Lament for a Son

Nicholas Wolterstorff is a professor of philosophical theology at Yale Divinity School. In Lament for a Son, he reflects on the loss of his twenty-five year old son Eric, who died in a mountain climbing accident. Wolterstorff recalls fond memories of his son and the pain of his absence. Wolterstorff gives advice for those who want to comfort grieving friends and reflects on hope. The depth of reflection in this brief book has been helpful for me as I am living alongside people who are grieving. In our congregation, a mother recently lost her son. I plan to reread this book again and again. I would do a terrible injustice to this book if I merely described or summarized it. I would encourage any and all to read it; it’s brief but deep. The following are snippets from the book.

“Born on a snowy night in New Haven, he died twenty-five years later on a snowy slope in Kaisergebirger.”

 “He loved the mountains, loved them passionately…his love was his death.”

“We took him for granted. Perhaps we all take each other too much for granted. The routines of life distract us; our own pursuits make us oblivious; our anxieties and sorrows, unmindful. The beauties of the familiar go unremarked. We do not treasure each other enough.”

“It’s so wrong, so profoundly wrong, for a child to die before its parents. It’s hard enough to bury our parents. But that we expect.”

“Death is the great leveler, so our writers have always told us. Of course they are right. But they have neglected to mention the uniqueness of each death – the solitude of suffering which accompanies that uniqueness. We say, ‘I know how you are feeling.’ But we don’t.”

“I shall look at the world through tears. Perhaps I shall see things that dry-eyed I could not see.”

“There’s a hole in the world now. In the place where he was, there’s now just nothing. A center, like no other, of memory and hope and knowledge and affection which once inhabited this earth is now gone.”

“What do you say to someone who is suffering? Some people are gifted with words of wisdom. For such, one is profoundly grateful. There were many such for us. But not all are gifted in that way. Some blurted out strange, inept things. That’s OK too. Your words don’t have to be wise. The heart that speaks is heard more than words spoken.”

“The world looks different now. The pinks have become purple, the yellows brown. Mountains now wear crosses on their slopes.”

“For a long time I knew that God is not the impassive, unresponsive, unchanging being portrayed by classical theologians…but strangely his suffering I never saw. God is not only the God of the sufferers but the God who suffers. The pain and fallenness of humanity have entered into his heart. Through the prism of my tears I have seen a suffering God…Instead of explaining our suffering God shares it.”

“In the valley of suffering, despair and bitterness are brewed. But there also character is made. The valley of suffering is the vale of soul making…How do I receive my suffering as blessing while repulsing the obscene thought that God jiggled the mountain to make me better?”  

“Will I hear Eric say someday, really now I mean: ‘Hey Dad, I’m back.’ ‘But remember, I made all this, and raised my Son from the dead, so…’ OK. So goodbye Eric, goodbye, goodbye, until we see.”

Divine Wind and Dusty Culture

Not too long ago, a friend said to me, “That’s real cool that you’re getting a seminary education, even though I know the Holy Spirit is really our teacher.” I thought to myself, “Thanks for attempting both to pretend to compliment my efforts and to undermine them in one fell swoop.” That’s not what I said. I don’t really remember how I responded, and I have no intention of this little blog becoming an extended rant or a disburdening of stored up resentment or a thorough defense of theological education. However, such comments have caused me to think a bit about what it would mean and look like for the Spirit to speak to cultured creatures such as humans. What follows is a smattering of thoughts concerning the Spirit, culture, and (church) tradition as they intersect.

What it looks like for the Spirit to be our teacher takes form in ways that are intelligible to us, and therefore what it looks like for the Spirit to be our teacher takes form in ways that are dusty, dusty with our local dust. The Spirit contextualizes for our benefit. Put colloquially, God meets us where we are. But this complexifies the matter rather than simplifies it. Discerning the Spirit of God acting in our midst takes a lot of work not merely by individuals but by communities in dialogue with other communities.

Recently, I have been reading some bits about African peoples’ struggle to discern what the Christian gospel looks like for Africans in Africa in contrast with the Anglo gospel they received from modern missionary movements that disregarded African culture. Attempts now have been made to better understand the Christian gospel in African garb. In 1973 Manas Buthelezi, a Lutheran bishop in South Africa, explained,

“The Black Man must be enabled through the interpretation and application of the Gospel to realize that blackness, like whiteness, is a good natural face cream from God and not some cosmological curse. Here lies the contribution of Black theology’s methodological technique. Black Theology challenges established Christianity to engage in a dialogue with the black people who feel that somehow theology has not taken them into consideration. It cautions the preacher and minister to stop preaching ‘pie in the sky’ religion, but instead to come down and toil with the black man spiritually and existentially in the sweat and dust of daily life.”

In order to discern the Spirit’s voice speaking to us in and through our cultural foibles while recognizing our own theology as contextual theology (whether it be Latin American, Black, Womanist, Anglo-American, Anglo-European, Feminist, Minjung, Mujerista, etc.), we must dialogue with the communities of the past as well as the present being ever-open to conversion while maintaining serious commitment to whatever tradition we happen to belong.

It may be supposed with a vague sense of sophistication that we need not be committed to any particular (church) tradition. However, to ignore our own tradition is both presumptuous and naïve. I would suggest that refraining from being rooted concretely in a tradition sterilizes any particularity we may have in our voices. Without tradition we have only generic gesticulations that will make little if any contribution to ecumenical conversations; furthermore, inter-traditional dialogue and translation is impossible unless we acknowledge our own particular dialect. In order to speak and to listen well, we must locate ourselves in a particular tradition, lest we suppose that we can speak and listen with “language” that is not particular but is somehow a-cultural.

Moreover, unless we think the Spirit of God has been ever silent for the past two thousand years of the Church’s life, we would do well to listen to our friends who have lived as members of the listening community, listening ever attentively to the Word of God. Unless we think that God has been silent until speaking to us today, we would do well to listen for the Spirit’s voice that has spoken to our friends through the ages. I would agree with the Eastern Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas as he has asserted that the charismatic life constitutes, rather than being derived from, the church’s being (in Being as Communion). The very being of the Church through the ages evidences the workings of the Spirit. It then goes without saying that we should glean insights from the Church’s past in order to understand our present since the Church through history is the activity of the Spirit.

Having recognized our own dialects and affirmed the voice of the Spirit as the life of the Church through the ages, as we speak from a particular tradition in dialogue with traditions different from our own, we may very well find that the same divine wind that stirred in that house on Pentecost has stirred the dust of churches through the ages and continues to stir the dust around us today. However, our inattention to the past and refusal to be concretely rooted in a tradition may leave us feeling that God remains ever silent or that God has finally spoken authentically for the first time only to us today.

The Spirit has been speaking in the past, and because we are cultured creatures in order to hear the Spirit’s voice in the past we must identify our own cultural foibles in order to discern the Spirit’s voice speaking to those in the past according to whom we discern the Spirit’s voice today. This involves acknowledging discontinuities and identifying potential continuities.

I would like to thank friends who have caused me to reflect on various dimensions of theology’s task. Many questions have come to mind. Why in the world would I spend days, weeks, months, years, and even a lifetime studying the past in dialogue with the present? Why do I spend so much time with biblical languages? Why do I grapple with matters of moral discernment and holistic hermeneutics? Why do I stay up into the early hours of the morning and then rise early in order to study theologians from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and Latin America? Why do I get so excited and read insatiably? Because I believe that indeed the Spirit has been speaking and continues to do so. Because I believe that indeed the Spirit is our teacher and that our teacher speaks amidst our dusty culture.