Last weekend we went camping with some friends at Starved Rock State Park (a beautiful spot if you’re in Chicagoland).  On Sunday morning – Father’s Day – Maggie “made” me sit by the campfire while she made a delicious breakfast.  I sat and finished Alister McGrath’s excellent biography about C.S. Lewis before picking up God, Christ and Us by the Catholic preacher, Herbert McCabe.  As sometimes happens, I stumbled onto McCabe through a review in Books and Culture where he was quoted approvingly by Eugene McCarraher. 

I continue to slowly make my way through Augustine’s Confessions. I’ve found F.J. Sheed’s translation to be lyrical and very readable.  In conversation with Augustine on my actual nightstand is Studs Terkel’s And They All Sang. (I imagine Studs winking at Augustine as he says, “Lighten up!”)  This may be my submission for the perfect bedside book.  I can leave it alone for weeks and then dip back into one of Studs’enthralling interviews with some interesting musician or singer from a bygone era; last night it was Dizzy Gillespie reminiscing on jazz and the rhythms of latin music.  Wonderful stuff.

Having anticipated it for a few months, I’m now reading James K. A. Smith’s Imagining the Kingdom with three church friends.  We’ve traded some emails as we read and will find time to discuss Smith’s perspective on worship, cultural anthropology, liturgy over dessert later this summer.  Smith’s first book in this series, Desiring the Kingdom, was incredibly helpful to me and this one looks to be equally a gift to the church.

Finally, I just received in the mail Educating all God’s Children: What Christians Can – and Should – Do to Improve Public Education for Low-Income Kids. I’ll be reviewing this for Englewood Review of Books and am hopeful that it will add to my own education on a topic that is incredibly relevant to our neighborhood and church.

So that’s what’s on my night stand.  How about you?  Read anything lately that you’d recommend?

Photo credit: Chicago Public Media (C.C.).

Displaced children and their families are now trying to understand their options and considering the consequences of their eventual decisions.  How much farther will a child’s new school be from home? How welcomed will she be? What invisible lines now have to be crossed?

A few months back I attended a breakfast with other clergy from the South Side and the CEO of Chicago Public Schools.  Dr. Byrd-Bennett is clearly an intelligent woman and very capable as the CEO; she said much during our breakfast that I appreciated.  But there was this one thing… “Don’t forget,” she stated while discussing the upcoming school closings, “children are resilient!”  Her point was simple: It’s unfortunate that we have to close these schools, but kids are tough and they will be just fine.

The representative at our neighborhood meeting said much the same thing even as he ran through a massive list of programs, initiatives, and strategies to help school children who are experiencing crisis.  Crises like the school closings.

So which is it?  Resilient or vulnerable and in need of systems and support during crisis?

Probably it’s both, though if we get clearer with our language we might be slower to talk about a young child’s resiliency.  The more than 31,000 displaced students (8% of these are currently homeless) are experiencing the violence of the system in which they find themselves.  Dr. Bryd-Bennett, Mayor Emmanuel, and the Chicago School Board would dispute it, but theirs are violent decisions.  That they aren’t talked about as such only indicates the extent to which violence is normal, the currency of the powerful.

Of course, we can all sleep easier if we believe  soothing truisms about the resiliency of the powerless.

It’s also been encouraging to see Evangelical folks get behind these efforts.  Some friends have put together a campaign to encourage Christians to pray for the passage of reform legislation that will be just and hospitable to immigrants and refugees.  Check out the #pray4reform website for a bit more information and to commit to pray in the coming days.

You, who are Truth, reside everywhere to answer all who ask counsel of You, and in one act reply to all though all seek counsel upon different matters. And You answer clearly, but all do not hear clearly. All ask what they wish, but do not always hear the answer that they wish. That man is Your best servant who is not so much concerned to hear from You what he wills as to will what he hears from You.

-Augustine, Confessions, Book 10.26.37.

That last sentence is especially wonderful, until I consider the implications for longer than 10 seconds.

Coretta Scott King during the Poor People’s Campaign. (Jack Rottier Collection.)

I wonder if the slipperiness of the word makes my earlier point that violence is less a moment in time and more the ground on which we walk.  On June 19, 1968 Coretta Scott King addressed the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington DC and described the pervasiveness of violence.

Poverty can produce a most deadly kind of violence. In this society violence against poor people and minority groups is routine. I remind you that starving a child is violence; suppressing a culture is violence; neglecting schoolchildren is violence; discrimination against a working man is violence; ghetto housing is violence; ignoring medical needs is violence; contempt for equality is violence; even a lack of will power to help humanity is a sick and sinister form of violence.

Context always matters, no more so than in the case of Mrs. King’s remarks.  Less than three months earlier her husband, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., had been assassinated in Memphis.  His was an especially violent death, captured in images and eye-witnesses accounts that still register in our national consciousness.  Yet, when describing the toll of violence, Mrs. King pointed not to her husband’s spectacular and undeniably violent death but to the millions of accepted and overlooked acts that take place every day.

Making the shift toward Mrs. King’s view of violence leaves us with a dilemma far more significant than a murky definition: such a view implicates not a few violent actors but most of us, most of the time.

“The Aquarium” was originally published as an essay in The New Yorker and in it Hemon tells how his very young daughter contracted a rare and deadly form of cancer.  The reader need not be a parent to imagine the terror experienced by the author and his wife, though images of my own son’s three frightening trips to the hospital flickered across my memory as I read Hemon’s precise descriptions of hospital beds, medications,  and, of course, the fear.

And then, in a paragraph halfway through the chapter, the author writes about the annoying platitudes offered by acquaintances who weren’t sure what to say in the presence of such suffering.  I read these sentences sympathetically; though I’ve not known pain anywhere near what this family experienced, I share their distaste for words and sentences that explain tritely the unexplainable.  But then I came to these two sentences and had to set the book down:

And we stayed away from anyone who, we feared, might offer us the solace of that supreme platitude, God.  The hospital chaplain was prohibited from coming anywhere near us.

A good friend of ours has been working as a hospital chaplain this year and the thought of her offering God to anyone as a platitude is too much to believe.  But that’s not really the point, is it?  For Hemon, whose religious antagonism surfaces only occasionally throughout the book, God is a platitude: a meaningless bunch of words dressed up to sound spiritually relevant.  We don’t get to know why he and his wife feel this way, though I’m not sure it matters; they are not alone in their distaste for God-talk, especially when applied like a cheap bandaid to a gaping wound.

The thing is, I share a bit of the author’s antipathy.  Over the past three years I’ve spent time in the emergency room three times with members of our family.  During those uncertain moments I’ve been glad to know (and be reminded) that friends and family have been praying for us.  But that’s about all I’ve wanted to hear.  I don’t need an explanation for these too-frequent emergency room trips and any such explanation, no matter how theologically nuanced, would have been supremely annoying.

Why is it that people like Hemon have experienced God as “that supreme platitude”?  In part it must be that we who claim to know God have represented him as such.  In moments of suffering – in hospital rooms or in the aftermaths of bombings and tornadoes – Christians often say too much.  We offer explanations that may have some Biblical heft but are tone-deaf to the experience of profound suffering.  When our mouths should be shut we instead fill the disquieting air with thin platitudes.

The sad irony is that Christians have access to more humane ways of encountering tragedy, whether our own or another’s. Throughout the Bible we observe God’s people lament during their moments of suffering. In place of quick explanations or claims to speak on God’s behalf, they grieve, mourn, and question. Job’s friends are the first to offer platitudes disguised as spiritual wisdom and they are eventually silenced by the God whose actions will not be neatly explained.  On the other hand, the Psalms, the textbook for prayer, are filled with lament and silence.  In the Bible, the one who interrogates God about suffering comes off looking far better than those who try to explain God to the suffering.

Of course none of this may change even a little Hemon’s assumption that God is nothing but the supreme platitude. But his belief and, I infer, the experiences behind it, remind that God is best represented in moments of suffering not through any spiritual platitude but through our lament, sometimes spoken and often not.