Clarion: Journal of Spirituality and Justice

Confession’s Crown - Poem by Jessica Williams

Confession’s Crown

When you spoke of self-love

I did not know what it meant.

I’d caught only glimpses of this—

and I’d resist.

 

But a light had shimmered across the surface of my heart…

Revealing that Love was real.

 

It sparkled so beautifully—

I longed for more.

 

Yet, it did not penetrate

and I wondered why this longing kept ending in such despair.

 

So for years I simply swam in this water.

I learned how to float,

and, how to hold my breath to go deeper sometimes…

I practiced.

 

It was lovely there, exploring Love,

but it wasn’t enough.

 

Then one day,

You led me down,

meter-by-meter,

to the deep dark bottom of my soul.

 

All those years I had tried to escape this place,

to stay afloat.

Terrified by what it meant—

that I was not wholly good.

 

But, slowly, in the depths of this water,

I looked at everything that I had done.

 

And there, in the truth of my transgressions,

I found myself.

 

It was (eventually) a strange relief.

 

To face myself and say—

It is true:  

the blood is on my hands too.

 

You stayed with me,

and simply let it be.

 

Because, it was.

This was me.

 

Then suddenly the floor of my own heart gave way,

as if a holy drill had been working all along,

deepening everything I’d ever known.

 

I discovered there that Love is limitless,

and that when I sink down into the depths of myself,

Love will come.

 

As if She’d always been there

--waiting.

 

The answer became strangely simple:

Love could not reveal herself to me where I was not.

 

I learned that I had more power than I’d ever known.

My own self-acceptance was the mystery key.

 

It unlocked everything.

Deuteronomy, Jewish Prophets and the Sermon on the Mount - Ron Dart

Deuteronomy, Jewish Prophets and the Sermon on the Mount: Moral Formulas, Comedy and Tragedy: Monophony of Polyphony?                 

The Classical Hebrew canon tends to be divided, for the purposes of classification, into the Law, the Prophets and the Writings. Deuteronomy is the final book of the Law, and the text articulates and threads together the Jewish political vision as the Jewish people are about to cross the Jordan into the much anticipated and longed for promised land. There is a very real sense in which Deuteronomy is the 1^st political manifesto written in the West (centuries before such western classics of political philosophy by Plato and Aristotle), and in this manifesto, an ethical, liturgical and distinctive political agenda is clearly articulated. The Jewish nation is offered a blueprint in Deuteronomy for both domestic and foreign policy issues.  Moses seems to be the lawgiver for most of the book, and Moses’ enhanced and enlarged view of the Jewish framework for running their new society cannot be missed. Deuteronomy merely means the second laws, the larger economic, social and political laws that were meant to build on the Decalogue (10 Commandments) and the Shema (‘Love the Lord Your God with All Your Heart, Soul, Strength and Mind’). The Shema and Decalogue are foundational to the Jewish tradition, and, in many ways, don’t raise the tensions that the larger history and 2^nd set of laws entails. Let us now turn to the tensions. 

Those who take the time to sit with the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament cannot but be taken by a trying tension and problematic dilemma. The problem is, at a primary level, theological. God is, at times, merciful, just, long suffering, generous, fatherly, shepherd like and compassionate. God is, at other times, angry, brutal, warlike and destructive. It’s often difficult to know which aspect of God will appear at what time and why. God seems no different from Zeus, Odin or Jupiter in his warlike and hawkish tendencies at places in the textual narrative. This has raised serious concerns and questions for those that take the Bible with some level of seriousness. Is God truly a consistent and good God, or does God’s willing and actions trump his goodness?  These tensions have been duly noted by many thoughtful exegetes of the Hebrew canon. Peter Craigie’s, The Problem of War in the Old Testament (1978), Eric Seibert’s Disturbing Divine Behaviour: Troubling Old Testament Images of God (2009) and Simone Weil’s Letter to a Priest (1942) are but three classics that probe and ponder this difficulty. It is this perennial tension that the well known Canadian theologian and philosopher, George Grant, grappled with much of his life.   If God’s ways are above our ways, can God do anything and humans have no right to question Divine behavior? If God is beyond good and evil, does this mean that God can use unjust and immoral means to achieve a Divine end? There are many passages in the Old Testament that seem to suggest this might be the case. Many of these questions and issues are expressed clearly and poignantly in Deuteronomy, hence to Deuteronomy we now turn to explore the ethical implications of such Divine behaviour.

[Is now the time you will ] Make Israel Great Again? (Acts 1:6-8) - Mike Neelley

Make Israel Great Again

Acts 1:6-8

Following the resurrection encounters recorded at the end of the gospels, we are told by Luke in Acts 1:3 that Jesus presented himself alive to (the apostles) after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the Kingdom of God.

Jesus’ teaching on the Kingdom of God/Heaven is the primary theme of his life from his first sermon, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” (Mt. 4:17), to the framing of the Lord’s prayer (Your Kingdom come…), to the cry of the thief who hung next to him on the cross, “Remember me when you come into your Kingdom.” Jesus outlines the Kingdom mission when he quotes Isaiah 61:1-2 at the start of his ministry (Luke 4:18-19) – most notably that the Kingdom is evidenced by Spirit empowered liberation of the oppressed and marginalized – this is where the will of the Father for the liberation of His people is manifest; the overthrow of the rule of darkness; the judgment of the powers.

In contrast to Jesus, we are shown the religious system and its representatives (the Sanhedrin) who were trying to get Israel to obey all the religious rules in order to pave the way for and be worthy of the promised messiah, who would come to restore the kingdom of Israel. The Pharisees believed that sinners were ruining everything for Israel, and that sickness, leprosy, and demonization were signs of God’s judgment against individuals, while the continued Roman occupation was further evidence of God‘s displeasure with Israel as a sinful nation. This theological framework is still very much in evidence today – that God is punishing us for our sin and that bad things that happen to us are a sign of God’s displeasure; therefore we must purge and distance ourselves, exclude, punish and cast out in order to keep ourselves clean.

Retributive Justice Is No Justice At All - Abp. Lazar Puhalo

 “Then the LORD spoke his word to Zechariah. He said, ‘This is what the LORD of Armies says: Administer real justice, and be compassionate and kind to each other. Don't oppress widows, orphans, foreigners, and poor people. And don't even think of doing evil to each other.” (Zechariah 7:8-10) 

 

“Here is my servant whom I have chosen, the one I love, in whom I delight; I will put my Spirit on him, and he will proclaim justice to the nations. He will not quarrel or cry out; no one will hear his voice in the streets. A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out, till he leads justice to victory.” (Matthew 12:18-20 – NIV)

 

Retributive justice is no justice at all. It is merely revenge.

 

No concept of retributive justice can possibly be compatible with forgiveness. Where there is punishment, there is no forgiveness. Where there is forgiveness, there can be no punishment.

 

Justice, in order to be just, must always take into account every mitigation and extenuation: “He remembers that we are but dust,” the Psalmist says.

 

Moreover, “justice” includes giving rewards and restoring things to rightful owners. Justice with mercy includes giving what a person actually needs rather than only what they merit. There is a reason why Paul, referring to “sin,” uses the concept την αμαρτία, rather than την ενοχή, την ανομία, or το σπάσιμο του νόμου. Sin means to miss the mark, fall short of the goal, and the goal is unity with God. Alienation, not “breaking laws,” is our real problem. Even a virtue can be a sin (`αμαρτία) if it causes an alienation between us and God. Not only the idea of retributive justice, but the idea of redemption through “substitutionary sacrfice” negates every concept of forgiveness. Nevertheless, salvation comes through forgiveness.

A Note on Union with Christ - C. Baxter Kruger

“A Note on Union with Christ”

©C. Baxter Kruger, Ph.D., 2017

In Honor of Ken Courtney and Lance Muir

 

“Father, I have made Your name known to them, and I will make it known, that the love wherewith you love Me may be in them, and I in them.”  —Jesus, John 17:26

“The Incarnation means that God Himself condescended to enter into our alienated human existence, to lay hold of it, to bind it in union with Himself…” —Thomas F. Torrance, The School of Faith

St Athanasius of Alexandria

The apostles lead us to contemplate the fact that Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of the Father incarnate.  Some of their statements about Jesus are quite astounding.  It was fidelity to this apostolic witness to Jesus that expanded the mind of the early Church and led to the recognition that God is eternally Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—three distinct persons, indivisibly one divine being.  This vision of Trinitarian oneness led the fathers at Nicaea to proclaim with the apostles that all things were created from the Father through the Son and in the Holy Spirit, echoing John and Paul’s insistence that all things were created in and through and by and for the Son.  A Trinitarian discussion of union with Christ begins here with the oneness of the Triune God and with the Son’s union with all creation as the Creator and Sustainer of all things—prior to the incarnation.  It is striking that so much of what is said about union with Christ ignores this very proclamation and assumes separation, that is to say, assumes that creation and the human race within it have existence and being and life apart from the Son of God.   

For the apostles and the Nicene theologians the Son as Creator is held together with his ongoing sustaining of creation, such that any rupture between the Son of God and creation threatens creation with nonbeing.  The incarnation of the Son anointed in the Spirit is thus not to be viewed as the establishment of a previously non-existing relationship or union between the anointed Son and the human race.  For the cosmos would vanish in an instant without him.  To be sure, the Fall of Adam constitutes a rebellion from the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and a declaration of independence from the Son as the very source and meaning of human existence.  The Fall is a denial of human participation in the life of blessed Trinity and thus threatened the union between Adam and Eve and the Triune God.  As Athanasius said, the human race was on the road to ruin and lapsing into nonbeing. In its deepest sense, the incarnation addresses this threat of our ultimate disappearance from existence.  In becoming flesh, the Son of God establishes his existing divine relationship or union with humanity, which was seriously jeopardized by Adam’s rejection, inside the very specific context of human alienation and rebellion.  In an act of astonishing redemptive genius, the Son of God entered personally into the reality that threatened his union with us, namely, our rejection of him.  By giving himself into the hands of wicked men he yielded to our great darkness and rebellion, suffering them personally, thereby using our alien vision and rebellion as the means of establishing his union with us in our sin.  Bearing the insidious scorn of broken humanity, Jesus met us and accepted us precisely in our resistance and unwillingness to come to him, indeed in our hatred of him and of his exposing light.  Therein the incarnate, crucified and resurrected Son secured his union with us by way of our unbelief, once and for all obliterating the threat of our nonexistence.  For he is a merciful Creator who loves the human race.

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Review of Robert William Sanford's "Our Vanishing Glaciers" - by Ron Dart

Review of Robert William Sanford's Our Vanishing Glaciers:The Snows of Yesteryear and the Future Climate of the Mountain West (Rocky Mountain Books, 2017). Review by Ron Dart

I have had for many a decade an interest in the slowly vanishing Illecillewaet Glacier in Rogers Pass (as recorded by the Vaux family)

and the history of Great Glacier Lodge (as the first centre of alpinism in North America). My treks to the Wheeler-Asulkan Huts (and beyond) and Nakimu Caves have revealed much about the disappearing glaciers of which Illecillewaet was a reigning elder at one auspicious moment.

So, I was more than delighted to be sent Our Vanishing Glaciers to review--so much packed into this clarion call of a well-crafted book Glaciers are, in many significant ways, the proverbial canary in the mineshaft. The state of the receding glaciers in our world tells us much about substantive shifts in the climate and augers much warning for the future. The sheer momentum of Our Vanishing Glaciers is the succinct and compact manner that Robert William Sandford highlights how the slow moving glaciers of the past (and the contributions they make via fresh water) are in jeopardy (as are we if we do not awaken to our perilous plight).

Our Vanishing Glaciers in an incisive, textual and visual way unfolds the tale we must all be attentive to in a most convincing manner. There are ten illuminating chapters in the hard cover beauty of a book (each worth reading many times): 1) The Wonder of Water, 2) What Winter Does to Water, 3) Ecology as Defined by Winter Water, 4) How Icefields and Glaciers Form, 5) Canada’s Most Accessible Glaciers: The Icefields Parkway, Athabasca Glacier and the Columbia Icefield, 6) The Death of Peyto Glacier: A Case for More Comprehensive Hydro-Meteorological Monitoring in the Canadian Rockies, 7) The Columbia Icefield Today, 8) Glaciers in a Changing Climate, 9) What We Stand to Lose and 10) Water, Climate and the National Parks Ideal. Both the headings and content of the chapters make it abundantly clear the drift and focus of Sandford’s convincing argument. Our Vanishing Glaciers begins with a general overview of the issues of the wonder of water, the impact of winter on water, ecology and winter water and how icefield and glaciers come into being. Needless to say, the shifting state of the warming earth is one of the main actors in such a drama. But, the beauty and genius of Vanishing Glaciers is the way, once such essential and general topics are covered, the main themes are, rightly so, applied to the glaciers and icefields of the Canadian Rockies. The specificity of such a turning to the Rockies illustrates in ample detail the reality and dire implications of the future climate on the Canadian mountain west.

It is this concentration, again and again, on the Canadian Rocky glaciers and icefields that make Our Vanishing Glaciers a canary test textbook.  

There are those who are convinced by arguments of a textual, logical and empirical manner, science being very much the guide and tutor.  There are others who need photographs or actual encounters with the issue being pondered and discussed.  The textual and scientific approach, appropriately so, does outweigh the visual in Our Vanishing Glaciers, but, wisely, the visual affirms and confirms the larger thesis. There is a fine “Glossary” at book’s end as is there an excellent bibliography of sorts (for those, hopefully, wishing to be more informed on the topic).

I have, since the mid-1970s (after spending a couple of years in Norway with the mountain Sami and in the high alpine in Switzerland in the early 1970s) done many a trip to the glaciers and icefields of the Rockies. One of my 1^st trips was on Peyto Glacier in 1975 (so tragic to witness its slow death). I have certainly seen (as have many more astute and committed than I am) the impact on glaciers and the icefields of climate change and the tensions, as Sandford notes in his final chapter, between water, climate and the national parks ideal.

There can be no doubt on this the 150^th anniversary of Canada since Confederation that we face challenges not faced in 1867. One of the most obvious and not to be ignored challenges is both climate change and the impact on glaciers and icefields (and, in time, the consequences for us). Our Vanishing Glaciers is an informed and compelling siren call book, framed in an aesthetic yet judicious manner, and should be standard reading for Canadians (and others, of course) concerned with the future of the climate, water, glaciers, icefields and the place of humanity in such a delicate yet real changing world.

montani semper liberi

Ron Dart         

Interview with Ron Dart - by Matthew and Joy Steems

[MJ]Your life is characterized by a remarkable ethic of hospitality; you go out of your way to walk alongside people in their individual journeys. In fact, in one of your books you state that “We can always know when we are in the presence of those who are near to God if they are sensitive to human suffering and human struggles … such people will know, in the depths of their lives, the comfort, stillness, grace, and kindness of God.” Considering your years of work with Amnesty International, how would you say your commitment to social justice and hospitality work together in the larger context of a Christian vision? 

First of all, I think that the core of the Christian vision is embodied in the Beatitudes: the Magna Carta of the Christian faith.

Unfortunately, there has been a fragmentation between an understanding of evangelism and social justice. Liberals do the social justice and evangelicals do not. Evangelicals often do the large events, the born again experiences, but infrequently say enough about injustices, war, human suffering or tragedy.

There are actually a few frameworks of the Christian faith. One is the pietist or devotional model. In the pietist method people retreat into the personal/ private world in which they don’t deal with the public responsibilities of the larger issues of hospitality, justice, peacemaking, and environmental concerns.

Then, the second is the model that reinforces power. We call this one the Constantinian or caesaropapism model. In this paradigm, faith reinforces the crassest understanding of power.

Finally, the third is the prophetic vision. The prophets of both the Old and New Testament were always very concerned with the treatment of the single mother, the orphan, the outcast, and the foreigner. Indeed, that prophetic vision gets very congealed in the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount.

So of the three models, the pietist devotion, the Constantinian and the prophetic, I would say I come out of the Hebrew Christian prophetic tradition in which hospitality, justice, peacemaking, and environmental concerns are at the core and centre of the good news.

What’s a current problem you see with how many people approach the “gospel” message?

In my opinion, you can’t tell people about the good news if you only define it by “born again” experiences.  It’s not good news to people when we preach almost a gnostic gospel of the soul cut lose from the material conditions of life. A message that leaves the earth being polluted, people living in injustice, and wars going on is not the good news.

That is a very distorted notion of “gospel”; that is not good news to people who are suffering. And so, the question in terms of Christianity is, what do we mean by “good news”?

Good news has to do deal with freeing us from our ego or false self. It also has to do with bringing good news to people who live under terrible oppression and situations of war; bearing the good news is being agents of transformation in those contexts.

What is good news to the earth? Well, you’re not polluting it, first of all. There’s always been a triangular understanding in terms of Christian faith: God, humans, and nature.

The true question of the gospel has been, how do we bring harmony into spheres where there is disharmony and dis-ease? The notion of hospitality and social justice, I would argue, is the backbone of the good news in terms of a mature and integrated understanding of how evangelism brings the good news. I actually hesitate to use the word “evangelism” because unfortunately it has been so distorted and reduced in meaning that it often excludes issues of social justice, hospitality, war and peace, and the environment: the truth is, it’s not good news for many people.

I think there probably has to be a deconstruction of the pietist/devotional tradition so that people can get to the much more integrated holistic tradition of Christianity: a tradition in which justice and hospitality are an essential part. They are like the spiritual air that is breathed.

How do you think a pietist tradition, combined with our fixation on individualism, plays into our retreat from cultural involvement?

Individualism is close to pietism because it says, “my faith is about me.” “It’s my life with God.” “My life with prayer”; this is the sort of liberal individualism which really emerges in the 16^th century, and then gets accelerated in certain forms of the evangelical tradition. Pietism is a product of liberal individualism, which is about me, my closet, and my life with God.

That also leads to people saying, “I’m spiritual, but not religious.” You see, with the spiritual but not religious terminology, we’re back to individualism again. Actually, you get the same thing in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

It’s about the protagonist, Christian, who has to leave family and everyone behind in order to complete his own personal spiritual quest. I would actually assert that Pilgrim’s Progress is a quintessential manifesto of individualism.  For example, if you compare it to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, you can see that while one is an organic understanding of what Matthew Arnold calls “God’s plenty,” the other is about puritan individualism. I see the same thing in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Milton is much more sophisticated in his presentation of puritan individualism whereas Bunyan is a cruder variety, but they’re the same message.

You can see then that individualism antedates what we call the political theory of individualism, which actually prepares the way for liberal individualism. In other words, it was Protestantism that prepared the way for liberal individualism as a secular philosophy. I argue that it’s not the enlightenment that birthed liberal individualism: Protestantism birthed it.

So far you’ve spoken about the importance of being agents of restoration rather than simply being on an independent spiritual quest. However, in your books and previous conversations, you are very clear that we must not simply act for action’s sake. For example, you emphasize the significance of action coming from a place of contemplation. Can you tell us about the relationship between contemplation and action in a spiritual vision?

Well, if Protestantism on the one hand is the birth of individualism and liberty, it’s also been the death knell of the contemplative. With the coming to be of Protestantism, the monastic tradition is trashed or devastated.

The problem is that Protestantism has resulted in the elevation of the active life: the vita activa. This is the life of busyness, accomplishment, success, of defining one’s worth by these sorts of things. It’s a subordinating or banishing of the vita contemplativa.

The Christian mystic Evelyn Underhill writes that we spend so much time conjugating three verbs: to want, to have, and to do that we’ve forgotten how to conjugate the verb to be. The contemplative is about conjugating the soul and society. The verb to be. The hyper-busyness of our culture is just a secularizing of the Protestant vita activa in that sense.

Our culture is addicted to the vita activa. If you ask people to slow down, to be still, and to be a little quieter, they have the same symptoms of a drug addict or an alcoholic. They get the jitters; their hands start moving in all directions, their feet start twitching, they’ve got to get a blackberry, a blueberry, a thimbleberry, they’ve got to get to a computer, they don’t know what to do, so they pop another pill of the vita activa.

Some of the finest political philosophers and philosophers have attempted to challenge this tendency in the 20^th century. For example, TS Eliot would say we are in a wasteland. Indeed, in the Four Quartets, probably his finest work of contemplative poetry, he attempts to offer an alternative: he says that we tend to be distracted by distraction through distraction, which, of course, is the vita activa.

We find ourselves in a capitalist civilization where there’s always the jingle of “try this” or “consume this” or “buy this.” It has created a whole generation of people who are hyper-restless and don’t know where to go to nourish their soul: they’ve forgotten the depths of what it means to be human.

This is why, I think, there is a turn today to an interest in a Catholic tradition because people intuitively sense that there is a mother-load there that we’ve lost, and Protestantism has not been able to fulfill the lack.

When people turn to other faiths, people from protestant traditions worry they’re losing their faith, but really, they’re finding it. Philosopher George Grant once said, “I belong to the Hindu wing of Christianity.” What he was saying was that Christianity has lost its contemplative way. And, a significant element of Hinduism and Buddhism have maintained that, so in fact they can take a person to depths that the current Christian church cannot because it is so fixated on the vita activa.

We’ve lost our memory of the vita contemplativa vision. When we lose our memory, we don’t even know where to go.

This is where Plato is very concerned that people lack memory of who they are meant to be.

How do you suggest we recover a contemplative vision of our humanity, and therefore become equipped to engage in our culture as agents of social justice and hospitality?

I would start by reading George Grant, Martin Heidegger, Evelyn Underhill, TS Eliot, Thomas Merton, and Bede Griffiths: these are all women and men who are attempting to call people back to the vita contemplativa. They are not against an active life by itself; they are for a more discerning contemplative life that then leads to the issues of justice and peace and environmentalism.

When people neglect to cultivate the contemplative, they lose the very ground in which their soul and society and faith emerges: they retreat into a private world in which Rilke says, they keep going in small circle turns.

Contemplation takes us into the bigger world of the imagination, thought, literature, and poetry. When we’re grounded in these things, we are better equipped to enter the public domain because we are no longer simply tantalized and mesmerised by the vita activa.

There is clear historical precedence for this, too. For example, in Plato and Aristotle, the contemplative was the highest form of being. We see this in Plato’s Symposium or Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Cicero, Seneca, Augustin. Aquinas, Macrina, Benedict’s sister Scholastica, as well as Chrysostom, and Olympia: these are the great stories of the Christian faith and the fruitful relationship between men and women who were committed to the vita contemplativa.  We see that it’s out of a framework of contemplation that these women and men engage in the most important public issues of their time.

For example, Chrysostom is actually banished for challenging the emperor for the luxury and wealth they had while there is poverty on the streets. Chrysostom was the leading critic against the expensive games people went to and the injustice of slavery. Moreover, Olympia was an abbes in a convent of over four hundred nuns who were at the forefront of social justice movements.

In other words, we see examples of people who were grounded in the contemplative and directed their lives in generous contributions to tragedy, suffering, injustices, and war in the late antique world of both the east and west. This is why memory is important. We must remember that the contemplative emerges from a place of stillness, a place of listening, and place of asking, “what am I called to be” and how can I birth these gifts into the world that I live in.

Coming to Oneself - Matthew and Joy Steem

I have a confession to make: the story of the prodigal son has long been one of those tales that has been a little lost in translation for me. A young son asks his dad for some money, squanders the money in disreputable company, then goes home. His dad embraces him with open arms and has a feast, but his older brother is sulky about the arrangement. Sure, it’s an interesting story, but not particularly gripping. I never really wanted to say this out loud for fear that I would be taken for one of those types of people who can’t quite grasp the original context of a passage. So, I lived for years without the passage ever actually genuinely impacting me. 

 Recently that changed.

At the suggestion of a spiritual leader in my community, I’ve been spending some time with my nose in books on restorative justice. The good thing about it is that I knew very little going in, which means that I was an open minded reader who didn’t have to fight against pre-existing assumptions and opinions that could detract from my ability to actually learn. So far, I’ve found the writers to be hopeful yet humble, optimistic yet objective, and most of all – strategic in the way they honor the stories of both victims and persons who have caused harm. The experience has been expansive both intellectually and spiritually.

One of the books, Compassionate Justice by Christopher D. Marshall, explores our approach to victims and persons who have caused harm through the lens of two parables: the good Samaritan and the prodigal son. Because I’ve been so exposed to these stories, they’ve lost a little of their scandal. Which is unfortunate, because this was exactly the effect Jesus was going for when he originally told them. 

Marshall was speaking to me exactly when he says,

Modern readers are inclined to view the offending of the younger son [in the prodigal son] as a relatively trifling episode of self-indulgent hedonism by a hormonally charged adolescent acting as though he were bullet proof in a cruel and unyielding world. Understood this way, the father’s response to his son is much like what any enlightened parent would show to their misguided teenagers in such circumstances. But such a reading is far removed from how Jesus’ first century hearers would have interpreted events. They would have shared the prodigal’s own assessment of his behaviour as a case of sinning gravely against heaven and against his loving father.

In other words, Marshall puts this story back into the context of scandal. The prodigal son is a scandalizing story. Here’s why. Some scholars suggest that, in context, the young son asking his father for his share of the inheritance is tantamount to expressing a death wish towards his father. The son is not taking a summer vacation, or some time to “discover himself.” He says he does not belong, nor does he wish to belong. The son is deliberately and permanently disconnecting himself from his family and community ties. In fact, he is asking for the money that would normally be spent, in part, on caring for his father in old age. Therefore, he is exposing the father to the possibility of destitution, and thereby opening his father up to severe criticism from his neighbors.

The son renounces relationship. He violates community. He rejects the notion of interconnection.

But then something wonderful happens.

After wasting the money and experiencing humiliation at the hands of a cruel hearted employer who refuses to adequately feed him, the son reaches rock bottom and longingly looks at pig slop. And then – and here’s the beautiful part – he “comes to himself.” He commits in his heart to go to his father, not his hometown or his family or even his house, but to his father.

Marshall highlights that the passage deliberately uses phrasing which emphasizes relationships. To come to ourselves, he says, is to remember ourselves in the context of our community. The son’s return to himself is deeply connected with his recollection of to whom he once belonged: “what caused the offender to confront his need for moral change, then, was the recollection that he is inescapably connected to the person of his father.”

Belonging is everything. Without it, we seldom come to ourselves.

Marshall repeats Miroslav Volf’s telling statement, “there is no coming to oneself without the memory of belonging. The self is constructed in relation to others, and it can come to itself only through relationship to others, the first link with the other in a distant country of broken relationships is memory.”

But while the father has harboured love for the youngest son, the elder son has harboured the reality of what his younger sibling has done.  The eldest is not being merely petty or resentful: his response is actually pretty understandable. His younger brother dumped all responsibility of the family onto his shoulders; the eldest has been the one bearing the burden since the youngest left. The eldest wants to respond to his brother’s butchering of relationship with his own death blow, but his father begs him not to. The father asks him to join the feast, to celebrate reunited relationships, to acknowledge interconnection and belonging. In a way, it is now the eldest who must choose whether or not to come to himself: to act in a way consistent with relationship.

In the end, I am left in suspense about how the eldest choses to respond. The story concludes with the father interceding with the eldest to come and join the celebration, but I am not told what the final result is. This literary device is often deliberately used to help readers contemplate either who they identify with in the story or what they themselves might do in a similar situation.

Am I the youngest? Given to burning relational bridges, but able to come to myself in terms of hoping in the strength of relationships? Am I the eldest? Given to carrying responsibility, but maybe less willing to extend mercy? Am I the father? The type of person who makes someone feel such a sense of belonging, that thinking of me might actually help them come to themselves and rejoin the larger community?  

How I respond to these questions is indicative of my relationship with God.

George MacDonald has a fitting passage:

We shall never be able, I say, to rest in the bosom of the Father, till the fatherhood is fully revealed to us in the love of the brothers. For he cannot be our father save as he is their father; and if we do not see him and feel him as their father, we cannot know him as ours. Never shall we know him aright until we rejoice and exult for our race that he is the father. . . To rest, I say, at last, even in those hands into which the Lord commended his spirit, we must have learned already to love our neighbour as ourselves.

So how will I love my neighbour as myself? I might begin by trying to include them into my community. To remind them that they belong, that when they leave they are missed, and when they are present they are appreciated. I might remember that to grow in my relationship with God requires that I grow in my relationship with others. And, I will remember that if I am ever to fully come to myself, it will be done in the context of community, of remembering to whom I belong.

Taking Hamlet to Prison - Matthew and Joy Steem

I lived in a penitentiary city for a time. When I am feeling particularly mischievous I will introduce this information to people with a feigned sense of discomfort, averting my eyes and speaking quietly and quickly. It’s my own little micro social experiment to see how people respond to the possibility that I spent some time in a correctional facility. Usually the results are similar: silence and then an uncomfortable and somewhat forced laugh when they realize I’ve been pulling their leg.

The experiment always leaves me feeling dissatisfied. Probably, in part, because I’d likely respond similarly. What exactly would an appropriate response to receiving knowledge like that be, anyways – “welcome back”?

Truthfully, I’ve had limited exposure to either prisons or inmates. I mean, other than knowing someone who has been in and out of jail a few times as well as someone who was personally invested with working with victims of violence (when he was a child, his mother was stabbed to death – by an ex-law enforcement officer). Because of my limited experience, when I think of prisons I generally think of their outsides more than their insides.

Maybe that’s why a 2002 episode of This American Life, entitled “Act V,” had such an effect on me: it took me past the stereotype of hardened prisoners and into a prison classroom where they were reading Hamlet. The show gave the inmates voice, both metaphorically and literally, and it changed me.

The episode ends with this question, but I think it’s a good place to start:

Why do we put people in jail? To rehabilitate them and restore them to our company, or to punish them, regardless of how much they might change? 

At one point in the episode Jack Hitt, the host, asks the inmates why they agreed to do readings of the play and be bossed around by the play’s tiny but fierce director, Agnes Wilcox. The response of this individual stunned me:

She makes us feel human, man. She really does. When I go in there, I have to take my clothes off and get butt naked and bend over and spread my cheeks so some man can look up my butt, you know, all the dehuman-- the humiliating things that they do to us here. And when she comes in and does what she does, for that minute, them two and a half hours, all these guys with PhDs and can be doing other things, they come in, I at least can feel human in here.

It stunned me because it helped me realize that I had fallen prey to the deceitful nature of labels. I had allowed the label “convict” to supersede the description “human.”  What was particularly challenging, for me, was that the episode does not sanitize their offences. Sometimes, in a well-intentioned attempt to convey a person’s dignity and humanity, we can tend to minimize or justify a person’s actions. Jack Hitt does not allow us this luxury.  Three quarters into the episode, he confronts us with this:

Although I found myself playing a constant guessing game with all of them about [their crimes], they wouldn't discuss the past. That was then, they said. This is now. But I had to know. So one morning, instead of visiting, I went to downtown St. Louis, not far from the Arch, and sat in a records depository reading old case files.

It was more horrible than I thought. One guy I particularly liked shot a man in the head twice at point-blank range. Another of my new friends raped his pubescent daughter, impregnating her. Later, there was an abortion. Another friend grabbed a man getting out of a car, put a gun to his chest during a robbery, and pulled the trigger. Others had sodomized children-- younger children, the age of my own children.

What was I to do with this information? How could I reconcile my emerging appreciation of the convicts as “image bearer of God” with “murderer” or “abuser of children”?

That’s a tall order.

Hitt concludes the episode by informing us that 97% of incarcerated people will be released in the future. Many of the Hamlet readers, we learn, have served their time and found employment in their communities. Honestly, my response is mixed. I’ve gotten to know the Hamlet readers, yet I still struggle with their crimes. Am I supposed to celebrate that someone once capable of those actions will now be living in community?

And then I think of the gospel.

As the show ends, I am left to wonder how my vision as a believer in Christ’s message should impact my view of and interaction with people with a criminal history. It seems to me I often feel more “convicted” about my sins of commission than of omission.  Whether pride or lust or anger, addictions, indulging in a bit of character decimation, or assuming bad intentions of others: these are things I am likely to repent of over the Lord’s supper. But what about my interactions with people who have been incarcerated? The Bible says that one of the ways believers demonstrate their belief is by visiting those in prison. Sadly, I wonder if I’ve interpreted this as applying more to people who have wrongfully been convicted, or better yet, Christians who have been incarcerated for their faith in different countries. That type of population seems much more approachable, much more deserving, doesn’t it? And then I am convicted about the degree to which I believe God is Love and loving and in the business of restoration – that is, reconciling people to Himself AND to each other.

If the gospel I adhere to ends where my comfort does, if my version of the gospel is only fit for people I can comfortability interact with, I fear my version of the gospel is not the real thing. “Act V” challenged me to see the humanity of incarcerated individuals, but the Bible challenges me to live out that vision – to be the Agnes Wilcox who reminds people of their humanity – of their importance to God and others— regardless of their history. How will I tangibly do this? Honestly, I’m not sure. I have a friend who has a pen-pal in jail. I know someone else in the performing arts who does performances with her team in local institutions. I know of artists who attempt to give voice to inmates who have often been silenced to the rest of society. I know of a church that enthusiastically opens its arms to people fresh from correctional institutions. Perhaps I might start enlarging my imagination by asking these people more questions about their experiences, because as my imagination expands, so does my capacity for caring involvement. Maybe my actual interactions with incarcerated individuals will always be limited, or perhaps it won’t.  But being a conduit of Love, affirming that we all bear the image of God, that we all have dignity and access to God the Father, realizing that a rupture in the fabric of community affects all of us: these things are not optional if I call myself a follower of Christ.