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.