Category Archives: culture

a note to the previous

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The title of my last ramble was taken from a sixteenth century poem by the Englishman, John Davies. “Nosce Teipsum,” know thyself, interestingly, is misspelled at the Poetry Foundation website, here. I used Davies’ spelling, itself perhaps a variant of the popular aphorism nosce te ipsum, because my general subject was Christian humanism. Davies (1569–1626) was a courtier and a lawyer, not a professional poet. Almost all his poetry belongs to the early part of his life, before he bacame embroiled in public affairs. He sought and gained the favor of Queen Elizabeth, who appointed him to various public offices. After the Queen’s death he served among the delegation that brought James VI of Scotland to England to be king.

“Nosce Teipsum” is a long philosophical poem that is sometimes regarded as a compendium of Elizabethan knowledge. It is hardly that, but it is a profoundly conventional poem, essayistic, of that species of sixteenth century English poetry that C. S. Lewis called drab. It has two claims to fame, its early use of the decasyllabic quatrain (which Davies didn’t invent) a verse form sometimes known as the elegaic measure because of Gray’s later use of it in his famous elegy. But Davies’ poem is better known for the three quatrains that conclude its first section, subtitled “Of Humane Knowledge”:

I know my bodi’s of so fraile a kind,
    As force without, feauers within can kill;
    I know the heauenly nature of my minde,
    But tis corrupted both in wit and will:

I know my Soule hath power to know all things,
    Yet is she blinde and ignorant in all;
    I know I am one of Nature’s little kings,
    Yet to the least and vilest things am thrall.

I know my life’s a paine and but a span,
    I know my Sense is mockt with euery thing:
    And to conclude, I know myself a Man,
    Which is a proud, and yet a wretched thing.

Immediately prior to these stanzas, the poet avers: “My selfe am Center of my circling thought, / Only my selfe I studie, learne, and know,” in lines that suggest an acquaintance with Montaigne. But by 1599, the year of the publication of “Nosce Teipsum,” this idea, like the sentiments that follow it in the poem, was part of the conventional conception of Human nature about which philosophers from Descartes to Locke and Berkeley mused. A later, and better known, example is Pope’s aphorism:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.

My point is not to argue for the correctness or the venerability of the caveat, though Davies invokes Socrates as an originator. I mean rather to allude to Davies’ poem as a typical product of Christian humanism in his time, not so beautiful or monumental as the 1559 Book of Common Prayer or the English Bible (KJV 1611) or so influential and original as the Institutes of John Calvin (1536), but perhaps more typical because more ordinary. In the first section of the poem Davies’ theme is the limits of human knowledge; in the second, the immortality of the soul. In both sections he draws upon a variety of classical and biblical sources in a manner thoroughly commonplace in his time.

The stone whose photograph I have used at the head of this post and the last may be found in a small garden in New Harmony, Indiana that contains the grave of Paul Tillich. I have referenced it once before, here, and noted its proximity to the Roofless Church, designed by Phillip Johnson.

Sidney’s reference to Anchises calls up a moment in Virgil’s Aeneid after all is lost and the city has been destroyed. Aeneas escapes carrying his father, Anchises on his back and leading his son, Ascanius, by the hand. His wife, Creusa, is unable to keep up with them and falls behind. When Aeneas searches for her after satisfying himself that his father and son are safely hidden, he finds that she has been killed. There follows a tender conversation between the living Aeneas and Creusa’s ghost. (Aeneid, II, 705–795)

Nosce Teipsum

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I came across an email the other day from an old friend who sent me his address at the time by way of saying that I might need it in case there were some imponderable about which I needed to speak with him. Usually I get to the imponderables during Advent, but this year I’m late. It’s taken until mid January for the winter of my discontent to set in with its perennial itch.

But here goes—of all silly questions (silly in our sense of benignly foolish and also in Chaucer’s sense of blessed) perhaps the most sophomoric is what is the meaning of life. I spent the summer of my nineteenth year with it nonetheless, not mooning over it in the abstract but attempting to decide whether I would continue on the career trajectory to which I had at that time committed myself. I had grown up in church, by no means a bad thing; and I had announced to my family and my peers at the end of high school that I thought I had been called to the ministry.

In due course I had been appointed a local preacher in the Methodist Church, which meant that I was permitted to preach under the supervision of an ordained pastor and that I might serve as an an assistant, or apprentice, minister in a church. In the summer of my nineteenth year after my sophomore year at college I had a job as youth minister of Central Methodist Church in Dalhart Texas, It was not a job that involved onerous responsibility; I had a lot of time on my hands. There were no young people my age around that summer in Dalhart. I thought of the church youth group I helped to supervise as my clients, not as friends, and socialized with them only in very limited ways.

There was one movie theatre in Dalhart—films changed once a week or so. The primary entertainment of an evening was to drive your car up and down the town’s main street and honk and wave at your friends. I joined in that activity to some extent, but lacking friends and feeling some discomfort honking and waving at my youth group clients, though they were perfectly civilized young people, I didn’t do too much dragging, as the driving and waving was called. I spent some midweek time, twice I think, visiting a girlfriend who was working as a camp counselor five hundred miles away in Kerrville, but that was exhausting. Mostly I read.

I’m sure I must have read plenty of trash, but what I most remember is that I read War and Peace, pored over the agonies of Pierre Bezukhov in particular, and speculated about comparisons between Napoleon’s marches and Hitler’s (drawn by Clifton Fadiman for the Inner Sanctum Edition I found in the Dalhart Public Library). I read War and Peace twice through and continued to reread parts of the novel until I had exhausted the experience. When a voice spoke to me out of nowhere and announced that the meaning of life had to be lived, I thought for the first time that I might find meaning in my own life by throwing myself into the flux and complexity of lived experience, though I remained uncritically sure that questioning the meaning of life ought to remain the constant occupation of a serious person.

My idyllic time came to an end in late July or early August when I preached a sermon at the Sunday morning service. I naïvely and irresponsibly explained to the good folk who came to hear me that day that I was in some doubt about heaven and hell and was becoming what I would have called a universalist had I known the term. I presented what I thought were fine arguments for my emerging views and invited any of my co-parishioners who were so inclined to come and talk with me about them. Afterwards, the kindly minister who was my supervisor suggested to me that perhaps I didn’t really want to be a preacher and advised that I might want to think about doing something else.

Fast forward to the present year: I’ve been reading Marilynne Robinson’s new book, The Givenness of Things, which I like a lot with some reservations. I suspect Robinson of a similar universalism to my own, though she claims to be a Calvinist. Still, after owning that Robinson has read Calvin more deeply than I have, I’m skeptical, primarily because the reformed tradition with which Robinson identifies places more faith in logic and theological correctness than I do. Having worried ontological questions most of my life, I have much sympathy with Robinson’s rehabilitation of ontology. But my own ontological meditations don’t inevitably lead me to affirmation of the Trinity or to a literal belief in a created universe.

I have no trouble claiming solidarity with the ages in the Nicene Creed, which we Episcopalians recite in the plural: we believe (I suspect Robinson would demur); but my submission to the creed is a concession to formulations I am bound to regard as metaphors. After I recite the creed, the fundamental ontological questions remain for me. What is reality? What is being? What is my place in the cosmos? What indeed do I mean by the locution, I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty? If this means that I am promoting the questions of Greek philosophy as the philosophers confronted the death of their ancient Gods over those that must have guided the Hebrew prophets as they confronted the death of their ancient Gods, so be it. Actually, I dont think there is such a conflict, as Robinson seems to do. I think in both traditions wonderful minds were at work on inherited pieties, transforming them into the poetry of new historical epochs.

The Creed, after all, is a political document, as I think all creeds are: ideology in Mannheim’s original sense of formalization designed to forclose discourse. It takes some stretching to assert that it is scriptural. Its primary purpose at the time of its adoption was the defeat of Arianism, which was the Christian religion of a substantial minority in Christendom of mostly Germanic origin. Its adoption represented the triumph of Constantine and the return of Rome to Romans; though Constantine was obliged to wage wars most of his life in that cause, and Arianism survived well down into the eighth century. Arius, himself, declared a heretic in 325, was exonerated in 335 only to be declared a heretic again in 381 after he had been dead almost half a century. Robinson’s loyalty is to the earlier Apostle’s Creed, though she mostly speaks of a Trinity that involves two persons only, hardly mentioning the Holy Spirit (or Ghost, as we used to say).

Robinson spends a good deal of time arguing for a historical Jesus, something I’ve never seriously doubted; though like Dostoyevsky’s inquisitor I think the magisterium of the Faith, Gospels, Churches, Dogma, the rich inheritance of liturgy, the terrible and cruel inheritance of sectarianism, all of it could exist on its own even if there had never been such a person as Jesus. Years ago I encountered in a book of sayings of Albert Schweitzer the statement that the quest of the historical Jesus fails because that Jesus inevitably returns to his own time; whereas the faithful who encounter Jesus in their own worlds and lives possess a wisdom that transcends mere history. Robinson is content to leave issues such as predestination and the problem of evil out of consideration and to treat them as mysteries. Though I do not doubt the historical Jesus, I will confess here that I regard the existence of a God apart from the world of worlds (saecula saeculorum) who numbers the hairs of my head—as a deep mystery, though I revere (and hope I keep) the first commandment. As to the second, I have broken it so often, committed so many offenses against my fellow creatures and myself that I am acquainted with grief.

I still worry the question with which I began from time to time, but from a different perspective. Closer to my eightieth year than to my teens I wonder occasionally what it might mean, beyond oneself and one’s selfish pursuits, to ask if one’s life has meaning? One answer, a moral one perhaps, might be to wonder if, at life’s end the world in which one lived and acted were at all changed by one’s passage through it. The question is still naïve, one’s life being subsumed in historical processes over which one has had no individual control and which remain hidden by one’s immersion in them. It is like asking whether a lake (or an ocean) is changed because one swam in it, or whether the air is changed by the flight of a bird. And the matter becomes more obscure if one asks the question in ontological terms. Is the void to which one’s being returns at the end of life the same void out of which one’s being emerged. Is the void of not life changed, indeed, by the emergence and eventual dissolution of any single life, or even by the emergence of life in the aggregate. Is life in the aggregate an accidental, a momentary disturbance in the great peaceful eternity of not life. Or does the emergence of life argue for something like emergent evolution, a process in which a new creation struggles to be born.

Robinson likens the universe to a storm, seeking to appropriate insights from physics and contemporary cosmology. I have no quarrel with that image, though I am more attracted to T. S. Eliot’s image of a turning about a still point, with its Aristotelian and Thomist resonances. And I am attracted as well to the ancient conception of peace as the primary characteristic of the world of worlds, the universe of universes which we have in idea, a little handful, to paraphrase a poem I love. I also think it does not diminish humanity to take the psalmist’s view, “what is man that thou art mindful of him.” I have always mostly thought that art, science, religion, and philosophy all lead our understanding towards wonder. Robinson takes a similar view. The Givenness of Things is a meditation on such wonders as quantum physics, Shakespeare’s poetry, and human forgiveness. The presence in our limited world of such wonders argues for a kind of cosmic optimism, in Robinson’s view, with which I can only concur.

And that brings me to the parts of Robinson’s argument I like the most. Wonder first, which Robinson evokes most poignantly with respect to human forgiveness and the largeness and generosity of spirit that can often accompany it. Robinson finds these displayed preeminently in the plays of Shakespeare. She argues that Hamlet’s famed hesitation should be understood as a humane shrinking from revenge, to be expected, to be thought normal, in a king’s son, especially perhaps in a king’s son who has been to the university and longs to return. It is the genius of Shakespeare’s language to model such things for us without sentimentality. The prince’s dispatching of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is a necessary act of self-preservation. His killing of Polonius and his complicity in the death of Ophelia must be seen as more than problematic. But he refuses to the end to play the hero of a conventional revenge tragedy, refrains from exulting in Claudius’ death, and is at pains to beg Horatio to tell his story truly, not as one done in by the sour necessity of revenge, but as one who was “likely, had he been put on, / To have proved most royally,” as Fortinbras describes him at the close. I am thinking of something Sidney says in the Apologie for Poetrie as part of his argument that poetry limns a world that might be, a world that ought to be. He describes a scene that men of his time often carried on their persons inscribed upon medallions. “Who readeth Aeneas carrying olde Anchises on his back, that wisheth not it were his fortune to perfourme so excellent an acte?” And sometimes, as we can also see in Shakespeare, excellence is more than its own reward. What more unlikely than the restoration of Pericles’ daughter, whom Pericles had thought dead. It is “like a resurrection”. It “makes men glorious” as promised by the Prologue to Pericles, Prince of Tyre, “by allowing plausibility to drop away in deference to human particularity, human love and loyalty and worth.”

For Robinson the givenness of things is most displayed in the arbitrariness of our experience, which she links to what Jonathan Edwards called “the arbitrary constitution of the creator.” For Robinson as for Edwards, the fact that “We know only what we know only in the ways we know it or can know it” argues persuasively for “the creation’s arbitrary character, that is for its being composed to reflect the intentions of a creator, not as the elaboration of an order intrinsic to itself.” I think this is the weakest place in Robinson’s argument in that it requires the same unjustified leap from epistemology to ontology that positivists make in claiming that the limits of our experience require us to conclude that what we take for nature is of our own making. For me the givenness of things is palpable. I think of Wendell Berry’s reverence for topsoil. We cannot make it. It is my belief that we awake as humans (slowly, to be sure) to nature and culture as equal parts of our environment. I believe it is our gift as humans to stand apart from nature simultaneously as we are contained within it. That is what the story of the loss of Eden means to me. It is the measure of the problematic place of humans in the scale of being. “Who told you you were naked?” the Lord asks Adam in the cool of evening.

Yet it is that very problematic place that is our freedom, such as it is. Like Robinson I am unwilling to argue that the extremes of human sin are the price of that freedom. Such a conclusion is as vicious a reduction of experience as it is to claim that any chimpanzee with a typewriter would eventually write the works of Shakespeare. I am a brother to that chimpanzee. It is because I began my conscious life as a disciple of Jesus that I refuse the sort of arrogance that proclaims a human superiority that I cannot justify, since all I really know about my sibling chimp is that her thoughts, if she has them, are not mine. And I am as unwilling as Robinson is to reduce human nature to ‘hominid nature,’ as a friend of mind suggested in conversation a while back. The developed being is not reducible to her remote ancestor, however much we may agree about the genealogy. I think it was Annie Dillard who described the universe somewhere as feathered and free. I worry more silly questions: what accounts for difference, lissomness, the persistence of trees, turtles, cockroaches, and the thousand iterations of human excellence, pride, and meanness. I incline to the view that it is grace that accounts for these things at a level unknown to science or to theology; but I also believe that as regards culture it is we humans who must keep the balance. We seem now to live in a time characterized by meanness and the determination to reduce all of life to money. But I expect my little yard to bloom again this spring after I clear away my neighbor’s leaves. I expect science will deal with the virus that is presently decimating Missouri’s white tail deer herd. And because I began my life as a disciple of Jesus I hope for a resurgence of humanism in the world after I am gone. We need to learn again to love one another, to honor and to love the second commandment, however poorly we may keep it.

a sailboat named desire

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Including a homily preached on November 28, 2015 at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church, Denton, Texas by Fr. Donald K. Johnson

Last weekend I traveled to Texas to participate in a memorial service celebrating the life of my old friend, Cecil Adkins. Here he is with a tromba marina or trumpet marine, a strange instrument about which he llkely knew more than anybody. The photo is courtesy of his daughter, Madeline. The grin was his own. I’m thinking that Cecil built this tromba marina, though I think he also owned another that was quite old. He built many musical instruments in his long and rich life.

Cecil’s career spanned thirty-seven years as a member of the musicology faculty of the College of Music at what is now the University of North Texas. His obituary, published in the Denton Record Chronicle lists his accomplishments through those years. One of the last dissertations Cecil directed at North Texas concerned the Hinners Organ Company, long a builder of pipe organs for churches, mostly in the Midwest.

He also loved the accordion and turned to playing that instrument in retirement. His family chose a photograph of Cecil with an accordion to represent him on the cover of the memorial pamphlet they prepared for his funeral. Again, the grin is his own.

Whatever else he was, Cecil was a man who loved life, who loved to work with his hands as he loved the life of his mind. The memorial service at St. Barnabas Church, arranged and presented by his wife of many years, Alis Dickinson Adkins, and his wonderful children, was moving and beautiful. I can think of no better way to remember him here than to quote Fr. Donald Johnson’s eulogy at that service. It perfectly images my memory of my friend and relates it to the occasion of our presence on that day.

Prayer lies at the heart of the life of faith. It does so because prayer is, in a very real sense, the human half of a conversation or dialog with God, an interaction with the Creator of all things. Though we sometimes limit our understanding of prayer to our words, either audible or silent, this is a rather unfortunate limitation of understanding. Prayer is really an attitude, an approach to life; as such, it may undergird and find expression in any aspect of our lives, and is not limited just to our conversation. As we gather today as family and friends to remember Cecil Adkins and to commend him to God’s eternal love, it seems appropriate that we recall once again the words of that great 16th century German theologian Martin Luther that, “the person who sings, prays twice.”

Yet even Luther’s words, taken on their own, are far too limiting, especially when we consider Cecil’s life. Along with many others, a humble monk named Brother Lawrence reminds us that anything, even so mundane a task as washing the dishes, can be a form of prayer.

Cecil Adkins lived his life with an enthusiasm and a creativity which revealed a soul in constant dialog with God. Music was, of course, central to his life, from his college days, through his military service, through his career at the University of North Texas, and then in his retirement years. His skills as a musician, and as a builder of instruments, were great gifts to his family and friends, his university, and his church. And I always appreciated the way that he could track down and silence a cyphering pipe when our often cranky but much beloved pipe organ decided it wanted attention. Together with Alis, Cecil helped to create the musical tradition which is still a central a part of the identity of St. Barnabas’ Parish.

Cecil’s skill as a craftsman was not limited to instrument building. I was blessed by being able to work with him for several months on a project that brought him great satisfaction – the rebuilding of a 28 foot mahogany sailboat, named “Desire” by her previous owner. Since I have no real skills in woodworking or boatbuilding I felt like an apprentice because I knew that I was working in the shadow of a Master Craftsman. Someone else is now continuing that rebuilding process, and I hope that he finds as much joy and fulfillment in that work as Cecil always did.

An instrument builder and a boat builder, Cecil’s work also included furniture and marquetry. While working on his boat, I watched him build a beautiful cherry wood night stand for Alis. So, whatever he was creating, his work was always at the highest level of beauty and function.

I suspect, however, that when it came to his legacy, Cecil was most proud – and rightly so – of his and Alis’ children. Whether it was Sean, a scientist-engineer in the field of astronomy, Lynne in radio and television, Anthony in the business world, or Elizabeth, Christopher, Clare, Anthony, Alexandra, and Madeline in music, he took great pride in their accomplishments. And, of course, we know that Cecil and Alis were dedicated to one another. Their love for each other was obvious to all that knew them.

Cecil’s faith was evident in all that he did, and especially in his efforts on behalf of his parish church. Through music and through many other ways, he served to enhance the life of the St. Barnabas community. At the time of his death, for example, Cecil was serving on the building committee which is in the process of planning for new facilities for the parish.

We have much to celebrate today as we give thanks to God for sharing Cecil’s life with us. That, then, is our primary purpose here today.

Still, though we gather to celebrate, because of our sense of loss which we have experienced in his death, this is also a time for grieving, a time for sorrow. That sorrow is far from inappropriate. Even Jesus wept at the news of the death of Lazarus, his friend.

Yet, our sorrow should be for our own loss, and not for Cecil. His faith assured him that death will not have the last word. As the Apostle Paul expressed that faith in his letter to the Church at Rome, nothing can separate us from the love of God, not even death. The Holy Spirit given in baptism is not taken from us, and because we are assured of this we are also assured that we have a share in resurrection life. Cecil knew that promise, and he trusted in God’s faithfulness.

I mentioned earlier Cecil’s skill in marquetry. I first became aware of that extraordinary talent several years ago when I saw a beautiful marquetry box at Cecil and Alis’ house. It was a box that Cecil had made long before. Up to that point whenever I thought about Cecil and music I was much more likely to think baroque rather than folk music, so I was somewhat amused to discover that the box contained one of Cecil’s favorite things: one of his accordions. I mentioned to him a well-known Larsen Far Side cartoon. It contained two panels, one above the other. In the top panel, a line of souls was waiting to enter heaven. St. Peter greeted each person by saying, “Welcome to heaven; here’s your harp.” Then, in the lower panel, a similar line was waiting at the entrance to hell, where they were greeted with the words, “Welcome to hell; here is your accordion.” I think you will probably understand when I say that Cecil hated that particular cartoon. And I suspect that he was absolutely right, as I can only imagine that when he arrived at the gates of heaven God said, “Welcome to heaven; here is your accordion. Forget that nonsense about a joyful noise; let’s go make some glorious music.”

I have to add a word about the boat, as Cecil told it to me. Cecil was in the habit of sailing in Chesapeake Bay with his friend and former mentor, Eugene Helm. One summer in nineteen ninety something they were driving along the eastern shore when they saw a beautiful, but damaged, sailboat landlocked in front of a house. They stopped to inquire and were told that the boat was available at no cost to anyone who could give it a good home. Cecil brought the boat back to Texas and eventually built a shop to house the project it became. I always thought it fitting that the boat was named Desire, since it had called to Cecil in its need, and since that need had ultimately required a response that had to be passed on. Mike Cochran, Cecil’s friend and long time colleague in his many restoration projects, now has Cecil’s shop and the boat and the task of finishing its restoration.

town again

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I awoke this morning to reports of the terrorist atacks in Mali, which I’m sure will rachet up xenophobic paranoia in this country. For some days now I’ve been thinking of an essay I posted back in 2012. Part of it was another essay I had initially posted five years before that. It’s a memory that haunts me. Unlike some who seek solace in being alone during times of stress, perhaps in favorite secluded outdoor places, I tend to look for company when the world turns mean.

I’ve been going to church a bit more than usual here lately; and while there are some purely local reasons why, I also have to acknowledge a need in me to locate myself (or relocate myself) among folk with whom I share much of my final vocabulary. Notice I did not say my faith community or my religious family. I have stopped using such terms because I think they have been debased beyond present repair by identity politics and are now ciichés of various discourses in which I have no wish to participate.

In response to my 2012 speculation that perhaps we need a bigger tent, religiously speaking, a friend commmented that parhaps we’d build a bigger tent if we had bigger hearts. I think I seek a large heartedness that can leave to the cosmos its undoubted unfathomability, at the same time claiming solidarity with a sense of human community that embraces enmity, even enmity unto death, without irritably reaching after fact and reason, as the poet says, and still proclaim what Reynolds Price has called “the unaccountable worth of the world.” This is very hard.

* * *

August 26, 2012

I attended church today, and while I enjoyed seeing my friends and loved the eucharist as always, I found the lessons a bit edgy. We’re at the end of the sixth chapter of John’s gospel in the lectionary, and in today’s lesson Jesus protests that his way is the only way a bit heavy handedly with the result that many of his followers leave him and only the few most faithful remain. The epistle lesson was Paul’s injunction to the Ephesians that they put on the whole armor of God, language that I as a boy in the fourth grade was required to memorize in my public school class.

Perhaps it was that memory, or perhaps it was that we sang “I am the Bread of Life,” with its strong assertion of the exclusivity of the Christian way, as a communion hymn—whatever the specific trigger, I found myself thinking (as I often do these days) that we need a bigger tent. In a recent post I used Churches as a generic term for religious houses of all sorts. When I realized the error of my usage I decided not to edit myself and to talk about it. Having attained the age of 75 I often find myself thinking and sometimes speaking the language of my youth before I learned from my old friend Martha Webb that there are some women who really don’t like being lumped in with men as the linguistic default and further came to realize by reading Abraham Heschel, James Carroll, and others, that Judaism gets a bad rap in the gospels. Some Christian apologists draw a distinction between anti-Semitism and the anti-Judaism of the New Testament, but that seems to me to be interested pleading claiming a distinction that doesn’t count for much.

For these reasons, and for some others, I thought I’d repost a piece I wrote just after I began this blog. I’ve edited a bit, and I’m going to leave it up for a while because I constantly find myself reaching out for some spiritual balance as my country slides deeper into a slough of hateful sectarian partisanship. I can’t be any smarter than I was in this piece from five years ago.

* * *

Here’s a story. It begins in the parking lot of the Denton (TX) Islamic Society, a tiny congregation named so as to claim standing in the world outside the traditional Islamic realm. It was Sunday, the Christian Sabbath. Three hundred or so local citizens, Muslims, Christians, Jews, and others gathered in the back parking lot of the society’s tiny mosque in order to express our solidarity after someone had fire bombed the place. I didn’t visit the interior of the building because I didn’t know whether I should take off my shoes, and I don’t know today whether the Sabbath has any standing in Islam.

Tuesday the week before—I won’t put the date down—a thing occurred that I never dreamed I would live to see when terrorists crashed two hijacked airliners into the main towers of the World Trade Center in New York and destroyed them, together with other buildings nearby and the lives of several thousand souls. I should set it down that other terrorists also hijacked airplanes that were crashed into the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside. These terrorists were almost immediately identified with Islamic fundamentalism by government and press–hence the bombing of our little mosque in Denton.

I’d been stunned since the destruction of the World Trade Center. Our very young President (he seemed so at the time) had told us we were at war. I had resisted that conclusion in my own heart since I watched the first news reports and believed them to be true. I couldn’t find any anger in myself, though perhaps it was there and I didn’t recognize it. What I remember now is that as the Imam began to chant the prayer with which we began the little service that afternoon, I wept.

Bishop James Stanton was with us, having come to town for a confirmation service at my church. His preaching had urged the proposition that we all needed to touch one another in the aftermath of our communal loss. Those of us who remained alive needed to touch, I think he meant. I thanked him for his sermon and his presence at the mosque, felt close to him for a moment and was surprised because I disagree with him more often than not. I was struck too by a dear old friend’s comment as we walked around the parking lot together, exchanging greetings after the service, when he said to me that he didn’t want to go to war without God (without something he could pose to himself in his own mind as God—those were his words). I can go along with Bishop Stanton that we seek to touch what grounds us in times of great crisis. I’m not sure I understand my friend’s anxiety about going to war without God.

The Imam chanted and then translated. His prayer expressed gratitude to God for his beautiful creation. ‘This is my Father’s world,’ as we sang in the Methodist Sunday School of my childhood, I thought—I will take the memory of that prayer, which I didn’t initially understand, as a symbol of our struggle to find community with inadequate language and inadequate minds as we stood there in the hot sun on that concrete parking lot, greeting one another with words expressing our knowledge that we are not one people. I believe we stood in grace there, however much God may have turned his attention from his beautiful creation as the World Trade Center exploded. The next evening I opened my class at the university with the statement that I’d be glad to hear thoughts and expressions in regard to our country—we’d been asked to do this by the president—and I let my students talk for an hour and a half. There was a variety of expression, including that of one student who left the room because the discussion disturbed him. Later I put my arm around him, and the other students welcomed him back for the remainder of the evening.

I can now report that my eldest child, who is 45 years old, is as likely to have another birthday as I am. He worked in the World Trade Center–when there was a World Trade Center. Fortunately for him and his coworkers and their families and friends including yours truly, his office didn’t open until 10:00. St. Paul says ‘here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come.’ I’ve always loved that sentiment; somehow, it suggests to me the kindness of strangers. Maybe that’s why I felt at church the next week that our processions and triumphal evocations of God were not just pretentious but wrong headed. I thought of a Quaker meeting house I know and wondered if real piety waits upon grace without asking any questions.

I tend to think the moral universe is a human creation, more like a town than like the vast reaches of interstellar space. What I believe in outside that is grace and the human struggle for community, a version perhaps of what we used to call in my church ‘the summary of the law.’ I remembered my son’s words as he looked from his apartment in midtown Manhattan and described the smoke and the smell of the great explosions at the World Trade Center. That awful thing caused many New Yorkers to remember their town and to become citizens behaving like citizens in countless ways that filled the news reports in the aftermath. Perhaps something similar happened to us in Denton; perhaps we remembered our town, and remembering, perhaps we transcended our differences for a while.

And I’m remembering now a notion of Karl Jaspers’s, in a little book entitled Die Schuldfrage, that in the aftermath of the Nazi terror perhaps all who remained alive felt a sense of what he termed metaphysical guilt, a sense of estrangement from the body of humanity. I have felt and talked with others who have also felt, in the aftermath of the terror of what we now call nine-eleven, a sense of alienation from the body of humanity and the world, not guilt but something that makes us reach out for one another. Was God in those terrible explosions that destroyed so many innocent? Was God absent? I don’t know. I can’t believe God caused them in the sense that some religious zealots have claimed. To my mind the question is something like asking if God was in the Tsunami of 2004. All fear and trembling is not hierophany. Some of it, even the unthinkable, is the ordinary terror of the world. This makes us feel uneasy in our skins sometimes, to experience ourselves as painfully other. Some say that Jesus undid our alienation just as he healed the eyes of the man born blind; and perhaps it is significant that the mud Jesus placed on the blind man’s eyes is mixed with spittle, earth and human stuff.

The blind man’s answer when he is asked what occurred is enigmatic: ‘I only know that before I was blind and now I can see.’ The wind of God blows where it will. But in the interstices of the world, where we are who mostly lead ordinary lives, it often seems good that we touch each other, that we love as much as we can and do what we can to make the world better than it often manifestly is. We’d like to think that the world as God made it is as fresh as we’d like to find it on Easter morning. We’d like to think that the prophets and poets who have taught us to love our father’s world were right and that it is indeed a good and joyful thing to give thanks for it, even on a hot Texas parking lot in the aftermath of a fire bombing.