“If we don’t come together, we will come apart.” Vance Havner said it. I’m not surprised to learn that he was a preacher. We come together, don’t we, at times of great celebration or great calamity. May 8, 1945: Germany surrenders and people around the western world pour into the streets. A fire erupts in a neighborhood and everyone is out on their porches, gathering in little groups, talking, shaking their heads, embracing each other. And then we drift off to our own little worlds, our own private affairs. I write early, in morning darkness. I find it easier to focus, to follow the quiet thoughts in my head, the quiet movements in my heart, as I try to integrate my thoughts and my belief. But Havner and this man Jesus knew: we need emerge from solitude or we will come unglued; we need to bring our thoughts and our beliefs into the noisy, busy world, to integrate our inner life with our public life.
Next week the great coming together begins, as this preacher we’ve been spending time with rides his donkey into town with a throng of people surrounding him. Celebration or calamity? Yes. Lent which began with this man in the desert now builds to a crescendo as his internal search for human authenticity becomes a very public matter. In Through a Glass Darkly, David portrays the father of young adult children, a writer who leaves them for long periods to write his novels while they…and
he… struggle with their demons alone. His daughter Karin is in treatment for schizophrenia; his son Minus suffers powerful longing for communication with him, his distant father. As he comes to recognize the agony he is causing them, he escapes to the empty kitchen and weeps provately. Karin waits, in her contorted mind, for God to come through the door of an abandoned room in the cottage they share. Minus struggles privately with his worth. Only after calamity strikes his daughter does David come together with his son. The two are framed in the same kitchen window in which David had, in his private agony, been framed earlier, his arms out as on a cross.
We begin this week to experience the comings together and the comings apart that make the Good Story so much like our own. We come to see coming to God means coming together with family, in the light of morning. Consider with me how private, how hidden, this Lenten journey has been. Perhaps it is time to come together with those from whom we have been apart. As we approach this calamity, this celebration, perhaps we can do it together.
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John,
ReplyDeleteAnother late comment, I'm afraid, but as you know, Billie and I are in Paris (courtesy of a friend). So, I'm just getting to some of your recent entries. I rejoice in your wonderful experience with the students' alternative spring break, and I love your poem on Detroit's not supposing to look so good! Here in the City of Light, where almost every street corner is a postcard and where 2 million people seem to walk happily arm in arm while crammed into a city of just 40 square mies (contrasted with Detroit's 900,000 residents spread out over 184 square miles), it's easy to make unfavorable comparisons with our home town as we meander about. And, sadly, it's easy to not see the people who are sitting against the walls of buildings with their bedrolls and possessions, awaiting another night of "rough sleeping" as Alexander Masters describes homelessness in his book "Stuart: A Life Lived Backwards." So, your reminder (Frost-like) that Detroit makes up in height what it lacks in depth is a tonic to my rueful, wishful thinking and my blind eyes. Indeed, Detroit used to be called the Paris of the Midwest. Even while we trod the cobblestones of the real McCoy, it remains so in my heart.
Bill