by the way, in the word “beloved.” It involves a whole lot more than accepting a set of factual statements about Jesus.

Habakkuk’s “the righteous will live by faith [believing]” doesn’t mean “agreeing with” doctrinal statements.

Borg moves on to words for faith, three of them.

1. Assensus, intellectual agreement.
2. Fidelitas, faithfulness.
3. Fiducia, trust.

The latter mean living in faithful relationship and risking your life on.

Genuine Christianity requires the second and third. But since the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on science, and the Reformation, on doctrine, the first meaning “agree with” has become ascendant.

Real faith means living in God-confidence, not anxiety and fear.

I find Borg’s thought exciting. I accept the possibility of the miracles being factually as well as symbolically true more than he does. But it’s unimportant because he clearly has a living relationship with God.