Nine devotional innings in relief

A bullpen game pitched by my pride, my midlife crisis & my imposter syndrome

The first: utility player

When I checked in last month at the political theology conference, my worst fears were immediately realized. I wasn’t registered. The registrar apologized and searched, but my badge was nowhere. Then I happened on it: I had forgotten that I had registered as Bryce Tolpen, my pen name.

We laughed: I didn’t know who I was. And I had no business being there. I have no degrees in theology or political science. As it turned out—lovely people—it was all the same to them.

We citizens are generalists in a world of specialists. To rediscover democracy, we must lean into our imposter syndrome.

The second: intentional walk

No subtitle has earned an author more notoriety than Hannah Arendt’s A Report on the Banality of Evil. The criticism seems unfair. Arendt makes the same point about the Holocaust a dozen years earlier in The Origins of Totalitarianism, and nobody cares. My theory is we don’t read theory. But when she applies her theory to a specific mass murderer, and implicates not a monster but mass man, we pounce.

Here, in a nutshell from that earlier book, appears the incipient Eichmann in Jerusalem:

The philistine is the bourgeois isolated from his own class, the atomized individual who is produced by the breakdown of the bourgeois class itself. The mass man whom Himmler organized for the greatest mass crimes ever committed in history bore the features of the philistine rather than of the mob man, and was the bourgeois who in the midst of the ruins of his world worried about nothing so much as his private security, was ready to sacrifice everything—belief, honor, dignity—on the slightest provocation.¹

Himmler, in sum, recruited not criminals but the bourgeois, knowing they’d do anything for security. That security, Arendt says, involves not just financial stability but the routine of work:

For the ruthless machines of domination and extermination, the masses of co-ordinated philistines provided much better material and were capable of even greater crimes than so-called professional criminals, provided only that these crimes were well organized and assumed the appearance of routine jobs.²

Our work life trains us not to love the world.

At my recent high-school reunion, an old friend described his adjustment to retirement. It took him only a year, he said, to acclimate himself to irrelevance.

Me, too. But I’ve had the benefit of going through something like retirement once before. Half a lifetime ago, I quit my law career and almost lost my mind. Who was I when I wasn’t drafting pleadings and negotiating claims weekdays from 9 to 5? In Arendt’s terms, I was a bourgeois who by becoming a minister had also become a philistine, “the bourgeois isolated from his own class.”

So I got therapy for three years. During my first few sessions, though, I knew I could avoid working through all that darkness if I chose to get my relevance back. Would I have participated in genocide to get it? God, I hope not. But I might have come out of retirement just to prosecute my shadow self.

The third: sign stealing

Just as the nouveau Texan is all hat and no cattle, so also the nouveau patriot is all flag and no republic. But it was “to the republic, for which it stands” for which I stood each school-day morning, a form of government that pledges, first and foremost, to protect the res publica, the public “thing.” What’s a signifier without its object? And what becomes of us as representamen? “Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip?”³

The fourth: pine tar

In Arlington, Virginia, stickers and stones may yet break the bones of oppression.

Stumbling stones are being installed in sidewalks to mark where African Americans spent their lives enslaved in what’s now a Washington, D.C. suburb. And stumbling stickers are being stuck to sidewalks to mark where neighbors have recently been disappeared by ICE agents.

There’s something urgent about stickers, especially compared to stones. The comparison brings to mind Walter Benjamin’s distinction between brochures and books at the outset of his collection of feuilleton known as One-Way Street:

Significant literary effectiveness can come into being only in a strict alternation between action and writing; it must nurture the inconspicuous forms that fit its influence in active communities better than does the pretentious, universal gesture of the book—in leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards. Only this prompt language shows itself actively equal to the moment.⁴

Stumbling stickers and the brief liturgy that accompanies their placement are the minutemen of Arlington’s exacting moment.

The fifth: mound visit

The Quaker equivalent to the Lord’s supper is a business meeting.⁵

Both the Lord’s supper and a business meeting, of course, can be done perfunctorily. People may watch the clock. But both can be enriched by a sense of Presence. And both, when done with the right heart, can lead to inner transformation.⁶

For inner transformation to occur in a business meeting, according to a 1993 Quaker pamphlet, Friends shouldn’t try to reach consensus. Instead, they should wait for a sense of the meeting.

Three practices enhance Quaker business meetings and invite the collective inward Presence to lead the group to a sense of the meeting. The first is release, the patient, nonjudgmental listening to others’ pent-up emotions. The second is long focus. “. . . Ideas in competition shorten focal length,” says Barry Morely, the pamphlet’s author. Instead of contention and compromise, Friends “stand on an inward high place and look beyond the ideas being discussed.”⁷

The third enhancing practice is transition to Light. “. . . long focus brings us to the Source of resolution and clarity. It is in this Light that God’s voice is heard.”⁸

Of course, all of this can make for a long business meeting. When I first read this pamphlet, I was also reading Francesca Polletta’s book Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements. She describes how the American pacifists active before World War II put in the time to work things out among themselves. The pacifists used the Quaker sense of the meeting to resolve “tensions between the absolutism of personal conscience and the demands of concerted group action.”⁹

Perhaps public freedom—and personal transformation, too—really is an endless meeting.

The sixth: warning track

Behold, those who insist on literal readings live in king’s houses. If you enter, watch your step. Nathan had to speak in a parable to King David. David himself had to speak as a madman before Achish, the king of Gath. Hamlet does the same before his uncle, the King of Denmark. It’s a rare king who doesn’t demand, as Prince Hal does of Falstaff, to “come, roundly, roundly.”

The entire New Testament circulated just outside of the Caesars’ grasp. To hear its range, we must leave our fine homes and go out into the wilderness to see.¹⁰

The seventh: double clutch

A recent college grad and I had coffee last month, and they used a big word. I wish I had interrupted them and asked them to tell me its meaning, but of course I was too proud. If I had done so, I would’ve always recalled the word as pleasantly as I blush.

The eighth: fan interference

This hour’s story is the story of the widow interrupting the story of Gehazi about the same widow to demand her house and land.

The king was questioning Gehazi, the servant of the man of God, about all the great things Elisha had done; and, as he was describing to the king how he had brought the dead to life, the selfsame woman began her appeal to the king for her house and land. “My lord king,” said Gehazi, “this is the woman, and this is her son whom Elisha restored to life.”¹¹

It’s the story of another king, King Ahasuerus of Persia, who couldn’t sleep, so he had his servants read to him from the chronicles. He learned from the chronicles that Mordecai had saved his life. As they read to the king, Mordecai was outside the king’s gate in sackcloth and ashes, mourning the king’s edict to kill the Jews, and Haman was walking in to ask the king to kill Mordecai first.¹²

The past now is more than prologue; it’s present. This hour is the hour when the men of Nineveh and the queen of the south will rise up,¹³ when many of the bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep will rise and enter our cities to be seen by many.¹⁴ No story is safe.

We are those “upon whom the ends of the ages have come,”¹⁵ and we just want a little distraction, a little peace. But what gives us peace demands justice.

The ninth: pitch framing

One model for a diverse, republican polity is what historian Richard White calls the Middle Ground, the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Great Lakes region over which neither the Algonquians nor the French who lived there could impose their will.

Each side operated there consistently with its own worldview, but each side had to speak to the other in terms of the other’s worldview. In these interactions, any congruences were precious.¹⁶

One important congruence was the concept of a father. In their relationship with each other, the French wanted to be the fathers, and the Algonquians wanted to be the children. This isn’t surprising, given the two sides’ different conceptions of fathers:

The French were quite at home with such patriarchal formulations and attached quite specific meanings to them. For them all authority was patriarchal, from God the Father, to the king (the father of his people), to the father in his home. Fathers commanded; sons obeyed. The Ottawas understood the relationship somewhat differently. A father was kind, generous, and protecting. A child owed a father respect, but a father could not compel obedience.¹⁷

When the relationship between the Algonquians and the French would fray, it was usually because either the Algonquians had been “disobedient” or the French had been ungenerous or unsparing. Each side would remonstrate with the other by trying to make the other’s concept of a father more like its own.

I wonder if something like this divergence in the concept of a father explains some of the New Testament’s divergent uses of the word “father.” Paul, for instance, laments the surplus number of tutors in the Corinthian congregations, pointing out that he is something more important—their father.¹⁸ Jesus, however, tells his disciples not to call anyone “father”:

“Do not call any man on earth ‘father,’ for you have one Father, and he is in heaven. Nor must you be called ‘teacher’; you have one Teacher, the Messiah.”¹⁹

Paul seems to refer to something like the Algonquian sense of a father, while Jesus seems to warn against something like the French sense of a father.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus refers to his Father in heaven at almost every turn. It isn’t until after Jesus’ resurrection, though, that he pointedly includes his disciples as children of God in the same sense:

“But go to my brothers, and tell them that I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”²⁰

Jesus’ resurrection makes him a big brother; when he rises from the dead, he becomes “the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.”²¹ These verses seem to lay the foundation for Jesus’ assemblies made up of people from many nations, assemblies characterized by equality and love.

What’s the greater of the two models for a diverse, republican polity found in the Middle Ground? The cultural norms developed by gradual mutual understanding among disparate peoples or the Algonquians’ political freedom and lack of subordination associated with their concept of a father? Maybe, from a republican standpoint, between these two models some congruency exists.

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Thanks for reading (or listening)! Feel free to comment below on any or all of the nine innings that make up this bullpen post. — Bryce

The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

1. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, A Harvest Book (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1994), 338.

2. Arendt, 337.

3. John 14:8-9 KJV.

4. Benjamin, One-Way Street, 61.

5. “Whether we wish to admit it or not, the sense of the meeting is a Quaker equivalent of Communion.” Barry Morley, Beyond Consensus: Salvaging Sense of the Meeting, Pendle Hill Pamphlet 307 (Pendle Hill, 1993), 24.

6. Morley, 24-25.

7. Morley, 17-19.

8. Morley, 19.

9. Francesca Polletta, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements (University of Chicago press, 2002), 49.

10. “Warning track” is a meditation on Matthew 11:7-8.

11. 2 Kings 8:4-5 REB.

12. Esther 4:3; 5:9-6:5.

13. Matthew 12:38-43.

14. Matthew 27:52-53.

15. 1 Corinthians 10:11 NNAS.

16. “In attempting such persuasion people quite naturally sought out congruences, either perceived or actual, between the two cultures. The congruences arrived at often seemed – and, indeed, were – results of misunderstandings or accidents. Indeed, to later observers the interpretations offered by members of one society for the practices of another can appear ludicrous. This, however, does not matter. Any congruence, no matter how tenuous, can be put to work and can take on a life of its own if it is accepted by both sides.” Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815, 20th anniversary ed, Studies in North American Indian History (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 52-53.

17. White, 84.

18. 1 Corinthians 4:15.

19. Matthew 23:9-10 REB.

20. John 20:17 REB.

21. Romans 8:29. See also Colossians 1:18 and Acts 13:33.