Diary of a Theologian

Hickory Lane

Runners have it easy when they visit another city. The only special equipment they have to pack is their shoes. Then in the morning before the day begins, they head out to see the place they’re visiting.

Nowadays, they can carry a palm-sized computer that communicates with satellites and, with it, track their path and progress. But they also can go without (as in the ancient days of, say, the year 2000) and trust their own wits to find their way back home.
 One priest, staying at the old College of Preachers in Our Nation’s Capital, went out for a run and got lost. The streets were winding and hilly, the sun had not yet risen, and he just had to keep going. He returned after an hour an a half—the sun was up and he was wiped out by this, for him, really long run. I think it was a sighting of the National Cathedral that brought him back. He had a sense of having being caught without alternatives; not unsafe, but without cash or ID, just a key (or maybe it was just the mental knowledge of the entrance code). All he could do was keep running, think, hope, and pray.
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 Running as a visitor recently, I noticed that the residential street I had come upon was called Hickory Lane. Lots of streets in that part of the world are named for trees and are almost never called “streets.” Then a tune came into my mind.
 I was back in grade school, in a world that really was a long time ago. We’re in the auditorium where we had music class a couple of days a week, and we’re singing a song that, even then, was old fashioned. “School days, school days, dear old golden rule days: Reading and writing and arithmetic; Taught to the tune of a hickory stick.”
 I’m on Hickory Lane and my mind dredges up something half a century ago about hickory sticks. Corporal punishment was just an accepted thing then, but to speak of a spanking with the stick as a “tune” was even then a poetic transformation. The good and the bad are alike transformed and remembered with an equal gaze. Education, discipline, and love come together.
 The song, of course, goes on with words we boys squirmed to sing: “You were my queen in calico, I was your bashful, barefoot beau As you wrote on my slate, ‘I love you, Joe,’ When we were a couple of kids.”
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 We’re all runners, of course. We’re all visitors, wherever we are. We carry memories that are themselves memories that bathe all they consider with love. And although we can get ourselves lost, that cathedral spire is there and might indicate the way home.
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 Out & About. This Sunday, November 11, I’ll lead a seminar discussion on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, Never Let Me Go. I hope you read the book and, if you can, join us at Incarnation, 3966 McKinney Ave., Dallas, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. in room 205 of the education building.

Moral Books

Assisted suicide, which is also called “aid in dying,” is a practice that at one time was inconceivable or even taboo but is now legal in certain countries and some of our states. My readers may well know of someone who helped someone else die, or whose physician provided the lethal drugs.

In my fall theology lecture, “Rules and Personal Exceptions, With Particular Attention to Assisted Suicide,” I mentioned a study that I would recommend widely: Nigel Biggar’s 2004 book, Aiming to Kill: The Ethics of Suicide and Euthanasia. Biggar, who is Regius Professor of moral and pastoral theology at Oxford, here lays out with great clarity and detail the arguments that are made for removing the prohibitions on assisted suicide, and he then addresses them with arguments drawn from both general human reason and also Christian principles. He concludes that there may well be cases in which “aiming to kill” could be justified, as long as we restrict our view to the case at hand. But when we consider the broader effects on our neighbors and society in general, we need to maintain the prohibition.

It is an uncommonly clear book, and if you disagree with Biggar it is at least clear why you disagree. I would recommend it for broad reading, especially if you give yourself permission to skip over any section that seems to get rather technical. It is not a long book, just four chapters and about 160 pages apart from the notes.

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While I’m at it, let me recommend another book: Law, Love, and Language by Herbert McCabe. (The same text, in earlier printings, is called What Is Ethics All About?) McCabe, an original thinker in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas, had an uncommonly insightful way of communicating theological truths in sensible yet arresting language. He says that this book is “a quick look at three starting-points from which we might think about ethics,” namely, “ethics is a matter of loving, ethics is a matter of obeying the law, and ethics is a matter of talking to people.” His first chapter, “Ethics as Love,” is a compelling explication of “situation ethics” which shows the problems of thinking of ethics as a matter of always doing the most loving thing. The second chapter goes on to show problems with thinking of ethics as a matter of law, yet nonetheless both love and law have important roles in ethics!

McCabe’s rather bracing preference is to think of ethics as language, as a matter of talking with other people. I have found his thinking very exciting, for instance, when he says that ethics is a matter of being human and that to be human is to live with others as friends; that Jesus, being perfectly human, was “of course” killed by the likes of us who prefer to live rather sub-human lives. All this is a suggestion of the riches inside the conception of ethics as talking.

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Out & About. This coming week I’ll be making my annual visit as “theological visitor” of All Souls’ Church at 63rd and Penn in Oklahoma City. On Sunday, November 4, I am to preach at 8 and 10 a.m. On Mon., Tues., and Wed. following (Nov. 5-7) I’ll teach a class on the book of Esther at noon each day. And on the same days in the evening at 6 p.m. I’ll teach a class on Christian bioethics. If you’re in Oklahoma City, it would be great to see you.

Good Books & Good Talk: Kazuo Ishiguro is a Nobel-prize-winning novelist; his book, Never Let Me Go, is written from the point of view of a student in a British country boarding school in about the 50s. Shortly into the book, you realize all the students there never go home, that they are trained to take exceptionally good care of their health; that they are, in short, clones. Through this device of an “alternative present,” Ishiguro raises poignant questions of our humanity and capacity to use one another obliviously.

  I will lead a seminar on this book on Sunday, November 11, at Incarnation in Dallas, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Anyone who reads the book is welcome to the conversation.