The Toughness of Salvation

A few months ago I mentioned Grievous, the latest novel from H. S. Cross, and I said that I’d probably write more about it. Now my review has been published in the latest issue of The Living Church (and is online here: https://livingchurch.org/2019/09/13/the-toughness-of-salvation/). May I commend this book to you again?
    The title of this book is the nickname, spoken by the boys just so—“Grievous,” sans honorific—of a housemaster at St. Stephen’s Academy in Yorkshire in the year 1931. St. Stephen’s is a boys’ boarding school with a scandalous past, a dingy present, and an unexpected interiority. It also has, for part of this year 1931, a girl in its midst, one Cordelia, goddaughter of housemaster John Grieves. Cordelia’s mother (affliction unclear), who suffers quack medicine (have the “treatments” of 1931 ever been so frightfully evoked, where mercury is taken as health-producing but penicillin is feared?), was and remains the one whom Grieves would love. Grieves, a widower, also is corresponding with the mother of one of his schoolboys (herself a widow and a nurse). As a boy, Grieves grew up in the home of Jamie Sebastian, St. Stephen’s present headmaster, with Jamie’s sisters and bishop-father, where strange loves and longings were had and continue. As you see, the book is a universe of emotion and action, of thought and repentance, all connected to John Grieves, who at one time put his life together by becoming a pacifist—he did it for love of Cordelia’s mother—and whose life, along with his pacifism, are now going, wrenchingly, to turn to dust.
    But the title also means the adjective, applied in Anglican worship to one’s sins, as these boys would have spoken in chapel, “which we most grievously have committed.” It’s the human condition of wrongness, and I cannot think of another contemporary novel that takes it so seriously as Grievous. The author is a friend of mine, and so I know that she is someone who takes the reality of Christian faith seriously, and who has herself drawn from its depths when she was plunged into her own. But one does not need biography to get Grievous. What is happening here is the fusion of human life and salvation’s bloody story; something hard and, because hard, more real than the usual stories we tell ourselves. . . .
    Our world, if we look at it squarely, is one that can only make us grieve. Thomas Gray Riding, student, has some treasures in a beat-up box that is itself a bit of disguised treasure—it had been his late father’s. Those treasures are letters, and a story he is writing that contains secrets of his own life, and other things that we do not know. It is hidden in a forbidden place, and to rescue it he breaks rules, implicates other boys in wrongdoing, causes harm, and then tries to lie to protect the truth.
    And then he comes to himself. In a breathtaking passage which shows Cross knows that an adolescent (as we would call him) can have a penetrating conscience, Thomas thinks through those things that he has done, and not done, and reckons himself to the conclusion that there is no health in him. He has the question—the existential question, the every-boy and every-girl and every-one-of-us question: Will I have another chance? Or is this the end of it? Are second chances real, or have I ruined it all?
    How do we humans get “sorted out,” how is it that we might move from and through and even beyond our sins? What is the remedy? Cross is clear, between the lines, that such would take the suffering and death of one who called God his Father, yet she is no preacher. The truth has to be got at by these characters themselves, by whatever path it takes. . . .
    Corporal punishment is very much part of this world. Grieves has tried to function differently, eschewing all violence. But when Gray is caught in his misdeeds, caught further in his stubborn silence followed by truth that seems a lie (because of the silence), Grieves is ordered to give 12 lashes to Gray, double the normal severest punishment. The order is delivered by the headmaster as he, the head, departs on important business. To carry this out is to break Grieves. He discovers anger within himself, then is sick over his falling, then turns to drink, more and more, to “drops,” to intravenous (what crude procedures) in a back-alley dope shop, with predictable dire consequence. The reader wants to grieve over Grieves, the housemaster sinking ever more grievously.
    Our world is squeamish, and I would venture rightly so, over the use of corporal punishment. But in our efforts to be less harsh we doubtless have created our own horrors, not least being our acquiescence in middling reality without hope of true salvation. Cross dares the reader to consider the toughness of salvation, the blood of it, and the way we may need for love to be harsh in order to be saved. And if you take her dare, you will find that Grievous is strangely hopeful. Indeed, it is a work of love for our demented world.
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    Out & About. This Sunday, Sept. 22, I am to preach at Church of the Redeemer in Irving, Tex., at 8 and at 10:30 a.m.
    Then on Sunday, Sept. 29, I am to preach at Church of the Advent in Boston. Boston, I believe, has slightly cooler weather than Dallas.
    The following week, on Sunday, Oct. 6, the fall theology lecture will be given at Church of the Incarnation in Dallas, at 6:15 p.m. in the church. My topic is the book of Ruth, and my question is: do we need a husband or wife in order to flourish as a human being? Ruth is a gem of a book, and it is a delight to begin talking about it. The lecture will include time for Q&A, with a wine and cheese reception following. Free and open to the public: If you live in the Dallas area, it would be good to see you (and invite your friends).
    My sermon on “God helps those who help themselves” soon will be here.
    Finally (for now!), the next Good Books & Good Talk seminar will be on Sunday, Oct. 13, on What Happened to Sophie Wilder by Christopher Beha. It’s an easy novel to read yet full of mysterious depths. (The seminar is at 6 p.m. at Incarnation in Dallas.)

 

 

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

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

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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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