Compassionate Kingdom

"And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" — Micah 6:8


By now it's no secret that my spirituality seems to have evolved into a concern for justice and, what I believe amounts to the same thing, the extolling of humility, kindness, and compassion. With the help of Google I have stumbled upon an odd website, www.compassion.org, that seems to consist of a single page containing four quotations about compassion. I find all four resonant.

The first of these quotes is from the Catholic monk and author Thomas Merton: "Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things." Another site with quotes about compassion cites Merton as saying, "The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another."

The second quotation is from someone I don't know, Arthur Jersild, who (Googling reveals) is a psychologist and professor of education at Columbia: "Compassion is the ultimate and most meaningful embodiment of emotional maturity. It is through compassion that a person achieves the highest peak and deepest reach in his or her search for self-fulfillment."

Quotation number three comes from another source not known to me, Matthew Fox. This article about him appears in Wikipedia. There he is called "a controversial American priest and theologian, and the leading exponent of Creation Spirituality," which is apparently a mystical tradition from the 12th to 15th centuries. The quotation reads, "Compassion is not sentiment but is making justice and doing works of mercy. Compassion is not a moral commandment but a flow and overflow of the fullest human and divine energies."

And the fourth quotation, "The whole purpose of religion is to facilitate love and compassion, patience, tolerance, humility, forgiveness," comes from the present Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso. The Dalai Lama is the supreme head of Tibetan Buddhism, said to be one in a series of incarnations of the bodhisattva, or enlightenment-being, of compassion.

These quotations, taken together, emphasize: gaining a sense of all beings' mutual interdependence; finding spiritual and emotional maturity; enacting justice and mercy; and facilitating love, patience, tolerance, humility, and forgiveness. Christians have an expression that summarizes it all: living in the kingdom of God.

The kingdom of God, also called the kingdom of heaven, is spoken of often in the Gospels and throughout the New Testament, but the meaning of the phrase is a bit elusive. Thus, this question put to Father John Dietzen, whose column answering knotty concerns of Roman Catholic belief appears widely in the Catholic press.

Fr. Dietzen addresses the perplexing problem that the kingdom of God is said to be both present now and coming in the future. Rather than thinking of it as "a static, unchanging condition, something finally finished here or perhaps even in the future," we need to imagine it as "active and full of life, constantly at work in everything [God] continually is creating."

The kingdom is, in fact, "God’s reign, his loving rule over all creation" which we can experience as the "compassionate and magnanimous presence of God." As "an ongoing presence," the kingdom "declares that the rule of God is now." This rule of God is to be experienced as "the Father’s benevolent presence and power active in the world."

Yet the kingdom involves the future just as much as it concerns the present. It is a force working ceaselessly "to re-establish the harmony of creation destroyed by sin." This redemptive process, Fr. Dietzen says, is "part of the mystery of God's creating love." It seeks to establish the perfect justice which our everyday experience finds woefully lacking in this material world.

In view of the reality of the kingdom here and now, yet extending forever into the future, we are urged by Jesus "to trust, not to be afraid. Whatever happens, we are sure of the Father’s benevolent presence and power active in the world. ... The more we are aware of the power of this divine rule among us now and its continuance in eternity, the greater is our confidence that, in St. Paul’s words, nothing can separate us from the love of God that comes to us in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Closed Circles

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

In his book Enchantments, which I continue to pore over, Rev. Thomas M. King, S. J., speaks of how a verbal enchantment can make of those who are entranced by it a "closed circle" that excludes all who are not caught up in the enchantment. Such was the case with the words of the prophets in the Old Testament. When the Jews were in exile, they were sustained as a people by the likes of Isaiah, who wrote: "O my people, who dwell in Zion, be not afraid of the Assyrians" (10:24).

The prophets had foretold what actually happened: the destruction of Jerusalem by the Jews' pagan enemies. Yet, King writes (pp. 103-104):

If the prophetic words [had once] disheartened the nation, they sustained it when fortifications and arms were not to be had. In the Babylonian exile the captive Jews would have lost their hope, if they had not been supported by the prophetic word. And they would have lost their identity if their words had not made of them a "closed circle" ... with its familiar clichés. The words had a power to hold the community together and bring courage into being.

Words, even familiar clichés, can speak to us with power when

... all we see before us is "a grayish sea of ambiguity." We seem to be looking for something else — someone who will speak to us so that we will pass out of ourselves into the other. If that happens, everything is changed. At such a moment, the words spoken may be few, but they can change the direction of our life. (p. 105)

This, I think, is exactly what evangelicals experience when they say they have been "born again."


A new documentary, Friends of God: A Road Trip with Alexandra Pelosi, premiered last night on HBO. It depicts the lives and beliefs of the estimated 50 to 80 million evangelical Christians living in America today. Pelosi is an Emmy-wining filmmaker and the daughter of new Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. As I watched her interviews with leading evangelicals such as ...

Pastor Ted Haggard, who recently stepped down as president of the 30-million strong National Association of Evangelicals — the largest evangelical group in the U.S. — following allegations that he had sex with a male prostitute and bought illegal drugs (see the synopsis of the documentary here)

... I was struck by the way many of the interviewees talked as if they had been programmed by a cult. A very large cult. There was a notable absence of independent thought.

For example, when several interviewees were asked whether they believed in the theory of evolution, all responded to the effect that, no, they believed in the Bible and creation, and that it was evolutionists who could be accused of parroting a pre-programmed package of thought. Yet Pelosi's footage shows anti-evolutionist preachers and lecturers in action, feeding anti-evolution notions into the heads of Christian adults, teens, and pre-teens, in what I found to be a scary, chilling litany of vibrant, well-honed rhetoric and potent musical singalong.

In other words, the documentary showed me that if you're born again, you're apt to be subjected to religious and quasi-religious enchantments that serve to make all who are like you into a proverbial "closed circle," staunchly defending a party line on what is and is not true.


The born-again Christians in the documentary are not unlike the Jews held in captivity in Babylon, in the following sense. They feel they are a put-upon minority, strangers in a strange, secular land. Mouthing things like "America was founded by Christians" and "This is a Christian country," they feel they ought to be — and someday soon will be — the majority voice in the land.

According to my history books, the Founding Fathers indeed were mostly Christians of various stripes. But many of them were, as was Thomas Jefferson, deists who held that the Creator is no longer involved in human affairs. Some were of Puritan stock; it is not clear to me that the Puritans should be counted among the ranks of born-again evangelicals. Many were Anglicans, or what we now call Episcopalians. Quite a few were Lutherans or Catholics, neither denomination being particularly evangelical. There were Quakers and Methodists, Baptists and Anabaptists, Presbyterians and Calvinists ... but I am not aware of any signers of the Declaration of Independence who claimed to be born again.

Yet today's evangelicals are convinced we are on the threshold of a new Jerusalem.

This can take the form of expecting Jesus's imminent Second Coming. Different evangelicals have different notions of how the world's "End Days" are to play out, but there seems to be a general tendency to champion the cause of Israel's Jews, in furtherance of the prophecy in the Book of Revelation concerning their putatively necessary role in it all. If the Jews aren't living in Palestine, the thinking goes, it can't happen. But it has to happen, so we Christians need to do our part by making sure the Palestinians don't expel Jews from the Holy Land.

In other words, Israeli Jews have lately become members emeritus of an American evangelical "closed circle."


Looked at abstractly, evangelical belief seems to hold that the history of the confusing, chaotic, material world is about to be subsumed into that of the ideal world, directly under the will of God. Very soon now, those pesky differences between what is and what ought to be — the condition which I generally term worldly "injustice" — are going to go away. If we all hope real hard for this to happen, it will happen, and sooner rather than later.

I see this sort of thinking as a way to stave off the Second Baptism which King speaks of, the one that inaugurates in us a true spirituality of humanity and compassion. It staves it off by obviating the Dark Night of the Soul — the descent into a whirligig of confusion, doubt, and temptation — which necessarily precedes the Baptism of Fire and Spirit.

Not that evangelicals aren't compassionate. Toward others in their closed circle they are most caring indeed. As Ted Haggard pointed out in the documentary, when a member of his 14,000-member New Life Church phones 911 in a medical emergency, someone from the church community is likely to get there before the ambulance does. A megachurch, he says, is very much like an old-time village or township, providing all the fellowship and brotherhood those vanished institutions once did.

The problem, as I see it, is that the compassion is not universal. It does not extend much beyond the church community, or the larger community of American evangelicals ... with notable exceptions being made for members emeritus such as Israeli Jews and for those who are being evangelized in hopes that they will become initiates to the cult.

Those who clearly are not about to join the cult are in a different category. A personal anecdote: When I was about 16, I spent a summer with my cousin Susan's family in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I was taken to Sunday School at their Southern Baptist church. With other kids my age I sat in, yes, a closed circle and heard the teacher/leader put the following question up for discussion: Now that we were reaching an age in which we would be going out on dates, was it a good idea to date people who did not share our religion?

I put up my hand and, as the guest, was called on first. I said it was fine to go out on dates with non-Christians such as Jews, as well as Christians of other denominations such as Catholics, because meeting them and their families would broaden our understanding of other types of people.

That turned out to be the wrong answer. The right answer was that dating non-Baptists could lead to knotty problems if marriage and children ensued, such as in what church to have the wedding and how to raise the offspring.


Extrapolating from that, I assume that in this view non-Baptists (or, at least, non-evangelicals) are to be evangelized, or, failing that, pitied. But pity is not the same as compassion. Pity is suffering for or about the woes of others. Compassion is suffering with others. Jesus did not teach pity. Jesus taught compassion.

His teaching of compassion, furthermore, went beyond the closed circle of his Jewish ancestry by virtue of the cross. King writes (p. 143):

The Gospels proclaim the Good News. Yet the good news is paradoxical, for the Gospels tell of God's chosen One going to a shameful death. In [the Gospel of] John the paradox is even more striking [in that it is] a stunning revelation of divine Glory. A contemporary exegete has explained the Jewish background of the term: "In the [Old Testament] the glory of God implies a visible and powerful manifestation of God to men" ... . For John the Glory of God was fully manifest only in the passion when Jesus was raised on the cross.

Late in his public ministry Jesus was told that some Greeks wanted to see him. This interest — from non-Jews, from those outside the closed circle — indicated to Jesus that his time of preaching was over. He responded, "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified" (12:23). That is, his preaching was for a "closed circle" of listeners, those who shared a common book; hearing of the interest of the Gentiles he knew that his time of preaching was over; it was time for crucifixion and silence. Raised on the cross he would be present in the full absurdity of the human scene, but then his message would become universal; he continued, "I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself" (12:23). The power of the crucifixion would extend beyond the "closed circle."

It would do so in a way beyond words and sense, beyond the clichés of the book faithful Jews held in common, beyond preaching and verbal enchantments. It would pose a riddle for one all to contemplate in the depths of the spirit: how could one so high be glorified by being brought so low as to be executed like an ordinary criminal? What does this paradox say to us?

Moreover, how does it say it to us? Not with words alone. King says (pp. 143-144):

As the passion began Jesus again spoke of it as his time of glory ("Now is the Son of Man glorified"). By his passion he would become a "visible and powerful manifestation of God" to all the world. His glory would be manifest on the cross where all power, all sense and meaning were defeated.

... Zen [Buddhist] masters ... lead their disciples to the point of illumination by proposing koans for their consideration. These koans [are] paradoxes which ... take the disciple beyond words. The most famous koan asks, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" One is not able to conceive of one hand clapping, yet one meditated on this or other koans until one "saw" apart from meaning; phenomena apart from meaning was the illumination. The Jews lived in a world of meaning, for, having received the heavenly word, everything was meaningful. But by their book they also formed a "closed circle with their own clichés. During the days of his ministry Jesus was drawing those within the circle — the Gentiles would be drawn a different way. ... The phenomena itself would be the revelation, his time of Glory.

Think of it: according to John, the final glory of the Word of God, Jesus Christ, comes to all of us alike in beholding a phenomenon without words. A riddle, a paradox, a koan, an incomprehensible cross is needed to take us out of our hitherto closed circles and into an attitude of universal community and compassion. Here, then, is a crucial part of the Christian message which evangelicals seem to have forgotten!

Impulse Control

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

In his book Enchantments, Fr. Thomas M. King, S. J., describes a spirituality of any type as a way of dealing with the impulses and urges within us, given that they lie outside the domain of the rational will. In general, an act is potentially sinful only to the extent that it is willful. If something wrong is done as a result of a mere impulse, uncensored by rational intent, it is in a different category of transgression.

Christian ethics and morality seek to train the will to want only right and proper things, but as King points out, none of us can suppress our urges and impulses entirely. We may dedicate ourselves to serving an ethical ideal. Then we may encounter a Dark Night of the Soul, when we realize that our chaotic inner impulses have refused to die. Oddly, the next stage of religious development is quite marvelous: a "second baptism" into a true spirituality.

Impulses are neither intrinsically good nor intrinsically bad. However, they need to be placed under some sort of control, some "decider" which tells us in which direction to move after an impulse has propelled us to make a change in our life, or even just to alter something in our momentary situation.

King suggests this is the province of the Spirit of God, which, the Bible says, "blows where it will." The Spirit, that is, does not adhere to rules that can be stated in words, in the way that a rational ethic does. (This is why King says that the Bible cannot always be read literally, as if all divine truth could be conveyed in flat, everyday prose.)

I am put in mind of a scene in the movie The Apostle where the protagonist, Robert Duvall, is kicked out by wife Farrah Fawcett for his philandering ways. He is nonetheless a holy man. As he motors along toward some sort of new life, he asks the Good Lord for direction by driving his car round and round in circles in a deserted intersection until an impulse tells him which highway to take.

I think this is something my evangelical/charismatic friends Chris and Dee (see Aspiration and Inspiration) are intimately familiar with. They are always talking about how God is "leading" them to do this or that, a locution which I interpret as meaning that the Spirit is moving them in a particular direction. Or, in terms of the urges and impulses that they feel as complex human beings, I think they are saying that they experience one particular impulse, among the riot of possibilities that well naturally up within them, which they feel has God's sanction and bears his blessing. It is that particular one which deserves to be followed. It is that one which marks the highway they need to take, at the proverbial crossroads.

Activating Compassion

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

I wonder how many people, Christian or not, know of the Gospels' reference to a baptism that happens after the first, familiar one, that by water. The second baptism, of fire and spirit, is crucial to the understanding of the faith which is explicated by Thomas M. King, S.J., in his book Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (available used from Amazon or from Alibris).

If the first baptism is the seal of righteousness, the second is the precondition of compassion. It is the guarantor that righteousness does not mean self-righteousness.

The first baptism is that of being spellbound by a verbal enchanter — Jesus was such a one — being taken up out of oneself to an ideal world above this one, a paradisal world of perfect justice in comparison to which our world of impure sense experience can seem utter darkness. We can be so taken by the Word that we seek wholly to abandon the World. This is the Night of the Senses. After it, as various knights-errant, we may devote ourselves to serving our ethical and moral ideals to the exclusion of giving free expression to our own needs and interests.

This typically brings on a Night of the Soul, since such purity of adherence to any impersonal verbal formula or set of commandments is ultimately, we tend to find to our chagrin, beyond our ability. Temptation intervenes in our lives, just as it did for Jesus when he was thrice tempted by the devil in the desert. That is when our baptism of fire can, if we are as steadfast as Jesus was, become a baptism of spirit, a germination of our inborn capacity for humanity an dhumility into the habit of compassion. Compassion, in which we confront the ways in which we are all equally prone to temptation and imperfection, to suffering and weakness, is seemingly the key to the kingdom of heaven on earth.

This is the paradigm of religious experience which King refines from his reading of scripture; from the spiritual biographies of Thomas Merton and Ignatius Loyola; from medieval mystical writings such as The Cloud of Unknowing; as well as from the Dialogues of Plato, Faust, Don Quixote, and a host of other works.

When I peruse King's book, I find it totally convincing. But after putting it down, I find myself asking questions. One of these is that with which I opened above: why is it that so few people think of the Christian faith as one in which the germination of humanity into full-fledged compassion is the crucial point?


We think of righteousness first, and only then (maybe) compassion as the prime directive of Christian living ... right? Righteousness, as in holiness, uprightness, rectitude, or probity; as in virtue, decency, goodness, honesty, integrity. As in being free of sin and going to heaven rather than hell when we die. If we serve God and not Satan, we do so first and foremost by our pious faith, by our turning away from sin, no? That is how we save our souls.

Not only does compassion come in a distant second to moral compunction, some even see religion as the enemy of compassion. In the current issue of TIME magazine, scientist Steven Pinker's article on "The Mystery of Consciousness" betrays such an attitude. Pinker suggests we may never be able to solve the "Hard Problem" about consciousness, no matter how much we learn about the workings of the brain. That problem is the one I talked about in my "Quickening to Qualia" series of posts (the last of which was "Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans"). To wit, how does our brain give rise to the sheer experience of undergoing its own activity, as we internally monitor its subjective nature? Or, why is it like something to see the color green?

Pinker notes that the religious idea of the soul is akin to this notion that consciousness is an ethereal reality above and beyond the workings of the brain. Lewis Thomas wrote in The Lives of a Cell, according to this article on personal grief in a recent edition of The Baltimore Sun,

... that it would be odd for nature to waste anything as complex as consciousness. "I prefer to think of it as somehow separated off at the filaments of its attachment, and then drawn like an easy breath back into the membrane of its origin, a fresh memory for the biospherical nervous system, but I have no data on the matter."

If that's what consciousness is, severable at the filaments of its attachment, then maybe that's also what the soul is. But Pinker nixes that easy identity of soul with consciousness — without going so far as to deny the validity of the Hard Problem, as does philosopher Daniel Dennett, who is a much more impassioned atheist than Pinker is.

Pinker expresses his own distaste for religious belief in his final section, "Toward a New Morality." He finds the scientific impenetrability of consciousness to be an aid to compassion. If each person knows that he or she is conscious as a mysterious property of brain functioning — however unprovable that fact of one's consciousness may be to skeptical others — then every other person with demonstrably similar brain function must be seen also a like vessel of conscious experience, entitled to the same consideration we give to ourselves: "Hath not a Jew — or an Arab, or an African, or a baby, or a dog — a cerebral cortex and a thalamus? The undeniable fact that we are all made of the same neural flesh makes it impossible to deny our common capacity to suffer."

Religion with its concern for the advancement of the individual soul to the afterlife is, to Pinker, the enemy of such a recognition. It can promote cruelty, not compassion: "Just remember the most famous people in recent history who acted in expectation of a reward in the hereafter: the conspirators who hijacked the airliners on 9/11."

I'd say that's a caricature — nay, a corruption, a demonic parody — of the idea of religion. Yet it's one to which many religious practitioners are prone, in the name of God or Allah. It's simply incorrect for Pinker to fall into the trap of identifying a thing with its demonic parody. Yet it's understandable that he and others do so. In fact, I'd say it's far more important for someone to find his or her own compassion than to be right about religion.

Aspiration and Inspiration

I recently received in the mail a flier from Heather K. telling of her youth group's plans to evangelize in Europe this summer of 2007. Heather is the teenage daughter of good friends of mine who I think it is fair to say are among America's huge number of evangelical Christians, though they could also be described as charismatic as well. Heather's youth group, the flier said, is looking forward to preaching God's word in countries that they feel have pretty much lost touch with it.

I know there is widespread sentiment on this side of the Atlantic that the Europeans are a bunch of rank atheists, but I can testify from my multiple visits there that there are plenty of Christians in Europe and plenty of churches, some of which I have attended beautiful services in.

One of the things that distorts our understanding of this is that American Christianity has a strong evangelical orientation that seems to be lacking in much of Europe. My guess is that it's because evangelicalism fits in so well with upward socioeconomic mobility in America, but in Europe the movers and the shakers tend to be the ones who have abandoned religious values for secular ones.

Meanwhile the "ordinary" folks in Europe are still religious, but in a quieter way since they don't necessarily aspire to the next rung up the ladder. In this country, folks who are climbing the socioeconomic ladder see God as an awesome, mighty force in aiding that process. In other words, how we experience God depends on how we experience life. Nothing wrong with that, but it does tend to make Christians of different styles talk past one another, rather than to one another.


Those are the kinds of things I told Heather's parents, Chris and Dee, in an e-mail I have just sent them today — in which I also told them I have mailed Heather a small donation in support of her trip. It just so happened that Chris and Dee e-mailed me to find out how I've been doing, and I received their missive on a morning after I had awakened during the night with a host of thoughts concerning evangelicalism in American religion.

My primary thought was this: I have to admit, personally, to having an anti-evangelical bias in my own religious sensibility.

In trying to explain that to myself, I began to focus on the notion that I have never been in the position of aspiring to a great deal more socioeconomically than the life without want I was born into as the son of parents from the American heartland or Bible Belt whose own upward trajectory — a very successful one, in material terms — I would call sort of "European," in a broad sense. Or, at least, cosmopolitan.

Harold Francis Stewart and Leota Isabel Berry Stewart, my beloved parents, now dead, were among the generation of Americans who became teenagers in the Roaring Twenties. It was a time when religious backgrounds (she was Southern Baptist, he Methodist) were experienced by many Americans as hindrances to the high life that could be theirs if they threw off old-fashioned strictures and shackles of religious observance.

My family did very little churchgoing in my youth, though some of my mother's large family stayed faithful to the old-time religion. They stayed away from big cities and remained back in the Midwestern states which Mom and Dad had left behind to make a better life, during the Great Depression, in the "godless" East. Of course, the metropolitan East wasn't really godless, but neither was it evangelical. Religion was mostly a private affair.

My parents kept it so private that, today, I am not quite sure exactly what they believed about God, or how much they believed it. I do remember one dinner-table conversation in which they told me how the home of my maternal grandfather, William Palmer Berry, a man who was trained as a lay preacher in the Southern Baptist Convention, was run so strictly that there was no listening to records or the radio, no dancing, no card playing ... and, of course, no cigarette smoking or alcohol drinking.

My father's father, Willis Warder Stewart, was also a stern sort, in a Methodist way rather than a Southern Baptist one — I never quite caught on to the difference, if there was one. All I knew is that my parents had abandoned religion, while still clinging to some belief in God. They were not, strictly speaking, freethinkers, but their lives had been strongly influenced by the free thought of the likes of, say, H.L. Mencken.

Mencken was the newspaper reporter and columnist who had emerged from strictly local renown in Baltimore, Maryland, to a national audience through his coverage of the Scopes "Monkey" Trial in 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee. This was the famous trial of a local schoolteacher accused of violating state law by teaching evolution. Mencken assailed the Dayton townsfolk who resented Darwinism and set up the prosecution of John Scopes as benighted ones "unable to imagine a man who rejects the literal authority of the Bible" (see this account of his coverage).

My parents felt that success in this world — what I think of as the high life — would follow upon the relinquishing of such benighted, fundamentalist attitudes.

In other words, their aspirations were such as to lead them away from religion. I think for Chris and Dee, as for countless other evangelicals today, it is just the opposite. Aspiration and inspiration are inseparably linked in their religion and in their life experience.


In mid-adulthood I became a Christian. But, rather than having a born-again experience, I gravitated toward and eventually became a member of the Roman Catholic faith. In other words, instead of emphasizing the evangelical, as so many Americans, my life experience has been more of the Old World variety, even down to the style of Christianity I felt drawn to.

I remember during my childhood watching, on that first new TV that entered our home in the primitive 1950s, one of the early televangelists thumping his Bible and asking members of his live audience to come forward and accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior. I also remember my mother saying something disparaging about it — her exact words are ones I can't recall. All I know is that it left me with a distaste for that kind of religion, which persists to this day.

In my middle-of-the-night musing about such things, I realized my distaste may be in large part a matter of not wanting to re-associate myself with the socioeconomic class my parents left behind on their rise to the upper middle class.

Or perhaps the class to which I refer was the one their parents had left behind in moving from the recurrent edge of poverty to what I think of as a staid "middle middle class" existence in the American heartland. I may have this wrong, and if so I apologize to any whose feelings I offend, but my impression is that evangelicalism appeals mainly to the peculiarly American socioeconomic stratum that I think of as poor Scotch-Irish and their ilk.

The Scotch-Irish in America, my ancestors, are the descendants of Protestant people who moved away from oppression and penury in Scotland centuries back, to take up residence in Northern Ireland. After their prospects there dimmed, many sought a brave new world in America — including my direct Stewart antecedent, one of three brothers who came here from Ulster at about the time of the War of 1812. One brother struck it rich as the founder of the world's first department store, A. T. Stewart's, later Wanamaker's, but the other two, including my lineal forebear Robert Stewart, weren't so lucky. My heritage on both sides of my family — not all of it identifiably Scotch-Irish, by the way — came through ancestors who often had to struggle to make ends meet.

All my grandparents were devoted to their religion, as far as I can tell, but I received no inkling that they were particularly evangelical in their religious style. By the time I was old enough to sit up and take notice, my paternal grandfather had remarried after mourning the death, some time back, of his first wife, my true grandmother. Then he died before I could get to know him. As for the grandparents on my mother's side, I did get to spend some time with them before their own rather early deaths, but I never knew them as particularly fervent religious types. True, when we went to visit them in Springfield, Missouri, my mother had to slip into the bedroom to sneak a smoke, or, along with my Dad, a wee nip. But I don't recall being taken to church on a Sunday or hearing much in the way of religious talk. And there were the games I'd play with Grandpa Berry, checkers and Chinese checkers, to make him seem like a regular guy. There was a bit of a dust-up, as I recall, over whether I was allowed to chew gum in their house... but a lot of that generation, born in the second half of the 19th century, thought gum-chewing was "common"; it wasn't just religious evangelicals.

The point is, I don't really know why my grandparents weren't terribly evangelical, but I suspect it was because they had attained their early aspirations of middle-class security and respectability long before I came along. That, and they were no longer young and full of zeal.


By the time my parents were thinking about leaving their respective nests, the smart set back East were well known across the land as having traded in the old-style religion for a high life of sophistication and glamor. My father wanted to follow in the footsteps of Mencken ... but W.W. Stewart couldn't afford at the crucial moment to put him through journalism school at the University of Missouri. H.F. Stewart instead joined the Army; served in peacetime Hawaii; turned down Officer Candidate School to spare his intended wife, my mother, a vagabond life of military bases; married and brought his new wife to Washington, D.C., to latch on as a policeman; rose through the ranks; took time out to serve as Executive Officer on a ship in the Pacific in World War II; came home to take Mom on a belated honeymoon and engender his only child, me; and wound up Chief of Police just as I was turning seven years old.

Their world was indeed, I found, one of cosmopolitan sophistication — though later events would show what a thin veneer that sophistication really was. My father even admitted it: at heart he and his Missouri-days associates were still the hillbillies they always were, men who would visit moonshine stills in the Ozarks backwoods during Prohibition to get their dram of liquor. In his salad days, Dad would come to drink 12-year-old Scotch whisky, but in later life he reverted to Maker's Mark bourbon, bless his soul.

One of the things I don't quite get about the poorer whites of the not-too-distant American past — my own ethnic heritage — is this distinction between the born-again set and the moonshine crowd, some of whom were the same people. I have extended family in both camps. Part of me is in both camps!


That's because I'm basically a straddler, from straddler stock. I look at the situation this way: the evangelical spirit is kept alive in folks who in the Old West would have been gunslingers and card sharps and saloon girls, if not for having been saved by Jesus Christ. In more recent times they might have been moonshine runners, not just partakers like my sainted daddy. Being born again is what has put these folks, in their modern incarnations, firmly on the other side of the fault line of sin from their wilder doppelgangers. It is what keeps their energies and zest and zeal from turning rancid. It is what makes them sheriffs, not gunslingers.

As a straddler, I have one foot on each side of that fault line. I identify not with gunslingers and sheriffs, but with "peaceable townsfolk" who can secret a bottle of illicit liquor in their pantry and who believe in minding their own business about the equally minor transgressions of others.

I identify with the old sawbones doctor who may have a drinking problem. (I'm speaking metaphorically here, with all these booze references, since I myself consume no more than a beer with dinner.) Rather than toting a gun, though, he digs bullets out of those who do.

A literary hero of mine is Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, who trumpets no religion but bears malice toward none and charity for all, the way Jesus did.

It is possible to be upstanding as a straddler — like Atticus was and I would like to be — but it is apparently not possible to be an evangelical. I am not able to be a trumpeter of religion. Such a trumpeting of righteous fervor makes no sense to a straddler, who knows the other side of the fault line to be but one tiny hop away.

Which has the curious side effect of making the straddler suspicious of those who find socioeconomic aspiration and religious inspiration to go so easily together. Sorry, Chris and Dee. Sorry, all ye evangelicals of this land.

Beyond Enchantment: A Spirit of Compassion

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

I focus once again on Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (available used from Amazon or from Alibris). The more I read it (or, actually, re-read it) the more convinced I become that King puts his finger on the true pulse of what a mature Christian life is all about. Specifically, it is about compassion.

I have talked in earlier posts about the idea of the unavailability of perfect justice in this world, taken as a cornerstone of Christian understanding. I found I was having a hard time pinning down exactly what I mean by justice ... or, rather, by injustice. It gradually dawns on me that my definition of injustice is this: anything that is capable of evoking our compassion.

It seems to me that most of us begin life pretty much blind to injustice ... except, of course, when we ourselves are its victim. Nor does real, human compassion exist as much more than a seed of potentiality within us. What causes that seed to germinate? King suggests an answer: we become "enchanted" by a verbal text, seek to exemplify it fully and to live by it perfectly, and eventually run aground on the sheer impossibility of ever doing so completely.

Then ensues a Dark Night of the Soul, followed by a Second Baptism. The First Baptism, that of Righteousness, is what happens when we take up the task of living strictly by a verbal rule or text. The Dark Night is what overtakes us when we find that such rules from on high — in Christian terms, the Word of God — cannot fully subdue either our sense-experience of this world or our impulses to do otherwise than obey rules. Only then are we ready for a Baptism of Fire and Spirit.

These are things spoken of in the Gospels and by Christian mystics down through the ages. But we hear very little about them from the pulpit today. A Second Baptism? Why, even the First Baptism tends to take place in infancy, in most churches, prior to the onset of mature experience. Not much commitment at that stage to living righteously, in accordance with a verbal text.

Yet there are in the Gospels the experiences of Two Baptisms. The second one, the Baptism of Fire and Spirit, corresponds to Jesus's threefold temptation in the desert by Satan, after his own First Baptism at the hands of John the Baptist. At that time Jesus had consented to live solely by his Father's word: Christians now call that body of text the Old Testament. A voice from Heaven had proclaimed, "This is my Son, in whom I am well pleased."

Yet Jesus would have to do more than live that Word. As Flesh, he would have to suffer and die. He would be the victim of such a colossal injustice that his death and resurrection would save us all. Extrapolating from what King says about this, one feels justified in imagining it could not have been possible had Jesus the Man not learned to get beyond the mere enchantment of the divine Word. He had to understand what it was like for us, in an unjust world, in which every verbal formula eventually stubs its toe on the hard rock of woe.

Compassion is only possible when we see that words and formulas alone don't bring full justice to this material world. Righteousness can be taught by rote. Compassion cannot. Perhaps paradoxically, the Christian answer to this difficult truth is not cynically to abandon all words and formulas and rotes, but to travel beyond them as a creature of Word and Spirit, of righteousness and compassion.