Behavior Befitting a Covenant: Part II
"... because there was no place for them in the inn.” Luke 2:7
In the last issue, I argued that honest conversation is the foundation of covenant life and that this is seen in the exchanges between God and the people in Exodus 19 — that the running up and down that Moses does is a picture of such conversation. It is in this spirit that I offer the following to continue the conversation.
I am currently reading a chapter on “Martin Buber and Psychotherapy” by Leslie H. Farber. It is printed in the 12th volume of the Library of Living Philosophers, which is devoted to the work and thought of Martin Buber. Farber, himself a psychoanalyst, begins his reflection with a quote from Kierkegaard. (The statement is not footnoted, so I am not certain where it is located-perhaps a reader of Pietisten can help me.) The quote is as follows:
In relation to their systems, most systematizers are like a man who builds an enormous castle and lives in a shack beside it; they do not live in their own enormous buildings. But spiritually that is a decisive objection. Spiritually speaking, a man's thought must be the building in which he lives-otherwise everything is topsy-turvey.
Certainly, there is a whole lot of “architecture” out there that claims to give us the definitive structure within which we are able to know all sorts of things-from human beings to the origin of the universe. For instance, psychoanalysis is one type of architecture. By describing the various buildings that psychoanalytic theory has built, Farber helps us understand what is common to so many of these grand structures. He uses object-relations theory, a pyschoanalytic approach that centers attention on the relationship between mother and baby, as an example of a system that seeks to understand human relationship. He quotes from W. Ronald Fairbairn, one object-relations theorist: “( Mature dependence) is characterized neither by a one-sided attitude of incorporation nor by an attitude of primary emotional identification. On the contrary, it is characterized by a capacity on the part of a differentiated individual for cooperative relationships with differentiated objects.”
We might well wonder, “What in the world is this guy talking about?” At least I do. For me, this is a frequent reaction to the use of professional vocabulary. Systems builders, though not alone in this, love to use language only others like them can understand. One can only enter their building with their dictionary, that is, on their terms.
However, let us try not to let the jargon get in the way of learning what object-relations theory might help us understand as we look at the complexity of human relations. Fairbairn is attempting to tell us what a mature adult person might look like. After careful study, we might grow more comfortable with the language and begin to understand him better. Even so, we are left with another question: “Who in the world is this guy talking about?” Is this an actual human being; or is it some idealized person — a person who has been created for this system?
Can an actual person — can we — take up residence in this particular building, or “castle” as Kierkegaard calls it? Or, more likely, having constructed it and explored its many rooms, must we then go outside and take up our actual residence in a “shack” alongside? And what do we do while we live alongside because the castle is not for us? Do we sit and admire the work of our minds and lament that there is no place for us? Poor impoverished humanity, not living up to its potential. Do we nourish the resentment that comes from being excluded and hope one day to assault the castle and bring it down? Do we move on and look for another?
The problem with these huge castles—or, to shift the metaphor, inns — is that there does not seem to be room enough in them for real human beings. The systems become reductive; that is, through a process that shaves off the pieces that do not fit, the creature that is left becomes someone we hardly recognize. Even the castles’ creators are forced to become homeless, take up residence in the shacks, and and have their children in stables.
Farber suggests that “it is a matter of some irony, if one turns from psychology to one of Dostoevski’s novels, to find that no matter how wretched, how puerile, or how dilapidated his characters may be, they all possess more humanity than the ideal man who lives in the pages of psychiatry.”
I wonder if this can also be said of the Church. I wonder if our own conception of covenant, what it is and who it is for, has not become like other castles humans have built — gleaming and élegant, yet unfit for human habitation.
I have always loved Mark Twain in this regard. When Twain contemplates going to the Heaven, which the church describes awaits the faithful, he concludes that we go to heaven for climate, and hell for society. All the interesting people are left out of heaven. For Twain, a place devoid of sex and good conversation with skeptics is no place to spend eternity. The church often suffers from the same anemia-it is not a particularly interesting place to spend the short amount of time we are given on earth. The person we have constructed to live in this particular covenant castle, a sort of ideal covenant person, seems more like a cardboard cutout from an evangelical platitude than a flesh and blood human being. Indeed, it continues to be a strange derivative that peoples’ lives should be more interesting before they were saved than after. It may be that being interesting doesn't save you, but it certainly gives texture, color, and shape to life that otherwise feels a lot like living in Sheol — a mere shadow of existence. Elie Wiesel once remarked that God created humans because he loved a good story. I want to argue that it is precisely those parts of us “which the castle builders have squeezed out that make each of our stories “good” — worth telling and worth living!
In this regard, I want to be quite specific about the lack of room in our Inn by lifting up a whole community of real flesh and blood human beings. If, for example, I am walking up to the castle doors with my friends who are gay and if I must first tell them to be quiet about their lives or remain outside, I find myself asking, “Why would I want to enter?” It seems to me that by going in and leaving them out, I only add to their pain and alienation. Such action replaces friendship and love with mistrust and arbitrary walls of separation — walls established by a whole tradition of architects who have argued persuasively that, if such persons were to enter, the entire castle would come a tumblin’ down.
I could be angry about this exclusion yet remain silent, fearful of losing my own place, as I have done. And yet, I cannot help asking myself, “Why would I leave the rich and fascinating world of flesh and blood and enter the constrained and hog-tied world of ideal covenant people.” We acknowledge, as does the military, that gay men and women exist within our ranks. Yet we also insist that these persons remain silent and hidden. Bad for morale. Others would feel uncomfortable. Suppose you knew one was sitting in your pew, or teaching Sunday school. We could argue from this that to remain comfortable the occupants of the castle would need to guard the doors carefully. No room in the Inn! Go down with the animals and live in the stable!
Let us examine the effect of this vigilance. The castle seems comfortable enough. There is little if any troubling conversation. But is it really comfortable when persons inside are persuaded to remain silent to their own questions; never to speak what they might be thinking; never to explore their own sexuality and the fears that occupy the deeper mysteries of attraction and love. To grasp at this comfort and to live in the community of the castle people, many must often deny members of their own family: brothers, sisters, and children. Their love and affirmation must be given in secret for fear that others will find out.
The strangeness of this is highlighted in our wanting to care for persons of this community who are suffering with AIDS. After all, it is argued, there needs to be some pastoral response. (We even have to struggle with what kind of a response it is going to be.) Though a response from the church is commendable, it is a strange thing that we seem to be more comfortable with the disease and discussing it than we are with the persons who are suffering. A gay man dying of AIDS has more access through the roof of the castle than a healthy gay man who has come to the conclusion that his own sexual orientation might be part of God's good creative work. The church has a history of being more comfortable with the wages of sin — so to speak — than with the person who comes in with a different perspective of wholeness.
And herein lies the greatest loss to the occupants of the castle. A major part of human life is excluded from the castle, which of necessity leaves the inhabitants poorer. To exclude any is to make the whole place less fit for everyone. The gay community might just be able to teach us about brother love and sister love in a way we have not been able to grasp or experience as persons staring uneasily across the room at each other, afraid to touch and acknowledge our passions — fearful of our own feelings, mistrusting our bodies and affections. This denial undermines our own human depths and cuts us off from our own inner life and from each other. It keeps the castle clean and neat, but it is no place for human life to find the fullness of expression and acceptance.
In his book Reaching Out, Henri Nouwen suggests that a critical movement within community has to do with a shifting from hostility to hospitality. Hostility, he associates with loneliness-exclusion arising out of fear of the other. Hospitality reflects a life marked by solitude— one which is so centered as to make room for and bid welcome to the other to draw close. He quotes Johannes Metz:
We must forget ourselves in order to let the other person approach us. We must be able to open up to him [or her] to let his [or her] distinctive personality unfold — even though it often frightens and repels us. We often keep the other person down, and only see what we want to see; then we never really encounter the mysterious secret of his [or her] being, only ourselves. Failing to risk the poverty of encounter, we indulge in a new form of self-assertion and pay the price for it: loneliness. Because we did not risk the poverty of openness (Matthew 10:39), our lives are not graced with the warm fullness of human existence. We are left with only a shadow of our real self.
It seems to me that the modern church is to a great extent a lonely place and, as a result, is not very hospitable. The first greeting of humankind to the holy family was one of exclusion — because there was no room at the Inn. Perhaps we should see hospitality as our first concern, lest we reenact that refusal to receive Christ into our lives.
It used to be that covenant people felt more at home in the shack anyway. Calling our church architecture "mission houses” emphasizes this awareness of hospitality. The church should not be forboding to anyone. Its mission is to welcome all who come in the name of the child born in the stable “. . . because there was no room in the Inn.”