I started to attend the Episcopal church regularly. I loved the unitive meal, called Holy, but it didn’t happen every week. Why not? Did they think we Christians only needed to be transfused with Christ’s body and blood monthly?
All this religion. All this prayer. All this church. All these beautiful rites and rituals and songs. No one has a right to any of it. I was learning that rights and duties merged—merged—in acts of simple creative gratitude, like worship. Worship is art for the sake of everyone’s spiritual delight. Worship is, or should be, natural. It just happens, like praise. Birdsong is worship as grand as the huge Mormon Tabernacle choir, or a Gospel Choir of all black people, or a little girl marching about crooning Handel’s Hallelujah chorus, or the murmuring hum of prayers.
What matters to God, really? Would I find that in church? I went to graduate school at Columbia in N.Y.C. where I got my Master’s degree in Spanish language and literature, still searching for God and myself, still wondering about my racism and God’s vision, feeling sure that words mattered as much as sacrament and song in true worship.
I was married and the mother of four lovely children. I was still searching for God’s will—or mine, whichever came first. This might be the first time in my young life that I tangled with a moral dilemma that had no right answer.
Chapter XXXII. Motives and Consequences—Another Pungent College Learning
The professor, Miss XXX, walked slowly, so slowly you could call it deliberate, into the Ethics class to deliver the first lecture. Would she make it onto the dais? I thought she was either too ancient to care about ethics, or had lived enough life to be close to a guru on the moral life. Either way, I remember exactly her first sentence of the first lecture: “In making ethical decisions, which is more important, motives or consequences?” She added: “Please prepare an essay with your own thoughts on that question and have it ready for next week’s class.”
This old woman was nobody’s old fool. I wrestled with that question day and night. I thought there had to be a “right” answer. This was an Ethics course, wasn’t it? I argued for consequences, imagining all the innocent people hurt in car accidents, or in wars, or in love.
I remembered that Bill Brakeman had been very badly injured in a car accident. I remember the phone call from his mother; I remember going to visit him in a hospital off of Den Road, in Rye, New York, just over the Connecticut line into New York state. Bill had been driving home from the big city where he had gone to hear jazz and was hit by another vehicle. I have no idea who was at fault. All I knew was that Bill was very badly injured. I stared down at him, pale and in pain, in that hospital bed. Not sure of a thing except my own shock, I bent over and kissed him lightly on the lips. I thought but do not remember saying: I love you. Bill’s recovery was very long, so long it delayed his going to college by a year. He had been a year ahead of me in high school, and now he would be a year behind me in college. God, I was glad he lived.
Years later I would decide that motives outweighed consequences. I think I got that from the Bible. God was often portrayed as a voyeur into human hearts, and people often changed from within, like Job. I decided that what happens inside a person has a lot to do with God—and motives.
Chapter XXXIII. Who Is The Greatest?
Memory: Once in junior high school a teacher posed this question to a bunch of upturned but blank faced seventh graders: Who was the greatest man in the world and why? I hated the WHY! I knew enough not to put down my father, which wouldn’t have been quite true anyway. I wrote down Abraham Lincoln. Why? He freed the slaves of course. I learned that my answer was void of any historical complexities, but the teacher cleared up my confusions—and failed. There was no freakin’ right answer! Later I thought the church’s answer would have been Jesus of course. I didn’t understand that one either, but I recall a twinge of guilt that I had not put Jesus down.
Would I now? Would Jesus have freed slaves? Surely he died trying. Jesus’s cruel death was inevitable given his political vision. So was Lincoln’s. Jesus acquired the messianic title Christ after his followers woke up years after his death to the image of God he proclaimed and lived. Lincoln had no such a title though he was a devout Christian. Still, one does not have to be a Christian to be a christ.
Both men, strikingly, were “men of sorrow acquainted with grief” as the great messianic lyric (Handels’ Messiah) tells us. Lincoln didn’t smile much. And Jesus is not remembered in the New Testament as laughing and smiling either.
Chapter XXXIV. The Sower
Jesus’s Parable of the Sower was told to listeners living in an agricultural culture. A sower goes into a field to sow seeds with the obvious hope that some of the seeds will take root, grow, and supply food enough to feed hungry people.
Those who remembered Jesus and retold his parables, orally and later in writing, knew that he had a habit of not explaining them. Jesus hoped his stories would seed the kingdom. Lincoln too sowed seeds he hoped would become a country. BUT, in this parable, Jesus, or Jesus according to Matthew’s gospel, gives in to nagging disciples who beg to know what this parable means—exactly. Please, please, please. He succumbs to the lure of consequential ethics. He details the different qualities of soil, each one descriptive of a human condition—too dry, too rocky, too distracted—none of which yield a fruitful harvest.
Just like when a parent gives in to a nagging child, Jesus’s usual strategy of not explaining got sabotaged. His immediate followers, then and forevermore, obsess and compete. Whose soil will yield the best growth for the vision of God? Right away they, and we, lose sight of the main character in the story: the Sower.
The Sower, a metaphor for God, continues to sow and sow and sow. That’s the idea. That’s the grace, the point. This is not a parable about divine condemnation, rejection, or self-improvement. It’s not even about the sin of competitiveness for self-gain. The silent sower, whose sack is never empty of seeds, keeps sowing—without ceasing. God is extravagant with seed. If your “soil” is too arid today, seeds keep coming. There is no end to such potentiation. And no discrimination. I pray to the Sower.
Sow me, Sower
Sow your seeds.
In the beginning, I am fertile—flirty, fruitful, foxy
Any seed is mine. Every seed bears fruit.
In the middle, I try out soil-types—obsess about my own—until
I harden against any seed
waste seeds, ignore others,
arid with indifference,
thinned by busyness and grief,
bloated with pride or affluence
The Sower deftly sows—all seeds mine, all soils me.
At the ending time
I don’t care—nor lie nor fake nor die
—nor try to be sower seed or soil alone
Sower, seed, and soil—just so.
Sower, sower, double my order. Thank you.
Chapter XXXV. Formation
I learned from all the sources that have formed me over time. I didn’t realize this at first, but now I see that most of my seeds came from Scripture and prayer conversations with the Sower. I was seeded to believe that no one was excluded from divine seeding—no one. Such conditioning would become my armor against racism, even in a white-privileged world. I could see that this way of living was NOT the way of God. Simply so.
“Lincoln will not return from the dead, even as a ghost, but his broadly balanced democratic pluralism may be all there is to rescue us yet again.” New Yorker, 9/28/20, Adam Gopnik “Better Angel. An Abraham Lincoln of His Time, and Ours.”
Jesus the Christ appeared to many after he died. We are STILL working on Jesus’s vision of the Kingdom of God. Perhaps these two greats will collaborate—for kingdom, for country.
I must note this: Neither one of my chosen heroes slipped into racism or exclusionary rhetoric along the torturous way of promoting a unitive vision—although both men were white, Jesus with a semitic edge, and privileged, Jesus with rich friends who provided consistent hospitality and some financing of his campaign.
