Nations and Kingdoms: Some Inconclusive Thoughts on Patriotism, Freedom, and all That

This reflection has been composed gradually over the past week—before, during, and after July 4.

As an American citizen, I struggle with July 4^th.  I struggle with July 4^th because I struggle with patriotism.  I struggle with patriotism both as a manifest reality and as an idea.

I know that there are other notions of patriotism than “my country, right or wrong.”  I know that there is an actual, active, and vital tradition of defining patriotism as loyalty and obedience to the ideals that a nation supposedly embodies as opposed to the nation itself.  But, even when it’s framed that way, I still have a problem with patriotism.  I struggle with patriotism and its representative holiday always, even when I like the president and feel kind of okay about the shape of the country.  Neither of those things are the case right now, and so my nausea is a little more pronounced this year, but that’s a small matter.  I would feel at least a bit of this anyway.

Even if patriotism is framed as loyalty and obedience to principles instead of the nation, I still struggle with the notion precisely because of those two ideas—loyalty and obedience.  The core of my struggle is that I am a Christian, and as such I have placed my loyalty and obedience elsewhere.  I briefly did some teaching in a few public high schools recently, and I always found it a surreal and troubling experience when I was asked to lead my class in the pledge of allegiance to the American flag in the mornings.  I would pray the Lord’s Prayer aloud with my congregation each week for gathered worship and on my own in my private time of devotion, affirming my citizenship in the kingdom of Christ “on earth as it is in heaven” before any other group, organization, or system.  I was always irked by the persisting thought that it was either one or the other, that I needed either to affirm my loyalty to the reign of God in the kingdom of Christ or to the visible powers of the governing bodies of my geographical home.  And the fact that a sizable and visible portion of American Christians seem to feel no such tension only made this all the more irksome.  Think of all the common phrases—faith and family, God and country—that imply an inseparable link between one’s spiritual identity and one’s national or familial identity.  Think of all the patriotic services that go on in so many churches with so few eyes batted or brows furrowed. 

Given these dispositions of mine, it should be no surprise that I always wince a little at the word freedom.  If I’m in the right mood, all the things that I’ve been told about this abstract noun over the years begin replaying in my mind, only in a sardonic, mocking, and slightly slurred voice (you know the one):  Freedom isn’t free.  It’s more important than life itself.  It’s what we as Americans have that no one else in the world has in the right way or to the right degree.  It’s why the terrorists hate us.  More thoughtful and principled reflections on this word might state that freedom is a right that comes with responsibility; that freedom is given up when one breaks the law or fails to earn one’s keep.  On the other hand, I have often had such questions as “why did you throw all five of those cheeseburger wrappers out the window of your car” or “why did you drink three two-liter bottles of soda today” answered with “because this is America, dammit!”  Freedom, for some, means that I can do whatever I want whenever I want to, and anyone who tells me that maybe I shouldn’t do whatever I want whenever I want to needs to get their head out of their ass and mind their business.

My own church congregation does nothing in our services to commemorate this national holiday, and I am grateful for that.  This past Sunday, however, one of our hymns did offer a reflection on this word freedom and how it might be understood for a person of Christian faith.  The hymn is a setting of the canticle of Zechariah, found in the first chapter of Luke.  The music and text adaptation are both the work of a friend of prodigious musical ability and theological insight.  The text adaptation frames verses 74-75 of this chapter of Luke as a comment on “true liberty,” which is “to be holy, to be righteous, in His sight throughout our days.”  Freedom, in Zechariah’s song, is the freedom to be holy.

To a Christian, to be holy is to be like Christ.  To increase in holiness is to be transformed into the image of Christ.  And St. Paul gives a sweeping and lyrical explanation of what this might mean in the Christ-hymn in his letter to the Philippians (2:5-11):

                   Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he was in the form of God,
    did not regard equality with God
    as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
    taking the form of a slave,
    being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
     he humbled himself
    and became obedient to the point of death—
    even death on a cross.

 Therefore God also highly exalted him
    and gave him the name
    that is above every name,
 so that at the name of Jesus
    every knee should bend,
    in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
 and every tongue should confess
    that Jesus Christ is Lord,
    to the glory of God the Father.

There is so much going on here that my head is spinning and singing.  The second half of this hymn declares in no uncertain terms that Jesus Christ is the authority to which every person and every nation, every citizen and every governing body, will finally answer.  For a Christian, this should make pledging allegiance to anyone or anything else extremely uncomfortable at best.  But Paul has just held up the mind of Christ to his audience as the pattern of their transformation, what their freedom to be holy allows them to approach.  And the first half of this hymn tells us that this mind is a mind that knows its position of privilege and relinquishes it for others.  It is a mind that relinquishes privilege in order to exist in solidarity with the slave.  It is a mind that does not place its own safety and well-being above that of others, but instead voluntarily gives up its own life—not even as a fighter or as a warrior, but in complete humility.

All the talk of freedom that happens around this time every year here in the U.S. makes me so uncomfortable because it usually takes a tone that is drastically different from the tone of this hymn.  Freedom, according to many of the voices that I hear, means the ability to protect and safeguard my own rights and my own way of life.  It means the ability to deny others what they want or what they need when those things cause me discomfort.  It means the ability to wield one’s beliefs and convictions as a sword against those whose beliefs and convictions I find abhorrent or inconvenient.

So what am I saying here?  Am I saying that I hate my country?  No.  I find the land on which the United States has grown up and the cultures made up by the people who inhabit it to be endlessly fascinating, endearing, and inspiring.  The history of my nation is a sweeping story that engages my mind and my heart, and it is a story in which I cannot help but situate myself.  The ideals that undergird our political system—that power only works when shared and kept accountable, that every individual should have the right and the ability to realize their place in the whole—are inspiring and noble even if they have often been articulated and embodied by deeply flawed leaders and thinkers.  Even if they have not yet been realized.

Am I saying that I have attained the mind of Christ, or have disciplined myself to learn the freedom to be holy in all my ways?  No.  I see the very ills that I decry in our contemporary American notions of freedom so clearly because I know them to be a part of my own history and my own patterns of living.  Not only am I knowingly and unknowingly complicit in the ills of our social machine by which the oppressed are marginalized, ignored, or trampled upon; I am also guilty of pushing away friends and family, the very people that I am not habitually blinded to, for the sake of my own convenience.  I, too, often live as if freedom means I can do whatever I want whenever I want to, regardless of who may be hurt in the process.

I am simply saying that I want to understand freedom as entering into the holy free-flow through which I am emptied of myself—my privilege, security, and well-being—so that others may be filled with a measure of these very things.  So that, thus emptied, I might be filled again not by pulling myself up by my bootstraps but through receiving the same free-flow of grace.  When I think of this freedom, it includes freedom from the things that I think I want and need so that I might be transformed through experiencing a will other than my own. 

I don’t know a way forward in this.  I don’t have a concluding statement about how to redeem the notion of patriotism or come to a better understanding of how my objective identity as a citizen of the United States does and should relate to the other identity that I claim as more foundational and to which I do pledge allegiance.  But maybe the closest thing I can muster to patriotism is the faint hope that even nations can repent, can free themselves of their own self-conceptions and realize that power and privilege can be given up.  But, again, I also hope that I can learn to embody these things in my own smaller way.   

Going Limp: Flannery O'Connor and Ottessa Moshfegh

One night I had a dream that Gigi told me to make a radio program out of the demon voices inside of me.  I did so, and when I put the program on the air, the world heard the evil things the demons were saying, and everybody went crazy and killed themselves.  In bed, as I dreamed, I became paralyzed.  The ceiling opened up and an alien spaceship lasered down a powerful ray of vacuous light and exorcised all the demons out through my chest.  It took about ten seconds.
                                     -Ottessa Moshfegh, “The Surrogate”

note to flannery o’connor: most people are just regular
                                    -Patricia Lockwood tweeting for Strand Book Store

I picked up Ottessa Moshfegh’s short story collection Homesick for Another World for two reasons.  The first was the presentation of the book itself.  The title evoked an existential, quasi-religious sort of ennui that immediately struck a chord with me on the particular day that I came across it.  The cover art, featuring a flying saucer speeding through a cloudy sky and a small and limp human form being lifted off the ground by a tractor beam, added to this compelling title the further appeal of science-fiction iconography.  Already this seemed right up my alley.  When I opened the book to read the dust jacket, I was given the last piece of evidence that I needed to take this collection and read it—Moshfegh is proclaimed in the liner notes as “our Flannery O’Connor.” 

I first encountered O’Connor in an undergraduate literature course.  At the time her spiritual vision—of a Christ who had to break through humanity’s prideful and clueless stubbornness with the violent force of tough-love—was something that I needed to keep me hanging on to the Christian faith in which I had been raised.  Years later, while working on a Master’s thesis on O’Connor’s fiction, I again found her work crucial to my still-developing faith.  This time, though, it was different.  I found within myself the need to articulate my faith if not against O’Connor’s vision then at least in a way that tempered it significantly.  Humanity’s prideful and stubborn cluelessness I could still acknowledge, but I found myself craving something that O’Connor rarely offers in her work:  Divine gentleness. 

Upon beginning Moshfegh’s collection, I immediately saw the merit of the comparison to O’Connor.  Though set largely on the west coast of the United States, clear across the country from O’Connor’s Deep South, Moshfegh’s stories led me into familiar territory.  Like O’Connor’s work, the tales in Homesick for Another World are populated by absurd caricatures and ridiculous figures whose idiosyncrasies, while often hilarious, render them decidedly grotesque.  Also like O’Connor, however, Moshfegh’s characters are imminently relatable, summoning up the reader’s sympathy and pity just as easily as they may inspire revulsion.  They, too, seem to be waiting for an upsetting but saving intrusion that may pave the way for what we might call, if a bit tiredly, redemption. 

Though these similarities are clear, there are some critical ways in which Moshfegh’s aesthetic diverges from O’Connor’s.  It is in these differences, I believe, that she shines a new light, providing a valuable counterpoint.

The first significant difference is that Moshfegh’s stories have no overt religious or theological underpinning.  There are certain religious details in the backdrop of a few of her stories—the alcoholic math teacher at the center of “Bettering Myself” works for a Catholic school and the troubled siblings of “A Better Place” seem to attend a similar school—there is no consistent presence of any institutional faith as there is in O’Connor’s stories.  Nor should there need to be.  There is, however, a biting and incisive picture of capitalist consumer-culture and the degrees to which individuals invest their identities in acquiring and consuming.  My favorite example of this, perhaps, is Nick, the narrator of “Dancing in the Moonlight.”  Nick is thirty-three years old and self-consciously living through his “Jesus year,” in honor of which he has grown his hair out long.  Nick lives a strangely ascetic life in the small room he rents in a decrepit flophouse.  His existence is nebulous, with little evidence of attachment or connection to anyone other than his friend Mark, who has moved on to a defined and controlled family life that Nick seems to view with more than a little disdain.  His small income as a graphic designer goes toward expensive clothes, cappuccino, and alcohol.  The inertia of his life, it seems, is carefully walled up by the cultivation of style and comfort.  The story chronicles Nick’s infatuation with a woman who sells refurbished furniture and the ridiculous quest that this sends him on, momentarily breaking his inertia with a sense of absurd aspiration and momentum.  Upon the end of the story, Nick returns to find a fire raging in his flophouse, perhaps (but not certainly) due to his negligence with a heater, and he declares the fire an “act of God.”  This wonderfully ambiguous line leaves the reader (well, leaves me at least) uncertain as to whether Nick means that a force beyond his control has freed him from the symbol of his life of passive consumption, or if he is simply deflecting responsibility in extension of this mode of existence.  

O’Connor’s stories bring her characters to moments of loss—sometimes violent or deadly, but often simply humiliating—in order to force them to a transformative moment that they would never have reached on their own.  Moshfegh’s stories often bring her characters into contact with these moments only to see them sliding by them, correcting course back into tortured mediocrity.  There is a beautiful way, however, in which this refusal to transform is itself the sort of trauma that O’Connor wanted so badly for her readers to believe could be healing, and this leaves me guardedly hopeful for most of Moshfegh’s characters.

But, honestly, transformation doesn’t seem to be the point.  And it is the second difference between Moshfegh’s fiction and O’Connor’s that I find more telling as to what the point, if there is one, might be.

This difference is evident from the passage excerpted at the beginning of this post.  Notice the first person?  That’s it.  Moshfegh’s stories are often delivered in the first person, and it makes all the difference in the world.

O’Connor’s stories, to the very last one, come to us through the voice of a third person narrator who is…many things.  Although capable of moments of cutting compassion and sublime transcendence, O’Connor’s narrator is also merciless in presenting the deluded egos of O’Connor’s characters and, usually, the shattering of those egos.  Through the eyes of this narrator, readers can easily discern the cultural and intellectual patterns by which these characters enmesh themselves in false-selves (Southern cultural/religious gentility in stories like “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Greenleaf”, academic/artistic elitism in “The Enduring Chill” and “Everything That Rises Must Converge”, and a host of others).  This perspective is perfect for the process of caricature-critique in which O’Connor engages, but it usually leaves the reader unable to discern any sort of self-awareness on the part of the characters.  Generally (though with some possible exception) O’Connor’s characters appear confoundingly unaware of their own hypocrisy, self-contradiction, absurdity, and callousness.  It is this stubborn refusal to see the cracks in their own edifices that, in O’Connor’s world, necessitates their shattering to make room for something more spiritually authentic.  This aesthetic makes O’Connor’s moments of violent transcendence utterly captivating.  I have come to believe, though, that the disposition of the narrative voice makes O’Connor’s depiction of the human psyche and its motivations frustratingly problematic. 

This is why I appreciate what Moshfegh does with her first-person narratives.  Although Moshfegh’s characters are often as absurd or clueless as O’Connor’s (particularly in the third-person narratives like “An Honest Woman”), the use of first person in some of the stories allows readers to see that these characters are, in fact, aware of the cracks in their edifices.  It also allows readers to see that the efforts to keep the edifice intact despite these cracks are exhausting and agonizing to these characters in ways that would never be evident from a third-person narrator that is not committed to sympathy.  Nick from “Dancing in the Moonlight” gives a glimpse of this in describing his lonely Christmas-night visit to a patron-less bar staffed by a lone woman who, for just a moment, he feels is scorning him:

So much of my life I’d been faking my reactions, claiming to myself and others that I liked what I
liked because I believed it was good for me, while in fact I didn’t like that shit at all.  This woman could see that I wanted to be ruined.  I wanted someone…to come and destroy me.

Not all of these confessional moments, however, contain as much direct self-loathing as Nick’s.  Stephanie, the narrator of the story “The Surrogate,” is my favorite.  Committed to upholding and enacting an unfailingly attractive public personae by virtue of her job, Stephanie is locked out of true physical intimacy “due to a pituitary situation” (I’ll let you read about this yourself, should you choose).  Stephanie’s physical abnormality is accompanied by an agonized sense of her own perceived internal inadequacies—articulated beautifully, I believe, in the passage with which this post begins.  Of all Moshfegh’s characters, Stephanie’s story is the one that comes the closest to something we might call healing, and, though it is not in the fashion of her flying-saucer-dream, I think it is her dream that gives me a centralizing theme for Moshfegh’s stories. 

A small emblem on the cover of Homesick for Another World depicts something much like what Stephanie describes from her dream.  A human form stands beneath a descending ray of light.  The person looks for all the world as if he or she is going limp, ready to be pulled up in the tractor beam or simply overtaken by this alien ray.  “Resistance is futile,” the posture seems to say.  “I know because I’ve tried.”  Moshfegh does not bring her characters to the same moments of ego-shattering trauma that O’Connor does in her expressions of divine tough-love.  What Moshfegh does, however, is beautifully depict characters whose way forward is going limp,  allowing the flow to carry them somewhere beyond the comfortable confines of their ego-prisons.  Whether they achieve this posture or not is not often clear, but the rendering of the struggle is hilarious, uncomfortably familiar, and irresistibly poignant. 

I said, “On a good day, every small thing is enchanting.  Everything is a miracle.  There is no emptiness.  There is no need for forgiveness or escape or medicine.  I hear only the wind in the trees, and my devils hatching their sacral plans, fusing all the shattered pieces together into a blanket of ice.  I have found that it’s under that ice that I can feel I am just another normal person.  In the dark and cold, I am at ‘peace.’”      
                                    -Ottessa Moshfegh, “The Surrogate”     

*Quotations taken from Ottessa Moshfegh’s Homesick for Another World, published by Penguin Press in 2017.  

Planted More Deeply

*A note:  This piece was originally written in late January of this year. 

We affirm God’s goodness at the heart of humanity, planted more deeply than all that is wrong.

I had never uttered such words in prayer.  I had never spoken them aloud on my own; much less had I ever spoken them together with others in the context of gathered worship.  At first I wasn’t sure that I was allowed to.  In my life as a Christian I had heard a great deal about human sinfulness, a great deal about “total depravity,” and a great deal about how to work against one’s own grain in order to take on a fuller likeness of Christ.  But rarely, rarely had I heard an affirmation that perhaps the divine image in which our own scripture tells us we were created may still, despite all the mess we have made of things, be the truer, fuller picture of who we are as individuals and as a species.  And even when I had heard such affirmations, I had often received them as “our little secret”—a bit of accepted heterodoxy that would not fly outside of the small circles in which we dared to speak such words.

Yet after arriving on the Isle of Iona in August of 2016 I found myself praying these words in gathered worship every morning, as they pulse at the heart of the Iona Community’s liturgy of morning prayer.  At first I wasn’t sure if I believed them even as they escaped my lips.  Whether they were true of the world at large was questionable; that they could be true of me as an individual was unthinkable.  But as I lived out my eleven weeks on this small island in the Scottish Hebrides, among the most sacred of places to British and Celtic expressions of Christianity, these simple and beautiful words wore away at my defenses.  As I prayed, worshipped, and worked with a breathtaking group of people gathered from places it had never occurred to me to imagine going, I began to suspect that this affirmation might be true.  As I ate and laughed, sang and danced, talked and cried with these same people, I could no longer deny either this affirmation’s truthfulness or its vital importance. 

There are many ways one’s heart may be broken open.  One’s heart may be broken open with goodness. 

After my time with this community was over, I spent my first night alone in a cramped and crowded hostel in Fort William, at the foot of the Scottish Highlands.  I awoke in the morning with a start, for all the world as if I had come out of the darkest of dreams.  The grief of parting from the faces, places, touches, and voices of the island was still so palpable that I felt momentarily unmoored.  Before the light of morning I climbed out of bed and left the room that I had shared with roughly seven other people to whom I had spoken not one word.  In the silence and stillness of the hostel’s common room I pulled my Iona Abbey worship book from my backpack and opened to the liturgy of morning prayer.  Though on my own, I breathed deeply of the building’s musty air and let myself settle into the familiar words, offering them up as a supplication that I might find community around me even in the coming days as a wandering American vagabond in Scotland. 

We affirm God’s goodness at the heart of humanity, planted more deeply than all that is wrong.

At the close of prayer my spirit surged with a new sense of the vitality from which I had felt utterly cut off only a few moments before.  Through the bay window across the room I could see the sunrise revealing the trees on the sides of For William’s hills—blazing autumnal torches swaddled in the eerily beautiful mist of late October.

I knew that in the coming days no one I met would be a stranger.

***

Only two days later I found myself back in Fort William.  I had just spent two evenings in Portree, taking in the rugged, remote, and often abrasive beauty of the Isle of Skye.  En route to Glencoe, my bus stopped in Fort William for a half-hour break in the early afternoon.  Though I had had a late night the evening before, even the best bus seats make sleep difficult, and so I took the opportunity to walk around the corner to a small coffee shop to refuel.  After buying a cup of coffee I walked back around to the bus station to find a spot to wait until my journey resumed. 

This is where I met Alan.     

Alan is the name by which I’ll be calling the middle-aged man who approached me as I leaned against the outside wall of the bus station drinking my coffee.  His appearance was professional from crown to toe, from his haircut to his clothing to the briefcase that he carried with him.  Other than this, though, the first thing that I noticed about Alan was the immense exhaustion that peered out from behind his eyes.  He had the look of a man who had had a long day in a long week in a long month in a long year.  He greeted me very politely, and then asked for some information on bus timetables that I couldn’t give him (I wasn’t yet the seasoned bus-riding veteran that I would be by the end of that week).  I apologized for being unable to help him, but he would hear none of it.

“Not a problem,” he said.  “At least you can speak English.  It’s so hard to find someone who speaks bloody English these days.”

It was evident from my accent that I was American, so next came the question that I was only just becoming accustomed to answering:  “What are you doing in Scotland?”  I explained that I had just finished an eleven-week stint as a volunteer for the Iona Community, an international and ecumenical Christian organization that operates centers on the Isle of Iona.  Having finished my time there, I was taking ten days to play the role of a vagrant tourist in Scotland before heading back to East Tennessee. 

Alan seemed fascinated by all of this, but especially by my current status as an anchorless wanderer.  “So you’re just living out of that backpack, then?” he asked with a mixture of admiration, amusement, and incredulity.  I explained that I wasn’t, really, as I also had a large suitcase stowed away underneath the bus, but that didn’t seem to diminish his bafflement.

I asked Alan a bit about himself.  I learned that he had recently moved back to Edinburgh after spending several years in London.  A recent divorce and an antipathy to the larger city had instigated a return to his home place, though it didn’t sound as if homecoming had been treating him all that well of late.  He had stopped in Fort William on his way to a temporary home, as his flat in Edinburgh had recently suffered severe fire damage.  He had lost many of his possessions, and didn’t know if he would be able to move back in or not.  As he told me this story, the exhaustion I had earlier noted on his face became more apparent and more explicable.  This guy was having a rough go.

Alan didn’t seem to want to dwell on this particular misfortune, though.  He was far more interested in the future.

“But what about you all in the States?  Who the hell is going to be president?”

I had been asked one or another variation of this question many, many times since arriving in Scotland.  While this had often led to fruitful conversation, it had also taught me how to be tactful but brief.  I explained that there were many things that troubled me about my country’s state, but that at the end of the day my primary wish was that Donald Trump not be our president.

And somewhere a switch flicked.

Alan cut in immediately and almost sharply.  “I disagree,” he said, his tired eyes turning inward to search out the fire that he would need for what he had to say next.  He admired Trump’s tough stance on immigration.  He went on to deliver a passionate denunciation of the troubles he felt that immigration posed to a national culture, about the unnecessary friction created when people with vastly different ways of life tried to share the same space.  “Just go to London and see what it’s like,” he said.  It was just a bunch of people who didn’t know how to communicate with one another, who couldn’t agree on any shared values, bumping into one another and pissing each other off.  Suddenly his comments about having so much trouble finding someone who “speaks bloody English” in an English-speaking country were cast in a clearer light.  Alan’s intensity flared up through his evident tiredness, and it came to a head with one summative declaration:  “Multiculturalism just doesn’t work.”

I bristled at his words.  My heart and mind were still singing with my recent multicultural experience, and these declarations seemed to be coming from an alien world.  To be sure, the people I had lived and worked with on Iona had been bound together by English as a common language.  To be sure, the culture of our life together rested on many of the traditions of Britain and Scotland (I became fonder of tea than I ever thought possible for a committed coffee-addict, and fonder of ceilidh dancing than I ever thought possible for such an awkward guy).  But the culture that we formed and in which we lived together was really not about any of these things.  Such delight poured through the cracks.  Our varying degrees of English-proficiency opened us to the joy of learning one another’s languages.  Our common sharing of certain British cultural norms gave us the opportunity to offer up the things that we loved about our own home cultures, to share them and to invite others into the comfort that they could bring.  And our twice-daily (at least) gatherings of prayer and worship fixed our minds on the fact that we had come to the island to lose ourselves—language, culture, and all—in the light of something larger and more important.  Warmer, more radiant, and more loving.  This was the air I had breathed for eleven weeks.  As I listened to Alan’s words, defensiveness rose in me.  Unexpectedly, I found myself becoming angry.

But somewhere a switch flicked.

I can only call it grace, because it pierced through my immediately defensive disposition without my willing it, stealing away my anger.  Through the fiery frustration in Alan’s eyes I could see the same inescapable exhaustion that I had first noticed when we met.  What did I really know about this man?  He seemed bitter about multiculturalism, perhaps even violently so, to be sure.  But he was also wounded.  I thought of his apartment, his possessions, his marriage, and it became difficult for me to disentangle the resentment I heard in his political statements from the misfortunes that had so clearly left him raw.  I opened my mouth to answer him, hardly able to guess at what was going to come out of it.

From somewhere, words came.  I said that I couldn’t agree with him because I believed I had seen multiculturalism work.  I spoke of the beautiful expression of international faith and community in which I had been privileged to participate on Iona.  I spoke of the small but significant ways in which I had seen the same fruit growing from a similar soil of faith and compassion back home in Tennessee—in my church, on college and university campuses, from communities and organizations that were committed to making friends out of strangers despite the most seemingly insurmountable cultural barriers.  I did not use these words, but I believe that I was describing the Kingdom of God—or at least some small and precious reflections of it. 

“This is my experience,” I said at the last.  “But we all speak from our own experience, don’t we?”

“Yes,” Alan said with the smallest tinge of skepticism in his voice.  “I suppose we do.”

A few moments later the driver opened the door of my bus, signaling that it was time to resume my journey to Glencoe.  I thanked Alan for the company and the conversation, offering my condolences for his recent losses and my best wishes for the coming days. 

His eyes lit up as he offered his parting words.  “Do be safe in your travels!  I hope you enjoy your time here!”  On his face was an unmistakable and unaffected smile that told me we would both remember this as a good encounter.  It could so easily have been otherwise. 

***

We affirm God’s goodness at the heart of humanity, planted more deeply than all that is wrong.

To make such an affirmation is not to be naïve.  It is not to turn a blind eye to the brutal ugliness that human beings produce as they live together in the world.  What honest person could do so?

To make such an affirmation is to recognize that we don’t get to subject any person to any test—political, doctrinal, or ethical—before we affirm that God’s goodness resides in that person.  It does.  End of story.  Or, rather, not the end of the story, but the only true and necessary beginning to any story.  To pre-emptively build walls between ourselves and others because their beliefs, their cultures, or their ways of life make us afraid is to close the book before the story has even begun, to deny the story a chance even to get started.  We can’t do that.  But those of us who feel that we have digested this message and are working to live it out must realize that neither do we get to write off any of our neighbors simply because we see in them our own categories of anathema—racism, sexism, nationalism, or any other form of xenophobia.  We name these things, we denounce these things, we stand up to these things, yes.  But we do not in doing so deny the essential humanity that we share with those who espouse them.  And in the global scene that begins to take shape in the era of Trump, that work may be harder still.

I am a Christian.  So what does this mean for those of us who name ourselves as such?

For many who share my faith this affirmation may seem questionable, uncomfortable, or even heretical.  I am no theologian, but I don’t think that it is any of these things.  In the Iona Community’s morning liturgy this affirmation follows directly on the heels of another, equally foundational one:  We affirm that we are made in God’s image, befriended by Christ, empowered by the Spirit.  To affirm “God’s goodness at the heart of humanity, planted more deeply than all that is wrong” is simply to accept the implications of our belief that we are made in God’s own image.  Down to the very last one of us.  And if we affirm this, could it not be that to be transformed into the image of Christ is to allow Christ to draw that image out in friendship, no matter how many layers of “all that is wrong” have to be traversed before we get a clear picture of it?  And could it not be that the necessary response to that is for us, empowered by the Spirit, to do the same?  As Christ has done for us, to pierce through all of the worn and the weary and the ugly and the broken bits of those we find around us until we are gifted with a glimpse of that deeper and more foundational goodness?  To refuse to close the book until we have found it?  And then, like Jesus, to draw that goodness out in friendship through all that is wrong?

I don’t know what has happened to Alan in the days since our paths crossed.  I don’t know if he has found a place to live, if he has found some reasons to smile, if he has found any peace.  But I do know that, through nothing that either of us did, we uncovered some goodness in one another in our brief encounter.  Such a thing seems so much harder, so much more daunting, here at home where the stakes now seem so high.  But I hope to continually train my eyes to see through all that is wrong to the smaller but more luminous seed of goodness that is planted beneath.  To give it space and make it grow.  My hope is that what I do here on this blog will be one way for me to train my eye to see this seed in our world and its people, and also in that place where it seems hardest to find—in myself.    

    

A Home for Words

Intentions are funny things.  Especially considering what often happens to them.

I created this blog in the early days of August last year.  It was one of a number of things I was trying to do in a flurry over the course of a week.  I was a busy guy, simultaneously trying to transfer the bulk of my worldly goods from a small one-bedroom apartment to a storage unit roughly one block away and preparing myself to leave the country for three months.  On the eighth day of that month I would be boarding a plane for a series of flights that would take me to Glasgow, Scotland, on a journey that would ultimately find me arriving on the Isle of Iona, where I would spend eleven weeks working as a volunteer for the Iona Community. 

I was excited about this.  I was also nervous.  There were ways in which I knew what to expect from these eleven weeks, but there were even more ways in which I felt I was stepping into a luminous but obscure mist stretching out over roughly three months of my coming life.  I knew without question, however, that I wanted to pay attention to what unfolded on this pilgrimage.  I wanted to process it, to meditate on it, to be attentive to whatever had been prepared for my eyes and ears, my touch and taste and smell. 

And so I created this blog.

One morning less than a week before my departure I sat down in a comfy chair at my favorite coffee shop and set all of this up.  From my chair I could see out onto the main street of Johnson City, TN and watch as it lived out the early hours of this day.  We were in the middle of an oppressively hot summer, so I was happy to have an indoor task to occupy my attention.  I was pleased with myself.  I now had an outlet ready to share my thoughts, feelings, and impressions from my time on Iona (however that might end up looking) with the audience that I had convinced myself might exist.  I even gave it what I thought was a snappy title derived from one of my favorite authors, Italo Calvino. I chose a background that I thought might possess some approximate resemblance to the Scottish landscape in which I would be living and working.  This was going to be great.  Then, on the tenth day of the month, I arrived on Iona.

And through the eleven weeks that I spent there I never once posted anything here. 

I wrote, to be sure.  A journal full of details and reflections is one of the most valuable physical objects that came back with me to Tennessee.  None of those things, though, ever made it to digital form.

Now I am once again sitting in a comfy chair in my favorite coffee shop, looking out on the main street of Johnson City.  The inviting view of a sunny spring day doesn’t look all that much different from the summer’s day on which I set up this blog almost nine months ago.  I have been home from Scotland for a little over six months, and a lot has happened in that time.  The country, the world, and my own small life are all starkly different than the versions of them that I left last August.  Terrible, wonderful, baffling, laughable, dizzying things are happening.  And I find, in the midst of all of this, that words are rising up from my often-foggy mind, and they want a home.  That is what this space will be.

This will not primarily be a chronicle of my time in Scotland, though I will certainly return to that journey frequently here.  It will not be primarily an outlet for my frustrations, concerns, and hopes with our government, our nation, and our world, though the theme will arise from time to time.  It will not be primarily an outlet for reactions to and reviews of the things that I read, watch, listen to, and participate in, though I am looking forward to offering some of these reflections.  Nor will it be primarily a journal of thoughts and impressions from my experience, though I can’t imagine that there would be much to say without those reflections.  Before anything else, this space will be a home for words.  It will be a home with an open door, and you are invited to visit any time you would like. 

I am writing, to be sure, as a Christian for whom Jesus Christ gives the pattern of thought, of word, and of action.  This does not mean that all (or even most) of the writing offered here will be religious or devotional in nature.  It does mean, however, that the spiritual will be a consistent lens through which these reflections will view the world.  I am more concerned here with honesty than I am with orthodoxy, but in looking to the psalms I see that the latter perhaps speaks best as it grows out of the former.  I hope to grasp the assurance of the psalmist as articulated in the song and prayer of the Taize community:  “I am sure I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.  Yes, I shall see the goodness of our God—hold firm.  Trust in the Lord.”  I hope, should you decide to make an occasional visit, that you can, too.