FINDING GOD AT
Death and Work;
Memory and Leisure
Benjamin
Hunnicutt.
Death has been
much on my mind recently. The passing of several of the Trinity Episcopal
Church’s family and the procession of funerals over the Summer, has set me in a
certain pensive frame of mind and like Ishmael in Melville's book, I "find
myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear
of every funeral I meet."
But instead of
following Ishmael to sea I seek a kind of refuge in history, in that limitless
expanse of the past through which I have wandered the better portion of my
life. But again, like Ishmael, in the event I find less of a refuge and more of
a venue, a location and context to grapple with my concerns about the human
condition.
My
morbid turn of mind has set me to reconsider the doing of history. Why should I
continue to spend my life crafting histories that few read now, and no one will
read in ten years or less? Not only will I die, and soon, but my works of
history will be as dead as I am in few years.
And as my alma mater's (UNC's)
"fight" song concludes, "I'm a Tar Heel born and Tar Heel bred,
and when I die, I'll be a long time dead." (The bowdlerized ending of the
verse, "I'll be a Tar Heel dead" is beneath contempt.)
Topping things
off, Ecclesiastes kept showing up in the Lectionary last season. Last August we
read Ecclesiastes’ "Preacher" advising yet again, "vanity of
vanities; all is vanity," and asking "What profit hath a man of all
his labour which he taketh under the sun?"
And directly to
my point, "There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there
be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come
after."
Why not,
"numbering the days of my life," follow the "Preacher’s"
advice and, chucking it all, find out where the party is?
On second
thought, being a bit long in the tooth for sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll, I see
more wisdom in the “Preacher’s” lesser known counsel; “Better is a handful of
quietness, than two hands full of toil and a striving after the wind.”
But I find some
good reasons remain for me to "do" history, reasons that I recommend
to all my friends who struggle along. Whereas Ecclesiastes is a wonderful
purgative for the academic’s primary (in most cases, only) motives,
self-aggrandizement and ego-intoxication, (does anyone still have hope in the
old Enlightenment Project- “The Truth?”) some reasons withstand the
"Preacher's" memento mori.
The
first is the joy of the activity in and for itself. The primary advice
Ecclesiastes gives us, other than eat, drink, and be merry, is to take delight
in the "work" itself.
There is nothing better for a man, than
that he should eat and drink,
and that he should make his soul enjoy
good in his labour (Hebrew, ‘amal).
This also I saw, that it was from the
hand of God. (2, 24)
This advice, as
I understand it, is a far cry from the modern boss' plea to "be happy in
your work." It is evident that the “Preacher" is referring to an
activity complete in and for itself, separated from reward and without
constraint, full of the intensity of the effort- quite unlike most of our
jobs-- more like our hobbies and volunteer work, or maybe our “work” on
ourselves, or on our relationships, families, communities, etc..
For me, at
least, the counsel is to do history for itself. Teach others the joy of the
activity. Share the wonderful process. Involve as many others as possible,
freely. Do it, not a as job, hemmed in by professions, positions, publications,
degrees, status, perishable reputations, and the production of new
"truths" de jour. Do it freely in its fullness as God-given, worthwhile in and for itself!
"What
profit?" the “Preacher" asks. It's the activity, not the
"profit," not the truth-residue, product, reputation, or payment that
is important. The profit is just another vanity.
I am perfectly
serious, and have argued often, that history, and indeed all of the Liberal
Arts, are viable leisure options for
all of us, constituting some of the few good reasons to get up in the morning
that will stand the test of time. The Amateur is much underestimated in these
days and times.
Some will
disagree, but I am persuaded that the vast majority of our jobs, even the best
of jobs, will never provide such an enduring good reason "to do something
rather than nothing."
A more
palatable example here might be music. My experience with our new choir
director at Trinity is that he is instructing us in the joy of music. The
discipline and the work of preparation, as well as the rewards of performance,
all are in the service of singing in and for itself, in shared communion with
God.
Like Holy
Communion, " it don't get no better than this"- there is no reward
even close to being better than doing the activity. As Martin Luther put this;
"My God I love thee, not to gain heaven thereby."
The second
reason for me to keep doing history is personal, based in my Christianity.
Christianity, like Judaism and Islam, is an historical religion. Historians and
theologians have long pointed out that our modern historical sensibilities
sprang from the Jews, Christians, and Moslems. Our notion that history has a
beginning, middle and end, that it is going somewhere, comes directly out of
these traditions. Today most of us subscribe to "progress" in some
form or other.
Before the
monotheistic religions came along most people, even the Greeks and Romans,
thought about the past, if at all, in terms of repeating cycles. Consider the
“Preacher’s” attitude in Ecclesiastes, written in the 3rd century,
B.C. and heavily influenced by Greek philosophy. Christianity and Judaism gave
history direction and purpose, awakening the profound insight that history on
its own spins around, going nowhere- "twisting slowly in the wind.”
Meaning,
purpose, direction come from outside, at "right angles" to the course
of history as Reinhold Niebuhr put it. Without transcendent intervention,
history spins in place- a tale told by an idiot.
Try reading
Tacitus, or even Herodotus. The Roman and Greek histories are BORING. It is the
same story over and over. As Voltaire once said of history in general, these
histories are truly "one damn thing after another." Or as Henry Ford
observed; such history is “bunk.” Little men with giant egos, killing one
another with relish, rising to power, strutting and debauching, being
overthrown by others just like them- again, and again, and again. Sounds a
little like the evening news, or, closer to home, our yearly updated vitae.
With Christ's
birth a story with plot and direction begins. History has purpose and meaning. It has drama. It seizes us. We are
engaged, becoming very much a part of the action. We are on pilgrimage. We are
going somewhere. What we do makes a difference, for good or ill.
Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will
come again.
Part of the
drama is our periodic falling away from the Faith. Like the Children of Israel
wandering around in the wilderness, we tend to lose sight of the big picture,
the overarching story, and become preoccupied, busy to the point of mania with
our own thing and the work and works of this world, chasing after the wind.
Individually
and as cultures we begin to chase after what Jacques Ellul called "New
Daemons;" new gods that, like the Golden Calf, we ourselves have made. We
even sink to self-worship, relying on ourselves for salvation and meaning;
working even as an attempt at self-creation.
Invariably our
new faiths are our own creatures- the works
of our own hand. What we can really know about is what we can see (we want a
god we have made and can see, the Jews in the wilderness said). We seem to need
a "faith" based on what is "real."
Here is where
we will abide, we say to ourselves, lodging our faith in what we can touch and
know because we have made it ourselves.
I
am convinced that our new modern religion is work; our daily sacrifice, our
jobs. Work itself, and the things we have made, from buildings to bridges, to
academic “bodies of knowledge,” are the object of our worship and ultimate
loyalties. Work, and the works of our hands are where we live and move and have
our being. The more we moderns become a secular people, the more we rely on our
jobs to answer ultimate questions about meaning, purpose, personal identity,
and community. Many, perhaps most of us cling to work as one of the last
reliable absolutes; a severe comfort, a changeless given amid the shifting
sands of uncertainty that bewilder this new
fin de siècle.
Work
now answers what I take to be one of the most profound questions of our
humanity- what I have called “leisure’s question.:” “Why get up in the
morning?” or more formally, “Why do anything and not nothing if you don’t have
to.” This is a question, I believe even more profound in its answer and consequence
than Heidegger’s famous ontological query, “Why is there something rather than
nothing?”
But the problem
is that such "New Daemons" invariably face an "Apocalypse,"
as Ellul put it. If history teaches anything, it is the perennial failure of
modern rivals to the traditional faiths.
"All is
vanity and a chasing after the wind," says the “Preacher." He has
been saying this for millennia. But we humans have to learn this the hard way,
laboriously constructing new faiths only to find them crumbling to dust. We
have to be instructed by the hard knocks of life, by the profound inadequacies
of our new faiths and by their eventual, traumatizing collapse that "it is
He that has made us and not we ourselves."
Following
Jacques Ellul, it is here that I see a role for the historian, an enduring
reason to keep on "working" at my craft. By demonstrating
historically the inadequacies of modern rivals to traditional faith, e.g., the
religion of work, the believing historian might succeed by asking Pontius
Pilate's question in such a way that the contemporary world might hear,- that
one true and enduring question, "What shall I do with this Man?"
I believe that
history throws up, or presents this "Christ Question" to every
generation and individual. Disclosing the inadequacies and failures of
human-based, work-based faiths prepares the way.
If only I may
be permitted to show how the transcendent perennially breaks in "at right
angles" to all our lives in this way… If only I might suggest once again
how "all is vanity" forces us all to struggle anew with ultimate
questions of identity, meaning, and purpose... If only I can expose the false
god of working and the needless sacrifice to THE JOB…. If only I can show a
glimpse of how the Eternal is thus moving "in" history and present to
the ages....
The last, and
clearly the greatest, abiding reason to do history is love. Last summer my
Ishmael-like wanderings took me back to my old church, Samaria Baptist, just
outside of
We
Episcopalians know how reading something repeatedly in the prayer book is an
amazing experience. Things we have never noticed or thought about before are
always jumping out and surprising us, just at the "right" time. Just
so with my father's tombstone.
"Love
Makes Memory Eternal"
Indeed. My
mother's phrase- she knew all along, simply, what I have struggled to find
circuitously.
Of course.
Christianity has always known this. What others see as a morbid preoccupation
we know as one of the wonders of our faith. We Christians have always paid
close attention to the death of one of our family, we have always taken
elaborate care of catacombs, crypts, cemeteries, and graveyards for just this
reason. Love. We remember those who have died.
Thinking
back, I realize that my first real experience of history as an integral part of
life, not moldering away in books or locked up in classrooms, was my mother's
saving the detritus of my boyhood. Out of love she remembered, and
"saved" my past.
She filled
numerous "Blue Horse" notebooks with pictures of me and the family;
me going to
Reminiscent of
the cheesy Christmas story, "The Littlest Angel," she held on to bits
and pieces of pure junk; an old book-sack she made for me out of that stripy,
pillow-cover material the last minute the first day of first grade because I
was sure everyone would have such a silly thing, a broken, cheap clay Indian my
sister brought me from Cherokee, all for me treasures because they were bits
and pieces of my life- the very fabric of my being.
My wife
Francine (I try to help) is doing the same now, keeping parts of our children's
past. They look to us, as do our grandchildren, for a reference- for an
orientation by the past and a place to stand facing the future. Who they are
now and where they are going must
have such a reference point, otherwise life simply spins on, chasing after the
wind.
Amnesia
nowadays is very much a cliché, so much so that even soap operas seem to have
gumption to avoid it. But I have always thought that amnesia would be one of
the worst afflictions imaginable. If I loose my memory, I loose myself. I would
argue that who I am is formed almost entirely by my past. Amnesia would be a
death more profound than even the ordinary variety.
Remember Benjy
in Faulkner's Sound and the Fury. His affliction, his idiocy, is that he
is unaware of time and doomed to the present, to the cascading, fluxating now.
He is overwhelmed by the chaos of events that wash over him. His has no fixed
place to stand, no reference to make sense out of it all. He has no past.
I tremble to admit that I see signs of the
affliction in the University’s Administration- Benjy would fit right in the
deans’ office.
A pious conceit
I wish I could
remember who it was who suggested this. I think that it must have been
The argument
goes this way: all human faculties provide us with ways to know God- all have a
spiritual potential to give us hope and guidance. Why not imagination?
Here is my pious daydream. What is God like? A perfect being must have a
perfect memory- absolute recall. He is the Great Historian!
This is an
embarrassing display of my own self-centeredness. But it is a very human thing
to do- conceive of the Divine as a projection of ourselves.
Kept in
perspective it may be healthy. The Great Historian could serve as a model of
perfection, toward which I might take one of two faltering steps.
I imagine that
The Great Historian would be able to remember me in infinitely greater detail
than I remember myself. She then would know me even better than I know myself.
She could remember all people this way.
I imagine,
"Is this not a basis for thinking about immortality?" Remember the
adage: "The only eternity we know for sure is the Past."
Maybe we all
have a place in heaven reserved for us by a Deity who keeps us forever alive in
memory; our identities intact, our lives remembered, perpetually replayed,
re-lived for the delight of that remembering Being.
I have my own fantasies about these things - being remembered, I am then aware of other beings remembered, and thus meet my
brother Robert again in that perpetual remeberance.
Didn’t the
thief ask, “remember me;” and did not Christ promise, remembering, “Today. you
will be with me…?” But I will keep all the rest private. I think it best to
just set up the conceit and let others play with it.
Stephen Swanson
recently told me of a computer class he took at the university. His instructor
was going on about all the miracles of technology, one of which was that
scientist are now able to store memory onto electrons- make an election spin
one way, it represents a "0," make it spin the other, it represents a
"1". Using this device, the contents of the library of congress could
easily be stored in a one-inch cube of dirt.
Given all the
room and matter in the universe, is it not entirely reasonable to imagine that
memory may be everlasting, eternal in the mind of The Great Historian.
But why would
She chose to remember us? Back to love again- that most enduring and abiding of
all the spiritual gifts. Love that
remembers and keeps us. A loving remembrance that the Church has tried though
the millennia to reflect and imitate with catacombs and graveyards, and
perhaps, please God, even with accounts of the past, written by Its members.