The Limits of "Teaching Tolerance"

by Dave Gregory

Back in the 70s and 80s, legal scholars pioneered the field of Critical Race Theory (henceforward “CRT”), which recognized and attempted to address the systematic injustices writ into the very fabric of American history, politics, and identity. The constitutional framework, after all, emerged from an inherently sexist and racist perspective: enfranchisement, property rights, and basic freedoms were only guaranteed to property owners, a category of folks restricted to free white men. Two and a half centuries later, we are quite obviously dealing with the repercussions of constitutional marginalization on a variety of levels.¹

Equity in education is all the rage these days, and for good reason. It’s impossible to be an educator in an urban setting and not encounter professional development opportunities and in-services that address the varied injustices that plague student experience. One of my graduate school textbooks this fall is a reader of essays about CRT and education, and in August I attended a workshop with several colleagues on social justice education presented by Teaching Tolerance, a program founded by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 1991. From their website, Teaching Tolerance’s “mission is to help teachers and schools educate children and youth to be active participants in a diverse democracy”.

Attempts at teaching the actual virtue of tolerance run the gamut, from cheap and microaggressive² to those that provoke genuine encounter. The latter requires some crucial elements: space that is compassionate and brutally honest, where people can speak their minds and hearts without fear of punishment; space that invites the resonance of all voices, allowing the marginalized and invisibilized ones to speak a bit more, so as to counteract those subtle, silencing forces; space that is not about solving any problems initially, lest it become preoccupied with the problem rather than with authentic and transformative human dialogue.

Tolerance, however, can only take us so far, and herein lies the problem, as summarized by Teaching Tolerance’s quoting of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. on its website, where it states that he “used the Greek term ‘agape’ to describe a universal love that ‘discovers the neighbor in every man it meets.’”

In short, here we see a blatant secularization of a devout Jesus-freak, one that erases the cruciality of King’s religious imagination to his overarching mission. It was love for Christ that motivated King to persevere through a house-bombing, love for Christ that drove him to embrace active non-violent resistance as the means to pioneer real change in the civil rights movement. To silence the man’s Christianity -- and to silence the Christian worldview that gave rise to the events of a half-century ago -- is another act of invisibilization. In a world whose media tends to highlight the brutal weaponization of religion, we don’t necessarily like to acknowledge its liberating potential.

Agape is more than tolerance, greater and deeper and richer than mere respect. Respect permits human beings to coexist in the same space, but it can also be reduced to a shallowness that permits me to hold my neighbor at arm’s length; I can respect someone without engaging them. Tolerance, if made the preeminent virtue we strive for, can maintain boundaries for the sake of diverse folks peaceably co-occupying the same space. Oppression can fill a community or a country, even though tolerance be espoused.

Civil law, without the introduction of personal belief systems into the pluralistic foray, is limited by the fact that it cannot truly inculcate authentic virtue within its citizenry. On its own, secular law can do little more than prevent us from doing harm to one another. It cannot make us better, only less worse. And so, I have to wonder if the entire project of Teaching Tolerance might be forfeit in the sense that without returning to the religious roots of the civil rights movement, its inspiration, it will never be able to accomplish what the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and his colleagues hoped for.

In this, Catholic schools have a definite advantage, because we have the tradition of Catholic Social Teaching, a stunningly beautiful corpus of thought that holds agape as made known through Jesus at its center. Though we might fail to live it out in application, and though we’re still figuring out how to use it within the American legal system, the beatific vision of the heavenly banquet at which all are welcome presents a dream far more vibrant and colorful than that of potentially lukewarm tolerance. May we know the God of all mercy and of all liberation in this work.

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1 See the Netflix documentary “13th” for a mind-blowing take on the perpetuation of slavery into the 21st century.^↩

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2 For those uninitiated into conversations surrounding race, Merriam-Webster defines “microagression” thusly: “a comment or action that subtly and often unconsciously or unintentionally expresses a prejudiced attitude toward a member of a marginalized group (such as a racial minority)”. Examples of this would include assuming that a person of color loves a particular sort of food or speaks a certain language based on physical appearance, or asking to touch an “exotic” person of color’s hair, or telling a person of color they’re attractive “for a [insert ethnicity here] person”.^↩

Lessons from Visiting the Bones of the Patron Saint of Teachers

by Dave Gregory

Sarah tolerates a lot from me, the least of which is my religious fanaticism. Not being a cradle Catholic herself, GingerFace (as her appellation now goes approximately 90% of the time these days) still marvels at my absurd obsession with body parts enclosed in precious metals. On our honeymoon, I opted for the most romantic of destinations on our penultimate day in Europe: the motherhouse of the Lasallian Christian Brothers. I just really needed to see the remains of the patron saint of teachers, Jean Baptiste de La Salle, and I hoped that the Generalate would offer me some insight into the spirituality of the Brothers of the Christian Schools so that I might deepen my own affection for their particular charism.

When I moved into Lasallian education from the realm of Ignatius, I knew that a whole new world of lingo and terminology would come with the transition; and indeed, in two years’ time as a Lasallian, the unfamiliar virtues of “piety” and “zeal”¹ have gradually replaced those once familiar terms of cura personalis and the magis in my imagination, despite the fact that I have always protested against the notion of becoming a pious zealot.

The mother church of the Brothers rests in a relatively unassuming brick structure on the outskirts of Rome. Let past the gate by a man wearing shorts and a t-shirt, Sarah and I asked the receptionist if we could pay a visit to the chapel. She kindly directed us onward, and as we made our way through the Generalate, Lasallian educators wearing conference shirts milled about.

Christ the Child

Having passed through corridors lined with portraits of various Brothers General, we met Christ the child, who greeted us at the chapel’s entrance. Wearing a simple tunic, the prepubescent Nazarene steps forward, raising his hand in benediction. It seems almost as if he is still learning to offer blessing, for although his right hand’s fingers curl in the typical iconographic gesticulation of such, his hand does not yet extend toward the person standing in front of him. It’s not so much trepidation on his part, given the serenity with which he steps forward, but that gray area that defines one’s coming of age.

He reminds me of the call to find Christ in each student I educate. Throughout my half dozen years as a teacher, I have been told to find God in students, although this phrase remained sort of veiled in my mind. How could I tear down the defenses of the most surly, difficult, tired, traumatized student and find the divine breaking through their teenage fissures? The key, I think, lies not in looking for God, but in looking for the student. Cliche though it may sound, education is a thing that requires relationship above and beyond any other quality. Important though mastery of and enthusiasm for content may be, a real teacher knows that his or her students will potentially forget almost everything they are taught. Ironically, I cannot remember much of anything from my own high school theology classes, but those teachers made an indelible mark. Relationship does not so much require that I be “liked,”² but that a student finds my presence worthwhile, at the very least. Finding the kid involves coming to develop an understanding of their quirks, their eccentricities, their passions, their weaknesses, and offering to meet them where they’re at. Find the student, and then I’ll find God. Doing it the other way around, at least for me, results in the vice of thinking myself holy.

A Humble Reliquary

The empty chapel struck me with its simplicity and gentleness, for the palette of creams and ivories proved a stark contrast to the ostentatious nature of most Roman churches and basilicas. It seemed fitting that this chapel, serving as a reliquary for the bones of teacher-saints, would architecturally resonate with the very vocation of being an educator: simple, straightforward, without pretense. We walked the perimeter of the chapel, and paused before the small side altars dedicated to the various Brother martyrs, men who had quite literally died for love of their students; for these men, teaching was a seriously dangerous business, though they deemed the risk of empowering children on the borders of culture and society to be an important one to take. Being new to their world, I remain unfamiliar with their stories, but the beauty of the communicated message hit hard. It would be nice to die in the classroom, with my “boots on” as the saying goes, and here were folks who had done just that.



Sarah and I approached the sanctuary, where graceful angels bore the relics of Saint Jean Baptiste aloft. This dude, I thought, three and a half centuries prior, had corralled men whom society deemed unfit to become teachers into teaching youth deemed unfit to be taught. And here were his various remnants: skull, vertebrae, other bones I could not identify. Eyes that had once looked on the world, meeting the eyes of those who would educate and be educated. I paused for a few minutes, kneeling and praying for my own school and its various needs.

Before we left, Sarah and I sat in the second pew, gazing upward. The resurrected Christ hovering above the altar, I noticed, wasn’t Christ at all, but rather Jean Baptiste transfigured. Over the course of his life, he had become, in the words of C.S. Lewis, a “little Christ.”

The Abiding Teacher

Before we departed the Generalate, we wandered a bit more and discovered the room vaguely resembling a gift shop, where Abraham from Ethiopia, who had spent much of his life working at the Generalate (no doubt after having been educated in a Lasallian school), helped me out. Nearby, Sarah and I discovered an odd statue of Jean Baptiste, arms raised high, with various cavities throughout his body. I walked around it, peering into these holes, and realized their significance.

Smaller figures filled these spaces: a child growing into teenagerdom, falling in love, becoming a husband and a father and an old man, and beside each of them was Jean Baptiste, grinning. He accompanies each student a Lasallian educator has ever taught, through each part of their lives. He becomes part of who they are and who they become. My eyes teared, and my memory flooded with all the teachers who had impressed their lives into my own: Dr. Carew, Mr. Watson, Ms. Johanson, Mr. Acosta, Mr. Talbot, Professors Mitchell and Ambrosio, and Fathers King and Schall. I have never taken a single course in teaching or education, but have modeled my own labors after theirs.

I’m not paid to teach, really, and neither were these men and women. Strangely, I think a Catholic educator makes his or her living by loving students into their humanity, just as my own teachers had loved me into existence. Their lives abide in ours, witnessing joyously and generously to what a life well-lived means. And unconsciously even, we absorb these models into our own ways of proceeding and being.

Who Would Know?

My dad, himself a professor of labor and employment law of over thirty years, liked to quote A Man for All Seasons when discussing his vocation. Richard Rich approaches Thomas More to discuss the profession, and More probes, “Why not be a teacher? You’d be a fine teacher; perhaps a great one.” Richard replies, “If I was, who would know it?” and Thomas fires back, “You; your pupils; your friends; God. Not a bad public, that.”

The classroom is a place where magic occurs. It’s one of few remaining places in the world where minds can meet without any sort of intermediary. Students and teachers hold truths in front of them, pondering and questioning. There’s a sort of intimate enchantment in this process, and like any real enchantment, it’s not broadcast for all to see. And the beauty of it all lies in this: the work of a teacher is to make it so that they are no longer needed, no longer necessary. There is, however, a tension here. Although our teachers phase themselves out of our lives, they remain entirely and wholly necessary.

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1 St. Jean Baptiste offers twelve virtues of a Catholic educator; these virtues were widely publicized to many Catholic teachers into the early part of the twentieth century in various media, but they have since fallen my the wayside outside of Lasallian education.^↩

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2 More than any other prayer, Rafael Cardinal Merry del Val’s Litany of Humility has aided my teaching.^↩

One Last Post before Nuptials

by Dave Gregory

Well friends, I’m getting married in a few days, so I’ll try to keep this brief, because I’m currently prepping like a maniac. Erin recently wrote on the cost of faith, and I’ve been pondering this very same thing for several months now. The high school I teach at hemorrhages faculty and staff each year; as a Cristo Rey school, we simply cannot afford to offer salaries that compete with those of the public school system. Moreover, the combination of our renting a building from Portland Public Schools and outstanding loans means that we cannot even meet the payscale set by the archdiocese for its schoolteachers.

Editor's Note: I mean just look at this screenshot of their wedding website that I just took.
The substantial elegant beauty is enough to disgust common taste.

On top of all this, teaching at our particular school entails “getting the emotional shit kicked out of us” (in the words of one colleague, from a faculty lounge conversation a while back) on the day-to-day. This fact of my work has begun to sink into my bones a bit, and while most of my interactions with students are positive, regularly occurring and notably challenging engagements still leave me reeling.

Even those conversations that grow into a form of prayer, of cor ad cor loquitur (“heart speaking to heart,” to borrow from Newman), leave this borderline introvert drained of emotional energy; a student discloses, in the sort of innocent trust that only the less-jaded remain capable of, the difficulties of their non-academic life, and I consequently catch a glimpse of the enormous responsibility inherent to the ministry of education. “You stand in the gaps,” recently declared one of my juniors at a faculty discussion concerning equity, referencing the abyss of her father’s and brother’s absences brought on by gang violence. There’s a weightiness to all this, really, and one can feel the gravity of what one does at De La Salle. It pulls on the lungs, making it harder to breathe.

In short, unless one truly buys into the Lasallian charism and its mission of educating and forming socioeconomically oppressed youth, there’s no real reason to remain.

This environment constantly forces me to ponder what makes the shit-expelling blows worth it, and this ensuing reflection forces me to apply some book learning. It’s all about that distinction laid out by Bonhoeffer in The Cost of Discipleship, I’ve discovered, the one that articulates the stark opposition of cheap grace and costly grace and thereby reveals a deep truth: grace isn’t grace unless it costs us. If I’m sitting around on my laurels, reveling in my supposed Christianity, it’s not Christianity I’m reveling in...it’s the snares of the Enemy, who would love little more than lukewarm complacency. The opposite danger, methinks, lies in indulging the hubristic tendency to inflate my own Christian ego; in an era of stark political division, fingers are pointed and cries denouncing the Christianity of others fill the masturbatory space of social media.

I digress. My own pedagogical disposition must constantly deflect these temptations of self-gratifying praise. I can sit here and discuss the wounds inflicted by my students, but so doing would distract from the real work at hand. Real humility, as the saying goes, is not about thinking less of myself, but thinking of myself less. In a very real way, I need to ignore the shit-kicking, for those who fling their feet at my gut are doing little more than testing my grit, my dedication, and/or my ability to care enough about them to endure. They’re just teenagers, I need to remind myself, “Jesus in his least recognizable form,” to steal the words of a Jesuit quoted by a dean I worked with. Every defense I throw up in return, be it indifference or overly-indulgent disciplinary action or misplaced sarcasm, is a failure on my part to love these young human beings into who they become; I’m still growing into this understanding.

In the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius instructs that one must hold onto graces for periods of desolation: that is, when you’re in a funk, savor the blessings until the funk lifts. No place has taught me this more than my classroom in Room 208 on North Fenwick Avenue in Portland. Looking back on this year -- a year in which my father has been rendered immobile by the final stages of Parkinson’s and has been hospitalized multiple times, a year in which both my parents and I moved to what seem to be more or less permanent homes, a year throughout which Sarah and I have planned and coordinated all the infuriating details for this weekend’s nuptials, and a year that precedes welcoming a new puppy and the commencement of doctoral work -- I’ve got some graces to show you.

And they come in the form of haikus written by fourteen and fifteen year-olds for final exam extra credit. Although many may be silly, they all reflect a degree of authentic biblical and theological understanding. Others offer pearls of deep truth and mystery, thereby realizing the authentic purpose of a real haiku.

You’re welcome.

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Theological Haikus Composed by Disadvantaged Youth

Regardless of the
situation, sin always
will somehow exist

Jesus loves us much,
no matter if I fail this,
he loves me through all

Finals can be hard.
Theology can be hard.
Just believe in God.

Was Samson like a
Disney princess with powers
like Rapunzel’s hair?

Be a good person.
Judges and kings are bad, so...
so don’t be those.

So God gave up on
the Kings? No wonder they suck.
Basketball is rigged.

Mr. Gregory
is forcing us to do these
haiku poems, dang

God had one job: don’t
break Job, and lost his bet, he
could lose five big ones!

Oh, hello Job, it’s
good to see you once again.
Yeah, thanks a lot, God.

Satan was not bad
in Job, but now seen as bad,
just like my sister.

The Song of Songs was
really beautiful, much much
better than Bieber

Guy: “Let’s add a song
about sex to our God book.”
Everyone else: “Sure!”

The Song of Songs was
too secular, ew, too gross,
too much to handle

If I fail this test,
Jesus might still love me but
my mother will not

God is a puzzle
We cannot figure him out
He’s complicated

I know this isn’t
theological, but have
fun getting married

If Jesus still loves
us then he would give us As.
But you are not him.

Thank God I am an
atheist. Oh wait,
that’s contradictory.

I wish I was a
king, you know...violating
commandments for fun

Why are there minor
prophets? It’s because they didn’t
mind their own business.

I think Jesus would
have letted me use the bath-
room if he were here

Jesus loves you more
than white people love their dogs
and morning coffee

I am nothing but
a blind beggar who received
a merciful gift

Moving, Churching, Third Place-ing

by Dave Gregory

I’ve moved a lot over the past eight years: the District of Columbia to Syracuse to Bolivia to the Bronx to Syracuse to Maine to New York City to California to Oregon. The frenzied stretch between Syracuse and Maine was all thanks to the bopping around that comes with being a Jesuit novice, and a strong dislike of East Coast cities’ sensory overload prompted my move out West. My general transience has at long last come to an end, methinks: a couple months ago I moved into a first home.

My fiancee and I celebrated receiving the keys by fervently exchanging saliva on the living room floor in the absence of furniture. It occurred to me that this marked a change in basically everything: my nomadic existence was finally coming to an end. I vocalized to Sarah, lying on the hardwood floor as the gas fireplace blazed, “We’re gonna start a family here!” She laughed, and will probably be a tad frustrated with me for this public confession. Sorry, Sare-bear.

Although Sarah isn’t moving in until we get married in June (we are traditional, wholesome, Catholic folk, after all, though the aforementioned make-out sesh might lead some to assume otherwise), she’s begun to make her mark on the building, and I mine. We’re fighting little battles of taste and decor, making compromises. I have shed dustbunnies all over the bathroom floor, where they have collected en masse; I find them rather funny, and refuse to vacuum them for the time being. Sarah was putting my deodorant and hair crap¹ and comb in the drawer whenever she came over, but recently acquiesced to having them live in what would otherwise be a makeup organizer. I hung a marvelous icon (a rendition of Andrei Rublev’s Troitska) from an artist friend in our dining room, and ordered a cute hand-embroidered sign from ETSY informing bathroom visitors, “Please don’t do cocaine in the bathroom.” Sarah has placed tiny myrtle trees on the kitchen counter, only one of which has died so far.

The Liturgical Heartbeat of the Past Decade

High school and college proved themselves to be stabilizing forces in my life. A miserable experience throughout elementary and middle school left me generally friendless. I started practicing legerdemain as a means of escaping the crushing loneliness that came with attending the school that “School of Rock” was filmed at.² Contrary to my expectations, learning magic tricks did not make me any cooler in the eyes of my pubescent peers, who remained obsessed with sports and wrestling. I could never philosophically justify chasing balls around defined spaces, and therefore rendered myself an outcast from the inner circles of elite middle school cliques. My all-guys Jesuit high school, in total contrast, gave me a community of men who would eventually become college roommates, lifelong friends, and groomsmen. College offered a Catholic community to whom I will forever be indebted; although Georgetown is indeed ever so slightly more secular than Notre Dame, it had a supremely committed and vibrant group of papists. It was there that I attended daily Mass at 11:15pm with an eighty year-old Jesuit whom I had heard was rumored to be the inspiration for The Exorcist.³

Although my social circles shifted and my majors changed (biochemistry was simply too practical for my liking; I was looking for something a little bit more useless that would render me unemployable by the standards of free market capitalism), that nightly liturgy became the heartbeat of my collegiate experience. As he showered, a heart attack killed Fr. King the summer after my junior year, and I stowed away the cassock and surplice I had worn each night for two years, because I would never acolyte for him again. Thankfully, a few Jesuits took on a nightly 10pm Mass, and the forty year-old tradition of a late night liturgy lives on at Georgetown.

In retrospect, my entering the Jesuits was in large part an attempt to maintain some reality of these stabilizing forces: faith-sharing groups, liturgical routine, and counter-cultural Christian communities in which I had so firmly planted myself. Daily Mass became coupled to the Liturgy of the Hours, and time became sanctified. The heartbeat that so grounded my collegiate experience inhered and deepened, even growing stronger.

And so, when the fates and my disobedient nature and my novice master colluded to have me leave that world in which I felt so comfortable, a real sort of wandering began. The heartbeat faded, and the business of a teaching schedule rendered me unable to continue partaking in the Eucharist quite so regularly. My whole prayer life consequently dislocated itself, and to this day I have been unable to resume the practice of Examen-ing daily, or praying with Scripture regularly. Even more painful, I lost those folks with whom I studied, worked, worshiped, and labored.

The Pilgrimage of Real Life

Catholic and social communities simply don’t make themselves readily available in the real world. Once the Jesuits and I parted ways, I wouldn’t so automatically be given a tribe to call my own. Adulthood began to sink in, and I could no longer delay the inevitable loneliness that arrives with a one-bedroom apartment. Although religious life does certainly provide an unconventionally difficult and disciplined lifestyle, it did provide me with many of those things that imbue a human life with meaning: labor, relationships, ritual, so on and so forth. At the time, I largely took them for granted, because I had no alternative comparison as a 22 year-old.

For a few months I lived with my parents as I applied for teaching positions, attended a Dominican parish in downtown Manhattan, and dipped my toes in the waters of New York City’s rapidly expanding young adult crowd: a “Love and Responsibility” weekly summer series consumed one evening each week and hundreds of young adults converged at St. Patrick’s cathedral for Mass and drinks monthly. Many of these young adult New York transplants hungered for a significant other; these groups were, I thought at the time, little more than a middle school mixer with liturgical and religious pretenses.

July came, along with a job offer in California. Uprooted from all I ever knew, I moved to a desert, only to find that those who tend to move to the desert attend desert churches: old people⁴ in their final years of life. After three years of dissatisfied hopping between three different parishes (I know, I’m the worst), a couple friends and I started a young adult thing, which took off with a group of approximately ten regular attendees from a region of 400,000.

Thankfully, being a schoolteacher, I found myself in the midst of other schoolteachers. School became our church: each classroom a chapel, each student a tabernacle, each shared meal a eucharist of sorts.

Aching for Third Places

I spent my first number of months in the great Northwest without many friends outside of Sarah’s. The folks I teach alongside tend to be older, with families of their own, and they are unable to welcome a newcomer into their circles given these already planted roots. Sarah and I hunted for a young adult community and found one at the oldest church in Portland: a small Argentinian collection of missionary priests dedicated to the New Evangelization has developed a thriving young adult scene. We made connections, hit it off with some folks, and now meet regularly with seven other individuals to break bread and discuss theological treatises and our faith lives. In addition to this, I find myself in an ecumenical men’s group coordinated by charismatic Catholics. I’ve even gone so far as to pick up the hobby of my teenage years, joining a local group of magicians for monthly meetings; I observe elderly men doing (relatively bad) magic tricks at a Christian retirement home, only to be mocked and teased by their audience of other (mostly) aging magicians. It’s adorable.

Viktor Frankl writes in Man’s Search for Meaning -- arguably the most impactful book I’ve ever read -- that three sources of meaning define human existence: labor, relationships, and suffering. The former two obviously form the essential bits of the meaning-making process, the multi-valent orbits of families and romances and friendships and colleagues that all revolve around those beliefs and rituals we most value.

I’ve found that in order to maintain my sanity, I need “third places,” or spaces to dwell in between work and home. It’s about more than finding hobbies, it’s about indulging in leisure for the sake of leisure in and of itself.⁵ I have to remind myself what Fr. James Schall, S.J. taught me in his first lecture for “Elements of Political Theory”: the Greek word skole means “leisure”. We go to school so that we might get a job, and we labor to make money, and hopefully we make enough money to do things we love with people we love when we’re not working. Proper learning, that which consists of the liberation of mind and heart through an exploration of the liberal arts, culminates in third spaces.

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1 My possession of hair product is her fault though. I would have happily kept a buzzed head, but she wanted me to more closely resemble late 2000 Seth Rogen, rather than early 2000s Seth Rogen.^↩

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2 This “Country Day School” whose full name I shall refrain from disclosing here was located 12 miles outside of my neighborhood in Queens, and my parents forced my attendance given the dearth of more solid educational offerings in our immediate vicinity. At least I got to learn Latin. ^↩

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3 Although this was untrue, Fr. Thomas Mulvihill King, S.J. did celebrate an annual memorial Mass for the son of William Peter Blatty, the book’s author, and one particular scene from the movie was filmed in King’s bedroom: Jesuit Damien Karras, intoxicated, collapses on Fr. King’s actual bed, and you can see Fr. King’s actual Teilhard de Chardin poster on the wall.^↩

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4 Nothing wrong with old people, mind you. I just bemoaned the disheartening lack of diversity. ^↩

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5 For recommended reading on leisure, see Josef Pieper. ^↩

Reflections in Cruciform

by Dave Gregory

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Light separated from darkness, waters divided, atoms coalesced into molecules, molecules into the building blocks for organic life, building blocks into creatures possessing consciousness. From these nascent, orchestrated movements, all things took on the Word, and more specifically the Word’s cruciform¹ shape. The Cross, however would not occur for billions of years after the Bang. In the words of Sebastian Moore, O.S.B., evil finally crystallizes and nails the All Holy to the Cross, thereby manifesting the meaning of the entire cosmos in uncompromising clarity. It is, of sorts, a second Big Bang. Good and evil collide. Evil pours out its entire strength on God, who takes it on in order to drain the Enemy of his power. The stark illogicality of that event, its paradoxical stuff of bizarre nonsense, would draw into focus what the cosmos was created for, why the Big Bang even banged to begin with. Beauty and horror would coalesce in a revolutionary point of singularity.

All things are cruciform, so say the Paschal Mysteries. A few weeks ago, my juniors wrote a prayer service for the Stations of the Cross, seeking to identify human suffering with the calumnious inflictions imposed on Jesus, and the several acts of generosity that marked his path to the Cross. With the sort of genius that can only come from the marginalized and oppressed, these students explored a wide variety of ways in and through which people around the world suffer their own crucifixions, and in these cruciform experiences of humanity, God’s solidarity with humanity becomes readily apparent. Although I cleaned their writing up, keep in mind that the following reflections² come from the minds of seventeen year-olds. It’s all proof that the Cross casts a shadow over the human condition, and that it can be seen lingering if we squint our eyes just right, or open them just wide enough.

Stations of the Cross as Told by High School Juniors

In 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen year-old boy from Chicago, was murdered. Carolyn Bryant, a twenty-one year-old woman, claimed that he whistled at her and attempted to flirt with her on the street in a Mississippi town. Bryant's husband and brother-in-law abducted Emmett in the middle of the night, beat him, and left his body in a river; it was found three days later, bloated and disfigured beyond recognition, and brought home to Chicago, where his mother insisted on holding an open-casket funeral. Tens of thousands came to see Emmett, and his death sparked the Civil Rights Movement of the past century. Carolyn Bryant later confessed to making up a lie: Emmett had never whistled at her.

Across the United States, countless innocents have been condemned to death, either within the legally sanctioned justice system, or extra-legally. Our nation’s citizens have taken it upon themselves to judge these guiltless lives as not worth living, but rather as worthy of graphic and public execution. Jesus, deemed guilty of treason by the Roman government, though innocent, prefigures any and all such condemnations and deaths. We cannot forget that just as Emmett’s death led to the battle for civil rights, nor can we forget that Jesus’ death led to freedom from death. Beauty can be forged from the fires of suffering, but only if we choose it. Crucifixions occur all around us. May we have the grace to see them, and allow them to inspire our action.

+ + +

Around the country, hundreds of people have been murdered by domestic terrorists who are overwhelmingly male, white, and Christian. Their educational systems failed them: those entrusted with their care failed to notice signs. Their government failed them: lawmakers granted them easy access to weapons. Seeking revenge on their world, these terrorists do the unspeakable: despairing, they slaughter the innocent. Families of victims are left breathless, mourning the loss of young lives. The Stoneman Douglas shooting is just the latest of these horrendous evils. This image portrays a mother and her daughter outside of the high school, ashes placed on their foreheads for Ash Wednesday, soon after Nicolas Cruz murdered so many students.

Jews in Israel had been occupied for centuries by various empires: the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, and during the time of Jesus, the Romans. Women had seen their children suffer, bearing the weight of Roman persecution. And now Jesus, the Galilean preacher and miracle-worker, was just the latest in a string of Jewish deaths. He was crucified just as so many others had been. And mothers and sisters and daughters looked on, mournfully. As he carried his cross to the mountain, Jesus met these women. In years prior, he had healed them, restored their dignity, included them passionately in his message of love and forgiveness. And here, Jesus meets them for the last time.

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When Jesus’ clothes were being taken away, a part of him was also being taken away. This act made him vulnerable and exposed to everyone: he was crucified naked for the world to see. This image shows how people in our world are similarly stripped.

Families, adults, and elders flee their countries because of ongoing violence and war. They are forced to flee to try to avoid getting hurt. What some don't realize is that it's not easy to just drop everything and move. Refugees have to leave family, friends, their belongings, their homes and their whole lives. The only life they know is the one they have lived in their homeland, so when war disrupts their lives, it takes away all they have known. They feel weak and vulnerable, the same as how Jesus felt vulnerable when his clothes were stripped from his body.

Refugees don’t have a say in what should be done. They can’t have an option to stay, because if they do, they face the chance of getting hurt. In this image you can see families walking with their children. These children probably don't know or don’t understand what is going on. Imagine being a kid and not knowing why your family is leaving. Refugees are stripped of their livelihoods and their ways of living.

Some of Dave’s Thoughts on Mark

This weekend, the Easter Vigil’s Gospel was taken from the Markan narrative, the shortest and most stylistically hurried of the Gospels. Mark punctuated his story with rapid transitions, moving quickly from one event to the next; he leaves out much of Jesus’ preaching in favor of a profound story-telling mechanic. Throughout the Gospel, Jesus instructs various people to keep his messianic identity a secret. Jesus clearly does not think that his role of the Anointed One can be completely understood in the midst of his ministry. We cannot see this reality early on, because it has not yet become cruciform.

In chapter 8, almost perfectly halfway through the entire Gospel, Jesus heals a blind man: sight comes gradually, for at first he can only see walking trees³ before the healing reaches its fullness. Immediately after the healing, Peter declares that Jesus is the Messiah (only to be silenced), and then Jesus proceeds to preach on the way of the Cross. Life cannot be found unless it is lost. Jesus transfigures, he drives out a demon, predicts his death yet again, preaches a little bit on the Kingdom, and then the Passion narrative begins, which consumes a bit less than half the Gospel. His preaching from here on in points to the Cross. As the cat-o-nine-tails tears through muscle, and as the nails penetrate flesh and bone, the Kingdom rips its way into the created order, penetrating through time and space.

The excruciating nature of the passion has been ingrained in our Catholic imaginations, and Mark makes it quite clear that all he has written comes to its conclusion on the Cross. Jesus hangs there for the world to see, a Roman soldier approaches and declares, “Truly, this man was the Son of God!” Be this sincerity or sarcasm, we cannot be sure. But Mark believes it to be true.

The full identity of Jesus can only be recognized when crucified. As he unveils this detail that changes all things, the centurion cannot be silenced.

Mark’s lovely resurrection account, in its original form, ends with verse 8, as was read at the Vigil liturgy; some later editor added the full resurrection story with Mary of Magdala and the eleven apostles, but the evangelist left his readers waiting in suspense with his first edition of the Gospel. Jesus leaves behind the empty tomb for his followers to behold and the Gospel ends.

This is all too true of our experience as well. We wait here, unsure of the Resurrection. There is no proof of Heaven, no surety surrounding the immortality of the soul. All we can do, really, is behold all things in their cruciform shape, and tremble with hopeful anticipation.

A Final Word

Jesus’ wounds inhere in his glorified body, as evidenced by Thomas’ poking and prodding. Churches with crucifixes depicting Jesus ascending heavenward tend to drive me a bit nuts, because they tend to lack these salving wounds.

I wonder, along with Augustine, if our resurrected bodies will bear our wounds as well. These are the defining signs that we have given our lives in service of justice, or endured persecution and martyrdom, or have grown close to Christ in his own suffering. Nothing but our woundedness can teach us the art of surrendering our presumptions of self-control and self-mastery. When I visited my dad on Good Friday, I wondered if his own resurrected body, for example, will still be marked in some mysterious way by Parkinson’s disease.

These wounds make us who we are, after all. They are sacramental. They mark our path to Heaven. And even that, my friends, may be cruciform.

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1 A brief note on this term: by “cruciform,” I mean the shape of the cross. For example, churches are typically built such that their walls form a cross when viewed from a bird’s eye perspective. In this bit of reflection, I’ll be using “cruciform” symbolically rather than literally.^↩

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2 For the sake of brevity, I’m only including three: Jesus Is Condemned to Death, Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus, and Jesus Is Stripped of His Clothes.^↩

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3 Tolkien, anyone?^↩

The Alternate Histories of Wakanda and Canaan

by Dave Gregory

This past week, my freshperson classes began an exploration of the historical books of the Bible (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles), which (I unabashedly inform them) is my least favorite part of the Bible. The few students truly familiar with the stories of the Israelite monarchial line initially balk at me, because children’s editions of the scriptures -- including the comic book “Action Bible” -- inevitably portray these ancient leaders as figures we should seek to emulate. Close readings of the texts, however, make it quite clear that the kings are by and large ridiculously messed up, and the lesson to take away from their leadership is that of a failed experiment: God informs Samuel that the kings will ultimately oppress their own people, that the seduction of power will be so overwhelming as to prohibit the monarchy’s success. How true this is. Saul’s violence results in suicide-inducing madness, David murders a dude so that he can seduce his wife, and Solomon takes on hundreds of wives and concubines despite all his supposed wisdom. While these first three kings might succeed in unifying the tribes of Jacob’s descendants and building a Temple, their flaws culminate in horrendous downfalls, and the dozens of kings following them just get worse and worse.

The biblical authors present these histories in order to explain why Judah and Israel split up, and why they were eventually destroyed by invading forces in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE.

The Historical Problem

Before the kings, however, come the events within the Book of Joshua, one of the predominant biblical texts that has been used to justify war in God’s name: the Israelites have reached the land of Canaan after wandering around the desert, Moses dies on the border of the much-anticipated Promised Land, and the military genius Joshua takes over leadership of the Hebrew tribes. According to divine mandate and under divine protection, the Hebrews are to utterly decimate the Canaanite peoples, who have become legendary for their practices of human sacrifice among a slew of other immoralities. Should the arrival in the Promised Land necessitate hostile takeover and the spilling of blood, so be it. Apart from violence, no other viable options present themselves to the Hebrews.

The issue with the Book of Joshua is essentially that it’s a steaming, heaping pile of ridiculous defecation.

The vast majority of archaeologists and non-literalist biblical scholars have concluded that Joshua cannot be used as a reliable basis for determining factual history for a couple of primary reasons. First, records demonstrate that the territory known as Canaan was not invaded all at once by a substantial group of people, but was rather settled gradually over hundreds of years; in reality, the discovery and subsequent analysis of artifact record heavily indicate that the tribes of Israel co-existed (though not always peaceably) with Canaanite tribes. Second, the first two cities mentioned in Joshua -- Jericho and Ai -- had suffered conquest and destruction centuries before the Israelite tribes ever landed on the scene. The word “Ai” more or less means “ruins,” and had been destroyed in the 3rd millennium before the Common Era, over 1,000 years before Canaan was ever formally settled. Jericho, a more prominent urban center of the ancient Near East, had gone through many stages of being destroyed and rebuilt, and there is no indication outside of Joshua that the Israelites had anything to with them.

Simply put, the Book of Joshua claiming that the Hebrews conquered Canaan by force is more or less akin to my standing amongst the ruins of the Mayan empire and claiming that I conquered this ancient peoples.

The Etiology of an Alternate History

This glaring discrepancy between biblical narrative and verified and verifiable history leads to quite the question: why does the Book of Joshua almost completely fabricate a history of conquest? There must be a reason for it, a meaning behind its composition, after all.

The answer, methinks, lies within the Babylonian Exile, which -- as I have written about before -- was the single most formative event in the history of the Hebrew Bible’s formation. Returning home from Babylon, the former slaves of Judah (the tribes of the northern kingdom of Israel have been completely lost to history with their conquest by the kingdom of Assyria in 721 B.C.E.) returned to Jerusalem, and got to work rebuilding their Temple with the help of the Persian government. Prophetic traditions and successions had arisen during the periods immediately surrounding the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests of Israel and Judah, but it was when the Judeans returned home that they sat down to write down their history, to form the majority of the Hebrew scriptures as we know them.

While some texts certainly have historical and formative basis preceding the Exile, the former slaves created the solid majority of the Bible once they returned home; exilic themes inhere throughout the prehistories and the histories. In their postlapsarian condition, Adam and Eve go into exile from Eden, and the Sabbath day of rest began as a religious practice in Babylon when the Hebrews could no longer worship and sacrifice in the Temple. The stories of Jacob the trickster are folk tales of survival in a foreign land. The 613 commandments are codified legal, ritual, and moral code for a nascent nation.

The Book of Joshua (along with the rest of the historical books) is nothing short of an attempt by the Judean literati to create a sense of identity and meaning upon returning home. It is a tale of mythical proportions, boldly proclaiming in a state of birthing pangs: “Look how great we once were! We took over the land promised to our forebears! Look at what we hope to become!” How does one create a sense of pride and identity and purpose from nothingness, other than by telling stories?

Wakanda and Canaan

I was discussing all this with my first period kids, and if I do say so myself, this has come to be one of my better lectures as the years have progressed. It’s logical, coherent, and provides an insight into how and why the Bible came to be. This stuff sends the mind reeling, for it calls into question the entire narrative of Canaan, and therefore Israel, as we know it.

One student, when I asked for questions or comments or insights, raised her hand. “So, it’s kind of like ‘Black Panther,’ huh?”

“How so?”

“Well, Wakanda doesn’t exist. The Black Panther doesn’t exist either. The whole thing is made up.”

Another African American student crossed her arms in front of her chest, and mimicked the gesticulation that the characters of “Black Panther” do in order to make their Wakandan identity known. I paused, wondering if I should do the same thing as an offer of solidarity, but then I realized how ridiculous that would have been (thankfully).

“So if it’s made up, why see it? Why take it seriously?” I asked. I paused pregnantly again as the class looked at me, and I turned to her: “So do you and I get the same thing out of seeing this made-up movie?”

“No!” she retorted. “I’m black, you’re white.”

“Bingo,” I shot back. “I can’t get it. I can’t understand. I can only appreciate what it’s trying to do by creating this alternate Wakandan history.”

This first period class, along with the rest of my periods, came to the conclusion that even though “Black Panther” creates an alternate history to the one we actually know, it does so for similar reasons that the authors of Joshua did. It is a social and political commentary, and as a white dude I cannot in serious conscience doubt the meaningfulness of the story, or question its validity, because the comics and the film were not really made with me in mind. “Black Panther” takes the question of violence seriously, however, and does not assume it to be a given: while Joshua on the whole advocates for forceful colonization, the two Black Panthers, T’Challa and Killmonger, present diametrically opposed positions on the matter. The former intends to position his kingdom as force for establishing harmony in the midst of a broken world, whereas the latter hopes (understandably, though not excusably, given what he has suffered) to use Wakanda as a means for exacting revenge upon the world, fracturing its bones and drawing further blood. These leaders assume the mantles of restorative and punitive justice, respectively.

Those of us who take the Bible seriously cannot dismiss those parts of it that are historically fictitious, as they still possess truth. When the Jews returned to Judea from captivity in Babylon, they created a mythos, an identity by means of stories. And yet, it took twenty-five hundred years before Israel emerged as an independent nation, free from external overlords. Its writings vascillate between the intentions of T’Challa and Killmonger: at times, the Bible’s authors look for revenge, while its more lovely passages prophetically declare that the new Heavens will transform rather than obliterate the world as we know it. For these authors, God seeks restoration, rather than punishment.

The ancient Hebrews’ scriptures (and therefore our scriptures) proclaim that their covenant with God would be a light to the nations, a witness of the relationship through which God has wedded God’s very self to the entirety of creation and all divine image-bearers within it. Through their history and experience, salvation would be made known. I strongly suspect that Wakanda might serve a similar purpose as the Marvel universe unfolds.

The God-Hole

by Dave Gregory

“What have been your experiences of the mysterium tremendum?” asked Bert, a fellow in our faith-sharing group of twenty- and thirty-somethings. We had been praying with Luke 5, where Jesus invites a few dudes to “catch” people after a miraculous haul -- a passage that seems to repeatedly come up in my life for a variety of reasons¹ -- and Peter’s reaction to Jesus became a focus of our lectio divina reflection.

“Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” exclaims Peter when Jesus performs the somewhat trivial miracle of catching some fish. By “trivial,” I do not mean insignificant or unimportant, but it is a bit silly at first glance, is it not? It’s not as if Jesus morphs one substance into another (as with the wedding in Cana) or reanimates corpses (as with Lazarus) or heals bodies or drives out spooky demons. He’s just enhancing the natural world a little bit, drawing natural animals from a natural place where they naturally ought to be.

This fishy² occurrence unsettles Peter, whose spontaneous declaration simultaneously recognizes Jesus’ authority and his own unworthiness. We searched for the fruit contained within this statement, aided by Jesuit James Martin’s chapter “Gennesaret” in Jesus: A Pilgrimage, and Bert brought up Rudolph Otto’s³ insight that all things genuinely religious originate from an encounter with Mystery, which in turn prompted his question: where had we encountered Mystery? Which such encounters have sustained and fed our understanding of God?

I can point to a number of experiences in prayer and in ministry that reduced me to tears of joy or fear and trembling, wherein grace so overwhelms that I cannot help but celebrate and give thanks: making the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius over the course of thirty days in Gloucester changed the way I view and engage all things, and of course the adventure of teaching offers the typical rollercoaster of consolations and desolations.

This said, when desolation strikes, when the crushing inability to feel God’s presence dominates the lived day-to-day, how does one proceed?

The Hole that Is God

Over the past few months, I’ve felt a certain lack, or absence of God. I dunno if recent struggles have qualified as depression (caused by “first world problems,” I must admit), but I’ve thought about seeking out some therapy if the chaos of life continues to result in questioning my mental healthfulness. The best thing to cure me of a funk, I think, is to stick to routine, but the past number of weeks have been anything but routine. Thankfully, the madness of moving both myself and my parents has more or less subsided, and I think things are beginning to balance out.

My fiancée’s dad, Keith, recently discussed the notion that perhaps encountering God isn’t just about fullness and joy and completion, in light of the existential reality that human life isn’t all rainbows and glitter and butterflies. Keith referenced a sermon ⁴ he heard, about how God is the abyss: perhaps we are so focused on discovering God in that which is ostensibly and predictably meaningful that we freak out when the gaping and painful absence gapes a little bit more widely and becomes noticeably more painful. This got me thinking about the “God-hole,” as he put it.

To posit that the act of feeling abandonment is nothing less than feeling the reality of God...that presents a much trickier conundrum. The seeming impossibility consists in equating these two opposites, or at least identifying the Presence as dwelling within the absence.

The Hole⁵ Purpose

What does this God-hole do for us? Why did Saint John of the Cross write so beautifully about the dark night of the soul? Why did Mother Theresa’s journals reveal that for the majority of her ministry she felt the night so oppressively close in? Read any mystic or authentic theologian, and the same theme rears up over and over again, incessantly. Read Shusako Endo’s Silence or Karl Rahner’s Encounters with Silence, and you find authors and theologians struggling with the abyss.

Although I’ve engaged this absence before, I never realized that I’ve approached it mistakenly. When I ain’t feeling the love, I’ve stored up memories of engraced consolations -- in the words of Ignatius -- to hold on to, but the hole is a stark reminder of my own creatureliness. It forces an awareness of my own profound and total lack of self-sufficiency. It reminds that literally nothing I “have” -- neither the place or family I was born to, nor the friends I’ve made, nor my bodily health, nor my job, nor my romance -- remains under my control with any absolute certainty.

And so, the Suscipe of Ignatius becomes all the more real when directed at the God-hole:

Take, O Lord, and receive my liberty, my understanding, and my entire will. All that I have and call my own, You have given to me as untold gift. To You, Lord, I return it. Do with it according to Your will. Give me only your love and your grace, and I shall be rich enough and desire nothing more.

The confusion of the apparent paradox subsides: making this offering of self to the God-hole transforms it into a Presence. Nothing, mysteriously, becomes Something.

The Sinner and the Stumbling Block

The thought occurred to me last night that the words of Peter to Jesus in the Lukan call narrative, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” loosely echo and parallel the words of Jesus to Peter in Matthew 16: “Get behind me, Satan!” A note on translation here: Jesus isn’t calling Peter the devil, but using the Hebrew term satan, which means “obstacle” or “accuser”; if we read “Satan” as such, the words immediately following make a lot more sense, where Jesus directly calls Peter a stumbling block. Peter is apparently focusing too much on worldly things, understandably refusing the possibility that his dearest friend will be murdered. Refusal becomes the obstacle.

Naming my personal sinfulness and insufficiency opens up the path to cognizance of the sheer gratuitous nature of all that fills my life. Peter’s identification as a sinner on the banks of Gennesaret lead to discipleship, whereas his all-too-human refusal leads him to deny Jesus. When I am stuck in the rut of perceiving the God-hole solely as a hole, when my vision is so limited that I fail to understand it as the restlessness, the unquenchable longing and yearning for eschatological completion, it’s then that I become an obstacle and a stumbling block.

Like Peter, my focus hones in on my own “human concerns” rather than on the “concerns of God,” as Matthew quotes the Nazarene. Human concerns still possess legitimacy, but as I’m plummeting through the God-hole, grace becomes so proximate that it challenges my willingness to fall freely.

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1 I know I’ve written about this before, but this was in the context of another faith-sharing group. I know. Two faith-sharing groups. I need people to keep me on the straight and narrow. ^↩

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2 AHAHAHAHA GET IT?!^↩

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3 A philosopher of religion and theologian whose life bridged the 19th and 20th centuries, Otto posited that all religion begins with religious experience, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans: the earliest humans and every human thereafter experiences the numinous, the awe of that unknown which is beyond. C.S. Lewis has a lovely description of this concept in The Problem of Pain, wherein he articulates fear of the mysterium tremendum as being more like fear of a ghost than fear of a tiger. Fear of the former provokes spiritual awe, whereas fear of the latter consists of concern for bodily safety. ^↩

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4 A pastor by the name of Christian Piatt has written a fair bit on this, and although I’ve never read his work in any depth, this is the dude whom Keith referenced.^↩

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5 Excuse the second pun, please. I’m just in a mood.^↩

On Parkinson's Disease

by Dave Gregory

This is one of those self-indulgent posts, one of those things that’s more therapeutic for me than for anyone reading. Please know that this isn’t an invitation to a pity party; hopefully I’ll come to some worthwhile conclusions by the end of this.

Over the course of the next eight months, Dave Gregory, Jr. (me), will be going through a bunch of life changes that should really be undertaken over the course of several years: getting married, moving into a first house, maybe starting grad school again (that is, if the local public university’s education program would be willing to tolerate somebody working on a dissertation in theological curricula), sponsoring his wife-to-be as she converts to Catholicism, and having his parents follow him across the country from their home in Queens that’s been passed down through five generations of family.

As with the vast majority of things in life, it’s a weird mixture of mourning and celebration, of moments radiating consolation along with deep troughs of darkness. Part of me wonders if I should be seeing a therapist for all the stuff that’s going on right now.

Fifteen years ago, my father, David, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a reality which he kept secret from the school at which he taught labor and employment law for three decades. Three years ago, his university put on a dinner to celebrate his many years of service to the school. As the Dorothy Day Professor of Labor and Employment law, my dad had founded a center for the study of such, run countless conferences on the intersection of Catholic Social Teaching and the law, and had most notably raised hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars for student scholarships. At the event, friends and former students roasted him (which included donning shaggy grey wigs and his characteristic Hawaiian shirts), and by the end of the evening, he remained glued to his seat. Parkinson’s has the tendency to cause “freezing,” so they brought the microphone to him for some closing thoughts.

“I hope I’ve taught my students how to live,” he remarked, “but a number of years ago I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and now I hope to be able to teach my students how to die.”

Parkinson’s Just Sucks

Three months ago, David walked into a hospital with some fluid in his lungs, only to contract two urinary tract infections in rapid succession and totally lose all mobility. Beyond debilitating a person’s capacity to get around, Parkinson’s also impairs the ability to speak, and a substantial minority of patients also get a weird form of dementia. Rather than destroy the memory, Parkinson’s dementia brings on perpetual hallucinations and delusions. While my dad had been seeing cats and dogs for some time, and would occasionally attempt to escape a restaurant because he thought terrorists were in the building, the urinary infections and his hospitalization intensified these psychotic episodes, making them almost constant. I flew back to New York a couple of times, only to find that the man I once knew could no longer walk, communicate, or maintain a connection with reality. A feeding tube had been inserted in his stomach, in order to avoid the aspiration of unwanted matter into his lungs, and thus one of David’s chief joys -- eating -- has been stripped from him.

Two weeks ago, David arrived at a Portland nursing home by air ambulance; my mom climbed out of an ambulance’s passenger seat on the rainy evening of December 18th, and medics rolled him out of the back. Wide-eyed and fearful, David surveyed his new surroundings, and once he gained an awareness of his whereabouts, he was happy to see me. He fell asleep as my mom and I took inventory of his belongings. In sum, all this means that the rhythm of my life now changes: almost every day, I’ll be spending a couple of hours at the nursing home after school, and much of my weekends as well.

The Temptation to Despair

The temptation to despair lurks in the midst of all this. My mother, Garris, a living saint -- to use a contradiction in terms -- has spent every day of the past several months with her husband. Spending time with David can be immensely frustrating; given that he’s generally almost impossible to understand, you’ve got to close the door and mute the television before leaning down next to his face to hear his words. Your nose meets the putrid smell of a mouth that’s difficult to clean (given the risk of aspiration, the staff avoids putting liquids in his mouth unnecessarily), and the words he struggles to get out often make no sense. His most persistent delusion is that he’s on a boat. I mean, the dude used to love boat and ferry rides, so I hope this is a welcome delusion. Nonetheless, all in all, it’s not fun. Here’s an example of one conversation, which is rather typical:

David: I won the Academy Award two years ago for best acting.
Garris: You mean from the American Academy of Arbitrators?
David: No.
Me: Like the Academy Awards for movies?
David: Yes.

In the midst of seeming madness, there are moments of lucidity, for which we must remain grateful. A few days after settling into the nursing home, my dad awoke from a slumber and asked me, “Did I flip?” In a rare moment, his face seemed at peace; his facial muscles did not distort, his jaw did not tremor, his tongue did not loll out, and he looked at me calmly. “Yeah,” I responded, and proceeded to tell him that he was in Portland, so that I could visit him every day.

It’s not that David forgets anything or fails to recognize the people around him, it’s just that he often believes things that simply aren’t part of reality. Last Wednesday, in one such brief period of clarity, when the disease loosened its grip on his body and mind, the following conversation went down:

David: So this is it?
Garris: Is what it?
David: Is this how my life ends? I have to eat this terrible food? What if I want a turkey sandwich or a good steak?

And he began breaking down. His face resumed distortion, though not thanks to the disease. Sadness filled his face, and he wept.

The Practice of Dying Well

In my freshman philosophy class, my professor wisely remarked that philosophy is the practice of dying well. That’s why I became a philosophy major, I think. I want to die well. My friend Eric offered the insight -- quite truly -- that having my dad out in Portland will provide me closure as he approaches the end. And while this is completely accurate for me, I’m not so sure it’s true of my dad. All the friendships and acquaintances we make fade into the distance as life draws to a close. The significance of our worldly accomplishments mean little when eclipsed by adult diapers, sponge baths, Hoyer lifts, and tube feedings. These miniaturized crosses cast a grim shadow over all that anteceded them. This is the nature of things. The years wax and wane, and the relationships we’ve forged wane more so than they wax. Loneliness settles in, and we realize that we die as we are born: largely alone.

In the aforementioned conversation, my dad tearfully acknowledged that Ingrid, my parents’ housekeeper of almost two decades with whom they’ve become quite close, had visited him more than anyone else in New York. He wasn’t placing fault or blame, I don’t think, but rather coming to grips with the situation.

David has repeated on several occasions that he wants to die. I don’t know if he has months or years to live (at least, I don’t think he’s on the brink of death), though I do know that our souls and our bodies are intimately connected. In some mysterious way, our bodies respond to our minds. Maybe this desire for death will speed the shutdown of his body.

I just hope that I am enough.

I hope that I can help him die well.

I hope he still has things to teach me.

Deleting a Letter from the Kingdom

by Dave Gregory

When I started graduate school at a Methodist seminary, I had to take a number of required courses: ethics, systematics, inter-religious dialogue and leadership, et cetera. As a biblical studies dude (I realized about halfway through the program that I would become a Master of B.S., quite literally), I spent about two-thirds of my coursework in language classes and biblical seminars, but the material I found truly enlightening was within the aforementioned courses that aimed for breadth, rather than depth. Needless to say, studying systematics at a Methodist seminary that almost got kicked out of the Methodist church for training rabbis and imams... well... you know. Neither Aquinas nor Augustine made the systematic theology syllabus; rather, we read Jurgen Moltmann and Delores Williams, and delved into the wildness that is John Caputo.¹

However, in my ethics class -- the one that featured Hauerwas and Winkle and Yoder and consequently turned me into a pacifist -- I learned a new term ² that has radically altered the way in which I hear and engage the Bible and liturgical things and preaching and kind of everything that utilizes certain thematic elements of the Christian imagination.

This term isn’t really a new word. It’s just a remodeling of an existing word: all you gotta do is delete the “g” from “Kingdom”.

The Inadequacy of the Kingdom

For hundreds of years, the “Kingdom” provided a more realistic metaphor to Christians than it does to the 21st century mind. As a feudalistic serf or lord or something in between (you know, someone with a fine sense of absolute authority), I might have been able to understand the concept of God as King; even if a Cersei equivalent ruled over me with a tyrannical fist, I would be able to understand the yearning for a virtuous replacement. And when that righteous usurper did come, I could internalize the concept of their foreshadowing the true King, who would accept me into the Kingdom. The Hebrews would have understood this, I suppose, even though they were never intended to have a human king, as made clear in 1 Samuel 8:10-18:

So Samuel reported all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king. He said, “These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”

The Hebrew people got jealous of surrounding empires, wanted a king, threw a hissy fit, and got what they wanted, despite the fact that YHWH (their actual king) warned them of unavoidable exploitation. Every human leader will enslave their people in some way or another, will oppress rather than liberate, will force injustice for self-gain. If you and I are rather incapable of becoming moral paragons, how much more susceptible are political leaders to evil inclinations? Take a quick glance at Saul, David, and Solomon, the first three kings: Saul loses his mind through violence and commits suicide; David is a rapist and murderer; and Solomon -- for all his reported wisdom -- quickly descends into idolatry given his unbelievable sexual promiscuity (literally, according to accounts, hundreds of wives and concubines were involved in his infidelity).

Beyond the fact that the biblical kings all possess deep flaws, and just get worse and worse (except for a couple, like Josiah) as the sequence of rulers progresses, those of us sitting here in the 21st century don’t have a whole lot to go on. I mean, I’ve never even had a king to compare God to, so how can my imagination possibly begin to appreciate and acknowledge all the weight that the symbolism of kingship carries?

My point is this: the notion of God’s “Kingdom” doesn’t really cut it anymore for many of us. Emptied of potential meaning, its repeated colloquial usage subtly fosters unhelpful, and even destructive, notions surrounding any number of theological stuffs.

Down with Praise and Worship Music: A Brief Though Relevant Rant

To paraphrase Fr. Greg Boyle, S.J.: God doesn’t give a shit about our praise. I mean, think about it: what sort of a good king demands constant praise? Does Jon Snow³ make the Wildlings or Winterfellians constantly tell him how stupidly handsome he is? Did King Arthur force his knights to sing about how awesome he is? All that is more of a Joffrey Lannister⁴ move. And yet…

After attending any number of church services (both of Protestant and Catholic leanings) that involve contemporary ensembles, I’ve come to grasp that such musical inclinations arise from a desire to sing at the King: to tell him how wonderful he is, how beautiful his love is, how great his sacrifice is. My fiancée glances over at me whenever one of these songs that “magnify” God commences; I think she’s convinced that I’ll be driven to involuntarily vomit one day. I do not mean to bash those who connect with God through praise and worship. In my mind, anything that fosters greater love for God is awesome. However, love of God isolated from love of neighbor means nothing, and my theological beef with much⁵ contemporary music is this: it ignores community in favor of the Kingdom.

Let’s face the facts here. While praise and worship can be quite moving, so long as it echoes the sentiments of the seraphim in Isaiah 6 (“Holy, Holy, Holy, is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!”) -- whose entire existences revolve around filling the heavens with song -- humans are not angels. We were not created with and for that purpose. Jesus is not Joffrey, after all. I have trouble reading the Gospels and thinking to myself, “Man, I should go sing to Jesus about how great he is, because that’s what he wants from my life.” I just can’t escape the feeling that the Incarnation did not happen in order that God could be sung at.

In reality, according to the first bits of Acts, the response of the Christian community to the Spirit is not singing praise and worship, but intentional community (Acts 2:43-47):

Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

And just to be clear, first century Temple worship did *not* look anything like contemporary praise and worship music. These disciples’ Temple sacrifices fed their community life, and vice versa. Praise and worship music, in icky contrast, tends toward individualistic consumerism, honing in on the guarantee of personal salvation because I praise and worship so damned well. Salvation becomes a financial contract, with a currency consisting of moral worthiness (at its best) or intellectual assent (at its worst). And praise and worship music does so precisely because the destination is the “Kingdom,” whose entry into which I want so badly.

Take the final two stanzas of “In Christ Alone” as one example among limitless others. Despite its gorgeous melody, these lyrics are abominable. Granted, there is a little bit of Christus Victor ⁶ in here, but nonetheless it emphasizes an understanding of salvation as transactional (“bought with the precious blood”), and removes all personal agency and freedom from the picture (“Jesus commands my destiny”). Note how it’s all about me, me, me, me, and more me.

There in the ground His body lay,
Light of the world by darkness slain;
Then bursting forth in glorious day,
Up from the grave He rose again!
And as He stands in victory,
Sin’s curse has lost its grip on me;
For I am His and He is mine—
Bought with the precious blood of Christ. 

No guilt in life, no fear in death—
This is the pow’r of Christ in me;
From life’s first cry to final breath,
Jesus commands my destiny.
No pow’r of hell, no scheme of man,
Can ever pluck me from His hand;
Till He returns or calls me home—
Here in the pow’r of Christ I’ll stand.

Blech.

The Kin-dom⁷ of God

Re-imagining the Kingdom as the Kin-dom does a number of things, I’ve come to see.

First, it forces our imaginations to engage a new perspective on what we’re all about, as followers of the Nazarene. The standard understanding of salvation -- as N.T. Wright points out in his excellent The Day the Revolution Began -- has been so thoroughly platonized over the centuries that we’ve lost sight of the biblical understanding. Salvation is not so much about us going from “here” to “there”⁸ as it is about “here” and “there” colliding: hence Revelation (chapter 21) and the second letter of Peter (chapter 3) speak of “a new heaven and a new earth”. The Bible’s various perspectives on eschatology do not so much advocate this world’s obliteration, but its transformation. Jesus does the same in his prayer, petitioning for the kin-dom to come, that it might be realized “on earth as it is in heaven.”

Second, the Kin-dom invites us to long for salvation not as a strictly individualistic matter, but a thing in and through which we become bound to one another in a radical solidarity. Neither bought nor earned, salvation is a thing that becomes and grows in the here and now. The Gospels make this glaringly apparent, at least when we sit down and read any one of them straight through: with each healing and exorcism, the Kin-dom pierces through the earthly plane a little bit more.

Third, and most importantly, the Kin-dom advocates a position of fierce subversion: we can sit by and wait to enter the Kingdom, but the Kin-dom requires our cooperation, for the Kin-dom -- though it be the not yet -- still properly belongs to the immanent. Should we begin to see that salvation is less about a transaction and more about a salve-ing, less about personal purity than about communal authenticity, maybe we’d kick things into a higher gear: the groans of birthing would grow stronger.

The Kingdom has clear boundaries. Some lay without, others within, whereas the Kin-dom has no boundaries. All these walls we construct, these walls that barricade the other from my presence, echo the structure of a kingdom. The simple radicality of the Kin-dom, though, reacts against both our natural inclinations and the exclusivist logic of the world. It demolishes those fabricated barriers we so willingly erect, for by its very definition, it cannot be anything other than unconditionally inclusive.

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1 Respectively: a super cool liberation-y Reformed theologian, a Black Womanist biblical scholar, and a post-Christian theologian/philosopher. The Crucified God, Sisters in the Wilderness, and The Weakness of God all shifted my theological perspective tremendously, especially when I figured out I could put them into dialogue with one another. ^↩

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2 This occurred in the most unassuming of ways. Each week, we were required to post a written response on a forum before our in-person meetings, and respond to the posts of two others. One student kept referring to the “Kin-dom” in her writings, and it slowly began to sink into my own vocabulary. My stubborn Catholic instinct initially dismissed it as silliness, but now it’s the only way I think about the “Kingdom”. ^↩

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3 For the uninitiated, Jon is the dreamy hero of Game of Thrones; humble and courageous, Jon possesses strikingly tamed curly locks.^↩

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4 Once again, for the uninitiated, Joffrey is the main a-hole in the Game of Thrones universe; he is a teenaged sadist who thinks far too highly of his golden locks and does all manner of unspeakable acts.^↩

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5 Maybe most. Or all. I dunno.^↩

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6 A more accurate understanding of the Paschal mystery, methinks, as advanced by the earliest theologians: the resurrection does not so much signify unlocking the gates of paradise in some weird equation, but marks the radical transformation of reality, for death no longer has the final word on our existence, as Christ has proven victorious over death.^↩

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7 In writing this post, I realized I had no idea as to this word’s origins, but some Googling yielded liberation theologian Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz. Yay her!^↩

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8 Salvation becomes platonized insofar as it takes Plato’s two worlds -- the realm of shadows and the realm of Forms -- and turns them into earth and Heaven. ^↩