On Resurrection, Redemption and Grace (for Neville)

When I was in college, it took me almost three years to hold onto the concept of “hegemony,” which now seems silly, because it’s not really a difficult concept. And it wasn’t that I didn’t understand the concept; at any given moment, if I looked it up, or someone explained it to me, I understood it perfectly. But an hour later, it was gone. I just couldn’t hold onto it, and I certainly couldn’t pull it up at will to use it or explain it. I had at best an impressionistic understanding, one that only occasionally came into focus. “Hermeneutics” is another one; I still have no idea what it means. And it won’t help for you to leave an explanation in the comments, because then I will understand it … but only until I turn off my computer. Then it will be gone.

Big theological concepts often feel a bit like that for me. But if I feel a little dumb when I can’t hold onto concepts like “hegemony” or “hermeneutics,” I feel like a downright fraud for having only a tangential grasp on concepts like “grace” and “redemption” and “resurrection.” This is one of the many reasons I love Kathleen Norris’s Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith. I come back to these lovely essays about the “scary words” of the Christian faith over and over, not so much to set difficult ideas firmly in my mind, but rather precisely because what Norris gives me is permission to claim them even in the fleeting, “hope is a thing with feathers” sort of way they dwell with me.

Mostly I don’t so much understand big theological concepts as I experience them. And the thing is, whether you understand it or not, sometimes grace can just wash over you. Sometimes redemption can grab hold of you in an instant and deliver you from a captivity you didn’t even know you were dwelling in. Sometimes resurrection looks you right in the eye in the form of a teen-age boy, now a grown man, who revisits you across the decades through the magic of social networking.

Last night I got a Facebook friend request from Neville Stephens (that’s not really his last name, btw), a name that rang a bell, but which I couldn’t immediately place. Julie said, “Didn’t you have a student named Neville Stephens?” Right. Our mutual friends were two other former students, so of course I immediately accepted.

I’m now Facebook friends with several of my former students from my brief foray as a high school English teacher in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s in Hancock County, Indiana. First was Radley; I found him at the Cato Institute when I was doing background on a potential donor to my kids’ school. I shot him an email; awhile later he wrote back, apologetic about the delay. I was actually in Indiana when I received his email, in a Holiday Inn Express, at Julie’s Nanna’s funeral. I was just miles away from Eastern Hancock High School, and his kind words about my influence on his intellectual life were most certainly a sort of grace, a totally unexpected affirmation from the least likely of sources. I’ve been a huge fan of Radley’s ever since, and will always be grateful for his thoughtfulness that began to redeem what was mostly a painful and difficult time in my life. I may have been miserable, but apparently it was not all for naught.

But miserable I was, for so many reasons. In no particular order, there was the fact that my introverted, anxiety-prone, bookish self was exquisitely ill-suited to a career teaching adolescents; there was the war, about which I held a distinctly minority opinion among my colleagues; there was my mother’s death at the end of my first year, the great trauma in my life, still; and then there was that toxic closet, which permeated everything. All around a bad combination. When I look back on those three years, my misery seems almost unremitting.

So I was happy to hear from Radley that something good had come of all that misery. And when I became Facebook friends with Shawn and Amy and Webb and Todd, I had a similar experience. “Miss Rose! [“Marta” I have to correct them every time] It’s so nice to be in touch! Thank you so much for trying to open our minds there at Eastern Hancock, you really did make a difference!” Nothing begins to redeem misery like this sort of unexpected and undeserved kindness and generosity. Especially since not one of them seems particularly freaked out by my life (not my lifestyle, Todd … it’s just a life, and so is yours! Though yours probably has more style, come to think of it… ;-)

Then a couple of weeks ago, I was chatting on Facebook with my boy Cory, whom I sit with at church, while Julie is conducting the choir (Michael, my friend and pastor, says new folks probably think we’re married, ha!). He’s a new friend, and very dear, a Hoosier no less. I adore him. While we were chatting, he told me that Autumn, one of his childhood chums with whom he is Facebook friends, recognized my name on his page because she had also seen it on Amy’s page.

“Autumn?” It took me a minute. “As in Asha’s older sister? Really, you knew Asha?” What a small world, huh? Asha isn’t on Facebook, but I immediately chatted up Amy and caught up on Asha’s life.

Redemption all over the place. I may have been miserable, but these kids? Well, they’re not kids any more, for starters, and what’s more, they appear to have grown up to be fabulous human beings. Very rewarding and heartwarming, let me tell you.

So I was happy to get Neville’s friend request, in much the same way I was happy to hear from all of them. Neville was a great kid. They were all great kids. His photo, though, it didn’t look all that familiar. People change, as it turns out, quite a bit between their mid-teens and their mid-thirties. Someone else commenting on his wall thought so too: “Neville, what happened to your long hair?”

And then it all came back to me: resurrection, redemption, grace, all in one fell swoop. Because suddenly I really remembered Neville. I really saw him, his fifteen-year-old self, with his long blond hair and the fabulous smile and a certain open-yet-shy sort of head-ducking, looking-out-from-under-his-eye-lids gesture that was so, well, Neville. Like his young self was standing right there in front of me.

Michael recently preached a beautiful sermon about bodies (one of my favorite topics) and resurrection, which threw me for a bit of a loop at the end, because he proposed that resurrection is not really a metaphor, that our resurrections will be bodily and unique, right down to the expressions on our faces and our quirky personalities and the very gestures that make us unique. I loved this sermon right up until that point, when I fell right into fretting about being a fraud. Because resurrection as not-a-metaphor and not-a-symbol is not-so-much something I can easily wrap my mind around. A couple of days after that sermon, I made Michael go for a walk with me and quizzed him about it. We walked around the block in the sunshine, my first limping excursion of any distance since my last bout with plantar facsiitis. I was in a funk, and a walk in the sunshine and my new fancy running shoes with my pal Michael was certainly a resurrection of sorts. His further explanation of his sermon was helpful, too, but still I was left mostly scratching my head.

I still don’t really understand the end of Michael’s sermon, but this morning, when a flood of Nevilleness washed over me, I certainly experienced resurrection in just the way Michael proposed: specific, quirky, bodily, right down to the very gestures and expressions that make Neville himself. I have experienced this before: fifteen-year-old Radley is pretty easy to recall too, but here’s the thing (and I trust that Radley would take no offense): there’s not so much redemption or grace in recalling a fifteen-year-old Radley in all his smirky particularity. The redemption of Radley is in knowing he turned out to be a fine human being, a good man, someone who does important work in the world.

The difference was that my experience of Neville, resurrected, recalled for me that my time at Eastern Hancock was not all misery. Neville appears to have turned out to be a fine human being, like most of my former students I’m sure, one that I will be happy to know and be friends with, on Facebook and perhaps even in real life. But the gift that has redeemed those years like no other is in recalling – so specifically, so particularly, so vividly – how much I adored him, then, and how happy it made me, then, to know him.

In the two pages Kathleen Norris devotes to “Grace” in Amazing Grace, she recalls the story of Jacob, who, as Norris tells us, “has just deceived his father and cheated his brother out of an inheritance. But,” says Norris, “God’s response to finding Jacob vulnerable, sleeping all alone in open country, is not to strike him down for his sins but to give him a blessing.” Upon waking from his dream, Jacob responds, “Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it!” Grace, suggests Norris, is in realizing that God is with us even when we don’t know it. “Even when we try to run away from our troubles, as Jacob did, God will find us and bless us….” (pp. 150-151)

Indeed.

I Just Love These Guys: Andrew Sullivan and Ta-Nehisi Coates

Last fall I was obsessed with political blogs, but come on, who wasn't, right?  The domestic front at Chez Marta-Julie was turned upside down by a basement renovation; I was coping with depression and anxiety triggered in part by the chaos here at home, but mostly by escalating drama around programs for kids living in poverty sponsored by my church in which I had invested way too much myself (note to self: don't do that again) but which, despite my best efforts, were falling apart; and oh, yeah, Barack Obama was running for president!  So obsessively reading political blogs was not only a form of escape, but really, my duty as a citizen of this fine democracy, nu?

So raise your hand if you experienced just a little bit of a post-election slump.  Okay, so I'm not alone? Good.  Anyway, yeah, my own private malaise continued apace, but somehow administration-building-in-the-midst-of-the-next-Great-Depression wasn't nearly as fun as OMG-it-looks-like-we-might-win-Indiana!!!  I finally called everyone's bluff and just quit everything at church (other than going to church, though even that felt excruciating at times), and made my world intentionally small.  Really, really small.  Really, really, cozily, love-a-ly, scrumptiously, stress-freely small.  Oh, and I started seeing my therapist too, which was super smart and helpful.  I even came this close to starting anti-depressant/anti-anxiety medication, something I have not done yet, but will definitely do if I ever feel that bad again for any length of time. Fortunately, my depression lifted suddenly, just as I started reaching out for help, and life got better.  But in the meantime, I totally abandoned my political blogs, and stuck with a very small, cozy handful of domestic blogs I have been following for years.

Interestingly, the first to go of the political blogs were the far-left rags.  I was actually getting pretty annoyed with them even before the election, because they were so completely predictable and knee-jerk.  Yawn.  Among the last to go were two of my favorites, The Daily Dish, by Andrew Sullivan, who blogs for The Atlantic, and Ta-Nehisi Coate's self-named blog, also at The Atlantic.  Now that I am once again dipping my toes back into the political blogosphere, these two blogs (along with my homeboy, Radley, who blogs at The Agitator) are, not surprisingly, the ones I am reading these days.  

I love both Sullivan and Coates independently of each other, and I intend to do a full-length Blog Review of each of them some day.  But in a nutshell, I love them both because they are unpredictable and thought-provoking.  Sullivan is a self-avowed conservative, or as he more recently described himself, "a libertarian independent."  I reviewed his book The Conservative Soul here; I tend to sympathize with some of his detractors who question his conservative credentials (or maybe, heaven forbid, I'm becoming conservative myself??)  I do in fact disagree with him in principle about a few pretty fundamental things, but I agree with him way more often than not, and admire his integrity all the time, and even when I think his arguments are just plain silly, I find him so damn charming and sweet and earnest that I just have to shake my head like a doting sister.   Ta-Nehisi Coates, on the other hand, I feel like I'm just getting to know.  I also find him charming, especially in his willingness to jeopardize his street cred with his brazen geekiness.  I haven't found much to disagree with him about, but I think his unblinking honesty and thoughtful openness about the issues of race that he routinely and deftly tackles is just super refreshing.

So yeah, I love both of these guys independently of one another, but what I really really just love so much is the thoughtful, respectful interplay between them on their blogs.  I'm probably being completely sentimental, but there's just something about the obvious affection that this White gay man and this Black dude from Harlem (via the 'hood in Baltimore) have for one another. One of my two biggest critiques of Sullivan is that he has yet to incorporate a convincing analysis of race in America into his philosophy of conservatism (and it strikes me that once he does, the more silly parts of it will crumble), so I'm really glad that he's listening carefully to Coates.  It would be hard not to, since Coates is so passionately spot on when it comes to one of Sullivan's favorite issues, marriage equality for lesbians and gays.  I think we'd all be a lot better off if there were more forums for respectful discourse across the political spectrum; I'm glad that Andrew and Ta-Nehisi are providing at least one.

Here are a couple of their recent posts that so swelled my heart I had to write this little love letter to two of my favorite boys:

Sullivan on Maine's passage of marriage equality legislation (and I agree whole-heartedly with him that legislative strategies are far, far superior to court victories, though I'm not complaining about how Massachusetts got the ball rolling).

Coates on Marion Barry's lonely "No" vote on a D.C. ordinance recognizing gay marriages performed elsewhere (!).

And because he was too spittin' mad to get it all out in just one post, another Coates post on Marion Berry and gay marriage.

In other news, life here is richly and happily full of birthdays, baptisms, confirmations, and end-of-the-school-year; and when not engaged in those delightful past-times, it's All Gardening All The Time.  So while my head is always teeming with things to write about, I'm not so sure how much time I will actually have to write in the coming weeks and months.  We'll see.