Ch 14--Up the Boulder

Chapter Fourteen:
Up the Boulder: Retiree
Big Timber, 2001-2008

As you leave Billings traveling west, you begin to ascend the Rocky Mountains around Columbus. By the time you get to Reed Point, the Absarokas crystallize out of the blue haze on your left and take your breath away. In the middle of Big Timber, you drive down main street, where many of the buildings are made of a grey-brown sandstone that is constantly crumbling little bits of itself onto the sidewalk. That main street turns into highway 298, which follows the Boulder River upstream. The first few miles of highway wind through meadows thick with deer. Above the valley floor are high cliffs laid down in the late Paleozoic, 300 million years ago, when most of the Western Montana lay under shallow seas that advanced and receded for 150 million years. The shelled animals that collected in those seas in Western Montana is called Madison limestone. It dissolves in water to make carbolic acid that can leach the limestone to create deep canyons and underground tunnels. About 20 miles south of Big Timber, the Boulder did this, creating a formation called The Natural Bridge. Later the bridge collapsed, but the water has formed another. In the spring the tunnel fills up, but in the summer, the water disappears into the limestone entirely, re-emerging miles downstream. Just few miles further upstream, the canyon suddenly narrows and the landscape above the road is replaced by pine trees except where the mountain side has been scarred by rockslides. Presumably the Rocky Mountain orogeny jammed two kinds of geology together at that point. Early settlers noticed the difference and built a little town there, called Contact.

__________________________

I still say I drifted into the priest-business, though one generally drifts into things that are near-by. I liked being an acolyte in church, bowing reverently as I passed before the cross when I was lighting candles. When I was still in high school, one of our priests in Dillon commented on that and asked if I had ever considered becoming a priest. I thought it was preposterous that one could be called into a vocation on the basis of candle-lighting and didn’t think much more about it. Then in a college conversation in college, over coffee in the Union (I could show you the table, if it still existed) my friends one took delight in pointing out how my earnest, studious demeanor was that of a clergyperson. At that time, I was working hard at shedding what faith I had, so I laughed them off. Twenty years later, when I became active in church again, a rector named Gordon Plowe gave me committee assignments, then got me licensed to help with Eucharist, and finally suggested I work toward becoming licensed to preach sermons of my own composition. He was a decent and persuasive man, so I pretty much did what he said. Besides, the church had given me my life back, it seemed only fair to do whatever the church asked. Preaching went well enough and so people began talking about ordination--different people in the congregation and then Joanne, and a 90’s rector named Paul Rider, and then the Bishop, Andy Fairfield.

You might think that having accepted that God was God, it would be an easy step to accepting ordination as an Episcopal Priest, but I resisted, partly on practical grounds. I didn’t need to be a priest to be useful doing the things I liked doing: preaching, teaching, doming committee work. But resistance also came from deeper down. Part of me was still a rebel and determined to go against the tide, even when the tide is flowing in a sensible direction. Except at home, I had always been outwardly conforming and cooperative—the diligent Key Club member in high school, the hard-working frat-rat chemistry major in college--but I still cherished in my secret heart the feeling of being the outsider, the beatnik, the outlaw.

Part of this may have been natural. In high school, for example, I wore sailor hats. I don’t know where I got the idea. It was something I did, as inevitable as walking, except that everyone walked and not everyone wore sailor hats. I ordered them from war surplus catalogs, dyed them different colors and wore them on the back of head so that they would not mess my carefully sculptured hair. No one teased me about them that I remember, but it would not have mattered. In my senior year, people started asking me if they could buy one. Needless to say, it was the only fashion trend I ever started.

But modernism gave an ideological base to my adolescent ranting at the world. . The whole tenor of modernism is “We have been set free. Now we must liberate others.” When I puzzled over passages from Eliot and Stevens, I saw myself standing heroically with the great rebels, renouncing the shiftless masses who were still reading Tennyson and Browning.

Later, but not much later, I think my loner streak got tied up with a need to think of myself as a Writer, one of those people—I was told--who need absolute freedom to see the truth in their unique way. The vision of Socrates as a martyr to truth had burned in my heart ever since I first read Plato’s apology. The truth-seeker as martyr had been reinforced by 19th century Romanticism, when writers felt the grime of the industrial revolution settling down on the land and on their souls, when the receding vision of the sacred created a vacuum into which something had to flow.

But again, I drew again on the thoughts that consoled me when I converted: that I could probably find all the alienation I wanted in kinship with the Jews whose history was mostly 2,000 years of oppression and defeat by the their neighbors to the east, south, and west, culminating in an obscure Jewish carpenter who was ridiculed and misunderstood during his brief ministry and then executed as a common criminal. There was, unfortunately the great triumph of Christendom, when for a thousand years or so, Christianity was the default world view, when to be a Christian was to be an insider. But Galileo and Descarte took care of that in the 17th century, and by the late 20th century, , scientism and materialism had pretty much amalgamated into a reigning secular worldview that regarded orthodox Christianity as a bizarre anachronism, at least among people with graduate degrees.

In the end, I was seduced by the prospect of the study. I was already reading in most of the curriculum: Old Testament, New Testament, Church History, Theology. I thought it would be fun to study this same material more systematically and under direction, so around 1997, I signed on, jumped through the relevant paperwork hoops and began. Our then-Rector, Paul Rider gave me books and I read them, but mostly I learned by doing take-home questions sent to me by Bishop Harris, a retired Bishop of Alaska, then living in South Dakota. Every three or four months, he would send me another sheaf of questions: Describe the relationship between the Eastern and Western branches of the church, beginning with the Great Schism and continuing to the present time. Describe the Graff Willendorf hypothesis of Old Testament origins. Do you find it helpful in your own reading of the Bible? What is meant my Deuteronomistic history. Cite several examples of it not only in Deuteronomy but in subsequent books. What key events took place in the inter-testamental period that significantly influenced the New Testament?

I would look up answers at the library if necessary, though I could usually find them in my own library, which probably was and is bigger than it should be. When I thought I knew enough, I would type up the answers (usually one single-spaced page per answer) on the little Mac Classic I used then. The take-home exam still seems to me the most painless way to learn almost anything. An assignment was usually 12-15 questions. I would send those answers off to him. He would respond in a positive but cursory way and send me another assignment. I only met face to face with Bishop Harris once, when, at direction of the ND Bishop, he met me in Jamestown. He was big man, shaggily handsome. He asked me, first off, when the book of Ezekiel as written and why. I knew the answer for many books of the Bible, but not for Ezekiel. Using the skills acquired in the academic wars, I fought back panic and began talking about what I did remember about Ezekiel, which was the hallucinatory imagery of the fiery chariot in chapter one. The Bishop was polite enough not to mention that I had not answered the question, and rest of our time went fine. The Bishop died of prostate cancer as I was finishing my study, and the last batch of questions had to be read by someone else.

Before he died, he sent me his personal copy of a biography of Roland Allan, an Anglican priest who spent his life arguing that all clergy should be bi-vocational and non-stipendiary because only such priests could be free to preach God’s word uncolored by the need to keep their job. I had read Allan before and believed him, but this personal gesture by Bishop Harris sealed the deal. When I became ordained and took on more and more clergy responsibilities I clung to the vision of Roland Allan. I never considered taking pay, not for a moment. I still believe in a kind of ecclesiastical anarchy, where churches are run entirely with volunteers, meeting in storefronts or homes. I still cling—unrealistically I know--to the idea a persecuted church such as it existed before Constantine made Christianity the official state religion in the fourth century and conferred on it the burdens of bureaucracy and edifice.

I was ordained as Deacon on the fall of 2000 at the Diocesan Convention in Whapeton. The church closed a couple of years later. My brother and his family came down from Fargo for that, and our daughter Julie came up from Minneapolis with her family. We stayed in a motel where our oldest grandson added to the family lore by declaring that “Grandpa was going to become a decoy.” The next spring, Bishop Fairfield ordained me a priest in my home congregation in Minot. That was how I drifted into my third career. I had been three years Navy officer, then 36 as college teacher. Now I was a village priest. As a priest, I figured that even at the worst, I would get to do the things I enjoyed most as a teacher, but without the drawbacks. I would get to teach, but I maybe four classes a week (counting a sermon) instead of 12 or 16. The students would be generally curious and grateful. I would not have to give grades. I would help run a small office and have a secretary. I would not have to listen to cranky faculty complain about their class loads. I thought it would a job I will be happy to do until I was no longer needed or until my brains or health failed, or until it wasn’t fun anymore, or until I died. I am now seeing which of those will happen first.
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I was ordained on May 25, the same month I retired from Minot State. We flew Marc and Brian out for that. My colleagues responded handsomely At the retirement banquet on campus one of our English staff sang Dylan’s “I Ain’t Gonna Work at Minot State No More,” set to the tune of “I Ain’t Gonna Work on Maggie’s Farm No More”

There was another celebration at a venue downtown honoring several other retiring colleagues. I read a few swan songs I’d written, one on teaching, addressing my students and describing myself as:

Confused and slurred, breathless,
my knowledge loose and blowing
in the wind, mostly unable
to awaken those slumbering
hungers that I could not feed
because I could not rouse,

hired by the state to change you,
too much respectful of what you
already were, I never figured out
what to praise and what to blame,

but we fumbled through the decades,
never giving up at least, ever hopeful,
me unworthy of your emerging minds,
you unworthy of all my hopes
for you, all of us unworthy of the English
tongue or the great dead who cheered
us on.

Another I called “Letter to a Retiring Professor.” It has these lines:

.
Give away those framed credentials,
All they were is fake potentials.
Destroy your pride and trust your heart
to give you blood to make your art.
All those dreams you wrapped with string
Get them out and make the sing.
Call no line bad if it gets written--
revise to make it hard and bitten.
Denounce the pain of bitter youth,
it contained but little truth.
The only pain that really works
that points to where the good stuff lurks,
is pain of pushing words around
until they find some firmer ground.
Silence, cunning, exile too,
there will teach you all that’s true.
Honor silence, subscribe to quiet.
Stillness brings the mind to riot

If in the end it’s all a loss,
that can be your brightest cross.
If people say you never found
the true heart’s core, the deep sound,
where mystery lived and truth lurked,
they will say “At least he worked.”

A new rector arrived that fall and over the next five years, until the end of 2006, I was the helper priest, sharing liturgical duties, preaching once a month, coming into the office several afternoons a week to offer support and counsel as requested but spending most of my mornings and some afternoons in the basement. So I had five years of the kind of time I had always been waiting for.

I luxuriated in that time, I wallowed about it in. For a while I read a page of The Columbia Encyclopedia every day and took notes. I set forth elaborate schedules for myself: writing first, then reading. But morning after morning, I put the reading first “just this time” and then found myself taking a mid-morning nap, answering e-mails, doing internet things, reading the New Yorker. Then it would be time to make some lunch and head off to church.

I did get some things done. I did a big chunk of these memoirs. I spent many fruitless hours trying to find coherence in the Farfox materials. I wrote a couple of short stories. But given the time I had, it was paltry. I don’t think I was lazy or even undisciplined. It just was not meant to be. I was disappointed in myself but not devastated. Twenty or thirty years earlier, my failure to get more done would have filled me with self-loathing, but now it did not. Through faith or common sense (and some people can acquire common sense only through faith), I was able to accept that what I was doing as what I should be doing.

DYLAN

Another thing I was resolved to do in retirement was to have another go at the guitar. I had tried before, with battered or inferior instruments from garage sales or pawn shops and never made any progress.

Still, I decided I would try again, and stick with it no matter what. This time I bought a decent classical instrument whose wider neck was more forgiving of my spatula fingers. I took a lesson twice a month on and off for a couple of years but stopped when it was clear to both my teacher and me that until I could master some basics, I was wasting my money and he his time. After six years I cannot reliably hit a clean C chord or reliably transition from D to G. In playing classical pieces, I can never be sure which strings my right hand fingers are on, which frets my left hand fingers are on, or where on the fret. Sight reading is painfully slow. I find it hard to memorize music either on the page or manually. I find it hard to remember words or the sequence of chords in a song. I have trouble counting and singing at the same time, especially if I play in public and especially if I play with a pick. But I never give up. I practice nearly every day, if only for ten minutes, and I find it a great source of satisfaction, even joy. I am not very good, and I may not ever get much better than I am, but I am better than I was. Until I can hit a clean C chord, I will settle for a muddy one. Until I can play acoustic, I will settle for classical. Until I can play interesting rhythms with the right hand, I will settle for a bass-chord strum. Until I can play complex chords, I will settle for simple ones. Often our yearnings run deeper than our accomplishments. They may do more to define us and bring us deeper satisfactions. Perhaps they even do more to honor God

I took up guitar again mostly so I could learn to play Dylan songs. He was the first popular singer who ever caught my ear. I didn’t own a stereo until 1966 or 67, and then I mostly used it to play the Dave Brubeck records I had purchased in the 50’s from the Columbia Record Club. But sometime in the 80’s, I read that Dylan’s Biograph was a great achievement, so I asked for it for Christmas. I read through the wonderful liner notes and found this paragraph in Dylan’s comment on “Every Grain of Sand”:

Make something religious and people don’t have to deal with it, they can say it’s irrelevant. “Repent the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” That scares the shit of out people. They’d like to avoid that. Tell that to someone and you become their enemy. There does come a time, though, when you have to face facts and the truth is true whether you wanna believe it or not, it doesn’t need you to make it true . . . That lie about everybody having their own truth inside of the has done a lot of damage and made people crazy.

From the moment I read those lines, I knew I had found a genus singer- song writer who was also a kindred soul. Gradually, starting with Blonde on Blonde and Blood on the Tracks, Joanne and I bought tapes and then CD’s working both ways until now we own every album, including all the official bootlegs. We have been to three concerts, the last one at a baseball stadium in Fargo. To get there, we had to drive five hours each way the same night, returning at 2 a.m. and getting up at 7 to get to church. Modern Times had just come out and we listened to it over and over both ways, like a couple of groupies in the 60’s. We like the “religious” albums (Saved and Slow Train Comin’) of course, but we recognized early on that everything Dylan wrote is rooted deep in a vision of brokenness and redemption that is profoundly religious, rooted in fact, Old Testament theology consistent with Dylan’s Jewish roots. Can it be an accident that the most profound film maker of my time (Woody Allen) and the our greatest song-writer (Dylan) are both fallen away Jews? Tradition tells.

Mostly we just like Dylan: the long profound narrative songs like “Desolation Row,” the heartfelt simple ones like “Protect my Child,” the absurd and funny ones like “Quinn the Eskimo.” The early protest songs seemed simplistic even when I first heard them and more so now. When “Masters of War” comes up on the I-pod now, I just skip ahead. We listen to Dylan on long trips. I listen to him when I do cardio at the Y. I don’t think I am ever any happier than when I’m dragging aging carcass on my fourth mile around the track at the Y with “Brownsville Girl” in the earphones. It begins with a tribute to Gregory Peck movies then moves into story of long cross-country road trip to find a man named Henry Porter. In the end, they never do find him, and in fact “The only thing we discovered about Henry Porter was that his name wasn’t Henry Porter.” But somehow it doesn’t matter becauses every episode in the story gets t punctuated by the chorus, sung by the Black female gospel group Dylan used in all the albums he made in the late 70’s and early 80’s:

Brownsville girl, with your Brownsville curl
Teeth like pearls, shining like the moon above
Brownsville girl, show me all around the world
Brownsville girl, you’re my honey love.

READING

What I mostly did when I retired was read. For starters, I committed to a program of reading the Bible through every year. I could hardly see how an ordained person could in good conscience do less, and it’s not that hard. There are only 1223 chapters in the Bible, counting the apocryphal books, which I do. That’s fewer than 25 chapters a week--five chapters a day with a couple of days off a week. I skip around: maybe the prophets for a while, then some history, then some New Testament as the mood strikes me. As I finish a book, I make an entry on a simple one-page table I’ve devised that allows me to keep track of what I’ve read and what still remains—five on that one page. It’s essential use a study Bible, and I use a different one each year: The Oxford Annotated, Harpers, New Jerusalem, New Interpreters, NIV. There must be a dozen of them, and if I ever I run out, I’ll rotate through them again. But even with a study Bible, one can read those five chapters in less than half an hour. Every reading is better than the last, more puzzling, more baffling, more full wisdom and hope, more connected to other passages, other books, to memory and to possibility.

To a person soaked in the Bible, sermon-writing is not hard. If you take any Biblical text and link it to other Biblical texts with the same theme or images or motifs, the links will generally shed meaning enough for most people and do it fairly gracefully. For the first few years, I wrote out my sermons, then outlined them and preached from the outline. But too often I found myself stranded awkwardly between paraphrase and memorized text, so went to just a simple outline, either written down or just floating in my head.

PROUST

Beyond the Bible, my first big challenge was Proust. In my retirement letter I had tried to hit a light note by saying that I had wanted all my life to read Remembrance of Things past and had finally realized I was going to have to retire to do that. So I got the three-volume Scott Moncrief translation and went at it. It runs to nearly 3500 pages; it took me two years. As I look back over it, the whole monumental experience comes flooding over me, and I can hardly wait to begin reading it again. I can (fleetingly) imagine myself learning French in order to read it in the original. I can (fleetingly) imagine myself memorizing whole passages—me, whose memory is so porous it can take a week to memorize a stanza of a Dylan lyric that I have been listening to for 20 years.

Proust rivals Dickens in the variety and richness of his characters, Montaigne in his wise generalizations, Wilde in his poignant treatment of homosexuality, Hammet in the intricacy of the detective stories that unfold as Swan tries to find out if his wife is promiscuous and Marcel tries to find out if Albertine is a lesbian, James in his intricate rendering of scenes. On page 715 of volume I, Marcel rides up on an elevator at Balbec, a seaside resort. The ride takes a page. During it, the elevator operator is described as a “domestic, industrious, captive squirrel” who, Marcel says, “bore me aloft in his wake towards the dome of this temple of Mammon.” A sentence given almost in passing encapsulates everything important about adolescent sexuality: “along one of the galleries . . . came a chambermaid carrying a bolster. I applied to her face, which was blurred in twilight, the mask of my most impassioned dreams, but read in her eyes as they turned towards me the horror my own nonentity.”

He tries to engage the elevator operator in conversation, who continues to “manipulate the registers of his instrument and to finger the stops.” Every moment chosen for description is caressed twice—once by Marcel’s observation and again by Proust’s prose. No doubt some readers would find this pace excruciating and would rather read “I went up the elevator.” But eventually one comes to see that Proust is writing “realistically”—life really is this rich and nuanced, though most of the time we cannot take time to see it and don’t know how. Proust reveals the complexities of the reality we live in and reminds us that these worlds—and all worlds--are connected in ways we can only be grateful for. Incredibly, the elevator operator shows up 2285 pages later as he is about the join the French air force and fight in WWI: “No doubt the young man was tired of going up on the captive cage of the lift, and the heights of the staircase of the Grand Hotel no longer sufficed him.”

But all this is, in a sense, gilding on the lily of Proust’s theory of memory, He may have gotten the idea from Bergson, but he has transformed it into something rich and strange enough to form the heart of the book’s title, À la recherche du temps perdu . As everyone knows, that title properly translated is not Remembrance of Things Past (a line lifted from a Shakespeare sonnet) but Recovery of Past Time. Thus the book begins with a long description of eating a madeleine (a complicated kind of cookie) dipped in tea. The sensation triggers a memory of similar taste years before, thus collapsing decades of time into one moment and redeeming the original moment which had passed uncelebrated. Periodically the narrator, Marcel, has similar experiences, with the clink of teaspoon, the feel of uneven paving stones beneath his feet, the stiffness of a napkin on his lips.

Incredibly, this theory of memory also forms the plot of the book, because Marcel, who for 2500 pages has presented himself as a charming, sickly, intelligent fop who drifts from one highbrow watering hole to another, sustained by vague but endless postponed plans to “write.” This unlikely hero discovers at the end of the book that his wasted life can be redeemed by connecting remembered moments with present ones and writing the book, which, as Marcel the narrator does not know but which Proust the author does know, is the very book we have reading, called Remembrance of Things Past.

In theological terms, we would say that redemption is one of the two great themes of the of the book. The other is grace, because the narrator Marcel and the author Proust both insist that such moments are not to be summoned by any act of will or discipline. Marcel says that “their essential character was that I was not free to choose them, that such as they were they were given to me.” So, without any forcing—so it seems to me—I found that two of the great themes of this book were themes of scripture. That happens a lot, even when those works are written by authors who profess to be indifferent or hostile to Christian scripture. That does not mean, of course, that literature should be read from a Christian point of view, whatever that might be. I still think what I was taught by new criticism to think: that literature must be read on its own terms, that we cannot use literature as an “example” of any external system, even the system I have found truest of all, Christianity. But I cannot not help notice how often great stories (lived or told) resonate with great scriptural themes: creation, incarnation, grace, redemption, atonement.

Besides Proust, I was drawn to two other encyclopedic, comprehensive-- and religious—minds: Northrup Fyre and Harold Bloom.

NORTHRUP FRYE

Frye was for a short time an ordained pastor in the United Church of Canada before he became a major critic of literature. In his magnum opus, Anatomy of Criticism, Frye connects all literature into an overarching schema in which the four seasons connect to the four major modes of literature: comedy, tragedy, romance, and satire. All Frye’s work assumes what he calls “the identify of mythology and literature.” He believed, following an Italian philosopher named Vico (who also influenced James Joyce) that “all major verbal structures have descended historically from poetic and mythological ones.” By itself, that seems harmless enough, but he goes on to refer (in the preface to Words of Power) to a “slowly growing realization that mythological thinking cannot be superceded, because it forms the framework and context for all thinking.” ALL thinking? Really? When he talked like this, I sensed that Frye was on to something big, something akin to a unified field theory in verbal structures.

Frye seems to be rejecting the conventional division of language into scientific/literal and poetic/metaphoric that I had puzzled over when I did my conference paper on that subject years before. In fact Frye explicitly condemns I.A. Richards, one of the critics I considered in my paper, for suggesting that “mythical thinking has been superceded by scientific thinking and that consequently poets must confine themselves to pseudo-statements.”

As I read him, Frye seemed to be hinting that reality itself is metaphorical, that the universe itself a poem, that we are poems inside it. When we write poems, or even when we read them, we are replicating the larger poetry in which we live. We are songs singing the music of which we are made—something that Wallace Stevens comes close to saying in his magnificent “Idea of Order at Key West”:

For she was the maker of the song she sang
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely the place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this then? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.

With just a little push, it seems to me that this vision of the world as total poetry can be seen as analogous to the world of total spirit as described by Genesis and echoed in the opening passage of John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the word.”

“Word” in John’s gospel translates the Greek word Logos, which is easily the most elusive, powerful and mysterious word in any ancient language. It can mean reason, word, discourse, definition, principle, ratio, or all these at once. The pre-Socratics talked about it in language remarkably similar to the way Hebrew scripture talked about wisdom (Greek Sophia) who gets personified as a female figure in the book of Proverbs. Coleridge was always going to write a book about her. Hegel and Heidegger both courted her. Some of the mysterious and powerful qualities of logos get carried into the New Testament and assigned variously to Jesus or the Holy Spirit. Frye dances around the term everywhere, even if he does not use it explicitly every often even in the book he wrote at the end of his life, Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. That was the book I thought was going to answer all my questions, though of course it didn’t.

Among his dozens of books, Frye wrote two on the Bible: The Great Code and Words of Power. He reads the Bible as a connected unity—one long poem--and says that if its historical origins seem to make that unlikely, then “so much the worse for history.” I was grateful to find a learned and brilliant scholar giving credence to my own reading experience. Frye offers considerable help to a teacher of literature trying to understand what it means to say that scripture is “inspired”—certainly something that a priest should understand.

In fact, when I was ordained, I signed a statement to that effect. I had been willing to call the Bible inspired even when I was reading it from outside the faith. That is, I knew it was “good” in the way Keats or Shakespeare is good, endlessly rich in implication (what Harold Bloom calls “endless to meditation”), with many narratives full of cunning understatement, and other passages of incantatory power capable of inducing an almost trance-like state when read aloud or when read closely. I am not prepared yet to say precisely how the Bible is unique in its particular inspiration. Is it a matter of kind or of degree? But Frye’s work on the Bible and the larger context of his powerful vision would seem to furnish materials for a deeper foray into the question, to be made by someone, or even myself, given worlds enough and time.

HAROLD BLOOM

Frye was a country parson who went on to bigger things. Bloom on the other hand, is a non-practicing Jew who claims to be Gnostic, yet names a portion of the Hebrew Mishna (Sayings of the Fathers) as the deepest sources of his inspiration. In Bloom I seemed to find a summary, recapitulation, and defense of my half-century of reading. Bloom refuses to do what Frye does, fit everything into one vast schema. He just moves from book to book, shedding luscious insights as naturally as a tree sheds leaves. He admits literature does no good but, paradoxically insists that it is essential. He offers no final criteria to distinguish good literature from bad but paradoxically insists that good literature is better than bad and that it is important to read the good.

I had already read The Western Canon, Bloom’s defense of the high canon against the postmodernist hoards, and I resonated then with Bloom’s description of the purpose of reading: “to enlarge a solitary existence.” Later, Bloom’s book on Shakespeare helped guide me through the plays in a little Shakespeare reading group I belonged to, that met twice a month for two years to discuss the whole corpus--twice. I read through Bloom’s How to Read and Why, and then through Where Shall Wisdom be Found, where he says that in everything he’s read he’s sought three things: “aesthetic splendor, intellectual power and wisdom.” Bloom avoids defining wisdom explicitly but he does say what wisdom literature does: it teaches us “to accept natural limits.”

At the end of How to Read, Bloom quotes two Jewish Rabbis who appear in The Sayings of the Fathers. One, rabbi Akiba, says:

All is foreseen, and free will is given, and the world is judged by goodness, and all is according to the amount of work.

And rabbi Tarphon says:

It is not necessary for you to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.

To work steadily at a task that calls on one’s best efforts, provided one does not sacrifice too many of one’s normal obligations as a citizen, seems consistent with most ethical systems. The theological term that seems most relevant is one’s vocation, one’s calling, which in this context is assumed to be from God. It grows naturally out of one’s experience and interests. It puts those things in the service of society but also in larger historical and literary contexts. It submits the work continuously to the scrutiny of prayer. In this way, one can, I hope, make up in integrity at least a portion of what one lacks in talent. The work God wants done will sometimes be hard, but it will always be accompanied by a kind of joy and a sense of being carried along.

MODERNITY

But the reading that hit me hardest was a little book called The Culture of Interpretation: Christian Faith and the Postmodern World by a scholar I had never heard of before, Roger Lundin. I am not even sure how I found his book--probably In the way I find many books: by following up check-marked footnotes in some other book. But I ordered a used copy online and once I started it, I read it as a thirsty man might drink clear water. When I finished it, I found out where Lundin taught and wrote him the only fan letter I’ve ever written. I said reading his book was like finding notes from my own reading of the last two decades, typed up and made coherent. His gracious reply included a list of half a dozen other books I’m still working through.

What Lundin did for me was break through a framework of intellectual history I had been working with since my earliest days of graduate study at San Francisco State in the early 60’s. There I had learned to see literary history in alternating periods of systole and diastole: expansion and turbulence followed by contraction and stability. Especially we were trained to see Romanticism as a rebellion against the Enlightenment and to memorize long lists of contrasts—emotion vs. reason, the couplet vs. the ode, etc. What Lundin had done, following Barth and MacIntyre and other scholars, is portray the Enlightenment and Romanticism as part of the SAME cultural movement that begins with Descarte.

What Descarte famously did was break the grip of authority, specifically the church. Padding about in his dressing gown, fondling a piece of wax in front of the fire, he turned the world inside out—he placed the Self in the center of all subsequent world-views. Rationalism, Empiricism, Romanticism all share the same self-confidence in humankind’s ability to save itself. Rationalism puts its faith in human reason, Empiricism in human science, and Romanticism in human imagination, but they are all united by far more than what divides them. Modernism, that artistic movement of the early 20th century is, on this accounting, a variety of Modernitiy. Rather than offering Nature as way to do without God, Modernism offered a complex blend of myth, aestheticism Freudian depth-psychology, technical innovation, and lyrical obscurity, which was, to hungering young men from small mountain towns, irresistible.

All of them in Lundin’s analysis are versions of Gnosticism, finding the divine spark inside of man and man in the center of things. The medieval ages gave us, granted a world full of physical suffering. But it also gave us the world as mystery and sacrament to be cared for in humility and trust and submission. The modern world gave us the world as ours to conquer, to be remade in our own image. In Modernist terms, there is nothing to submit to and no reason to live except serve our desires. Thus we have what Phillip Rieff calls a “The Triumph of the Therapeutic” and what Nietzsche calls perspectivism. Emerson comes off particularly bad in this analysis--an eloquent spokesman for a uniquely American blend of Romanticism and Chamber of Commerce boosterism.

Post-modernity, which I had thought of offering the free-play of signifiers as a counter-movement to scientific materialism is, in Lundin’s analysis, just a simple turn of the screw, the logical extension of what began in Descarte’s study.

In Lundin’s book I found the phrase that seems central to everything I have come to believe: sacramental vision. Whatever Lundin means by it, it means to me a universe which is alive with Spirit at every level down to the sub-atomic, in which all those stories about God creating the world and us in his image are true, in which God really did come to earth in human form, teach, and suffer and die and rise again in a series of gestures which really did change the relationship between himself and humankind, in which every thought we think and every word we speak adds to that Spirit or detracts from it as we submit to, or rebel against, its always-beneficent intent.

At first I thought Roger Lundin alone had, like Job’s messenger, escaped to tell us the bad news. But as is so often the case, once we find a clarifying idea, we see we had been stumbling blindly over and around it for years. In a syndicated column by George Will, published in 2005, I read this passage:

The challenge confronting the church an be expressed in one word: modernity. The church preaches that freedom is life lived in conformity to God’s will as manifested in revelation and interpreted by the church. Modernity teaches that freedom is the sovereignty of the individual’s well—personal volition that is spontaneous, unconditioned, inviolable, and self-legitimizing. .

There were people saying it earlier. As early as 1907, Pope Pius X had issued an encyclical called Pascendi Dominici Gregis: On the Doctirine of the Modernists containing this analysis of Modernity, formidable in its tone but actually quite acute:

Modernists place the foundation of religious philosophy in that doctrine which is commonly called Agnosticism. According to this teaching human reason is confined entirely within the field of phenomena, that is to say, to things that appear, and in the manner in which they appear: it has neither the right nor the power to overstep these limits. Hence it is incapable of lifting itself up to God, and of recognizing His existence, even by means of visible things. From this it is inferred that God can never be the direct object of science, and that, as regards history, He must not be considered as an historical subject. Given these premises, everyone will at once perceive what becomes of Natural Theology, of the motives of credibility, of external revelation.

The most recent version that I have run across is in a book by Huston Smith, called Religion Matters. Smith writes in a breezy, blowsy style that is light years away from the magisterium of the Roman Church, but he comes to much the same conclusions. In particular Smith does the best job I know of dealing with the bugaboo of Darwinsim, the concept that ran me off the rails in 1958. You may remember that in those days I clung to my baby faith on the grounds that order in the universe could not be explained by random chance, since there would not have been enough time for the universe to try all the various combinations necessary. My last defense was breached when a book pointed out time could be infinite.

Of course even in 1958, I knew about entropy, which says that the universe tends toward increasing randomness. If you leave a pile of lumber in the field, it does not “evolve” into a ship or a house. It turns into a pile of mush. But I didn’t think about that.

Instead I focused on that how Darwinism explains that design is only apparent: What looks like design is just the result of things bumping into each other and some combinations working well enough to survive. Order proceeds from the bottom up, not from the top down. A Darwinist I heard at a lecture put it this way: “If the universe were different than it is, it could not be at all.” That is, you can begin with atoms and the void and wind up with protein molecules and, eventually, a hippopotamus. This worked well enough for me until one day I went to the zoo and looked carefully at an actual hippopotamus, eating cabbages that the zoo-keeper was throwing into his gaping mouth. The hippopotamus--and whole created world—seemed then to have a kind of gratuitousness, a kind of absurdity, a kind of playfulness that--eventually--seemed easier to explain in terms of a creator messing around out of sheer joy than of atoms slamming into each other.

But Darwinism proposes to go further and account for moral order as well. Survival is the basic value and from it, all values may be derived. We cooperate, for example, not because we are made in the image of God, but because organisms “happened” one day to cooperate. The ones who did out-survived and out-produced the non-cooperating ones, so cooperation got built into the gene pool. Martyrdom would seem to be a problem for this system because martyrs subordinate survival to other values. But second generation Darwinists, such as sociobiologists like E.O. Wilson, get around that by positing a racial consciousness. Martyrs are, they say, motivated by the survival of the gene pool, which is still survival.

That seems like a stretch, but there is a deeper problem: if you start out with atoms and the void, it is hard to see how you can place ANY value, even survival, higher than any other. Atoms don’t “want” to survive. If you begin with atoms and void, nothing in the universe “wants” anything, and as soon as you say that one thing is better than another, you have smuggled in a value from outside the system.

So as a world view, Darwinism has its problems, however well it accounts for the shape of bird beaks in the Galapagos Islands. It seems less work (and far more joyous) to say that God made us in his image. He created us in love and he created us to love. Ass the gospel of John says, We love because he first loved us. Survival is good because God made life and found it good. The same with cooperation, and compassion and loyalty and all the things we call virtues.

Another piece of the puzzle fell into place when I discovered serious and orthodox theologians who had taken the full measure of modernity and could still recite the creeds with a straight face. Among these were Alisdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and N.T. Wright—the first two Roman Catholics and the third an Anglican. In the modern world, it can seem incredible to say that Jesus was the son of God, preposterous to say He was bodily resurrected from a tomb, and incomprehensible to say that because of this, our sins are forgiven. Surely, we say, no well-read person could believe these things. And yet here are these writers who appear to have read everything and to be nobody’s fools, who do believe those things and are prepared to explain them in long, coherent books with bibliographies that can run 70 pages or more. On days when my own faith wavers, these books sit on my shelves like ballast. They keep the ship upright in the storm even though I have not read every page of every one.

N.T. Wright especially. Sometime after I retired, I heard a colleague talking about Wright’s 800 page book, The Resurrection of the Son of Man, so I bought a used copy online and read it, pencil in hand. It turned out to be volume 3 of a 5-volume study of early Christianity. Its thesis is that on no other basis than historical truth could we explain the rapid spread of Christianity and its power to dominate Western Culture as it has. No myth, no matter how vividly related or how intricately constructed, could have inspired the martyrdom that Christ did, or provide the satisfactions it seems to have done for millions of simple illiterate serfs and factory workers, or have drawn to itself, for 1800 years, the best efforts of the best minds a high culture could produce.

I see I have volume 2 of Wright’s study on the shelf, with a page marked here and there. If I live long enough and retain enough grey matter, I will read it and the other three volumes as well. There are parts of our intellect we have to put in trust, just as we do our money, because we lack the time or capacity to make all the decisions ourselves. In my 60’s and 70’s, Wright has become what C.S. Lewis was in my 40’s and 50’s—a kindred spirit, a still point in the turning world, somebody who appears to have read everything, whose tone and prose style are comfortable and accessible, who has thought through to the bottom the issues I can penetrate only skin deep, and reached the positions I feel I would reach if I could read and think as well as he does.

In 1999, Wright co-authored a book with Marcus Borg, called The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions. Borg is a professor of religion, a devout Episcopalian laymen and married to an Episcopal Priest He is also one of the best-known advocates of liberal Christianity, which endorses Jesus as an ethical teacher while rejecting his divine nature and all the miracles including the resurrection. Remarkably, Wright and Borg and good friends and the book is a model of collegial debate. In alternating chapters, each offers his perspective on different aspects of Jesus’s life and teachings. Borg reads the resurrection stories as “powerfully true metaphorical narratives” while Wright thinks they describe an actual event that could have been documented with a video camera if one had been available. Both are decent men making a strong case. Every reader will be drawn to the side he already leans toward, even if he did not know to which side he leaned.

In the end, I found Wright persuasive. The writers of the New Testament clearly did not think they were writing “powerfully true metaphorical narratives.” The early Christians reading the Gospels did not think they were reading powerfully true metaphorical narratives, nor did Augustine, or St. Thomas, or Dante, or Milton, or John Edwards, or John Wesley, or St. Columba, who crossed the Irish Sea in a bathtub-sized boat to re-Christianize northern England in the 6th Century. If I was going to take the Bible seriously at all, I had to take it on the same terms as St. Columba, that is, on its own terms. I remember asking myself, Wouldn’t it be more fun to live in a world where this stuff was actually true than to live in a world where it was not--more dramatic, with more at stake? Many people don’t seem to have power to choose between liberal and orthodox Christianity or even between belief and non-belief. I evidently didn’t myself for many years. But as long as I did seem to have the choice, I chose--for better or for worse—to accept what the Bible says on this one. There is plenty of metaphorical stuff in the Bible: Adam and Eve and Noah and Jonah, and all that. But that something quite remarkable happened in Palestine on a Sunday morning around 30 A.D. seems to me quite certain.

Without the empty tomb its hard to take atonement seriously and the question of how we can be “at one” with the absolute—however defined-- is a serious question for all but the most case-hardened skeptics. The Bible does not explain the mechanism and the teachers of the church not agree how it works, though all agree that it does. Abelard (d. 1142) gave us the most comforting theory, based on John 3:16, that the cross demonstrates God’s love. But John Stott, rector for many years of All Souls church in London, defends the harsher and to me more compelling satisfaction theory, which came originally from Anselm (Archbishop of Canterbury(d. 1109). This is that God’s mercy and justice must be reconciled. A just God could not let our sins go unpunished, but those sins are so massive that mere humans would not be able to bear punishment appropriate to them.( If you are letting yourself off easy to day on your own shortcomings today, think Dafur.) Only a perfect man could suffer enough to set things right, so God made one. It’s a hard and beautiful truth, but it seems consistent with all my experience.

BOULDER RIVER

The very year that I retired, in 2001, a college roommate, Paul Wylie, invited me and two other friends to come to his cabin on the Boulder River, near Big Timber, Montana, for a few days in the fall, to hike, watch movies, talk. I leaped at the chance, not least because I was born in Big Timber as was my father before me, and it had always been a magical place. We have done that now for seven years. I am not sure what inspired him to do that, but I am grateful. It is rare privilege to have had friendships lasting 50 years. Two are attorneys, one is an architect and one (me) is a college professor turned volunteer priest. Three of the four have been divorced. We all have two children or three. We talk like women, never seeming to run out of things to say. We talk about the our foolish hopes, our innocence in the 50’s , before The Pill, when pre-marital sex had consequences it does not have now. (Or does not seem to have now, for I think this generation is fooling itself when it thinks that babies are the only serious consequence of sex, and easily averted.) We talk about politics and the current events. We talk about the traveling we have done since we met last. We talk about our medications. We talk about the latest technical gizmos. We talk about our reading. We talk about our children, all born in the 60’s, all of whom have had struggled and floundered beyond even the average for children. We talk about our remarkable absence of grandchildren—for none of us have grandchildren who carry our genes. All four lines are dying out, though one had a second round of children who are young enough they may redeem him yet.
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And we talk about God. All three of my friends are intrigued, baffled and sometimes irritated by my return to orthodox faith. All four of us were raised by homes where at least one of the parents was devout. All four of us rejected the faith of our fathers, or at least the faith of our mothers. Only I returned.

When we first began gathering, one or another would offer one of the conventional anti-God gambits: The Old Testament God is a buffoon and a bully. Wars are caused by religion. How about the inquisition? Sometimes I ventured an answer, more often not. I have never been good at debate. While some people’s wits sharpen under pressure, mine collapse. But there are ways to discuss without arguing and we have learned to find those ways.

We all wonder, Why DO some people believe and others not? Is it like brown eyes and blue, as Woody Allen suggests in one of his movies? Are some people born religious, so that they—and only they--wither if they don’t go to church? Is religion a matter of personal preference? Why does faith seem to turn some people into mean-spirited jerks. That’s embarrassingly true, though it’s possible they would be even bigger jerks if they weren’t religious. It’s also possible for anything—even faith (or especially faith)—to be perverted. Both faith and skepticism leave many questions unanswered. In the end, we can only choose the kind of unanswered questions we want to live with.

We have to be content to say each of us has a faith sufficient for himself and leave it go at that, even knowing that if God exists, then in some sense He exists for everyone, whether we believe in Him or not. The idea of a private God is a contradiction in terms. And from the idea of God, it would have to follow (would it not?) that people who believe in God and act on that belief will be happier than they would if they did not. By the same token, if there is no God, then non-believers will be happier than they would if they believed. I think it was Bertrand Russell who said, “It undesirable to believe things which are not true.” Even atheists believe the Bible when it says The truth will make us free.

Perhaps in the end, my desperation was greater than theirs. They were able to negotiate the crises in their lives without turning to God and I was not. By fate or luck or destiny or providence, I was led to a point where the amalgam of stoicism, Darwinism, civic mindedness, and self-improvement was not enough. I could not do it on my own. It seems odd that some people have to be broken to accepts truths that, once accepted, seem so accessible from so many other, less arduous avenues. It is as if a person crawled on hands and knees all around a garden and could find no access except by a path over broken glass, but once inside saw a hundred paths he could have taken: A mother’s self-sacrificing love, Aquinas’s proofs of God, Kant’s Categorical Imperative, even a glance at the starry heavens. All those things can be signs pointing to the nearest church and that Bible that everyone has lying around the house somewhere.

It comes down to this: the gap between faith and skepticism is an abyss, perhaps the final abyss, the final difference between one person and another. At the least, we can say that, from one side everything appears one way; from the other side, everything appears another way, like those tricky silhouettes that look either like a profile of a woman or a bunny rabbit but never like anything in between. And it would appear that no one steps across that abyss on their own--in either direction.

SUMMING UP

Often toward the end of the our four days together on the Boulder River, there comes a moment of summing up, where we offer our best shot at the stating the maxim that keeps us going day by day. For one is it is “Isn’t it enough to live a decent and honorable life.” For another, it is, “We do what we can, and then we die.” For me it has been, lately, a line from a Henry James short story: “We do what we can, we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task.” For those moments, those lines suffice.

For the purposes of this book, though, a larger question looms. Could I have made a different decision in that sunny corner of the Montana State College library that afternoon in 1958? Could I have avoided that detour of nearly two decades? Could I have spared others the suffering I thrust upon them, and avoided at least some of that suffering I did myself?

I can think of three ways to answer those questions:

One is to question the very notion of choice. . Sam Johnson famously said that all reason was against free will and all experience in favor it. We cannot stand at every decision point and launch duplicates of ourselves into parallel universes to see how things would have turned out. Therefore, it is useless to speculate about how things could have been different. We live the lives we live. Looking back, our choices seem inevitable, no matter how agonizing real they seem at the time

In 1958 the forces of modernity, especially on college campuses, seemed overwhelming. In theory, a young person today would have more choice because, post modernity seems to open up the system and allow more choices. In 1958, the forces of Modernity seemed inevitable. To some people they still do. Neither Postmodernity nor Modernity are friendly to the transcendent. But Modernism was actively hostile, and post modernism is indifferent.

From the point-of-view of Christianity, it is hard to say which is worse. Postmodernity with its gospel of tolerance, reduces everything to a matter of personal opinion. In the 90’s its motto seemed to be on everyone’s lips: “Whatever.” Modernity at least had some balls. By accepting that something things are true whether we want them to be true or not, it accepted a truth deeper than its own materialism and opened up the possibilities of submission. Once you have begun to submit to a vision of the universe larger than yourself, you may find a way to submit to the living God. This is what seems to happened to the rare Modernists who became Christian: T.S. Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, W.H. Auden. It seems to be what happened to Bob Dylan. To some extent, it is what happened to me. The bridge between Modernism and Faith is shorter than the one between Postmodernism and Faith, because in Postmodernity all the streams are so shallow there is no need for bridges at all.

Another way is to say that somehow it “all worked out for the best.” Once something happens, we might as well begin immediately to see the good in it or at least the good that can come from it. The notion that “everything happens for a reason” is a perversion of the gospel, but it is groping toward scripture that does say “All things work together for good for those who love God.” One can say that good came from my apostasy. My years in the wilderness made me acquainted with the devil’s wiles and gave me a sympathy for spiritual struggle, made me a better preacher and a better pastor.

Yet, in the end, both those answers ring false. It is too easy to say that things work out, or even that God writes straight with crooked lines. A mistake is a mistake, though the whole universe conspire to help cause it. I made a mistake. My years of unbelief did more harm than good. Good came of a bad choice, but more good would have come from a better one. I regret that I could not see beyond the siren cry of Modernity. Most of all, I am grateful that I was allowed to sail out of earshot and find other seas to explore. I pray that if anyone out there is reading these words and facing the same alternatives that I did, that they will make a different choice than I did.

We are back to dualism again. Are there two kinds of language, or one? Can language (and thought) be divided into scientific/literal and poetic/metaphoric? When are we doing one and when the other? Can it be done sentence by sentence? Word by word? Is it a mater of audience? Could the same sentence be literal in one context and metaphoric in another? How would we describe, precisely, these contexts?

Could the issue have anything to do with God? Ever since I found Jesus, I wanted to put the two halves of my life together—the literary and the religious. If it could ever be done, metaphor would be hunting ground. At one point in my religious musings (about 1971) I remember telling a friend that, while I didn’t believe in God, I was ready to admit that he was a “pretty good metaphor.” Even as I said the words I knew I was backing myself into a logical corner from which I could escape only by admitting that God was God. After all, what could God br a metaphor FOR?

We think of the tangible world as “real” and of spiritual things as less real. If you disbelieve the tangible world, you will keep bruising yourself on the furniture. We think that disbelieving the spiritual world has fewer consequences. But perhaps it does not.

Isn’t it as likely that the spiritual world is the real one and the visible world the symbol? Is the mythical thinking that Frye says we cannot escape something like the spiritual world that St. Paul talks about? Are we all inside the mind of God, whether we know it or not?

It is the same with matter and energy. Atom bombs turn matter into energy, photosynthesis turns energy into matter. But the more closely we examine matter, the more it looks like energy, while the opposite does not seem to be the case. It seems possible to say that we live in a universe of pure energy which has some kind of relationship to the life of the spirit tht St. Paul is always yammering on about?

In the end, some people are going to be proven right about final things and some people wrong. In the meantime, we can only tell our story, as I’ve tried to do here. We cannot argue or bully or legislate people into belief. The wind blows where it wishes and no one knows the ways of it, says John 3:8..

I said I was better than I was, and that’s true, but I can see a time coming when I won’t get any better, and then a time when I’ll get worse no matter how much I practice. Getting old means many things. One is being in pain somewhere in your body most of the time. But another one, and harder to accept, is not getting better at things you work at. As a child of the self-help fifties, it was hard even before I started getting old. When I was young, I really believed that people got better at things they worked at, and people who were very good at things got that way by working at it especially hard. I can remember, even in my 40’s, shooting jump shots at a hoop I had set up for my boys, and thinking that I would set up a regimen of shooting 200 a day until I was “good.”

When I had to choose between faith and something else and chose faith, I always seemed to get back the something else enriched and in spades.

What I did was wake up at the age of 38 sitting in the ruins of my life. All I could do was try to clean up the mess.

As Dylan said, memorably though unintelligibly, at an awards ceremony, “A man can become so corrupt that his own father will reject him, but God can still find a way to redeem him.”

I could have made a different choice. When I sought the counsel of my elders, they did not serve me well. The adviser of my Canterbury Club in College was a geeky man who offered us the Real Thing but whose nervous nature spooked us. The priest in my hometown loaned me a copy of Bishop Robinson’s Honest to God that offered a bland liberal Christianity stripped of miracle, drama, theology, and duty, blood, the cross. But I can’t blame them.

When a person not in the faith meets an item of revealed faith that seems incredible, she says, “I can’t understand that, ” which is the same as saying “ I reject it.” People in the faith say, “I don’t understand that YET.” Neither understands, but one has made an intellectual commitment to trust that she WILL understand it--when she is ready, when she has studied enough, when she is worthy. And this trust in what will happen later effects how she acts now. Our expectations influence our behavior. Thus faith is inherently future oriented. It should not surprise to find that eschatology is crucial to doctrine

As I grow older, the idea of eternal life becomes more of an issue. It was no factor in my conversion. I was looking for a larger life here and now, not for any assurance of a life beyond the grave. I have said, even from the pulpit, that if in the end, heaven should turn out not to exist, then I will still be grateful for my conversion for the stability and assurance it has given me every day for 33 years. But those very satisfactions are woven tight with the notion of eternal life, and

Modernism confirms the rebellious stance that is implicit in Modernity. Postmodernism in once sense *********

If I had thought about it, I might have realized that in overcoming the ancient world, Christianity called for heroic renunciation. What I could not see was that the larger world had become post-Christian, so that any authentic rebellion would have to be against the world. I could have had all the heroic renunciation I wanted and still stayed in the church.

In fact, only I could only move ahead after I could reconcile my image of myself as an outsider with the idea of being a priest. A couple of things helped. One was to discover Karl Barth and to find him associated with the phrase “Crisis Theology.” Since I had been in crisis most of my life, I was drawn to the term. I found that his particular crisis referred to the rise of Fascism between the wars, when parts of the Church were making accommodations with Hitler. I realized it might seem arrogant to connect my transitory depression to a world crisis that took the lives of 20 million people, but I did it anyway. I arranged for our book club to read an anthology of key Barth texts, and I read a little in his Epistle to the Romans and found it electrifying. It connected well enough with the dark Christianity I had found in Kierkegaard.

The other thing that helped as an old trick I had used before in an academic paper enquiring into the possibility of serious literature being written in the Pacific Northwest which had not been lucky enough to inherit a burden guilt and suffering as had the East and South. It was called Faulkner among the pine trees.” I concluded that in the context of the frontier myth, the Northwest could generate despair to give any writer hope.