To Go Through the Unimaginable

Another sentence Jesus never said: “He who hesitates is lost.” I failed to see “Hamilton” when it was a new and unknown play at New York’s Public Theater, and it was my fault: Terry Teachout in the Wall Street Journal had said it was fantastic and deserved to move to Broadway. While I hesitated, it did move to Broadway where it became a major cultural phenomenon (with famously scarce tickets).
    Being almost last to the party is my usual m.o. But I have seen it now: and I like it.
    “Hamilton” is encouraging in many ways: the use of African American (and other black) actors, the celebration of principle over expediency, the delightful word-play that is rap at its best. And way up there in the encouraging department is a breath-taking scene of reconciliation towards the end.
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    Hamilton (the character) had an affair with a married woman, whose husband extorted money from him over time. These payments were discovered, and they seemed to implicate Hamilton in the wicked financial speculation of the husband. To the contrary, Hamilton says: he committed adultery and made the payments to keep it secret—all unwisely. Everything comes into the open, leading of course to great pain to Hamilton’s wife.
    After this their son dies in a duel.
    Life can be hard in so many ways. Their reconciliation is tentatively told with small movements commented upon by the chorus as they occur. The song is called “It’s Quiet Uptown”—where Hamilton owned his house. His sin, the harm of it, is called “the unimaginable”: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s lyrics keep playing on that word. First they “push away the unimaginable” but then, uptown, they “learn to live with the unimaginable.” They are in their separate worlds. Hamilton: “I never liked the quiet before/ I take the children to church on Sunday . . . And I pray/ That never used to happen before.”
    The chorus asks us to have pity on him if we see him on the street, walking by himself. They say: “He is working through the unimaginable.” His hair greys; he walks and walks. The chorus asks us: “Can you imagine?”
    Then he is beside his wife, Eliza. The chorus now says, “He is trying to do the unimaginable.”
    What is unimaginable? First, his sin; also, their son’s death; then it’s unimaginable to go on living; and then—there’s something beyond. Those early “unimaginable” things are things we know about; they are, we might say, unimaginable because we can see how hard it would be to go through them. But this—this is something new, unimaginable in a new sense.
    The chorus asks us to see them walking in the park. They ask Eliza to look at her husband. The chorus tells us: “They are trying to do the unimaginable.”
    First, he was trying; now, they are. “There is a grace too powerful to name/ We push away what we can never understand/ We push away the unimaginable.” But here, this time, they don’t push away. We see Eliza take Alexander’s hand.
    It’s a quiet gesture. They tell us, “It’s quiet uptown.” And the chorus, at last, names for us what is really unimaginable, this grace too powerful to name. “Forgiveness.”  They ask: “Can you imagine?” They repeat, in case we missed it: “Forgiveness. Can you imagine? If you see him in the street, walking by her side, talking by her side, have pity. They are going through the unimaginable.”
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    I saw this in London with a theological friend. He named the unimaginable: It’s a new creation. The new creation.
    Every time we pray, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive,” we ask for God’s new creation to come to be in our lives, that new creation which Jesus inaugurated on the cross. We ask God for the unimaginable.
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    Out & About. This Sunday, Sept. 15, I am to preach at the Church of the Incarnation at the traditional services: 7:30, 9, and 11:15 a.m. The subject is those famous words that Jesus never said: “God helps those who help themselves.”
    Also on Sept. 15, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at Incarnation, the “Good Books & Good Talk” seminar will meet to discuss Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. If you read the book, you’re welcome to the conversation.
    The Nashotah course, Ethics and Moral Theology, starts in Dallas Monday, Sept. 16, meeting from 6:30 to 9 p.m. at Incarnation. The reading for the first class is chapters 1-4 of the late Daniel Westberg’s textbook on Anglican moral theology, Renewing Moral Theology.
    Wednesday, Sept. 18, I will speak on the creeds at the Brown Bag Bible Study at St. Philip’s Church in Frisco, Tex. The one-hour program begins at noon. More info here. 
    Sunday, Sept. 22, I am to preach at Church of the Redeemer in Irving, Tex.

 

Posted by The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin with

Canticle Leibowitz

It was published when I was three years old and has never been out of print, but only recently have I read A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter Miller. Two or three years ago Bishop Sumner said we all ought to read it if we hadn’t—or at least, in my memory he urged that; I can’t find the actual request (but see https://edod.org/bishops-blog/enough-with-narratives-already/ ). Well, I may be slow, but eventually I try to do what my bishop urges upon me.
    Today I wonder, what took me so long? This is a riveting and timeless novel which takes Christian and human truth seriously—with many a surprising twist. If you haven’t read it, do so.
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    It is widely said that Alisdair MacIntyre found this novel to be an inspiration for the opening conception of his own great book, After Virtue. MacIntyre thinks we live in a post-virtue world, not just in the sense that everything’s a moral mess, but in the sense that we no longer know what moral terms mean. It’s as if our memories have been largely erased, and all we are left with are scattered words and fragments.
    In Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz, it’s some centuries after a nuclear holocaust, an event so awful that, amongst the survivors, there was a “simplification” in which they destroyed any books or paper (as well as killing off people who cared about books etc.). Some monks have preserved, in memory and in buried writings, as much as they could of the past. They have some fragments that include words like “electron,” although no one knows what those words mean.
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    There are always tensions in a community. In this post-holocaust world, without electricity or gunpowder, one of the monks labors over trying to understand fragments of (we can tell, he doesn’t know) circuit diagrams. Another monk thinks he is wasting his time: “What was the subject matter of Electronics?”
    “That too is written,” he replies: “The subject matter of Electronics was the electron.”
    “So it is written, indeed. What, pray, was the ‘electron’?”
    “Well, there is one fragmentary source which alludes to it as a ‘Negative Twist of Nothingness.’”
    “What! How did they negate a nothingness? Wouldn’t that make it a somethingness?”
    “Perhaps the negative applies to ‘twist.’”
    And so on. The skeptic brother then says: “How clever they must have been, those ancients—to know how to untwist nothing. Keep at it, and you may learn how. Then we’d have the ‘electron’ in our midst, wouldn’t we? Whatever would we do with it? Put it on the altar in the chapel?”
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    Nice, no? But it is not hard to imagine a world where words like Jesus, mercy, sacrifice, Good Samaritan, and so on have become unmoored from their context and are just floating around, still used by people perhaps, but used in uncomprehending ways. It’s not a long step from “What, pray, was the ‘electron’?” to “What is truth?”
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    Out & About. On Sunday, Sept. 15, I am to preach at the Church of the Incarnation at the traditional services: 7:30, 9, and 11:15 a.m. The subject is those famous words that Jesus never said: “God helps those who help themselves.”
    Also on Sept. 15, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at Incarnation, the “Good Books & Good Talk” seminar will meet to discuss Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. If you read the book, you’re welcome to the conversation.
    Not too late to sign up: the Nashotah course, Ethics and Moral Theology. The reading for the first class is chapters 1-4 of Daniel Westberg’s textbook on Anglican moral theology, Renewing Moral Theology. We’ll meet from 6:30 to 9 p.m. at Incarnation. Instructions for registration are in last week’s blog—drop me a line if you need more.

 

 

Posted by The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin with

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The Rev. Canon Victor Lee Austin. Ph.D., is the Theologian-in-Residence for the diocese and is the author of several books including, "Friendship: The Heart of Being Human" and "A Post-Covid Catechesis.: 

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