Book Review: GILEAD by Marilynne Robinson

Posted on March 18, 2005 by Fred Yi

In Praise of Ordinary Time
by David E. Anderson

“A good sermon,” Marilynne Robinson writes, “is one side of a passionate conversation.” It has to be heard in that way. So, too, a good novel. It is a conversation among the novelist, the reader, and — as in the case of a sermon, perhaps, for some — God.

That may be true of all first-rate fiction, whether acknowledged or not, because the best novels are always a dialogue — perhaps an argument, perhaps a prayer — with the world and its meaning. In GILEAD, Marilynne Robinson’s second novel, God works as a second, unstated addressee, a mostly implied presence whose reality is suggested by the pervasiveness of prayer.

GILEAD is better than a good book. It is a slim, spare, yet exquisite and wonderfully realized story that will long stand as one of fiction’s finest reflections on the sacramental dimensions of life, especially the Christian life lived in the routines and wonderments of prayer. It is, like a good sermon, a passionate meditation.

The book is slender only in the number of its pages — a mere 247. Otherwise, it is a fuller, richer and more deeply textured novel than most contemporary fiction twice its size. Robinson makes use of a form — the epistolary novel — that is classic but one of the most difficult to pull off well. It can often seem forced and cumbersome and — to the contemporary reader more attuned to e-mail and instant-messaging rather than the carefully considered craft of composing a letter — irritating in its deliberate pace.

Robinson’s epistle takes the form of a letter from 76-year-old John Ames, a fourth-generation Congregationalist minister, to his just-about-seven-year-old son. Ames is suffering from heart disease, and his letter, written in 1956, is a summing up of the past sprinkled with anecdotes and advice and sketches of the present, especially of his son and his wife and his best friend, also a minister.

Robinson has given her protagonist a strong, unique voice — he disdains what he calls the pulpit talking — that seems in its own way biblical but not the Bible of the King James Version. It is rather the more vernacular English of the Revised Standard Version, the translation of the KJV published in the early 1950s that aimed to capture the plain speaking of Americans at mid-century. This “letter from John” to his young son also calls to mind the pastoral letters near the end of the New Testament in which another John addresses “my little children” and his “beloved,” and which, like John Ames’s letter, are suffused with a sense of light.

Ames’s letter is quietly but vividly told family history: the apparently disjointed recollections jotted down over time of his grandfather, a militant abolitionist given to biblical-type visions who went to Kansas to join John Brown and lost an eye in the Civil War; his father, who, recoiling from his own father, became a pacifist; his brother, whose studies in Germany led him to disbelief and alienation from their father; and his Presbyterian minister friend Boughton and his family, especially Boughton’s son and Ames’s namesake, John Ames Boughton, another prodigal whose homecoming is eagerly awaited.

Fathers and sons and their mysterious and maddening relationships — loving, prodigal, forgiving — are the spine of Robinson’s story, and the biblical resonances reinforce how timeless and wondrous those themes are. Ames himself was the good son in the prodigal parable he tells his own son, “one of those righteous for whom the rejoicing in heaven will be comparatively restrained.” But, he adds, almost in the “pulpit voice” he tries to subdue, “There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal.”

Less obtrusive but also a constant theme in the novel, as it is in American life, is race. Ames’s grandfather is formed by the abolitionist vision; the Iowa town of Gilead was a stop on the Underground Railroad (Ames’s recounting of pieces of that history provides the novel with some comic elements); and race figures importantly in the novel’s denouement. Robinson’s handling of the issue is careful and tragically appropriate for the story’s time: two years after the landmark BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION school desegregation decision and just months before the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, which would launch the modern civil rights movement. In a moving passage, Ames writes about an arson fire at the black church in town: “That church sold up some years ago, and what was left of the congregation moved to Chicago. … The pastor came by with a sack of plants he’d dug up from around the front steps, mainly lilies. He thought I might want them, and they’re still there along the front of our church, needing to be thinned. I should tell the deacons where they came from, so they’ll know they have some significance and they’ll save them when the building comes down. I didn’t know the Negro pastor well myself, but he said his father knew my grandfather. He told me they were sorry to leave, because the town had once meant a great deal to them.”

Very little of the politics of the outside world intrudes directly into Ames’s letter to his son, but the events that forge and form the characters — war and the Great Depression especially — are there as a constant backdrop to what, in a liturgical calendar, would be called “ordinary time.” GILEAD is a profound, prayerful meditation on, and a joyous thanksgiving of, life in “ordinary time” — the sacramental character of physical, everyday existence as well as “the gift of physical particularity and how blessing and sacrament are mediated through it.”

“I have been thinking lately,” Ames writes, without either despair or melancholy at the approaching end, “how I have loved my physical life.” As the novel concludes, he tells his son, “It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor grey ember of Creation and it turns to radiance — for a moment or a year or the span of a life.” It is a vision of transfiguration — the ordinary stuff of life made extraordinary in the apprehension of it. Marilynne Robinson has done the same with the life of John Ames. In the imagining of it she has shown the sacramental possibilities of the world.

David E. Anderson is senior editor of Religion News Service.

Interview: Marilynne Robinson

Posted on March 18, 2005 by Fred Yi

Writer Marilynne Robinson’s 2004 novel GILEAD is about the Reverend John Ames, a Congregational minister in Iowa who in 1956 begins writing a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Watch Robinson read from the final pages of GILEAD, and read this March 11, 2005 interview with her in Washington, DC:

Q: There is such deep empathy in GILEAD for the pastor and the preacher. What attracts you to pastors? What do you appreciate about them?

Click here to read a review of GILEAD

A: There are several sources for my appreciation of pastors and the way they are described in this book. One of them is reading history and realizing that they had a profound creative impact on the Middle West and the settlement of the Middle West. I was very interested in that. They established many wonderful little colleges, like Oberlin and Grinnell and so on, which were explicitly religious establishments in the first instance and were established in order to promote women’s rights, antislavery, universal literacy — many excellent things. Then, of course, there is the fact that I am interested in Scripture and theology. This is an interest that I can assume I would share with a pastor, so that makes me a little bit prone to use that kind of character, perhaps, just at the moment. Then there is also the fact that, having been a church member for many years, I am very aware of how much pastors enrich people’s experience, people for whom they are significant. I know that it’s a kind of custom of American literature and culture to slang them. I don’t think there is any reason why that needs to be persisted in.

Q: John Ames, the Congregational minister in the book, is a very theological thinker, and you have mentioned your own interest in theology. If you had to explain it to someone, what is theology and what does it mean to think theologically?

A: It’s a difficult thing to describe theology, what it means and how it disciplines thinking. Certainly, theology is the level at which the highest inquiry into meaning and ethics and beauty coincides with the largest-scale imagination of the nature of reality itself. Often, when I want to read something that is satisfying to me as theology, what I actually read is string theory, or something like that — popularizations, inevitably, of scientific cosmologies — because their description of the scale of things and the intrinsic, astonishing character of reality coincides very beautifully with the most ambitious theology. It is thinking at that scale, and it is thinking that is invested with meaning in a humanly evocative form. That’s theology.

Q: Is there a connection to poetry, too? John Ames is also steeped in the religious poets, and he mentions John Donne and George Herbert throughout the novel.

A: I think the connection between poetry and theology, which is profound in Western tradition — there is a great deal of wonderful religious poetry — both poetry and theology push conventional definitions and explore perceptions that might be ignored or passed off as conventional, but when they are pressed yield much larger meanings, seem to be part of a much larger system of reality. The assumption behind any theology that I’ve ever been familiar with is that there is a profound beauty in being, simply in itself. Poetry, at least traditionally, has been an educing of the beauty of language, the beauty of experience, the beauty of the working of the mind, and so on. The pastor does, indeed, appreciate it. One of the things that is nice about these old pastors — they were young at the time — who went into the Middle West is that they were real humanists. They were often linguists, for example, and the schools that they established were then, as they are now, real liberal arts colleges where people studied the humanities in a very broad sense. I think that should be reflected in his mind; appropriately, it is.

Q: You write that a good sermon is “one side of a passionate conversation.” Could you say more about what you meant by that and why you value the sermon as a form of discourse, especially in this pretty inconsolable and demythologized age of ours?

A: I think we have demythologized prematurely, that we’ve actually lost the vocabulary for discussing reality at its largest scales. The idea that myth is the opposite of knowledge, or the opposite of truth, is simply to disallow it. It is like saying poetry is the opposite of truth. A sermon is a form that yields a certain kind of meaning in the same way that, say, a sonnet is a form that deals with a certain kind of meaning that has to do with putting things in relation to each other, allowing for the fact of complexity reversal, such things. Sermons are, at their best, excursions into difficulty that are addressed to people who come there in order to hear that. The attention of the congregation is a major part of the attention that the pastor gives to his or her utterance. It’s very exceptional. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t enjoy a good sermon. People who are completely nonreligious know a good sermon when they hear one.

One of the reasons that I think that a sermon is a valuable thing now and so impressive when you do hear a good one — and there is a lot of failure in the attempt; it’s a difficult form — is because it’s so seldom true now that you hear people speak under circumstances where they assume they are obliged to speak seriously and in good faith, and the people who hear them are assumed to be listening seriously and in good faith. This is a kind of standard of discourse that is not characteristic of the present moment. I think that it makes a sermon, when it is a good sermon, stand out in anyone’s experience.

Q: John Ames knows his hymns, too; he knows his Isaacs Watts, and so do you. What do you think about Protestant hymnody, and what role does it play in the language of GILEAD?

A: One of the things that is wonderful about hymns is that they are a sort of universally shared poetry, at least among certain populations. There isn’t much of that anymore either. There are very few poems people can recite, but there are quite a few hymns that, if you hum a few bars, people can at least come up with two verses. Many of the older hymns are very beautiful. Isaac Watts, of course, is a hymn writer in the tradition of Congregationalism who lived in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. He is very interesting and important because he was also a metaphysician. He knew a great deal about what was, for him, contemporary science. He was very much influenced by Isaac Newton, for example. There are planets and meteors and so on showing up in his hymns very often. But, again, the scale of his religious imagination corresponds to a very generously scaled scientific imagination. It makes his hymns continue to have a spaciousness and resonance that locates, for me, the religious imagination in a very beautiful way.

Q: Catholics speak about “the Catholic imagination.” Is there such a thing as the Protestant imagination?

A: Oh, I think there is. Protestantism, of course, is much more explicitly divided into different traditions — the Pentecostals, the Anglicans. But there is the main tradition of Protestantism that comes out of the Reformation and that produced people like Kant and Hegel and so on, who are not normally thought of as being people writing in a theological tradition, although Hegel, of course, wrote theology his whole life. I think, frankly, that his PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT is theology, too.

When the Reformation became established, one of the things that was a question between Catholicism and the Reformation traditions was whether there was a hierarchy of being. If you look at Thomas Aquinas, for example, you have hierarchies of angels and all the rest of it, and hierarchies even of saints and then subsaints — people who aren’t quite there, that sort of thing. The Reformation rejected all of that and created a new metaphysics, in effect, that is not hierarchical. The idea that the universe itself is physically structured around hierarchy was sort of an integration of earlier science and theology that was made by people like Thomas Aquinas, that was assumed doctrinally in that tradition. The Reformation rejected that model of reality and created a highly individualistic metaphysics in the sense that it located everything normative that can be said about reality in human perception, there being, of course, no other avenue of knowing. There is Scripture, there is conscience, there is perception itself. If you read Calvin, for example, he says, How do we know that we are godlike, in the image of God? Well, look at how brilliant we are. Look how we can solve problems even dreaming, which I think is true, which I’ve done myself. So instead of having an externalized model of reality with an objective structure, it has a model of reality that is basically continuously renegotiated in human perception. I think that view of things is pretty pervasively influential in Protestant thought.

Q: Is GILEAD on some level a novel about “being Christian,” about what it might mean to live a Christian life?

A: I think I can guardedly say yes. The fact is, being who I am, my definition of human life is perhaps not readily universalized. But I hope that it is not a narrow view of human life itself. I don’t have the feeling that people need to be Christian in order to understand what the novel is and what it means and so on, to recognize it’s about father-son relations, or parent-child relations. In the New Testament, of course, that’s the major metaphor for the situation of a human being in the world relative to God. I think that, in using that metaphor, the New Testament is appealing to something that people profoundly and universally know: what it is to love a child and what it is to love a parent. So that’s a big subject in the book.

Q: You’ve written some about mysticism and mystery and an attraction to the mystical. What might mysticism have to do with your writing and your own religious life?

A: I find the whole question of mysticism, piety, religious life, and so on very mysterious. I know that’s an evasion. I go to church every Sunday, unless I’m away or something. I am profoundly influenced in my thinking by religious concepts. I know this. I don’t know what piety means, in a sense. I feel as if I would be presumptuous claiming it. I feel that way often when people ask me about religion. Of course, mysticism is very hard to isolate because, given the kind of consciousness that I was sort of instructed in as religious consciousness; that borders on mysticism so closely that it’s hard to know whether you qualify or not, or whether mysticism is artificially isolated when it is treated as a separate thing from experience. Obviously, mysticism can be a form of madness, but then consciousness can be a form of madness.

Q: It sounds like something John Ames might say. How much distance is there between him and you?

A: I think quite a lot, actually. That’s another thing. What do you know about yourself? One of the things about writing fiction is that you create people that you feel, more or less, as though you know. By contrast, you realize that you really don’t know yourself terribly well at all. I’ve put him in a very particular situation — leaving his life, leaving a child, and so on. These things aren’t my experience yet, God forbid! In any case, his situation is exceptional — from my point of view, invented. Then his thinking is generated out of his situation. It’s perfectly possible that if I can imagine myself in his place, I would think in that way, but it’s never been my circumstance to do that.

Q: What has been your own experience of pastors — their influence on you, relationships you have had with ministers like John Ames or others?

A: I really can’t claim ever to have had an exceptionally close relationship with a minister. I’m always there. I pay my pledge. I listen and observe with interest. I’m very sympathetic with the rigor and the aesthetic quality of what they do. Aside from that, I don’t have a kind of personal experience with any of them that I could consider privileged, so to speak.

A long time ago, when I was a little girl, I went to church with my grandfather on Easter Sunday, and I heard a sermon that I have thought about for years and years. I don’t know why it was so impressive to me, although the church was beautiful, with the emphasis that Easter gives. I think that probably that sermon and the memory of it was more important for crystallizing my sense of pastors and church and all the rest of it than any other single experience.

Q: You wrote about that in one of your essays in THE DEATH OF ADAM (Houghton Mifflin, 1998). At the time that collection was published, you said you wanted to “change the conversation” about modern American culture and society. Has that happened? Has the public conversation changed at all to your satisfaction?

A: It has changed to my dissatisfaction, as a matter of fact. The public conversation has changed in ways that I am not at all pleased by. Perhaps I had the slightest impact in keeping it from changing more radically in ways that I don’t approve of, but at present I can’t claim to be pleased.

You know, at one time we did some fairly unique things in this country for very interesting reasons. One of the things that we did was create bankruptcy laws that made it so that people who fell into bankruptcy were not ground into the earth for the rest of their lives. Isaiah calls it “grinding the faces of the poor.” The reforms were about simultaneous with the Second Great Awakening. We inherited British law, which is like the new “reforms” that are being made now, in the sense that people are permanently entrapped in debt, if they once fall into bankruptcy. The reason that the law was changed in American history — the whole early period of the formation of the country was moving away from British law into a law that is generated here and that conforms to the sense of what is appropriate here. The model for our early bankruptcy laws was Deuteronomy, the idea that, under certain circumstances — in Deuteronomy, it is simply the passage of seven years’ time — people are released from debt, simply because they are released from debt. No more debt. You start over again. This has been a very powerful model in this country. It’s being destroyed now. People talk about how much new employment, new wealth, and so on are continuously generated in this country. One of the reasons for that is because people can afford a risk. And the reason for that is because bankruptcy laws were written which prevented people from being permanently entrapped in poverty. If we knew what we had done, and we knew why it was done, there could be some conversation about these changes that are being made today. But there is no conversation, because nobody knows the history behind what we are giving up.

Q: One writer has said that perhaps our sacred scripture is the novel. I wonder what you think about that, and what fiction writing and the novel might have to do with the life of faith.

A: The novel has more to do with the life of faith in some cases than in others, shall we say. I sometimes am discouraged by what seems to be a sort of conventional disparagement of humankind. I think often people feel that they are doing something moral when they are doing that, but that’s not how I understand morality. I much prefer the “everyone is sacred, and everybody errs” model of reality. I am delighted if people find that kind of sustenance in novels, but perhaps it’s because they don’t read the Scripture that they are comparing it to, which would perhaps provide deeper sustenance than many contemporary novels.

The Bible for me is holy writ. It’s a very straightforward thing, although I am not a literalist. Literalism is a very bizarre phenomenon. Many people are literalists about, for example, the King James Version, which was published in 1611. Anybody who has ever translated anything knows that there is no reason to be literalistic about a translation. Anybody who has read any biblical scholarship knows that every scholar struggles over completely intractable problems with the original texts, or what they have to work from. It’s one of the great, powerful, mysterious objects that have come down through history. This does not translate into literal interpretation for me.

Q: How does the Bible inform the plainness and stateliness of the language in GILEAD?

A: I have taught Bible at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop several times. It’s something that writers feel that they need to know, no matter what their religious evaluation of it is, or the traditions they have come from. It’s always fun to read anything together with writers, because they are very sensitive to things that you might otherwise overlook. One of the narratives that is extremely beautiful and efficient and powerful is the narrative of David and Absalom in Second Samuel. I think that had a lot of influence on my thinking in this book — Absalom, of course, being the son of King David who betrays him and so on. There is an indubitable emotional power in many of the narratives in the Bible that return one to extremely basic emotions — about fathers and sons in that particular case. I think that often scriptural language is used almost ornamentally. I think that its effect is greater if its accomplishment as narrative is taken more seriously — how complex these things actually are and how straightforward at the same time they are: “Absalom! Absalom!” I hope that, in some degree, I have been influenced by that. The Bible is so pervasive in English-language literature that I think that people actually allude to it, or feel the resonance of it, without having any idea what it is that they are feeling.

Q: Do you read any contemporary theology? Has there been anyone since Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr who you think has advanced theological thinking? Is it all just about the theological past and retrieving what has been forgotten?

A: A lot of it seems to be written with that project in mind. That perhaps is the characteristic posture — that theology is written as retrieval. In many cases, this is the impetus behind the Reformation, after all, to try to reach back to a more authentic Christianity and so on. Over and over again, this is done. I can’t really keep abreast of things well enough. I read over too wide an area as far as time is concerned to be up on many contemporary things, but my favorite theologian of the relatively recent period is Karl Barth, who died in the late ’50s, who was a very honorable figure relative to the rise of Hitler and so on — he and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was another great theologian. They were both very serious people. I have a feeling that there has been a pressure away from seriousness in much modern thought, as if we could sort of scale reality down to a size that we are more comfortable dealing with. That might be a prejudice, but I feel that we have not come up to the standards of seriousness that others have reached at earlier moments.

The loss of seriousness seems to me to be, in effect, a loss of hope. I think that the thing that made people rise to real ambition, real gravity was the sense of posterity, for example — a word that I can remember hearing quite often when I was a child and I never hear anymore. People actually wanted to make the world good for people in generations that they would never see. It makes people think in very large terms to try to liberate women, for example, or to try to eliminate slavery. Of course, we have recrudescence of slavery all over the world now. It’s sort of, “Well, we won’t think about that. It’s too bad.” I’m really disturbed by the degree to which I don’t hear people saying, “Are we leaving the world better than we found it?” I think we are a generation that perhaps could not answer in the affirmative, and it is the evasion of the larger responsibility of being only one generation in what one hopes will be an infinite series of fruitful generations. There is a selfishness in refusing to understand that we are passing through; others will come, and they deserve certain courtesies and certain considerations from us.

Tibetan New Year

Posted on February 18, 2005 by Fred Yi

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Last weekend, Tibetan Buddhists celebrated their New Year, called Losar, with traditional services of prayer and purification, sending positive energy into the world, they hope, to help bring about peace. We visited the Tibetan Meditation Center in Frederick, Maryland, where Kalden Lodoe was our guide.

KALDEN LODOE (Tibetan Meditation Center, Frederick, Maryland): “Losar” means “new year.” “Lo” is “year.” “Sar” is “new.”

I wish that all Tibetans would actually keep on celebrating this Losar in a traditional way. Now that it’s Losar — my son’s third Losar; he’s three years old — my biggest concern is, what happens when my son grows up into my age and the values, culture, and religion become even thinner?

Spiritually speaking, I think it is a time to reinforce the resolutions that you have made to become a better person.

Prostration is a physical activity to accumulate positive energy, which would be restored in our consciousness. When there are more positives, automatically the negatives will be reduced and, finally, one can become a totally awakened buddha.

And, by reciting mantra, one can invoke a mind of a deity. We try to become closer to the reality of who we are — the buddhahood or the full enlightenment. Usually, we use the mala or rosary to count the mantras that we recite.

In Buddhism, in order to purify the world and find true peace, peace must begin with yourself. In order to find inner peace within ourself, we engage in purification practices.

New prayer flags are put up on special occasions like New Year or when there’s a new beginning.

We have five different colors of prayer flags. Mantras and sutras and prayers written on the prayer flags would activate special energy and would be carried throughout the world by air and wind.

We consider old prayer flags sacred, and we wouldn’t just throw it on the ground. And therefore we burn the prayer flags so that it’ll become ash. With the smoke it will carry the blessings.

Coming here, doing it all together provides an opportunity for the Tibetans to celebrate this in a spiritual way with their family and pass on the tradition to a new generation.

Iraq Elections

Posted on January 28, 2005 by Fred Yi

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: As Iraqis this Sunday elect a new parliament, to write a new constitution, a look now at the role of religion in that process.

Fawaz Gerges is professor of international affairs and Middle Eastern studies at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Welcome.

Dr. FAWAZ GERGES (Professor, International Affairs and Middle Eastern Studies, Sarah Lawrence College): Thank you.

ABERNETHY: The Shiite Muslims, 60 percent of the people in Iraq, are widely expected to get a majority in the election — in the new parliament. What will that mean about the role of religion in a new government?

Dr. GERGES: Well, leading Shiite clerics have tried to reassure Iraqis that they will not publicly lead the new Iraqi government. But I believe that Shiite clerics will play a prominent role behind the scenes, as the most powerful cleric, Ali Sistani, has been doing since the American invasion and occupation of Iraq.

ABERNETHY: Meanwhile, you and others have written that in Iraq, and perhaps all over the Middle East, at the popular level, the street level, people are becoming more religiously conservative — more Islamist. What does that mean?

Dr. GERGES: Well, Islamists are political activists who would like to create a state based on Islamic law. What we are witnessing in Iraq, Bob, is that social space in Iraq is becoming Islamicized by the day. In the last two decades, Iraqi society has become Islamicized from the bottom up as opposed to from the top down.

ABERNETHY: So the combination of what’s going on among the people and the clerics would indicate what for a new government and a new constitution?

Dr. GERGES: Well, even though the new government will not be led by clerics, I believe that writing the new constitution will be much more important than the new government. As you know, Bob, leading Shiite and Sunni clerics were very unhappy, as you know, with the so-called interim constitution written under Paul Bremer. And this is why I believe in the new constitution, Sunni and Shiite clerics will give religion a more prominent role and will try — the constitution will be more conservative, more rigid, and will roll back the rights of women, which gained under the interim constitution.

ABERNETHY: I wanted to ask you about that. Specifically, what would that kind of constitution and government mean for women, for minorities?

Dr. GERGES: Well, it will mean that women will not be able to play a prominent role in public life. It will mean that the educational structure will be more conservative. It will mean less tolerance for dissent and for minorities, including women.

ABERNETHY: And what about Christians in Iraq? There are a few left there. What’s going on with them?

Dr. GERGES: The Christians represent about 3 percent of the population. But what we are witnessing today is a very tragic chapter: exodus of Christians on large scales. Tens of thousands of Christians are fleeing to Jordan, to Syria, to the West because they are being targeted by militant Islamists and Jihadists: Allah Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, the militant Jordanian, and Ansar al-Sunna, and others.

ABERNETHY: Time’s up, I’m sorry. Many thanks to Fawaz Gerges of Sarah Lawrence College.

India’s Zoroastrians

Posted on December 24, 2004 by Fred Yi

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor (March 17, 2006): This week marks an observance for Zoroastrians, who celebrate their new year and the creation of human beings. Zoroastrianism began in ancient Persia, now Iran, and left its historical imprint on Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Estimates vary widely, but some claim that as few as 115,000 Zoroastrians remain—a few in Europe, North America and Iran; the vast majority in India, where they are called Parsis. Fred De Sam Lazaro reported on Zoroastrianism from Bombay, now officially known as Mombai.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The Jashan or thanksgiving ceremony is one of few Parsi rituals that can be witnessed by outsiders.

But it’s not hard to witness the impact this small community has had in India, especially its commercial capital. Parsis are leaders of business and industry, science and philanthropy, even music. Former New York Philharmonic conductor Zubin Mehta is a Parsi from Bombay.

The growth of Islam in what is now Iran drove a die-hard Zoroastrian community to seek refuge in western India around 900 A.D. They became known as Parsis, or people from Persia.

Oblivious to the chaotic street, they come to pray at the sacred well. Parsis honor the skies, water, earth and plants which, with cattle and humans, are six of the seven creations of Ahura Mazda—the one God.

Professor KHOJESTE MISTREE (Zoroastrian Scholar): We believe that fire is the seventh creation which Ahura Mazda created, and when Ahura Mazda created fire, life came into the other six creations, and in our prayers we actually address fire as the son of God.

DE SAM LAZARO: Parsi houses of worship are called fire temples. Non-Parsis are not permitted inside, where priests pray and maintain the fires. Also off-limits to all but official pallbearers are the unusual disposal rites for the dead.

Prof. MISTREE: This happens to be a place called Karighat Colony, very close to our “towers of silence,” which are in the distance. This wonderful greenery that you see is part of our sacred precinct.

DE SAM LAZARO: Shrouded from view by the trees and strictly off-limits are towers of silence—26-foot cylindrical buildings like these on whose roofs the dead are placed, to be devoured by birds.

Prof. MISTREE: We believe that when a person dies, the corpse is deemed to be defiled, and because it is defiled, we cannot burn it because that is desecrating fire; we cannot bury it because that is polluting the earth. We cannot drown the corpse because that is sullying the waters. So, the only method that is available by way of disposal is the exposure method, because death in Zoroastrianism is seen as the temporary triumph of evil, not the work of God.

DE SAM LAZARO: Temporary until the day of resurrection and judgment. Heaven can be attained if one’s good thoughts and deeds outnumber the bad. Zoroastrian beliefs come from the teachings of Zarathustra, the Persian prophet who lived at least 1,500 years before the Christian era. It is the religion of the ancient Persian Empire, whose kings—like Darius, Xerxes and Cyrus—were known for tolerance and praised in the Old Testament for their warm relations with the Jews.

Prof. MISTREE: Cyrus was a remarkable king; he is reputed to have liberated the Jews from Babylonian captivity. He encouraged them to go back to Palestine to rebuild their Temple, and subsequently Darius the Great and Xerxes—and this is all recorded in the Old Testament—gave Persian moneys to actually rebuild the Second Temple in Jerusalem.

DE SAM LAZARO: Persia was the home of the Magi, the biblical Three Kings who greeted the infant Jesus but who, Parsis say, actually came in search of a Zoroastrian Messiah.

Prof. MISTREE: And, it is now believed by most Western scholars that the concept of an afterlife, the concept of heaven and hell, the concept of the coming of the Messiah, the concept of the Last Judgment and the Resurrection, these are mainstream Zoroastrian eschatological tenets.

DE SAM LAZARO: Even though Parsis have prospered in India, their numbers are dwindling. Few couples have more than one child.

Also, many Parsis have dispersed abroad, and they’ve married outside the community. For Firuza Parikh, a leading Indian endocrinologist, it means her children are no longer considered Parsis.

Dr. FIRUZA PARIKH (Endocrinologist): I was pregnant with my first child, and I am quite a devout Parsi. I go to the fire temple maybe once a month—once in two months. That was an auspicious day, and I wanted to visit the fire temple, and my mother said, “You can’t right now because you’re carrying a child who technically is not a Parsi,” and that pained me to know that perhaps I would not be able to teach my religion to my children. But that did pass.

DE SAM LAZARO: At the same time, her parents did not object to her marriage to a non-Parsi. With no Sabbath, simple rituals, and the objective of gently promoting harmony in public life, Zoroastrians say they are inherently tolerant and ecumenical. So far, however, Parsi leaders have resisted allowing children of mixed heritage like Parikh’s into the fold.

Dr. PARIKH: I think we should be allowed to have this option, because if we really want our community to proliferate, one of the ways is to accept people from other religions into our fold, be more secular in our thinking. We’re very broad-minded in another sense, but I think in this particular sense we have a narrow vision, and perhaps that may be the reason why we are dwindling.

Prof. MISTREE: I am dead against that …

DE SAM LAZARO: Mistree, the Zoroastrian scholar, is convinced the community can survive ethnically intact.

Prof. MISTREE: But, it is very important for us to recognize that the spirituality of the faith is linked to its roots and, therefore, I’m a great believer in the “live and let live” policy. Namely, that if for 3,000 years the paradigm shows us that the Parsis and the Iranis have managed to keep this wonderful religion alive, then I’m of the view that these people should be allowed and, in fact, encouraged to preserve their heritage, to preserve their ethnicity, to preserve their religion, because it is a beautiful religion to preserve.

DE SAM LAZARO: Preserving old customs has its modern day challenges for a community with far more members in geriatric rather than maternity wards. Parsi families are now offered scholarships and subsidized housing if they have more children—a rare policy in one of the world’s most populous nations to preserve one of the world’s oldest monotheistic religions.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Bombay.

Nine Lessons and Carols

Posted on December 24, 2004 by Fred Yi

by Benedicta Cipolla

Since 1918, every Christmas Eve in England hundreds of people wait for hours in cold temperatures outside King’s College Chapel at the University of Cambridge for a coveted seat at the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols.

The millions of listeners around the world who tune in via short wave, FM and the Internet, unable to reach Cambridge’s 16th-century vaulted church or unwilling to risk frostbite, can now follow the annual radio broadcast with a new, illustrated book detailing the service.

THE FESTIVAL OF NINE LESSONS AND CAROLS (published in November by Universe, a division of Rizzoli, and designed by David Larkin) includes background on the tradition’s beginnings; texts of the prayers, nine Scripture readings, and carols most often sung from year to year; splendid photographs, paintings and engravings; and a CD recording of the service.

For the book’s author and editor, William Edwards, the volume represents a very personal labor of love.

“What people want for Christmas is something they can take out every year and read along while playing the music,” says Edwards, a former retail entrepreneur and bookstore executive. “I also wanted to capture the emotional impact the service has on me and I think it has on other people.”

Calling himself a “lapsed Congregationalist,” Edwards is moved each year by the overarching message of the service that he describes in the book as “the romantic and religious antithesis of the modern world.”

“This is a service about the birth of a child and about the birth of hope,” he says, pointing to the initial choice 86 years ago to lead the entrance procession with a solo chorister singing the first stanza of the nineteenth-century Victorian hymn, “Once in Royal David’s City.” “It stands for an innocence we all want to get back to.”

When the service of readings, prayers, and carols debuted in Cambridge not even two months after the end of World War I, Britain and Europe as a whole were reeling from the conflict’s devastation. Eric Milner-White, the dean of King’s College and architect of the program, which was modeled on an earlier service in Cornwall, had served as an army chaplain for four years. In 1919, he added to the service the Bidding Prayer, which spoke poignantly to the millions of Britons who had lost loved ones in the war with its evocation of “all those who rejoice with us, but upon another shore and in a greater light, that multitude which none can number, whose hope was in the Word made flesh.”

“It’s true to say that the 1918 service was so developed in the aftermath of terrific suffering and huge casualties referred to in the Bidding Prayer,” says Stephen Cleobury, the music director at King’s College, who recently led the choir on a U.S. tour. “The sad fact is that the two great world wars of the 20th century prove not to have been the end of strife in the world, and the story of the birth of a young and innocent child in a troubled world, as it was then and is now, gives some new and fresh hope.”

Since 1979, when public radio began broadcasting the Lessons and Carols service in the United States, Edwards has listened to it live every Christmas Eve morning. Last year, he and his wife finally made the trip to King’s College Chapel in person. “It was everything I expected. In my mind I had always visualized it the way it was. You’re sitting there, and you’re saying, ‘This is somewhere I have wanted to be for 30 years.’ I’ll never forget it.”

Part of the indelible memory, says Edwards, comes from the service’s timing, held at 3:00 PM, just before the light begins to fade from the sky.

“What happens is you watch the light go out of the [stained] glass. What you see is first the yellow goes, then the red, then the green. The last color you can really see is blue. It really becomes a visual experience. By the end it’s fully dark outside, and everything in the chapel is candlelit.”

Twenty-five years ago, Nicholas Nash, then programming director at Minnesota Public Radio (MPR), collaborated with National Public Radio and the BBC to bring Lessons and Carols to an American audience, despite hearing a “litany of rationalizations why this was not worthwhile.”

The rationalizations proved irrational, judging from the thankful calls and letters that followed that first broadcast, and Nash’s brainchild has only grown in popularity with each passing year, helping to spawn countless Lessons and Carols services at churches throughout the U.S.

“I thought it might be a one-off,” says Nash, who left MPR in 1985, “but I hoped if it could find fertile ground it could grow deep roots, and it seems to have.”

For Nash, who hosts 40 people every Christmas Eve morning for breakfast and the service’s broadcast, live radio possesses a connective power unmatched by any other medium.

Back in 1979, he says, “the country was ripe for something live that linked different parts of the world together … I believe there is something inherently important about people understanding they’re part of an immensely wide congregation participating at the same time.”

By its nature, radio allows for the service’s contemplative aspect to reach listeners thousands of miles away. “There is something about radio that forces you to concentrate,” Nash says. “You are forced to focus, something we don’t do very much these days … It’s the one time in the Christmas season when [people] can actually stop and pause and reflect, and then they can put up with the hurly-burly that follows.”

This year, Bill Edwards is following Nash’s lead by inviting 30 people to his house on Long Island for a Lessons and Carols sing-along to the live radio broadcast at 10 AM, followed by a festive luncheon.

“Instead of going out buying gifts at the last minute that you don’t really want or need, Christmas Eve becomes more about Christmas,” he says.

Benedicta Cipolla is a writer in New York City.

On Hanukkah

Posted on December 3, 2004 by Fred Yi

Read excerpts from LUMINOUS ART: HANUKKAH MENORAHS OF THE JEWISH MUSEUM by Susan L. Braunstein (Yale University Press, 2004):

In the constellation of Jewish holidays, Hanukkah is a minor festival, a late institution, one that pales in importance beside such major observances as the Day of Atonement, Sukkot, and Passover. Yet such was the significance of the Hanukkah lamp that the sages of ancient times declared the lights holy; the famous medieval rabbi Moses Maimonides urged Jews to borrow money or sell their clothing to purchase oil for the lamp; and the Jews of eighteenth-century Frankfurt, Germany, considered it one of the three essential silver objects to be given as a wedding present. Today, the celebration of Hanukkah as a time of freedom and miracles still resonates among Jews, and the tradition of kindling the festival lights on a winter’s evening continues to have great attraction and meaning.

Hanukkah Lamp, Lvov (Lemberg), 1867-72; maker: BD; silver: cast, engraved and traced. The Jewish Museum, New York: Gift of Dr. Harry G. Friedman in memory of Adele Friedman, F 5119. Photo © The Jewish Museum. Photo by Richard Goodbody, Inc.

Over the centuries, the festival of Hanukkah took on different meanings for those who kindled their lamps each year. The first transformation took place in antiquity, when the explanation for celebrating an eight-day holiday shifted from events enacted by human hands, that is, the liberation and rededication of the Jerusalem Temple, to those divinely wrought, represented by the miracle of the jar of oil that burned for eight days. This change parallels the political status of Jews at the time and the major transformation that occurred in Judaism. The Romans, who ruled ancient Israel at that time, had destroyed the Jewish Temple and the sacrificial ritual that was the heart of Jewish religious observance. A new form of worship emerged that was based on the reading and study of the holy book, the Torah. Yet Jews never ceased longing for the restoration of the Temple and the redemption of Zion, and the lighting of the Hanukkah lamp became a reminder of this hoped-for event. …

Although it must have been difficult for the poorest Jews to observe the holiday, rabbinic sources were insistent that the holiday be celebrated if at all possible. The Babylonian Talmud indicates that on the Sabbath during Hanukkah, if one had enough oil for only one light at home, one should light the Sabbath lamp on Friday night since it is used to see with. However, if one had to choose between spending money on oil for the Hanukkah lamp and wine for sanctifying the Sabbath, one should buy the lamp oil. By the twelfth century, observing Hanukkah became even more important and Moses Maimonides urged that even the poorest Jews who receive charity should borrow funds or sell their clothing in order to be able to purchase oil for the lamp.

Read an excerpt about Hanukkah lights from THE BOOK OF CUSTOMS: A COMPLETE HANDBOOK FOR THE JEWISH YEAR by Scott-Martin Kosofsky (HarperSanFrancisco, 2004):

Is it the placing of the candles (or wicks in oil lamps) or the lighting of them that fulfills the mitzvah [commandment]? This was once the source of much debate until it was decided in favor of the lighting. Does one begin with all eight candles and reduce the number by one each day, as said Rabbi Shammai, or does one begin with one and add one each day, as said Rabbi Hillel? Today, we follow Hillel.

Hanukkah Lamp, London, 1950; maker: Frederick J. Kormis; copper alloy: cast and engraved. The Jewish Museum, New York: Gift of Karl Nathan, JM 22-50. Photo © The Jewish Museum. Photo by Richard Goodbody, Inc.

How long must the candles burn? At least one half hour is the legal opinion. What if a light goes out before the half hour, do we relight it? It is not required to do so, but it is considered a hiddur mitzvah, an “enhancement of the mitzvah,” if you do.

Do we light from left to right or the opposite? Some legal experts say that the last candle to be set should be the first ignited. The reason for this is that the last light signifies another day of miracle. Other authorities say that we should add the candles from left to right, but light them from right to left because this is the way that Hebrew is read. The second way is more common today. Do we say the blessings before the candle lighting or say one before and two after? Generally, we say them before. The blessings are as follows:

“Blessed are you, Lord our God, king of the universe, who has sanctified us with your commandments and commanded us to kindle the light of Hanukkah.”

“Blessed are you, Lord our God, king of the universe, who has performed miracles for our Fathers in olden times and in our times.”

And the Shehehiyanu, recited only on the first night:

“Blessed are you, Lord our God, king of the universe, who has given us life and sustained us and brought us to this happy season.”

Ethics and the Shadow of Torture

Posted on December 3, 2004 by Fred Yi

by David E. Anderson

“The Christian in me says it’s wrong, but the corrections officer in me says ‘I love to make a grown man piss himself.'” — Charles A. Graner, Jr. on the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib

President Bush’s nomination of his White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales to succeed John Ashcroft as attorney general will almost certainly — at least briefly — once again raise the shadow of torture and whether or not the United States not only practices it but also condones it at the highest level of the government.

It’s an ethical shadow dramatically underscored by the comment of Spec. Charles Graner, alleged to be one of the key ringleaders in the abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison. The public revelations of the abuse and subsequent investigations and leaks of administration documents, including memos by Gonzales, touched off the first but short-lived debate on the ethics of torture.

But whether the Senate confirmation hearings on Gonzales will generate anything more than a superficial probing by the Senate and circumspect dancing around the complex and difficult ethical questions (to some) by the nation’s public intellectuals — those pundits and ethicists whose task it is to inform debate and discussion on such issues in civil society — remains an open question.

Gonzales’s confirmation hearing could spark such a renewed debate, because he is the author of a controversial memorandum to Bush labeling provisions of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war “obsolete” and “quaint.” In his view, the attacks on Washington and New York on September 11, 2001, and Bush’s subsequent declaration of a “a new kind of war — the ‘war on terrorism'” — created a “new paradigm” essentially requiring that the government be given carte blanche in pursuing the nation’s enemies.

Almost certain to deepen the controversy was a story in the November 30 editions of THE NEW YORK TIMES reporting that the International Committee of the Red Cross has told the U.S. government that the interrogation techniques used on the more than 500 detainees at the Guantanamo prison in Cuba are “tantamount to torture.”

In addition, the ICRC report, based on a lengthy visit to the prison in June, also said some doctors and medical personnel were participating in planning for interrogations in what it called “a flagrant violation of medical ethics.” The U.S. government, which received the report in July, has sharply rejected the charges, the TIMES reported.

Additionally, the more aggressive U.S. military operations in Iraq in recent weeks have generated a new surge in detainees, nearly doubling the number previously held to some 8,300, according to news reports.

THE WASHINGTON POST reported on November 27 that the increase in detainees is providing the biggest test yet of new facilities and procedures adopted in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison torture cases that sparked the first brief debate on torture last spring.

At the same time, a British Foreign Office official has told the United Nations antitorture panel that Britain has frequently expressed concern to the U.S. government about U.S. troops allegedly mistreating Iraqis as recently as October.

“The (UN) committee can be assured that we have raised allegations of mistreatment involving US military personnel brought to our attention at the earliest opportunity,” Audrey Glover told the committee, Agence France-Presse reported November 19.

The 2002 Gonzales memo sought to resolve for Bush a dispute between the State Department, which said determination of Geneva Convention status for Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners should be made on a case-by-case basis, and Ashcroft’s Department of Justice, which argued no such protections existed. It apparently did — in Justice’s favor.

On February 7, 2002, Bush, in what scholar and journalist Mark Danner has called the Original Sin of the administration’s approval of torture, decided to withhold Geneva Convention protection from Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners. “It made legally possible,” Danner wrote, “the adoption of the various ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ that have been used at CIA secret prisons and at the US military’s prison at Guantanamo Bay.”

Danner’s assessment is stark and persuasive.

It has long since become clear that President Bush and his highest officials, as they confronted the world on Sept. 11, 2001 and in the days after made a series of decisions about methods of warfare and interrogations. … The effect of those decisions — among them, the decision to imprison indefinitely those seized in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the war on terror, the decision to designate those prisoners as “unlawful combatants” and to withhold from them the protections of the Geneva Convention, and finally the decision to employ “high pressure methods” to extract “actionable intelligence” from them — was officially to transform the United States from a nation that did not torture to one that did.

Those “enhanced interrogation techniques” date back some 40 years and have been a part of both CIA and U.S. military instruction manuals and, through institutions like the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia — which throughout the 1980s trained Central and Latin American military officers in counterinsurgency and interrogation techniques to be used against guerrilla and popular movements — spread to dictatorial regimes throughout the Americas. The school, renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, has long been a target of religious and human rights groups for its alleged torture training.

The Geneva Convention against torture of prisoners, which went into force in 1987 and has been ratified by some 130 countries, does not allow the kind of distinction that Gonzales made in his memo to Bush and that the administration invoked to defend torturing terrorist suspects.

In fact, a key article in the convention, as University of Texas Law School professor Sanford Levinson has pointed out, says that “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for torture.”

Quite clearly the Gonzales memorandum is in stark contradiction to the convention, but like so much else with the “war on terrorism,” which has elided into the war against the sovereign nation of Iraq, there has been little or no public discussion of the ethical or moral implications of the decisions taken at the highest levels of the Bush administration.

Instead, the administration has either declared that — as in the case of the Gonzales memo — international law is “obsolete” or “quaint” and therefore does not apply to it or, in the case of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, where even the administration acknowledges international law does apply, that it was “a few bad apples” who were responsible for the abuse.

Neither argument, however, is either factually persuasive or morally compelling.

Indeed, it is something of an irony, albeit a cruel one, that one of the major rationales put forward by the administration since the “imminent threat” posed by Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction evaporated in the postconquest weeks was Saddam’s cruelty to his own people.

But the American liberators wound up practicing a forbidden brand of cruelty against Iraqis that, as the reports by the International Committee of the Red Cross as well as by the administration’s own probe of the Abu Ghraib scandal [make clear], while not as extensive or always as deadly as Saddam’s, was also a matter of “doctrine” or policy more systematic and more widespread than the “few bad apples” or “ANIMAL HOUSE on the night shift” defense mounted by the administration.

Nearly absent from the three major administration reports on the abuse at Abu Ghraib is any discussion of the ethical issues involved. The so-called Schlesinger report, named after former Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger, who headed the investigation, contains a cursory two-and-a-third-page appendix on ethical issues that urges more and better ethics education programs.

The military’s current “core values” programs, it concludes, “are grounded in organizational efficacy rather than the moral good. They do not address humane treatment of the enemy and noncombatants, leaving military leaders and educators an incomplete tool box with which to deal with ‘real-world’ ethical problems.”

A significant problem with the Schlesinger report, as well as the other administration reports, is the contradiction between what it asserts — the “bad apples” defense — and what it shows — torture as a systematic policy issuing from the highest levels of the Department of Defense using techniques that have been in the CIA and military’s arsenal for decades and that were easily transported from Guantanamo to Afghanistan, Iraq, and other secret prisons maintained by the government.

Most people instinctively reject any effort to morally defend or justify torture as offensive and deeply abhorrent, which may help explain both the administration’s efforts to draw a distinction without a difference in the Iraq and Afghanistan cases as well as the CIA’s and the military’s use of euphemisms such as “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

But that does not mean that a reluctant and ethically nuanced case for the rare use of torture cannot be attempted.

Indeed, the eminent ethicist and social thinker Michael Walzer, in a now-classic essay, “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands,” published in 1973 in the journal PHILOSOPHY AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS and recently reprinted in the very useful volume TORTURE: A COLLECTION, edited by Sanford Levinson, builds just such a case.

Walzer, examining arguments by Machiavelli, Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Max Weber, argues for the necessity of having political leaders who in extreme circumstances are willing to dirty their hands by engaging in action that goes beyond the moral rules. But, as Levinson notes, the “saving grace,” if that is an appropriate phrase, is in the leaders’ willingness to accept responsibility and feel suitably guilty about what most people would wish were an “absolute” prohibition.

There is no indication among top Bush administration officials, including the president himself, that there are either what ethicists would regard as suitable feelings of guilt or a willingness to assume responsibility for the acts carried out by those in the chain of command over whom they exert authority.

It seems likely, therefore, that barring new revelations, the ethics and politics of U.S. involvement in torture will remain off the agenda of public discussion.

David E. Anderson is senior editor of Religion News Service and a senior editorial consultant for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

Bishop Frank Griswold

Posted on November 26, 2004 by Fred Yi

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: For more than a year now, we’ve been reporting on the deep divisions over homosexuality in the worldwide Anglican Communion and its American branch, the Episcopal Church USA. At the center of the crisis is Frank Griswold, presiding bishop of the U.S. Episcopal Church. The presiding bishop can’t make or repeal Church positions. But he holds great moral authority in implementing policies approved at the Church’s General Convention – even policies that threaten to tear the church apart. Kim Lawton talked with Bishop Griswold.

KIM LAWTON: As presiding bishop, Frank Griswold is lead pastor and chief administrator of the 2.3 million-member Episcopal Church USA. It’s a prestigious job, and these days, he admits, a challenging one.

Bishop FRANK GRISWOLD (Presiding Bishop, Episcopal Church USA): It has not been easy to be the presiding bishop in this season.

LAWTON: Griswold is at the center of what many believe is the biggest crisis the Episcopal Church has faced in its more than 200-year history – a crisis that threatens the future not only of the U.S. Church, but also of the entire worldwide Anglican Communion. It was under Griswold’s watch that the U.S. Church approved the consecration of its first openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, and permitted the blessing of same-sex unions.

Those actions ignited spiraling controversy, not just over homosexuality, but also about the interpretation of Scripture, the nature of church authority, and the organization of the Anglican Communion. In the midst of it all, Griswold says his responsibility is to push for unity and reconciliation.

Bishop GRISWOLD: My basic task is to keep as many people at the table as possible, and to remind everyone that though they have their own particular point of view, there are others who have another point of view, and they are equally members of the church, loved by God, members of Christ’s risen body, and therefore must be taken with full seriousness. And it’s in the tension, often, that the truth, whatever it may be, gets more fully revealed.

LAWTON: But statements like that have earned Griswold sharp criticism from conservatives who believe the U.S. Church has violated the Bible’s condemnations of homosexuality and violated traditional church teachings.

Canon DAVID ANDERSON (American Anglican Council): The Church starts with truth and finds its unity grounded on that truth, and in the Episcopal Church, according to the presiding bishop, there are pluriform truths: your truth, my truth, his truth. And that is no basis for trying to find unity.

LAWTON: Griswold presided over the consecration of Bishop Robinson and has been open about his own view that there can be differing interpretations of the Scripture. But he says he tries to minister to all, even those who disagree with him.

Bishop GRISWOLD: Certainly as the presiding bishop I see myself as belonging to everyone even though I have my own points of view. I care as much for people who are distressed as people who think the actions are inspired by the Spirit.

LAWTON: But Canon David Anderson, president of the conservative American Anglican Council, says Bishop Griswold has lost the trust of many in his flock.

Canon ANDERSON: We do acknowledge his leadership, but we acknowledge it to have been a fairly disastrous leadership so far, and we are hoping that there might be some changes in the course of direction of the Episcopal Church. We’d love for him to step down and recognize the damage he’s done.

LAWTON: Not all conservatives agree. One of Griswold’s closest friends is Bishop Charles Jenkins of Louisiana. Jenkins voted against the confirmation of Robinson but says he still trusts Griswold’s leadership.

Bishop CHARLES JENKINS (Diocese of Louisiana): I’m willing to say that Frank Griswold is orthodox, and I am orthodox. We are both seeking God’s truth. Now he believes God’s truth is pointing in a different direction than I. But we are both willing to wait upon God to show us that.

LAWTON: Griswold says he tries not to take the criticisms personally.

Bishop GRISWOLD: I must say I am well served by a wonderful spiritual director who once said to me, “What other people say about you is none of your business.” And that was very helpful. And I realize that a lot of the anger and upset, and indeed, some of the elation as well that gets focused on me isn’t so much about me as myself as me as symbol.

LAWTON: Griswold says he finds spiritual strength and resolve through regular prayer and Scripture reading. He begins and ends each day with cyclical readings from Old and New Testament passages and the Psalms.

Bishop GRISWOLD: As I read the Psalms each day in morning and evening prayer, many of the Psalms are about people in a situation of suffering and feeling isolated and alone, and nevertheless, “I know you’re with me, God.” I mean, those Psalms take on an immediacy that they didn’t have before.

Bishop JENKINS: He has taken some very hard punches. He has been betrayed by friends. And he keeps showing up, and he keeps saying his prayers, and he keeps, I think, exhibiting the graciousness that is characteristic of someone who knows Jesus.

LAWTON: The near future is likely to be just as contentious. Over the next several months, church leaders in the U.S. and around the world will be discussing the recommendations of the special commission appointed to help the Anglican Communion avoid schism. Conservatives say much is at stake.

Bishop ROBERT DUNCAN (Diocese of Pittsburgh, at Windsor Press Conference): The Episcopal Church is now faced with serious and difficult choices. They can follow the lead of Bishop Griswold, which will ultimately lead to the demise of the Episcopal Church, or they can choose to embrace the core covenant recommended by the commission: reject false doctrine and preserve faithful unity.

LAWTON: Griswold is proud of what the Episcopal Church has accomplished on many fronts since he was installed as presiding bishop in 1998. At this point in his nine-year term, he says he’s frustrated by how much attention is taken up by gay issues.

Bishop GRISWOLD: I find the endless fixation on sexuality, and more specifically homosexuality, a distraction from other areas that, quite frankly, are matters of life and death. When I retire as presiding bishop, I hope that I’m known for something other than this issue.

LAWTON: But the issue will be dominating Griswold’s agenda in the beginning of the coming year. The U.S. House of Bishops will be meeting about it in January. And the leaders of all the world’s Anglican churches gather in February.

I’m Kim Lawton in New York.

Bishop Frank Griswold Extended Interview

Posted on November 26, 2004 by Fred Yi

Read more of Kim Lawton’s interview with Episcopal Bishop Presiding Frank Griswold in New York City on October 6, 2004:

Q: Let’s start by talking about the new Lambeth Commission Report. What did you say in the House of Bishops meeting about how the U.S. church will be receiving this report?

A: It’s very important for us in the United States to receive the Lambeth Commission Report on communion in a generous spirit and in a humble spirit. One of the realities is the Episcopal Church, by association with United States policies – which are perceived in other parts of the world as very self-serving if not unhelpful to other societies – I think often the Episcopal Church is so associated with American policy abroad that we are thought of as arrogant and insensitive to other cultural realities and other concerns, and therefore it’s very important that we receive this report seriously, with openness of mind and a genuine desire to find ways in which we can be better partners with other parts of the Anglican world.

Q: In the years since the General Convention, how much hurt, how much anger, how much confusion have you heard about from some of these partners?

A: I’ve had the advantage of being able to travel to other parts of the world. I’ve been to Nigeria, where I gave a retreat to the bishops of Nigeria and visited a number of dioceses and saw the work and understood some of the complexities of life there. And the same is true also in Uganda. And therefore, I’m very aware of how different the contexts are in which, let’s say, the Anglican Church in Nigeria or Uganda is seeking to interpret and live the Gospel. And then in contrast, I’m very aware of different realities that are present here in the United States. And in fact, one of the primates, not from a Western country, said to me, “I think the Holy Spirit can do different things in different places.”

One thing about Anglicanism – and this is in some of the documents that have been generated by such things as the Lambeth Conference – the Anglican tradition realizes that the Gospel is locally embodied, and therefore it’s going to be affected by cultural and political realities in different parts of the world, and therefore what may seem to many people in the United States as a genuine unfolding of a Gospel direction may in another part of the world be seen as extremely unsettling and threatening.

So, I have a very deep sense of the complexity of all this, and it’s further complicated by the immediacy of communication. I mean, years ago, no one would have known about the ordination of the bishop of New Hampshire until letters had arrived some months later. But now, television, for example, beamed the ordination service around the world, so suddenly it was as if it were happening in Nigeria and other places. And so, naturally, the reaction was more intense because here it was, right in my own living room.

Q: When you as a church are making those determinations of how the Gospel is embodied in a particular context, where is the line at which point it’s not the same church, or the beliefs are so different that it no longer is still the same body?

A: I think what is very disturbing to me at the present moment is that sexuality seems to have trumped the creeds in determining fundamentals of the Christian faith. And the truth is that a great deal more unites us than divides us. There’s a common appreciation of the creeds as the ground of our articulated faith, and we all believe that the Old and New Testaments contain everything necessary to salvation. And then the interpretation of Scripture becomes something that varies. Even the primates themselves, when they met last October, in their official communications said there are differences in how we interpret Scripture, and we need to acknowledge those things.

Q: I want to ask you to simply explain this notion of a communion. I think it’s difficult for people outside the Episcopal context to understand what that means – how the U.S. church is autonomous, but yet in relationship with all of these other churches. How does that work?

A: There are two important things about communion. First of all, communion is a gift from God and not something we simply create. Communion is the intimate life of a relationship that exists between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit that is then expanded to human beings through baptism, and we are all then connected in what Paul calls “the body of Christ.” He says we’re all limbs, members of this body – arms and legs and constituent elements of a body. So, communion is about deep relationship created by God.

Now, the Anglican Communion exists not juridicaly – I mean – there is not a pope. The Archbishop of Canterbury does not occupy that kind of position. But communion is a matter of relationship on many levels. And so, though there may be strains formally between the heads of the various churches of the Anglican Communion, relationships also continue on the ground, and they are much more intimate. They are sometimes bishop to bishop, or a group of women from one part of the Anglican Communion, for instance, came here to New York to be part of a U.N. conference, as Anglican women, about women in the world. Well, this is a manifestation of communion.

So, it’s not a formal relationship so much as it is a kind of lived pattern of many relationships. And I think, too, it’s important to point out that the Episcopal Church, which was the first, as it were, breakaway from the mother church in England, saw itself as quite independent, and the notion of Anglican communion really is a more recent development, as largely British missionaries went to various parts of the world and established churches in what were British colonies. So the notion of communion has evolved, and it is still evolving. And I think part of the present strain is, what is the proper relationship between the local reality and an international body of churches in fellowship with one another, and where does the action of one church drastically affect the life of the other churches?

So, this is part of what we’re struggling with. And I think the Lambeth Commission report will help us in that struggle.

Q: To what extent do you think that you are in some ways redefining or evolving the notion of how all of these Anglican bodies relate to one another and live together or don’t?

A: Well, my hope and my prayer is that we will find a way to continue to be partners. For instance, there is such poverty and disease and internal turmoil in various parts of the world where we have resources that can be helpful and useful, and we want to be in a living relationship with brother and sister Anglicans who are dealing with HIV/AIDS, for example.

So, my hope and prayer is that the Lambeth Commission report, which really, as its title suggests, is about communion, will really be an invitation to live what I will call a more sacrificial life, not just on our part but on the part of everyone, to make a little more space for one another, because in this shattered and broken world where division is the order of the day, I think it’s so important that the church manifest a capacity to contain difference with grace and focus its attention on human need. After all, the church doesn’t exist for itself, it exists for the sake of the world and the world’s well-being.

Q: What is the U.S. church’s responsibility as a church here to deal with the people here, and then to what extent should outside voices have an impact here, as the church here deals with the people here?

A: I think when you look at the Episcopal Church you have to ask the question, “What kind of church has it been historically?” And you have to go back to the 16th century, when the Church of England, our parent, came into being, and at that time you had on the one hand reforming zeal, and on the other hand you had a sense of Catholic continuity. And these two really were at loggerheads with one another. But the Anglican solution, Anglican comprehensiveness as it’s sometimes called, saw containing those two realities within one reality, namely the Church of England, rooted and grounded not in perfect agreement, but rooted and grounded in a capacity to pray together. And so in the Anglican tradition, the liturgy has always been this sort of meeting point for difference, where difference is reconciled, not at the level of the head but at the level of the heart. Historically, we’ve always been a church that can contain and live difference.

So, that brings us now to the present moment and I think the overwhelming reality of the Episcopal Church is what I would call “the diverse center,” people who hold a variety of opinions, not just with respect to something as emotional as homosexuality, but all kinds of other things – war and peace, should we be involved in military operations or not? You have a church that has multiple points of view and by-and-large can live with that multiplicity of points of view because of the sort of common focus beyond ourselves, mediated by the liturgy, namely the person of Christ.

So, we have people on the edges, and people on the edges always are more loudly heard, I think, than the diverse center. And I don’t want to overly complicate the situation by describing something too diverse and strained, but still, I think it’s important to say that even within this diverse center you have people who are deeply pained by actions of the Episcopal Church in recent days, and others who are overjoyed, and yet they’re able to live together. Our recent meeting of bishops is a perfect example of people with diverse opinions being able to come together and say, “All right, for the sake of the world, what should the church be doing?” and sort of looking beyond ourselves.

There is this concern about ministering to all points of view, and certainly as the presiding bishop I see myself as belonging to everyone even though I have my own points of view. I care as much for people who are distressed as people who think the actions are inspired by the spirit.

Now, internationally, I am very aware, as are the bishops – and they said this in their recent letter – we’re very aware of the complications and difficulties the decisions we’ve made have caused in other parts of the world. And this is part of, I would say, the tension between trying to be faithful to what you perceive locally – yes, being sensitive to other parts of the world, but also acknowledging the fact that ultimately you have to live within your own context. And we, as a result of that, are certainly going to seek every way and are seeking every way we can bridge the gap and be authentic partners with other parts of the Communion.

Q: Is this truly a time of crisis? Is that how you look at it?

A: If you look at the Episcopal Church through the eyes of its parishioners, which I think is probably a realistic way to look at the church, see what actually is going on – on the ground, the overwhelming majority of congregations are focused on things like Sunday School, adult education, how can we meet the needs of the community in which we find ourselves, how might we be related to a parish in a diocese in some other part of the world. Things like the Lambeth Commission Report seem awfully remote, and some of the struggle seems awfully remote.

I’m not saying that’s universal. There are congregations that are deeply upset, and some that are deeply divided, but the vast majority are focused on what does it mean to be a Christian community, what does it mean to exist not for ourselves but for the sake of the world? That is the larger reality of the Episcopal Church, and I think probably that’s the larger reality of most of the Anglican Communion, if you look at it on the ground in terms of its congregations.

Q: Is it frustrating to be so focused on this and asked about it all the time as opposed to so many of the other places where the Episcopal Church is involved and issues that the church is wrestling with?

A: I find the endless fixation on sexuality, and more specifically homosexuality, a distraction from other areas that quite frankly are matters of life and death. I remember vividly, when the primates met last autumn in England, at the end of our meeting, which was focused mostly on the blessing of same-sex unions in a diocese in Canada and the actions of the Episcopal Church in confirming the election of the then bishop-elect of New Hampshire, one primate said, “You know, it’s been sex, sex, sex, and I am facing poverty and disease and life and death in my diocese, in my church.” And several of the other primates just sort of sighed. And I apologized. I said, “I am very sorry that this issue has been made center stage in the life of the Anglican Communion,” and I went on to say, “and that has happened in large measure because of people within my own church who are unhappy, who have insisted that this be the issue in the life of the Anglican Communion.” So that does sadden me deeply. And when I retire as presiding bishop, I hope that I’m known for something other than this issue.

Q: Has it been challenging for you spiritually, physically, and emotionally to be presiding at this time?

A: It has not been easy to be the presiding bishop in this season. I must say I am well served by a wonderful spiritual director who once said to me, “What other people say about you is none of your business,” and that was very helpful. I realize that a lot of the anger and upset, and indeed, some of the elation as well that gets focused on me isn’t so much about me as myself as [it is about] me as symbol. I make a distinction, insofar as one can, between myself as myself, and myself as a “role,” and therefore, sort of a focal point for any number of perspectives within the life of the church. I think my role, too, and my basic task is to keep as many people at the table as possible, and to remind everyone that though they have their own particular point of view, there are others who have another point of view, and they are equally members of the church, loved by God, members of Christ’s risen body, and therefore must be taken with full seriousness. And it’s in the tension, often, that the truth, whatever it may be, gets more fully revealed.

Q: How has all of this affected you spiritually?

A: Spiritually, this has all deepened my companionship with Christ. It has also made very real to me the whole notion of sharing Christ’s sufferings in order to share Christ’s resurrection. I mean, dying and rising, which is the basic paradigm of Christian life, seemed in some ways a bit abstract before I became the presiding bishop, and now it seems very, very real indeed. As I read the psalms each day in morning and evening prayer, many of the psalms are about people in a situation of suffering and feeling isolated and alone, and nevertheless, “I know you’re with me, God.” I mean, those psalms take on an immediacy that they didn’t have before.

Basically, I think I’m a happy person – not with my own sort of manic joy but with something the Holy Spirit has sort of worked in me. And I think this is what gives me a sense of graced confidence, you might say, and an ability not to be sort of thrown off course by these curious things that sort of erupt in the life of the church.

Q: What are you hearing from the Anglican churches in Sudan, and what do they want to see the U.S. do – not just the church, but the U.S. government, the U.S. as a nation?

A: The Sudan is very close to our hearts because there is an Episcopal Church of the Sudan, and at our recent meeting of bishops in Spokane, one of our guests was a bishop from the Darfur area. We have been, as a church, very focused on legislation. We’ve brought Sudanese bishops to testify before Congressional committees. Congregations across this country are in solidarity with the church in Sudan. Our Episcopal relief and development organization has received, I think, about $1.5 million for relief in the Darfur area. We’re trying to be partners in terms of political leverage and in terms of direct service, and trying to make the situation, as our brother and sister Anglicans can describe it in vivid detail, that much more real and immediate in the lives of our people, and certainly in the lives of our legislators.

Q: And what do they say that situation is? What are they suffering?

A: You could listen to a bishop tell you about his family being killed in the compound, and just chaos – I mean, a chaos to an extent that you can’t imagine how people can function. What has been so amazing to me is the power of a kind of deep faith, and indeed, a hopefulness in the midst of situations that from our point of view seem absolutely hopeless. Our faith is rendered so shallow, in a way, in comparison to the heroism with which the bishops and clergy and lay people in the Sudan are able to witness to the Gospel under the most appalling circumstances.

Q: You are a good friend with the Episcopal bishop of Louisiana.

A: Bishop Charles Jenkins and I go back to when he was ordained a bishop. In fact, I was scheduled to give a retreat to the clergy of his diocese before he was elected. He attended the retreat and we became, out of that experience of praying together and reflecting on the life of ministry together, very, very close friends. I think the fact that Bishop Jenkins and I have somewhat different views on matters of sexuality, but are absolutely of one mind on everything else, has been a very good example to people on both sides of the question, of people who can care deeply about a mission they share for the sake of the world, and disagree on some things, and yet make common cause in the name of Christ.

Q: Does he challenge you? Does he push you a bit on some of these things?

A: If anything, Bishop Jenkins teases me. He has an outrageous sense of humor. I would say we were both aware of our different perspectives, but we simply accept the fact that there are different realities within one church, and those realities are going to continue, and they need to be respected. And sooner or later the Holy Spirit will figure out how they might be reordered, but for now we live our two integrities together as brothers in Christ.

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