Diary of a Theologian

Eighty-eight Years

My father died a few years ago at the age of 88. In the days between his death and his funeral, I thought of how long 88 years is. Telephones, electrification, and radio were relatively new when he was born and hardly universal. His was a long life but still imaginable. Then I started piling them up. If we took my father’s life and put it before his life, going back 88 years before he was born, we would be back before the U.S. Civil War. If instead of one of his lifetimes we took ten (which doesn’t seem like so many) and lined them up, going back 880 years before his birth, we would land about the year 1050. No Bach, no Aquinas, no Franciscans, only a small part of today’s Canterbury Cathedral. Double that and go back twenty lives, it would be around A.D. 170: Christianity, not yet legal, under sporadic persecution. Twenty-one lives back, and St. John the Divine, who wrote the book of Revelation (chapter 7 of which is traditionally read on All Saints’ Day), would still have been alive, with his great Apocalypse not yet written. Twenty-two, and Jesus has not yet been born.

You can do the math for one of your parents or grandparents. And it doesn’t take too many such lives and we find we’re back to Jesus and John and Mary and Paul and all those biblical people before whose name we put the word “Saint.” It’s a long time ago, and yet it turns out not to be that long. Get your head around it, and the people of the Bible don’t seem that ancient. Or flip the perspective: what’s ancient needn’t seem that long ago. True, they had no indoor plumbing, and they did not enjoy that greatest achievement of modern man, anesthetic dental surgery. Still, they weren’t that long ago. Twenty, twenty-five times the life of a person in her 80s. Heck, they’re just around the corner!

When Saint John the Divine saw them, they were his contemporaries, members of that great multitude which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues. From our perspective as from his, they died, as it were, yesterday; some were martyred, others more peacefully expired. They’re under the altar, they’re in the choir with the angels, they’re close at hand.

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    A blessed All Saints’ Day to you.

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Out & About. This weekend, Nov. 2/3, I am to preach at All Souls’ Church in Oklahoma City: Saturday at 5:30 p.m. and Sunday at 8 & 10 a.m. This is my annual theological visitation there, for which I will also be teaching through the week: Sunday at 9 a.m., and Monday through Wednesday at noon and 6 p.m. The noon classes are on what’s good about marriage, starting with biblical roots of our Christian tradition. The evening classes are on pilgrimage, with thoughts on visiting churches and a final session on T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding.” Some of the evening classes will feature slides from walking the Camino earlier this year. All open to anyone who happens to be in the area.

The next “Good Books & Good Talk” seminar will be on Sun., Nov. 10, on Charis in the World of Wonders by Marly Youmans; at 5 p.m. at St. Matthew’s (in Garrett Hall, 2nd floor). Youmans is a Christian writing good fiction and good poetry who is part also of the movement to revive art and culture. The book itself is a sort of wonder. (I am also preaching at St. Matthew’s that Sunday, at 9 and 11:15.)

On the Web. The book of Job is a gift that keeps on giving, as I found while preparing for a conference sponsored by The Living Church last month. Some of these further insights were written into my recent essay for the “pastoral reflections” section of the Human Life Review website. To read “Friendship and Life in the Book of Job,” visit: https://humanlifereview.com/friendship-and-life-in-the-book-of-job/

What the World Needs Now

 Yours truly as a youth didn’t much care for popular music; weird even then, I enjoyed the likes of Beethoven. But some popular songs sink into the brain without trying to listen to them. Those songs are everywhere; their music is easy to grasp; they worm their way into the memory.

    Sort of. Recently I found an old song running through my head, and I have no idea what brought it to mind. It opens: “What the world needs now is love, sweet love.” The next line, in my memory, runs: “It’s the only thing that there’s not too little of.” And I thought, that doesn’t make sense! If there’s not too little of love, then there is enough of it. So why is it needed?

    So I googled the thing, and found (as you, dear reader, probably already know) that the word “not” is a mis-memory. The correct line is: “It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of.” That makes a bit more sense, although I think there are other things that we could use more of (truth, say).

    What was my memory doing? I wonder if, subconsciously, I changed that word 50 years ago so that the song would be nonsense, as if I had a desire to mess up the song.

    And if my mind can do something like that with a popular ditty, what else do I twist to my liking? I don’t know if it’s what the world needs, but I certainly need more humility about the things I remember! T. S. Eliot says that the wisdom of old men is overrated. Instead, we should be talking about humility. “Humility is endless.”

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    Out & About. “Walking the Camino: How and Why.” Sunday, October 27, the fall theology lecture. As I did two years ago, I walked again this year a thousand-year-old route of about 450 miles, ending at Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain. My lecture will face two questions that many people have asked me. First, what are the practicalities of making this walk? Do you need permission? What sort of preparation do you need? (and so forth). Second, why walk to a place that claims to be the burial place of a saint? Isn’t God everywhere? What is the connection of holy places to our nature as animals that walk? Bishop Sumner will offer a response; there will be time for questions; there will be a reception. 5 p.m. in the Great Hall at St. Matthew’s Cathedral, Dallas. 

    The next “Good Books & Good Talk” seminar will be on Sun., Nov. 10, on Charis in the World of Wonders by Marly Youmans; at 5 p.m. at St. Matthew’s (in Garrett Hall, 2nd floor). Youmans is a Christian writing good fiction and good poetry who is part also of the movement to revive art and culture. The novel is introduced thusly: Charis clambers “into the branches of a tree” fleeing “flaming arrows and massacre. She will need to struggle for survival: to scour the wilderness for shelter, to strive and seek for a new family and a setting where she can belong. Her unmarked way is costly and hard. For Charis, the world outside the window of home is a maze of hazards. And even if she survives the wilds, it is no simple matter to discover and nest among her own kind—the godly, those called Puritans by others.” And yet there is the world of wonders.