Homecoming

 Homecoming 

I had seventeen emails when we got home. One was from Gaspar Stephens, one of three people that read the blog regularly, or more or less regularly: “How was your trip? I thought you’d be writing about it?”
     “I might have been,” I wrote back, “but my laptop wasn’t working. But I will. Soon.”

Lebanon water tower, but in Missouri,
so not the one John fell from.

I also had a letter from Moira I talked to Dr. Feight about. She had gone to a movie with her friend Gretchen Moore and Gretchen’s friend John and Gretchen’s cousin John. Both Johns died young; both died in 1970, Friend John, just graduated from Carleton College in Minnesota, by stepping on a land mine in Vietnam, and Cousin John in a drunken fall from a water tower between his sophomore and junior years at Emory & Henry. He was visiting a classmate in Illinois, the son of a Methodist minister. He died on the third day, and, according to Moira, “He remains a young and callow fellow but extremely handsome — almost as handsome, though not nearly as pretty, as Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy, the movie we saw.
      “You wouldn't imagine it would be shown here, would you? Not only because it is about male prostitution and grinding, not humble and uplifting poverty (like Naomi and Ruth’s or Mary and Joseph’s), but because it is the saddest damn movie ever made, at least that I’ve seen. And it’s sad because love doesn’t redeem anything at all, and hope leads exactly nowhere. So, to paraphrase The Apostle (as you call him), ‘Death on a bus, hope, and love; and the greatest of these is death on a bus.’
     “We went for coffee after the movie, but only your high-school buddy Phil Allingham was there, watching a baseball game. He’d never seen the movie, he said, and he’d never wanted to. Gretchen replied that she’d never seen a baseball game or ever wanted to. Phil didn’t care; he only turned back to watching his. Plus, I think she was lying.
     “Her friend John said after we sat down that he didn’t much like it — it was too grim. Hadn’t he died, ‘and gone to heaven,’ he added with a grin, ‘to escape such sordidness or, more to the point, to see how it had been redeemed?’ He didn’t want to be reminded that it hadn’t.
     “‘It’s where the Christian faith fails, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Christ has died to redeem the world, but it hasn’t changed a whit. People cannot escape the messes they have gotten themselves into. Or, if they do, it isn’t by the grace of God but either by dumb luck or because they know someone with money or influence or, more likely, both.’
     “‘If you had gone to Harvard instead of Carleton,’ Gretchen said, ‘you wouldn’t have died in Vietnam.’
     “‘I’d never have gone to Harvard,’ John answered.
     “‘Me neither,’ John the cousin said. ‘I was lucky to get into Emory.’
     “Afterward, Gretchen went away with her friend John, and her cousin John said he would walk me home if I liked. A worldly gesture — no need for it here — but I said, ‘Sure,’ he was so good to look at even if not as pretty as Jon Voight in the movie. He was about as bright as Joe Buck though, I would add if I weren’t obliged always to be kind.”

There is a P.S.: “Is Gretchen’s friend John right about the Christian faith, that it promises redemption but doesn’t truly deliver? Or maybe it just hasn’t delivered yet? That’s one theme in the New Testament, right? — Christ will come again and reverse every ill, and there will be peace and no more tears?
     “What do you think?”

“So, what do you respond?” Dr. Feight said softly after I had lapsed into silence. The silence must either have lasted or have been “pregnant,” because he seldom speaks. When he does, it is softly, as if he doesn’t want to wake me if I have fallen asleep. But I hadn’t. Still, I waited. Sometimes, probably out of sheer cussedness, you want people to have to wait with you.
     “I was going to ask Axel — Axel Sundstrøm — what he thought,” I said. “Or Uncle Albert. But I decided not to.”
     “Oh?”
     “What I think?”
     He didn’t say anything more, which I took to mean “yes.” Or he was making me wait,which I didn’t.
     “My first thought was that we had never given redemption a chance. We couldn’t embrace Jesus — love and peace and healing, and concern for the poor and oppressed — at least not so that we were willing to give up wealth and power, all wealth and power. And pride. All pride.
     “Then I thought, though this is much the same thing: ‘Whose fault is that?’ Christ could not redeem the world because in Jesus of Nazareth God came not in power but in weakness, and the world could never embrace that. The few followers that did maybe were soon pushed aside by those that knew better. You don’t get on in the world without organizing, and you can’t organize without a hierarchy, a power structure. Power, then, cannot be truly shared, much less no-power — what is that anyway? And before long, the Jerusalem disciples would claim a monopoly on baptism by the spirit, Peter is judging Ananias and Sapphira, and Paul is judging everyone, including Peter, never mind that he is going to be the first Pope at Rome.
     “Then, I was thinking, ‘Who was the second?’”
     “Linus,” Dr. Feight said. Softly.

                                                                         08.04.23