Wade dancing with the bride.
I
call it “Trump territory” rather than “Trump country” because I doubt any state
wants to be characterized by how it voted in the last presidential election.
Nor do its citizens. And “territory” sounds less permanent than “country,” suggesting
things may change. And I am writing this post not to diminish Trump voters in
Indiana and Louisiana or even my own state of Georgia, but to recognize we may
share more values than pundits might admit.
I
am writing this because when Wade and I visited Indiana for his mom’s memorial in
September and Louisiana for our friend’s wedding in October, both held in
picturesque rural chapels, we seemed to find the same welcoming people we enjoy
in our own neighborhood and our own spiritual community here in Atlanta.
Now,
we weren’t talking politics in either venue, but how people respond to a
married gay male couple could be considered a sort of litmus test of values. And
we seemed warmly received in our grief in Indiana and our celebration in Louisiana.
What that says to me is that death and marriage are universally held as
profound and important enough to, as they say in theater, “suspend our disbelief”
in one another’s voting records and ideologies and, as they say in the church,
“bear one another’s burdens and share each other’s joys.”
In
a May visit to family and friends in California, one of my hosts was one of
“those” puzzling Obama-Trump voters, but we had enough to talk about without pushing
one another’s buttons over politics. As many of us anticipate family gatherings
over Thanksgiving and Christmas, it helps to consider what we share than how we
differ. Fox News does not need to share a turkey with MSNBC. If ceasefires can
sometimes work in the Middle East, then they might work—if briefly—at our
dinner tables.
My
reading for both trips to Trump territory was Henri Nouwen’s Reaching Out:
The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life. As I read the section on the
movement from hostility to hospitality, tears came to my eyes. I was about to
offer my morning prayers, but I realized my tears were my prayers.
My
tears came from my youthful ideals that seem so unrealistic in our present political divisiveness. My first sermon in my home Presbyterian church as a college
student was entitled “Conflict and Unity within the Church.” That congregation
was so divided politically that the liberals sat on the left side of the
sanctuary and the conservatives on the right! My sermon declared that maybe the
church could be one place political sides could come together and have
meaningful conversation.
Someone
in the church sent a copy of my sermon to a newspaper columnist who wrote about
it, doubting the possibility of what he called “an umbrella church.”
Off
I went to seminary and bumped into Henri Nouwen, whose spirituality course in
which I enrolled my first semester became the book Reaching Out. He said
and wrote, “If we expect any salvation, redemption, healing and new life, the
first thing we need is an open receptive place where something can happen to
us. … To convert hostility into hospitality requires the creation of the
friendly empty space where we can reach out to our fellow human beings and
invite them to a new relationship.” (p 54)
“An
open receptive place” to me is the very definition of sanctuary.
Regular
readers know what store I place on the history of how I came by a book. A Roman
Catholic priest who has remained a lifelong friend gave me his copy of Reaching
Out in the mid-70s. The copy I’ve currently been reading is the one I gave
my mother, writing inside the cover, “To Mom, What Henri shared with me I now
share with you—with much love, Chris.”
Because
it speaks to our current divisiveness, I’ve decided to use Reaching Out
as the text for “An Open Receptive Place,” a new course on Henri I’ve been
invited to lead for Columbia Seminary’s spiritual formation program September
17-20, 2020.
Life can teach us that although the events of the
day are out of our hands, they should never be out of our hearts, that instead
of becoming bitter our lives can yield to the wisdom that only from the heart a
creative response can come forth.
If any criticism can be made of the sixties, it is
not that protest was meaningless but that it was not deep enough, in the sense
that it was not rooted in the solitude of the heart. When only our minds and
hands work together we quickly become dependent on the results of our actions
and tend to give up when they do not materialize. In the solitude of the heart
we can truly listen to the pains of the world because there we can recognize
them not as strange and unfamiliar pains, but as pains that are indeed our own.
There we can see that what is most universal is most personal and that indeed
nothing human is strange to us. … It would be paralyzing to proclaim that we,
as individuals, are responsible for all human suffering, but it is a liberating
message to say that we are called to respond to it. (p 40-41)
Henri
then talks about compassion, quoting Thomas Merton alluding to the solitude of
the desert of the first Christian contemplatives: “What is my new desert? The
name of it is compassion. There is no wilderness so terrible, so beautiful, so
arid and so fruitful as the wilderness of compassion. It is the only desert
that shall truly flourish like the lily.” (Merton, The Sign of Jonas, p
323.)
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