LETTER FROM A FREEDMAN TO HIS OLD MASTER.
[Written just as he dictated it.]

Dayton, Ohio, August 7, 1865.
To my old Master, Colonel P. H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee.

Sir:
I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the[266] folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, “Them colored people were slaves” down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams’s Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq.,[267] Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant,
Jourdon Anderson.

“Who Should Attend The Elephant Room 2? Any pastor or student or motivated disciple who is serious about theological ideas and how they shape methodology. Not purely pragmatic or theoretical, the conversations hope to stir changes of mind and retrench long held beliefs. A great event for teams and groups, the conversations are a starting point for important conversations.”

The intention, it seems, is to get pastors who disagree robustly in private to do so in public, in order to gain trust, educate, etc., those who follow their lead. Well, that’s not a bad motivation at all. That’s what we do in universities a good deal of the time. Ongoing debate is essential for finding the flaws in an argument, getting the bigger picture, avoiding lazy thinking, collaborating, refining and developing ideas, sparking inspiration and so on.

As regular readers will know, one of my scholarly interests is analysing texts with as much attention to the form as the content. And scanning the Elephant Room website, I didn’t need to think very hard to notice a couple of things that seemed not so much subliminal as glaring messages. One is sadly predictable: beside an advertising flag saying “time for a new direction”, is the list of debaters, all of whom are men. So any Professor or Mentor taking their class, mentee, or junior colleague along to this event is going to be exposing them to a subliminal message: theology and church leadership is done by men. If the intent is really to “stir changes of mind and retrench long held beliefs”, then why not entertain the possibility that people with a really divergent viewpoint might have something to tell you?

The other is that, mixed in with the rubric about education, openness, honesty etc., and the claim is that the conversations take place “in a spirit of respect and love and mutual concern…”, is another thread of highly combative language. The next conversation is described as the “next round”, and website visitors are challenged to “take your ringside seat”. Now, most of the time I’m not a fluffy person; I’ve worked in some of the most presitigious Universities in the world, and I’m greatly in favour of robust debate. But there’s all the difference in the world between robust debate and a punching match – regardless of whether it’s inside or outside Church. I’ve been present at University seminars that have been hostile, aggressive, and conducted in the spirit of having a winner and a loser. There weren’t any actual bloody noses, but I’ve seen fine scholars emerge from such events looking about as traumatised as if they had been given a good kicking. But I’ve also been to seminars that, without any conscious recourse to a Christian ethic really were conducted in respect, love and mutual concern. Not at all like a boxing match, more like a high level reading group. The two are not the same. So I’m fascinated to see that the Elephant Room presents itself with such mixed metaphors. One might hope for a night out with the Inklings, but it sounds worryingly more like a boxing match, a competitive debate with a referee, a winner a loser, and not much potential for the development of thought. Of course, I hope I’m wrong.

I’ve read about one or two who have “lost the battle” with cancer – and for them I weep. But I also remember two members of my own family, each of whom were eventually taken out by the dread disease, but each of whom saw a decade or so of high-quality, high-adventure life in remission first. And I also think of more than a few friends who now live in ongoing remission, who have passed the magic “ten year” mark, and for whom the doom-laden threat fades a little more with every passing year.

I can remember extreme grief for a couple of people I know whose lives were diminished, and eventually ended, by forms of depression. But I also rejoice in the growing hope of many more who have lived long enough with the black dog to learn how to keep it at heel; inspirational people who live, not without their demons, but nontheless in hope and not in despair.

I share with many the ongoing journey of life marked by daily, deliberate, repeated forgiveness. The only way to survive the awful inhumanities that people visit upon each other is to learn to let go: to make our peace with the circumstances that halved or quartered our health or security; to cut adrift those who assasinated our marriages, our careers, or our self-esteem; to live day by day in the knowledge that life consists in celebrating what is, and ceasing to regret what never will be.

Yesterday my son and I – who together have weathered a few battles of our own – watched War Horse. It’s a movie that imperfectly translates a book to the screen, but despite imperfections still makes a story live. The beauty of the story is that instead of dissolving into mere happy endings, it draws out of life a sense of triumph over adversity. It walks agonisingly through the trenches of war, but instead of thoughtlessly wiping away the scars, it proclaims that life goes on.

New Year’s Resolutions often take on a kind of fantasy shape: that of pretending that all in the garden is rosy, that we can simply remake our lives and wave away the scars of the battles we have survived, and whose memories still haunt our dreams. What can we do that is better? To launch into a New Year we need to let go. That’s not to say we don’t remain cognisant of what we have lived through. But we can wear our fading scars without shame, and without letting them keep us in the trenches we have already survived. We have mourned our losses, and we will do so again. But if we have survived thus far, let’s hear the call to live, with joy and celebration, while life endures.

It was some years later that I realised the interval added something to the theological meaning of the whole production. We are so used to the cast and the audience being separated by the invisible barrier at the edge of the stage. Fairly often over recent decades that barrier has been broken: improvisatory performers will invite an audience member on stage and work their contribution into the performance (think, for instance, of Neil Finn (Crowded House) or Frank Skinner (Comedian). Godspell paints Jesus as a clown-like reformer: gone is the mystical, other-worldly figure of so many movies about him, and instead he is the leading light among his followers but also decidedly one of them. There is no resurrection in Godspell (or at least it’s only vaguely implied); the impact is all about the transformation of the crowd, who are completely involved with him, and he with them. He doesn’t preach and they follow; instead he begins each story and the cast then take over, speaking his words and acting out the stories themselves. This interactive relationship is then spread through the theatre as the cast run through the audience, so that by the time the invitation comes to join the cast onstage, the sense is complete that we, the audience, are also to join in, to hang our lyres On The Willows, and to become builders of the Beautiful City.

Last night I took my own son to see the Godspell revival in New York. It’s at the Circle in the Square theatre, which is fairly small; even though we were almost on the back row we were still a stone’s throw from the stage, and I wondered as the lights went down whether this revival production would include the interval invitation.

The production was a quite brilliant revival: all the elements and songs from the original stage show and the 1973 movie were there, but reinterpreted – right from Jesus deciding what he will wear, to the re-working of some of the songs as rap or hip hop. The staging was fantastic – a dozen or so trap doors opened and closed to reveal a baptismal pool, ten trampolines, and a piano. The choreography was cleverly put together for a theater in the round, so that every scene rotates to play to the whole audience. The cast are quite brilliant, with a range of musical and acting skills that leaves you breathless right to the end of the show. The only odd moment for me was that just as Jesus was carried, lifeless, from the stage, the audience broke out in applause. I guess people knew it was the final song, or maybe there is a kind of conditioning that you applaud when a song ends come what may. All the same, my instinct was that if the audience could have responded at that point with a deathly silence, it would have been altogether more apt. The cast bounces back on stage two minutes later for a reprise (the implied resurrection), so it’s not like the show ends in darkness.

And the interval?  Sure enough, “Jesus” invited us down to drink wine with the cast. This time, the wine was actually a mouthful of a kind of communion cherry juice, served in tiny plastic cups. But the wine isn’t the point. It’s crossing the boundary that matters. Without a moment’s thought, I gave my reluctant son a push in the right direction, and we went on to the stage.

Not only that, but the alternative Psalm for Gaudete Sunday is the Magnificat, which means on Advent 4, the focus on Mary has also been pre-empted. What are these people drinking??

The old man living
In his rented room
Grows lonely as the night comes on
Especially in winter

And the boy shooting drugs
On the tenement roof
Is lonely whether or not
He has companions

Lovers lie sleeping
Side by side
A wilderness between them

And their unborn infant
Is already alone
So soon to be discarded
Even as he begins
Unfolding in the womb
Of his lonely mother

Because the scatterer
Has overtaken us
Betraying promises
Estranging lovers

Tearing us inwardly
And tearing us apart
One from another

And this is why
Those of us who are sated
Find it so easy to ignore
Those of us who are starving

And why we have been known
To torture one another
Why there are times
When we are far more cruel
Than the animals.

Nevertheless
Taken all together
Or taken one by one
We are the holiest
Of all earth’s creatures

For he who kindled
The fire of the sun
He who draws out the tender leaves
From the dark twigs of winter

He who has whittled
A cabin for the snail
Has also carved our names
In the palm of his hand

And he became a child
The better to be near us
Born in the wintertime
Born on a journey

He grew to be a man
And lived among us
To be our healing
When we were sick
Our bread
When we were hungry
To be the wine
At all our weddings

He suffered at our hands
And he forgave us
He sweat from head to foot
With human anguish
And shedding every drop of blood
To give us each other

He gave himself to us
That we might live forever

He gave us even more
Than he has given the angels.

“…. the power of the Most High will overshadow you… “ -Gospel of Luke

Whe we think of God, and
angels, and the Angel,
we suppose ineffable light.

So there is surprise in the air
when we see him bring to Mary,
in her lit room, a gift of darkness.

What is happening under that
huge wing of shade? In that mystery
what in-breaking wildness fills her?

She is astonished and afraid; even in
that secret twilight she bends her head,
hiding her face behind the curtain

Of her hair; she knows that
the rest of her life will mirror
this blaze, this sudden midnight.

Friday December 2^nd, 2011

Marquand Chapel, Yale Divinity School

Maggi Dawn, Dean of Chapel

I guess you’ll have noticed by now that it’s Advent.

If you hang out in a church that does the liturgical tradition, you’ll already have lit an advent candle last Sunday, been wished the Church equivalent of “happy new year”, and had the first round of advent readings.  Or maybe you’ve been alerted to the fact that it’s Advent by the alternative liturgical tradition of the chocolate Advent calendar…

Psalm 27, which we read together a few minutes ago, encapsulates the two classic themes of Advent. The coming of Christ into the world is depicted by the metaphor of light in the darkness, and the anticipation of what is yet to come is teased out as we are called to wait, attentively.  As Augustine famously pointed out, our awareness of time passing often has little to do with the hands on the clock, or the pages of the calendar – for our lives may be measured chronologically, but they are experienced in a series of kairos moments.

It’s these two themes that make Psalm 27 so apt for the beginning of Advent. For here the author contemplates light and darkness, and he also waits in what seems like interminable anxiety, holding on to the hope that God will always be with him. But I love Psalm 27 because it not only combines those themes, but it also challenges the simplistic  way that we sometimes use them.

The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?
Light is right there in the first verse. And we can easily think of a whole slew of other familiar advent references to the light –  The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them has the light shined; let there be light, and there was light; light shines in the darkness, and the darkness shall not overcome it…

Darkness-and-light imagery, though, isn’t without its problems. Always associating dark with evil, and light with goodness, can have – has had – terrible consequences for our society.

But the scriptures don’t actually present this metaphor with quite the simple binary opposition we sometimes assume. Sometimes God is presented as light. But not always.

Psalm 27 begins “The Lord is my light,” but just a few verses later the Psalmist says,  “you keep me safe in your tent”. I daresay that some of you, in the course of playing hide-and-seek or some other kids game, will have crawled under a tarpaulin, or underneath the rafters of a house. It’s safe, it’s a great hiding place, and…

…it’s DARK!

God hides the Psalmist from danger by hiding him in the dark!

But get this – God isn’t only in the darkness – there are even places in scripture where God is presented to us actually as the darkness. Take the annunciation. We usually put the spotlight on the angel and Mary when we read that story. But right in the middle of Gabriel’s speech is this intriguing phrase – “the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the most high will OVERSHADOW you…”. Reading from a Christian viewpoint, this is one of the most mystical and God-breathed moments in all of human history. And it occurs, not in the light at all, but under the darkness of God.

Now I realize this is not a reading that would suit a puritanical mindset, where transparency and daylight are prized so highly, and secrecy treated with fear and suspicion. Yet right there we see that God works in dark and secret places, just as much as in broad daylight. God is my Light and my salvation. But he also hides me in his darkness.

It’s not only the scriptures that mix up this imagery; poets do it too.  In romantic poetry the sun was often used as a metaphor for God. But Samuel Taylor Coleridge did something quite different from his peers. Coleridge frequently uses moonlight to represent the presence of God. He had personal reasons for doing this: as a boy he was sent to school in London, and missed his home and the countryside very badly, The only place he could capture some sense of being close to the natural world was at night when school was over, and he could go up to the roof and gaze at the night sky. For Coleridge, then, moonlight became associated with the sense of God’s presence. But he also thought that light reflected by the moon was a better metaphor than sunlight for perceiving God’s presence. For all our knowledge of God is only ever indirect: as Moses discovered, you can no more look directly into the face of God than you can look directly into the sunlight. If we perceive the presence of God at all, it is always indirectly – always reflected light. So for Coleridge, the light of God can ONLY be seen in the dark, the night sky.

I like the complexity of this mixing up of imagery, the refusal to let simple binary oppositions box us into always using language in a particular way, or denying us permission to say this or that thing. St Paul wouldn’t allow his readers to set opposites against each other – male and female, Jew and Gentile. And the Psalmist doesn’t allow that simplistic approach either. God is my light. But he also hides me under the cover of darkness.

The author also plays with time in his Psalm.

He starts out with bravado – the Psalm is usually printed under the title, “A song of triumph”, and he recalls the past, and the confidence of his youth. And he also looks with hope into the future “I believe I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. But in between, neither the past nor the future can successfully gloss over his anxiety as he prays:

My heart says to you, “your face God, do I seek”. Hide not your face from me… for false witnesses have risen against me, and they are breathing out violence.

Times of stress and anxiety seem like they will NEVER END and it sounds as if the Psalmist is looking at his watch while he prays –
“come on, God, you should be here by now…”
he tries his best to wait for God but you get the clear impression that he thinks God is late.

And I like that – because it often seems to me that as we walk through the seasons of the Church year, things don’t happen on time. We have these great feasts and seasons of Church – Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost – and year after year they tell and re-tell the story of salvation year after year. They give us a scaffolding, a structure on which we can hang the story of faith.

But our daily lives don’t flow in sync with the story. Sometimes we feel happy in Lent and miserable at Easter.  And as for Christmas – well, of course as we all know from advertisements and TV and shop displays, everyone is always happy at Christmas, aren’t they? Families always get along. Couples always feel romantic. Children never cry. Grandma is always sweet and kind… Or not…

Often we have this dislocated feeling of being out of time, out of step – a lot like our Psalmist, who summons up the confidence of youth, and defiantly holds on to hope for the future, while all the time he is actually living in the anxious present and wondering why God doesn’t turn up on time.

What do WE do when that happens? What do we do when Christmas is approaching and we aren’t ready for it? When Easter arrives and we feel depressed not elated, or when Pentecost comes and the last thing we feel is inspired?

Let me tell you a story.

When I was a child we had a maiden aunt. She was a wonderful woman, always full of excitement, and someone who knew how to squeeze every last drop of joy out of ordinary things. She lived down on the south west coast of England, where the beaches are long and flat, and the tide goes out so far that you can’t even see the sea at low tide. One summer when we went to stay – I think I must have been about four or five – I remember her creeping in to our room in the very early hours of the morning, at first light. She woke my sister and me, pulled on jumpers over our pyjamas and put our feet into shoes, bundled us into her ancient morris minor and drove away.

By the time we arrived at the shore, we were pretty much awake, and to our great surprise instead of stopping at the car park she drove right down on to the sands and headed out towards the sea. I’m sure it was against the bye-laws – in fact, I know it was against the bye-laws – but at sunrise there’s no-one there to stop you.  Way out on the sand she stopped the car, and out of the back she produced a primus stove, a kettle, eggs, butter, salt and pepper, and fresh bread, and began to cook breakfast. We ate omelettes and drank tea as the sun rose over the sea, and then went paddling in our pyjamas, taking in great gulps of the salty sea air.

You can see why we loved her. But she had one particular idiosyncrasy – she always, absolutely dependably, forgot all our birthdays. But at some random time of year – May, July or November – a huge parcel would arrive full of presents. It was always books: Auntie Margaret taught English Literature, and she always knew just the right book to buy. Inside the cover it would say “Happy Birthday!: or “Happy Christmas”, regardless of the time of year.  She introduced me to Alison Uttley’s Little Grey Rabbit, and The Adventures of Sam Pig, and later to Madeleine L’Engle.  It seemed madly exciting to get an unexpected present just when life was going through a tedious stage: and somehow, although they were early or late according to the calendar, they always seemed to arrive at just the right moment.

Whenever I forget a birthday or a Christmas card, I think of Auntie Margaret. Please, God, let me be like her – let me be the kind of person who sends gifts that someone will love, not just gifts to satisfy a deadline. But whenever God’s gifts elude me – when there is no joy at Easter, no wonder at Christmas, or simply no sense of God’s presence in between times – again, I think of Auntie Margaret. The gift will arrive at the right time, even if it’s not on the appointed date. Joy on demand is joyless indeed, but presents in July, and breakfast on the beach at sunrise, I can seriously live with.

If we confidently depend upon the knowledge that God’s gifts, unlike Santa’s, are not delivered to deadlines, then we can live within the seasons knowing that the gifts they represent will come to us eventually – not necessarily on time, and probably when we least expect them. So we can say with hope, and even with a little holy defiance,¹³ “I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”

There is a happy ending to this, because my son and I have been invited to spend the Christmas break with friends, so this is not a tale of woe. But early last week, in the midst of feeling flat and disappointed, I stopped to think about Advent as a journey towards the unknown. The patriarchs and matriarchs of scripture travelled through some very dark times in the hopes of finding a promised land; the prophets who envisaged a time of harvests and sunshine and peaceful abundance did so against a backdrop of their own city being devastated and burned to the ground. Holding on to hope when there doesn’t seem any rational reason to do so is hard. The prophets’ words weren’t a fanciful, romantic denial of their circumstances, or a pretence that things weren’t as bad as they seemed. Their prophecies were an act of the imagination, in the true sense of the word.

Imagination is a word that has been somewhat devalued – it’s often used to describe mere fantasy, a Pollyanna-like refusal to face up to reality, or a lack of mental acuity that would engage one with the “real” world. But there’s a much more robust definition of the imagination as that part of the mind that creatively projects what could be, dares to conjure previously unthought possibilities, and refuses to submit to a bleak present, summoning up instead a better future. The imagination in this sense is not an escape from reality, but the power to summon up hope, which in turn propels people to bring the imagined future into being. That holds good not just for the small moments in our personal experience, but for the larger scale, world changing initiatives and inventions that make the world a better place.

I’m really looking forward to Christmas now. It will be intriguing to discover what it’s like to have no “job” to do on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning; it will be fun to be in the company of friends, and great to explore a city I’ve never been to before. But I treasure this little darkness-to-light Advent moment along the way; a brush with some bleak feelings, a reminder that we live in a world where darkness falls on us all too easily, but also deep-down thanks that there is a light that shines in the darkness.

“…the church has been criticizing itself for too long, and it ought to start celebrating its unsung and remarkable achievements. The trouble is that the faults of the church are so obvious – the gap between its ideals and the reality is so glaring.  But the other trouble is that most of us do not have our eyes open to see the miracles of grace> They are to be found in such ordinary, unremarkable, simple things that we do not even notice. We think our worship is dull, and miss the movement of the Spirit in the secret places, the eveeryday saints, who are there among us but we dismiss them as ‘old so-and-so.’ In my experience the church is capable of transcending the divisions in our society, it is capable of integrating the odd and unacceptable, it is more sensitive to basic human values than wider society. It can act as leaven, and we should no disparage this. Maybe we all need to go on a voyage of exploration into unlikely places to meet unlikely people – not the great ones of the world but the marginalized and afflicted who will teach us what true human values are.”

Frances Young, Face to Face, 105-6