Insights: The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary, Fall 2023

Honoring Professor David White

Insights

The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary

FALL 2023

White • Mahan • Banda • Tibis Hooker • Frost • Browning • Cardona • Blier 1

Insights

The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary

Fall 2023

Volume 139

Number 1

Editor: William Greenway Editorial Board: Eric Wall, Randal Whittington, and Melissa Wigington The Faculty of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary Margaret Aymer Patricia Bonilla Rodney A. Caruthers II Gregory L. Cuéllar Ángel J. Gallardo William Greenway Carolyn Browning Helsel Philip Browning Helsel José R. Irizarry David H. Jensen Donghyun Jeong

Bobbi Kaye Jones Timothy D. Lincoln Jennifer L. Lord Song-Mi Suzie Park Cynthia L. Rigby Crystal Silva-McCormick Asante U. Todd Eric Wall Melissa Wiginton Andrew Zirschky

Insights: The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary is published two times each year by Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, 100 East 27th Street, Austin, TX 78705-5797. e-mail: wgreenway@austinseminary.edu Web site: austinseminary.edu

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Some previous issues of Insights: The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary, are available on microfilm through University Microfilms International, 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106 (16 mm microfilm, 105 mm microfiche, and article copies are available). Insights is indexed in Religion Index One: Periodicals, Index to Book Reviews in Religion, Religion Indexes: RIO/RIT/IBRR 1975- on CD-ROM, Religious & Theological Abstracts, url:www.rtabstracts.org & email:admin@rtabstracts.org, and the ATA Religion Database on CD-ROM, published by the American Theological Library Association, 300 S. Wacker Dr., Suite 2100, Chicago, IL 60606-6701; telephone: 312-454-5100; e-mail: atla@atla.com; web site: www.atla.com; ISSN 1056-0548.

COVER: “St. John Reconsiders Modern Epistemology” by James B. Janknegt: oil on canvas (60 x 48") ©1995. See more of the artist’s work here: https://www.bcartfarm.com/

Contents 3 Introduction José R. Irizarry

Honoring Professor David White 4

Habitations of Spirit: Remediating Excarnation

by David F. White

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An Interview with David White with William Greenway

15

Embedded Agents of the Holy Spirit

by Brian Mahan

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Substantiality of the Spirit

by Devison T. Banda

23

Care Amidst Discrimination

by Van Cliburn Tibis

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Reminiscences

by Paul Hooker, Chuck Frost, Sharolyn Browning, Matt Cardona

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On Beauty and Beer, Dutch Masters and Dogs

by Helen Blier

Honoring Professor David White

Dr. David Franklin White

The C. Ellis and Nancy Gribble Nelson Professor of Christian Education 2005-2023

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Introduction

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t is only befitting that a volume of Insights dedicated to David C. White, the C. Ellis and Nancy Gribble Nelson Professor Emeritus of Christian Education at Austin Seminary, assembles reflections about the “Spirit.” This interest is not only a prolongation of David’s research on theological aesthetics, a Spirit-led transformation of quotidian experience into a subtle, yet revealing, expression of divine beauty, but a recognition of a spiritual source which deliberately informs his teaching, preaching, and overall approach to ministerial practices. Because of that recognition, David’s classroom turns into sacred space where learners are invited “to take off their shoes” as they wait to be encountered by unprecedented moments of wisdom and wonder. This is attested by former students contributing to this issue, who jointly argue how they have gained deeper spiritual insight when immersed in David’s pedagogy of enchantment.

I met David several years ago when I served as the president of the Religious Education Association at one of the annual conferences of the guild. David’s presence was noticeable for uncharacteristic reasons. Against the loquacious and selfindulgent atmosphere that characterizes many scholarly gatherings, David will drive attention by being the person sitting in the corner, observing the participants’ exchanges, listening quietly to the flow of ideas, waiting for the moment to be approached. Little did I know at that time he was silently attending to that space of human interaction looking for that epiphanic instant when spiritual awareness could fight itself out of a sea of theoretical and philosophical disquisitions. Perhaps because David is convinced­—like Amos Wilder in his Theopoetics—that religious teaching must overcome its addiction to the discursive and prosaic and prioritize imaginative encounters with divine disclosure.

Throughout his career as both a minister and as a teaching scholar, David has encouraged the faithful, especially the young, to form ever-deepening relationships with God and with the whole of creation. As a youth minister at heart, David retains his love for music, outdoor activities, creative play, and storytelling. It makes sense, for it is in the vitality of the young who are awakening to a self that is not yet determined or rigidly structured, where the Spirit resists excarnation. As Brian Mahan reminds us in his article using a quote by Saint Augustine, “God is younger than all else,” infusing new life through a Holy Spirit that Aquinas identifies with the “youthfulness of the saints.”

For centuries, writings on theological pneumatology have elucidated how pliable the description of the third person of the Trinity can be. Whether the Spirit is a strong liberating force as D. T. Banda argues in his analysis of African pneumatology, or a gentle caring upholder of diasporic Filipino healthcare workers as suggested by Van Cliburn Tibus, its reality is experienced as a gift that invigorates our lives and preserves our hopes. David White describes it better reminding us that “it is the fire that burns at the center of our worlds.” For that important reminder we will be forever grateful.

José R. Irizarry President, Austin Seminary 3

Habitations of Spirit: Remediating Excarnation David F. White

O

ne day in 1942, two buses of Vichy French police pulled into Le Chambon, a little village in southern France, to round up Jews who were given refuge there. The police captain rousted everyone into the village square and warned the Protestant pastor, Andre Trocme, “that if he did not give up the names of the Jews the village had been sheltering, he and his fellow pastor, as well as the families who had been caring for the Jews, would be arrested.” The pastor refused, and after a thorough and frightening search, the police could find only one Jew. They loaded him into an otherwise empty bus. Before they drove off, “a thirteenyear-old boy, the son of the pastor, passed a piece of his precious chocolate through the window to the prisoner, while twenty gendarmes who were guarding the lone prisoner watched. Then the rest of the villagers began passing their little gifts through the window until there were gifts all around him—most of them food in those hungry days of the German occupation of France.”1 Christian educator Craig Dykstra relates this story from Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed by Philip Hallie in his own book, Growing in the Life of Faith, because he deems it singularly important for Christian educators. Haille’s book is subtitled, How Goodness Happened There. But he never quite explains these people and their goodness—what we might think of as an embodied habitation of the Spirit—a vital point which Dykstra addresses. During World War II the Chambonais gave protection, shelter, and food to approximately 5,000 Jews fleeing the Nazis. This community’s acts of kindness, done at great risk and at considerable cost, were remarkable.

But, Dykstra makes clear, random they were not. Many years of liturgical and tactile practices trained them to show hospitality to friends and strangers. In worship

David White, The C. Ellis and Nancy Gribble Nelson Professor Emeritus of Christian Education, retired in 2023 following almost twenty years teaching on the Austin Seminary faculty. He is the author of several books including Tending the Fire that Burns at the Center of the World: Beauty and the Art of Christian Formation (2022) and Joy: A Guide for Youth Ministry (Wesley’s Foundery Books, 2020).

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White they learned stories, images, and gestures that created an open space in their hearts for hospitable acts. They were trained in habits of generosity by ordinary practices of welcoming each other into their homes and providing shelter for travelers and food for the sick. These gestures of worship and practice prepared the Chambonais to answer that knock at their door with steely resolve and offers of gifts. As Dykstra comments, “In the midst of their practice, the people of Le Chambon found that it was not really their practice. It was the practice of Another.”2 Worship and Christian practices turn out not to be mere dutiful efforts, but places in the contours of communal life where a habitation of the Spirit is able to occur.

As Karl Barth recognized, “the Christian life is a spiritual one, that is, a life which in its distinctiveness is, from first to last, conditioned and determined by that special movement and act of God in the work of the Holy Spirit.”3 Today, it has become common to set “empty rituals” in opposition to the supposed “vibrancy of the spontaneity of the Spirit,” as if these were inherently contradictory. But this is largely a false dichotomy for, as in Le Chambon, tactile practices of liturgy may cultivate habitations of the Spirit. In our current context this can sound odd, but the significance of an incarnate spirituality may be best grasped when contrasted to our culture’s predominant tendencies of “excarnation,”4 a de-emphasis and distortion of the relation of our body to matter. This article explores the concept of “excarnation” as developed in Charles Taylor’s genealogy of secular modernity,5 William Cavanaugh’s critique of neoliberalism,6 and Albert Borgmann’s analysis of technology.7

Excarnation In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor contrasts the premodern self, porous to an animated creation, over against the modern self, buffered from the cosmos by mental effort, by ratiocination.8 In modernity, meaning-making is primarily a mental achievement instead of a felt sense of a living cosmos. In Taylor’s account, the premodern world constitutes an essentially spiritual reality, alive not only with danger and risk, but also with wisdom and grace. The modern “immanent frame” closes in upon itself and evacuates transcendence, undergoing a kind of excarnation, “a transfer out of embodied, ‘enfleshed’ forms of religious life, to those which are more ‘in the head.’”9 Taylor attributes excarnation to various sources, including Descartes’s reduction of the human self to the cogito (a thinking thing) and the Protestant Reformation’s emphasis on scripture and theological reasoning—in this way the Reformation itself contributed to a loss of spiritual connection. Because it has come at the price of a loss of a felt connection to the cosmos, modern rationality, for all its goods, is a source of excarnation.

Another source of excarnation is neoliberalism, which champions market-oriented policies such as eliminating price controls, deregulating capital markets, lowering trade barriers, and reducing, through privatization and austerity, state safeguards for vulnerable populations. By rendering profit and consumption as proper human ends, neoliberalism has weakened traditions that value the intrinsic goods 5

Habitations of the Spirit of the material world. Neoliberalism came to the fore in the 1980s as an economic model, but it quickly became a determinative cultural force and is now orthodoxy, not only for businesses, economists, and politicians, but also for ordinary families and individuals, many of whom have no idea of neoliberalism as a theory even though they have been conditioned to live by its tenets. Neoliberalism emphasizes material goods but devalues matter by reducing all material goods to commodities, obscuring the natural world, ignoring and exploiting laborers, and facilitating vast inequities in wealth. Neoliberalism excarnates by evacuating material things of their mystery, goodness, and spiritual profundity, diminishing the meaning, joy, and gratitude that should flow from our connections to material things.

William Cavanaugh suggests that neoliberalism—its mythology, transvaluation of the material world, and relations—constitutes an idolatrous spirituality.10 According to Cavanaugh, we imagine that magic was a primary feature of the ancient world, while today we are concerned with hard facts and realities. Still, neoliberalism has its own aura of magic—e.g., a confidence in an invisible hand of the market (magical, wise, and good) or the magical aura advertising imbues into commodities (which are purportedly able to make us happy and content). With JeanLuc Marion, Cavanaugh observes that commodities function as idols that arrest our gaze and mirror to us our own egos, as contrasted with icons that draw our gaze into the depths of the infinite made visible in the material.11 Albert Borgmann suggests a third source of excarnation, technology. Borgmann distinguishes between focal “things” and technological “devices.” A focal “thing is inseparable from its context, namely its world, and from our commerce with the thing and its world, namely, engagement.”12 Because “things” are characterized by our engagement with them, they produce more than one good. For example, a wood-burning stove produces a commodity, heat, but it also comprises its own world of engagement. The stove requires skills for correct use—knowing how to get firewood and learning which kinds of wood burn best and how properly to build and stoke the fire. These practices bring one into interaction with natural things and involve extended human interaction. Since the stove is often in a central living space, it can encourage gathering and order the pattern of life in the home.

Its maintenance can order family chores, the timing of meals, and the gathering of family and friends. The more we reflect on the “world” of the wood-burning stove, the more we see it offers far more than economic value, since it stimulates a web of interpersonal interactions that order rich relations in daily life.

On the other hand, a thing may provide a particular commodity and cut us off from communion. Borgmann says such devices rob us of “focal practices”—routine but rich ways in which we engage the world in our daily lives. Focal practices, such as maintaining a stove, preparing nightly meals, or even carpooling to work, even if they are tedious, provide consistent, multivalent patterns of engagement with the world. Certain technological devices provide a consistent source of disengagement with living others and the world around us. Tragically, as Staffan Linder explains, when goods are reduced to commodities which do not provoke social engagement or connection with the natural world, the paradoxical result is a decreased capacity 6

White for enjoyment.13 If the Western world has suffered a dramatic excarnation in which we are buffered from a felt relationship with creation, distracted by neoliberalism’s commodity fetish from creation’s ordinary goodness and profundity, and alienated by technological devices from manifold engagements and organic wisdom, how might the Christian tradition involve a spirituality that restores joyful engagement with God’s world? Building upon Dykstra’s notion of practices and drawing from James Smith’s analysis of worship’s materiality, I will suggest an understanding of Christian worship and practice that constitutes a spirituality mediated by materials, bodies, and senses capable of remediating the excarnations of modernity.

Incarnating Spirituality What is the church’s response to the excarnating forces of secularism, neoliberalism, and technology? According to Smith, the Christian tradition points to liturgy as a “hearts and minds” strategy that “trains us as disciples precisely by putting our bodies through a regimen of repeated practices that get hold of our heart and ‘aim’ our love toward the kingdom of God.”14 Christian faith involves our kinesthetic senses, instantiated by worship’s gestures, images, and narratives, a kind of knowhow by feel for what faith demands. He observes: Being a disciple of Jesus is not primarily a matter of getting the right ideas and doctrines and beliefs into your head in order to guarantee proper behavior; rather, it’s a matter of being the kind of person who loves rightly— who loves God and neighbor and is oriented to the world by the primacy of that love … We are made to be such people by our immersion in the material practices of Christian worship.15 The gestures of Christian worship are akin to children bicycling in their neighborhoods, who absorb a sense of its geography into their bones with each pedal stroke.

Smith states, “Because our hearts are oriented primarily by desire, by what we love, and because those desires are shaped and molded by the habit-forming practices in which we participate, it is the rituals and practices … that shape our imaginations and how we orient ourselves to the world.”16 Smith considers humans as homo liturgicus, innately liturgical and doxological beings. So, culture is replete with its own liturgies, involving shopping malls, football stadiums, college campuses, social media, and the like, all of which demand patterned gestures and narratives that recruit our desires and habits. Smith draws from the work of Pierre Bordieu, who describes “pedagogies of insignificance” as occasions in which micro-practices instill entire cosmologies.17 A cultural anthropologist, Bourdieu discovered that a difficulty in cultural research resulted from the fact that he couldn’t rely on what was available at the level of people’s consciousness.

Instead, he learned to read their practices. He realized that within cultures there are micro-practices—as for example, when a child is taught to “sit up straight” or to “hold your knife in your right hand”—that instill a whole cosmology.18 These seemingly insignificant things constitute a covert pedagogy. In posture and cutlery, a whole way of life is taught.

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Habitations of the Spirit Likewise, worship’s formation, extorted by its micro-practices, happens largely beneath our conscious awareness, and its embodied know-how is not easily articulated in words or concepts. According to Smith: [I]n the same way that the “understanding” embedded in the paintings in the Sistine Chapel is not just a substitute for a treatise on Pauline theology, or vice versa … the distillation of the Christian worldview in terms of creation-fall-redemption-and-consummation can never adequately grasp what is understood when we participate in communion and eat the body of Christ, broken for the renewal of a broken world … The rhythms and rituals of Christian worship are not the “expression of” a Christian worldview, but are themselves an “understanding” implicit in practice—an understanding that cannot be had apart from the practices.19

Narrative, the Heart’s Milk According to Smith, “A liturgical anthropology is rooted in both a kinaesthetics and a poetics—an appreciation for the “bodily basis of meaning” (kinaesthetics) and a recognition that it is precisely this bodily comportment that primes us to be oriented by story, by the imagination (poetics).”20 Maurice Merleau-Ponty concludes “that our body is comparable to a work of art. It is a nexus of living meanings.”21 The truth of a story is understood on the register of praktognosia—a kind of practical wisdom we absorb in the betweenness of our incarnate existence.

Smith states, “The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing—which is just to say that the heart has a story to tell and loves to hear one told. The heart drinks up narrative like it’s mother’s milk.”22 The shape of our character is determined by the stories that captivate us by narrating a “good life” complete with values, behaviors, and authorized versions of self. Smith asserts, Liturgy is the shorthand term for those rituals that are loaded with a story about who and whose we are, inscribing in us a habitus by marshaling our aesthetic nature. Liturgies are “cunning” pedagogies that extort what is essential while seeming to demand the insignificant, precisely because they are stories that are told by—and told upon—our bodies, thereby embedding themselves in our imagination, becoming part of the background that determines how we perceive the world. Liturgies are those social practices that capture our imaginations by becoming the stories we tell ourselves in order to live.23 In Christian worship, the narrative of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ infuses each physical gesture—passing the peace, prayer, eating at table, baptism, song—in their liturgical enactment. Worship does not only tell a story, it illumines a tradition, a communal habitus into which we are absorbed that now orients our disposition to the world. Thus, the social body of the church recruits my body through the most mundane means: through bodily postures, repeated words, ritualized cadences that effectively “deposit” an affective orientation within.

Christian practices stand in continuity as “liturgy beyond the liturgy.” As Craig Dykstra and Dorothy Bass remind us, Christian faith is lived in a rhythm of prac8

White tice, such as honoring the body, hospitality, household economics, saying “yes” and saying “no,” keeping sabbath, testimony, discernment, shaping communities, forgiveness, healing, dying well, and singing our lives. In these and other practices the gestures of liturgy are elaborated and extended in concrete historical contexts. In Christian liturgy and practices, forms of life defined by them represent possibilities for knowing ourselves, God, and the world, enlarging and deepening our spiritual senses.

Conclusion In the face of the powerful forces of excarnation, I am striving to highlight an understanding of Christian spirituality that emphasizes a spiritual role for things which, when mediated by liturgies and focal practices, can serve as habitations of the Spirit. This understanding affirms that our concrete and habitual practices constitute a material home in which the Spirit can bear witness as an icon of God, sustain and encourage human virtue, and contribute to the world’s healing.

Just as goods procured through focal practices are inseparable from the practices themselves, so the grace of liturgical action and Christian practice cannot be reduced to non-material spiritual impulses isolated from the concrete action of ministers and communities. As focal practices, liturgical rituals demand “manifold engagement” and thereby draw us into a richly varied encounter with the “other world” of worship (the actual shape or architecture, the sights and sounds of the worship space). The ritual postures and gestures (standing or kneeling, prayer posture, kiss of peace) and sacred symbols (water, oil, bread, wine) concretely connect us to the assembly of the koinonia and to our own bodiliness. Moreover, these Christian practices generate “worlds” of manifold engagement—with stories, gestures, demands, and imaginaries—which create space in our hearts to open doors and offer gestures of greeting, food, shelter, and safety. Such Christian worship and practices can help to address our culture’s idolatry and restore the fragmentation of our attention with a “long, loving look at the real.”24 Modern excarnating trends which inhibit manifold engagement in the world and foster egoistic idolatry can be remediated by Christian worship and practices and put the lie to secularity’s abstractions, neoliberalism’s idolatry of individualism, commodification, and profit, and technology’s distractions.25 While Christian faith at its best has always included a role for creativity, we must not forget traditional practices that constitute a habitus for virtue. In a world grown increasingly excarnate, we are tempted to cater wholesale to impulses of convenience or novelty, but to do so would risk evacuating the friction of liturgies and practices which sustain habitations of the Spirit and bring the joy and wisdom of manifold encounters with the created world and its people. A slow and incremental, but vital, part of pastoral work involves learning and teaching the church to live rhythms of Christian liturgy and practice. This not only brings—but powerfully embodies—the good news of the gospel in an excarnated world that hungers for tangible expressions of love.26

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Habitations of the Spirit NOTES 1. Philip Haillie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 3; As told by Craig Dykstra in Growing in the Life of Faith: Education and Christian Practices (Louisville: Geneva Press, 1999), 56.

2. Growing in the Life of Faith, 64.

3. Karl Barth, The Christian Life (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017), 139.

4. Charles Taylor’s defines excarnation as “… a transfer out of embodied, ‘enfleshed’ forms of religious life to those which are more ‘in the head’” (554, A Secular Age). Excarnation involves a shift away from embodied ways of knowing—kinesthetic, aesthetic, affective, practical—and toward a reduction of meaning to pure reason or mental production.”

5. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).

6. See William Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008).

7. Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984).

8. A Secular Age, 32-35.

9. A Secular Age, 554.

10. Being Consumed, 50.

11. William Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 65.

12. Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, 41.

13. See Staffan Linder, The Harried Leisure Class (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970).

14. James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009), 33.

15. Desiring, 32.

16. Desiring, 25.

17. James K. A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2013), 138.

18. Imagining, 98.

19. Desiring, 69-70.

20. Imagining, 29.

21. Merleau Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge, 2007), 175.

22. Imagining, 38.

23. Imagining, 138,139.

24. Walter Burghardt, “Contemplation: A Long Loving Look at the Real” in: George W. Traub, An Ignatian Spirituality Reader (Chicago, IL: Loyola Press, 2008) pp. 89-98.

25. A critical reader may consider these liturgical re-enchantments as hopelessly naïve, luddite, or obscurantist. This article is not so much a rant against modern reason, commerce, or technology as a reminder of the stakes of these various forms of excarnation and the promise of Christian liturgy. We should always extend grace to an exhausted mother who microwaves a meal so she can have time to read a book at her child’s bedtime.

26. See Hans urs Von Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible, translated by D. C. Schindler (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2004).

27. Love Alone is Credible.

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Interview

Insights Editor William Greenway Interviews

David F. White First, what is a habitation of Spirit?

“Habitations of Spirit” point to the fact that the Spirit can be experienced in relation to material practices as home or habitat. The Spirit cannot be manipulated or exhausted by these practices, but is mediated by them. These practices have their roots in the church’s experience, but they are fluid and should be mediated anew in different contexts.

Christian educator Jerome Berryman uses “bounded freedom” to speak of the way Christian liturgy and practices have structured activities and gestures but also always surpass themselves, evoking new meaning and wonder. Another Christian educator, Maria Harris, talks about the ways in which we create the forms and then they, in turn, shape us in new and unexpected ways and yield a knowledge that can’t be attained apart from these practices.

I’m a (very) amateur jazz guitarist, and something like this happens in jazz performance. Jazz begins with chord structure and melody, but then it plays with that melody, experiments with it. This is the freedom of jazz, but it is not unbounded freedom. All of these creative moves remain faithful to the melody even as they elaborate upon it, so we come to know the melody in a new and more comprehensive way. One of my favorite jazz guitarists, Pat Matheny, says there is something mysterious and unintended in improvisation when the musician’s consciousness is totally absorbed in the music. In such ecstatic moments of improvisation, boundaries are exceeded and something new is expressed. Musicians often look back surprised when they hear their own recordings. So, improvisation gives expression to something that we might call Spirit.

Christian liturgy and practices provide structure like a jazz melody that invites elaboration and improvisation. The Spirit is mediated by these material forms and points to new ways of meaning and wonder. In these ways Christian liturgy and practices provoke habitations of Spirit.

What concerns led you to focus this essay on habitations of the Spirit?

We’re living in a historical moment where it seems any meaningful notion of spirituality has been obscured by Christians on the right and the left. Too often Christians on the right adhere to doctrine or systematized thought while Christians on the left adhere to their own sort of moralisms. Both sides not only oppose the ideology of the other but also tend to obscure the dynamic core of the Christian faith, which is spirituality. This way of thinking makes dogma determinative. In my view 11

Interview it’s not fixed or static ideologies or grammars that makes Christian faith true, good, or beautiful, it is this mysterious something, the Spirit, that gives expression to the forms. We risk a kind of idolatry when we do not embrace a faith that is more alive, more creative. That prompts me to think about spirituality.

Are you naming some risks in Christian liturgy and practice?

Yes, the risk is that they get flattened by familiarity that only reflects to us our own egos and obscures what is more dynamic and alive. We must improvise new forms without rejecting the melody of the gospel or the gift of past practices, for they provide a basis for the church’s improvisation. Such dynamism brings the church alive and makes it beautiful. The intransigent rigidity of both the right and the left is flattening, sometimes leading us to render each other as unmitigated enemies.

But none of us is finally reducible to our ideologies or abstracted identities, for we are created in God’s lively image. Good liturgy and practice remain open to what is contextually appropriate while never forgetting the core memory of grace and love and forgiveness which involves us loving even our enemies.

You begin with a very dramatic story of the citizens of the French village of Le Chambon, who hid Jews during the Nazi occupation at considerable risk to themselves. How does that relate to habitations of the Spirit?

Christian educator Craig Dykstra says that the heroism of the Chambonais was not a random act of kindness, but was cultivated by their liturgies and everyday practices of hospitality. Their hospitality began with learning a melody which was elaborated in their lived practices in their community as they welcomed travelers in need. And thus they came to be disposed to improvise upon the melody by opening their doors to Jews fleeing the Nazis.

You speak of liturgy and practices, and I suspect by practices you mean, in part, what John Wesley referred to as works of mercy, such as feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, engaging in struggles for justice …

Yes, Wesley is trying to name practices like works of mercy as a subset of practices or means of grace, but which are not just the fruit of faith, they are ways we meet God and are formed in Christian faith. So, we need to teach not just the rhythms of liturgy, but the rhythms of such practices that elaborate the liturgy, what the theologian Dan Saliers calls the “liturgy beyond the liturgy.” In this way we recognize a continuity between the life of worship, the life of thought, and the life of lived practice. Many churches today are unable to maintain this continuity between worship and life in the world because of what I am calling “excarnation.” With “excarnation” I mean to name ways in which our daily activities have been colonized by dynamics that remove us from material embodiment in which the Spirit is mediated.

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Interview You name three forces of excarnation: secularism, neoliberalism, and technology …

Yes, Charles Taylor characterizes secularization in part in terms of a fundamental shift in our way of experiencing reality. Premodern folks experienced themselves as porous to spiritual realities which suffuse creation, open to a world in which everything was alive with meaning and mystery. But now we have a modern understanding of ourselves as isolated, thinking things essentially separated from the world that we seek to master. Taylor says this turns us into “buffered selves,” mental agents in a disenchanted, material world. In his terminology, this is a form of excarnation. Of course, some of what we moved away from was oppressive superstition, and that should be affirmed, but Taylor thinks it is not good that we’ve lost a felt sense of interconnection with a world alive with Spirit and meaning.

William Cavanaugh thinks neoliberalism exacerbates our excarnation. Neoliberalism is an economic political vision in which production of wealth is the chief human end, and the building of wealth and consumption of the things of this world is idealized as the greatest good. The tradition of neoliberalism, which is so powerful today across the world, obscures the goods emphasized by religious traditions, such as love of God and neighbor and care for the world. Cavanaugh wants Christians to lament, name, and resist the excarnation sparked by neoliberalism.

Albert Borgmann focuses upon the ways in which technological devices excarnate us from what he calls “focal practices,” by which he means practices which engage us in concrete and intimate worlds of inter-relations. Consider a family having dinner at a table in contrast to a family having microwave dinners in front of the TV, or each member of the family eating their own meal in front of their own screen. All the steps of growing and selecting, preparing and cooking the meal, setting the table, eating and socializing together, cleaning up afterward constitute a whole world of interconnection with creation and one another, a world that focal practices cultivate but which can be obscured by technological devices. We gain access to volumes of information and “enjoy” a vast increase in speed at which we can get things done, but we lose the friction of working with things and with one another by which our knowledge of matter and bodies is deepened and virtue fostered.

Now, Borgmann is not against technology, and neither am I, but he is right in wanting us to be discerning about the ways in which technology can cause us to lose touch with the cosmos and its wisdom, not to mention certain virtues. I am thankful that when Covid hit there was technology like Zoom. Nonetheless, I think many of us had a sense that something was lost, and when we gathered together physically again, that something was restored—that “something” which was lost is what Borgmann is describing as the concrete, intimate “world” of focal practices with its myriad internal goods.

You’re saying that Christian worship, liturgies, and practices can help us to resist the excarnational forces of secularism, neoliberalism, and technology?

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Interview Yes, the gestures of worship, passing the peace, singing together, reciting prayers, coming to the Table: all of these are ways in which we, together, concretely embody a narrative of the world and our place in it before God. Christian liturgies and practices attend to matter with reverence and prompt us to live differently before the created world and people. Moreover, liturgies and practices don’t function on a purely intellectual level; they train our bodies, hearts, and imaginations, and extend beyond the sanctuary into the world, as we saw happen dramatically in the actions of the villagers of Le Chambon.

Now, I know it is usual these days to say that the church is not attentive enough to efforts on behalf of justice, and that is surely true in some cases, but I want to suggest that in other quarters the opposite is true. Too often churches don’t take worship seriously enough as a source for justice. I am troubled by congregations that minimize the significance of worship and normative tactile practices while they uncritically embrace social movements. Social movements have their own integrity that may or may not reflect the fullness of Christian shalom. I’m suggesting there are problems with both extremes, with churches who only take worship seriously but divorce it from the social witness of people, and with churches who only take seriously engaging in social action without the formation of worship and practice.

What concrete difference do you hope your essay will make?

We live in a time when for many people the idea of engaging in the Christian tradition with its practices is seen as a kind of affront to human freedom and authenticity. To be sure, some make Christian tradition into an idol, weaponizing rigid, received forms against anything that’s new and living. I urge us to celebrate both tradition and creativity, to respect the wisdom of the tradition and to be willing to adapt to new ways of bearing witness in new circumstances, to engage traditioned Christian liturgy like a jazz artist elaborates a familiar melody. I’m reminding us that a Spirit breathes through these material forms, that if we will engage creatively in liturgy and “liturgy beyond liturgy,” we will find ourselves enlivened by the true and living source of theology, ethics, and spirituality. I hope people who have been wounded by modern forces of excarnation will be inspired to creatively engage in these practices and will find themselves healed in communions enlivened by habitations of the Spirit. v

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Embedded Agents of the Holy Spirit Brian J. Mahan

E

leazar was, as David White is, a scholar and teacher of distinction. Eleazar was also, as David is, retired. In fact, when we first hear of Eleazar, he is ninety years old.

I’m not speaking of the well-connected Eleazar—son of Aaron, nephew of Moses, and second High Priest of Israel—but of Eleazar the youth minister, relegated, it is hardly surprising to anyone engaged in youth ministry, to the Apocrypha, to II Maccabees 6:18–31 to be precise.

It is also noteworthy that Eleazar died a martyr’s death and, what’s more, is to my knowledge the only martyr flogged to death after attending a posh dinner party to which he had been invited as an honored guest.

Eleazar chose martyrdom rather than to scandalize the Jewish youth in his charge, sealing his fate by spitting out the pork his gentile hosts had served him.

This offense against the king was also a singularly effective pedagogical gesture of faith and defiance, demonstrating to his beloved students the nullity of the cultural and culinary blandishments of Hellenistic culture in comparison to the surpassing dignity of their covenantal birthright.

Eleazar thus established himself as an exemplary witness to the Spirit in the world, what I would like to call, for purposes of this brief reflection, an embedded agent of the Holy Spirit.

Unlike Eleazar, some embedded agents get the call early. This was the case with Robert Gould Shaw, the young, privileged, white, Civil War colonel who led the first Black regiment, the Massachusetts 54th, into battle and forfeited his life doing so.

Brian Mahan is a member of the residential community of Green

Bough House of Prayer near Adrian, Georgia. He is the former director of religious education at Candler School of Theology. The author of Forgetting Ourselves on Purpose: Vocation and the Ethics of Ambition (Jossey-Bass, 2010), he is completing a spiritual memoir tentatively titled Panicky Pilgrim’s Culinary Cosmology: A Travelogue.

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Honoring Professor David White Like Eleazar, Shaw was a leader of young men, in his case, a placeholder in an army devoid of Black officers, who nonetheless helped young Black soldiers demonstrate, in the words of Harvard philosopher William James, “that a black regiment could excel in every virtue known to man.”

A key point about Shaw, and about Eleazar, too, and other embedded agents of the Holy Spirit, is that their discipleship is less like that of the swaggering hero and more like that of a servant in waiting.

In eulogizing Robert Gould Shaw, William James no doubt disappointed the tribal expectations of his elite Boston audience by refusing to portray Shaw as the magnanimous white warrior, posing on horseback, high above his men, saber raised, poised to charge headlong into battle, that is to say, as an exemplar in extremis of Boston-bred, upper-crusty noblesse oblige.

But William James, it turns out, is less impressed by the “gregarious courage” of Shaw’s final, adrenaline-fueled assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, than by the “lonely courage” he displayed when he first decided to resign his commission in the glorious Second Massachusetts Division. Shaw’s decision to forego inevitable promotion, distinction, and honor within the already established Second, James says, not only provoked “ridicule” from befuddled military colleagues and friends but also invited the possibility of abject failure and humiliation.

Reading a recent biography of Martin Luther King Jr., I was struck by something of this same tension between “gregarious” and “lonely” courage.

Who can doubt that Dr. King was a warrior, at least after a fashion. As he put it himself, “If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice … a drum major for peace … a drum major for righteousness.” But, like young Colonel Shaw, the young Martin Luther King broke cover early, before Selma, before Nashville, before even the Montgomery bus boycott.

Martin Luther King’s moment of “lonely courage” may well have been a shared moment, a consequential and heartfelt conversation with his wife, Coretta, while still living in Boston.

Coretta Scott King favored remaining in the North. And after all, young Martin had received offers of church appointments and teaching positions in Massachusetts and elsewhere. But Martin felt called to Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, this despite the obvious dangers and, perhaps more significantly, contrary to the wishes of his daunting father, Daddy King. Who could blame young Dr. King-to-be if he’d stayed up North or, for that matter, blame his good friend Samuel B. McKinney, also under consideration at Dexter, who with charming selfdeprecation confessed, “I asked God if he would follow me into the South, but He said He’d only follow me to Cincinnati.”

It was perhaps because of Dr. King’s intimate familiarity with repeated moments of “lonely courage”—moments in which he routinely chose against the grain of cultural expectation, against apparent self-interest, and sometimes against his own physical and psychological well-being—that he proposed, in earnest playfulness, the establishment of the IAACM, the International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment, in order to recruit, encourage, and support 16

Mahan otherwise isolated and “lonely” embedded agents of the Holy Spirit. Membership in the IAACM required only that aspirants pledge to muster the lonely courage to embrace “maladjustment” to a society in which racial hatred, economic injustice, and pervasive militarism remain enthroned, to embrace maladjustment, that is, as long as it took to “build this society of brotherhood and this society of peace,” a future that Dr. King envisioned and evoked with energy and faith-filled confidence.

Not everyone shares Dr. King’s confidence in the future or, for that matter, believes that saints and embedded agents of the Holy Spirit are harbingers of a future just society. There is a fashionably disconsolate spirit abroad in the land, a spirit that perceives saints and embedded agents of the Holy Spirit as spent forces, anachronisms, diverting curiosities to be dissected over preprandial cocktails.

In fact, essayist and embedded informant Phillip Lopate, in his classic essay “Against Joie de Vivre,” nominates the Manhattan dinner party as a kind of Vatican City of vacuity where the spirit of cultivated enervation reigns supreme, where, he chides, “acedia” is proposed as a kind of “vanguard position.”

David White is onto this, I suspect, when he writes within the pages of his panegyric to Beauty, Tending the Fire That Burns at the Center of the World, about the Manhattan dinner party in which embedded agent of the Holy Spirit Flannery O’Connor upbraids Mary McCarthy for her chirpy devaluations of the “Holy Ghost” and of the “symbol” of the Holy Eucharist: “Well, if it’s a symbol,” O’Connor says, “to hell with it.”

It turns out that two of Mary McCarthy’s friends, essayist Elizabeth Hardwick and poet Robert Lowell, were also in attendance that same evening, qualifying the gathering as a kind of spreader event for the spirit of entropic depletion.

Elizabeth Hardwick, for her part, spreads the unholy spirit of informed ennui in her closely wrought and frequently anthologized essay “The Apotheosis of Martin Luther King,” saying this of Dr. King’s funeral: “Perhaps what was celebrated in Atlanta was an end, not a beginning—the waning of the slow, sweet dream of Salvation, through Christ, for the Negro masses.”

Robert Lowell gives Robert Gould Shaw something of the same treatment in his celebrated poem “For the Union Dead,” wherein the classic memorial to Shaw and his men, sculpted by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, is shaken, thrown off-kilter, by explosions from the construction of a grotesque underground garage. The tawdry has replaced the sublime, and Shaw and his troops retreat before an onslaught of “giant finned cars,” and “a savage servility” replaces the nobility and grace of the Massachusetts 54th, now reduced to the status of a secular reliquary, a historical curiosity.

The trouble, of course, is that the entropic spirit, the spirit of fatigued resignation, often infects would-be embedded agents of the Holy Spirit as well. In fact, some of us, as we embark upon retirement and enter old age and despite witnesses like Eleazar, wonder whether our “call” will ever come or whether, worse yet, it has already come and we’ve missed it, allowed it somehow to roll over to voicemail.

So I’d like to conclude with a confession and a thought experiment. First, to tell you the truth, I’d like nothing better than to be invited to a Manhattan dinner party 17

Honoring Professor David White with Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Flannery O’Connor.

And here’s how I think I’d approach things were I to be invited.

To start, I’d fortify myself with a three-ounce martini—Hendrick’s gin, a thimble of vermouth, and a lemon twist—and then I’d seek out Robert Lowell, promising myself not to audition for his approval but, instead, to remember the harsh details of his exceptional, if tortured, life.

I’d probably break the ice by telling Lowell how much I loved reading about how he stole his Irish maid’s rosary beads because she was more enthralled with Mary than with him and how, later, during his Catholic period, I’d heard he’d prayed the rosary twice a day.

Then, if I could get him aside later, as things were winding down, I’d ask about his fondness for the great modern interpreter of St. Thomas Aquinas, Étienne Gilson, and ask, additionally, given Lowell’s world-weary cadences, what he thought these days of St. Thomas’s contention that the infusion of supernatural hope imparts new life to the soul, new life engendered by the stirrings of the Holy Spirit, new life St. Thomas identifies with “the youthfulness of the saints.”

But you know how poets are—I’m speaking now of the poets both within us and outside of us and how they invariably prefer the epiphanic to the expository— so I’d recite for Robert Lowell and for myself, just before last call, a single sentence from St. Augustine, one that confirms and illuminates St. Thomas and may just be the most stunning sentence ever written by a theologian: “God,” St. Augustine says, “is younger than all else.” v

Insights: The Podcast Listen to Editor Bill Greenway’s interview with Dr. David White at the link below or scan the QR code to the left.

AustinSeminary.edu/insightspodcast 18

Substantiality of the Spirit Devison Telen Banda

Who Is The Spirit Who or what is the Spirit? In the African perspective, “Spirit” with the capitalized beginning is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, or the Spirit of the Ancestors, while “spirit” is associated with the spirit of people or animals or impersonal matter. In the Chichewa or Chinyanja language of my people, the “who” and the “what” questions are distinguished by pronouns “a” and “u” respectively: “a” is used with “who” and “u” is used with “it” or “what.” Religious Africans understand the Spirit as a person—and it is hard to find a non-religious African. As John Mbiti observed, “Religion is found in all African peoples … The earliest records of African history show that the Africans of ancient Egypt were very religious people.”1 We should distinguish between the African Christianities and African non-Christian religions, specifying “Christianities” because Africa is a huge and complex continent with diverse indigenized forms of Christian understanding and community.

African Christian Perspectives

African Christian perspectives are influenced by the Bible and Western theologies.

In these perspectives, the Spirit is the third person of the Holy Trinity, a persona present and “hovering” over creation (Gen 1:1) and promised to be poured on all flesh (Joe 2:28 – 32, Luke 24:49, Acts 1:1-8, Acts 2: 1-21). The presence of God is made real in the daily living experiences of people through the operation of the Holy Spirit, and prayers and petitions are offered to God in and through the power of the Holy Spirit. While there are differences in the understanding of the Holy Spirit in African Christianities, this basic understanding is shared among African

D.T. Banda is former principal of Justo Mwale Theological University College and now serves as deputy vice-chancellor and professor at Justo Mwale University, in Lusaka, Zambia. He holds a PhD in New Testament interpretation from the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa, and an MA in political science from Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas.

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Honoring Professor David White communities with diverse cosmologies and doctrines and constitutes the core African understanding of the Spirit.

The Chewa Christian Perspective

In non-Christian African cosmologies there are many spirits: divine, human, animal, and nature spirits. “Spirit” is always relational, and there is no “Spirit” in contrast to “spirit” in the Chewa cosmology because the cosmology is orally expressed.

The designation Spirit (Mzimu) never stands alone. For instance, it may refer to human spirit (mzimu wa munthu), the spirit of the departed (mzimu wa malemu), the Spirit of God (Mzimu wa Mulungu), the “the Holy Spirit (Mzimu Woyera) or spirit of divination (mzimu wa mbwebwe).”2 There is a plurality of types of spirits, including “spirits of nature” such as “sky spirits” and “earth spirits,” or “human spirits” which may be “long dead” spirits (ghosts) or “recently dead” spirits (living dead).3 Generally, the spirits of the long dead are negative and fearful while the spirits of the living dead are positive and can even protect, especially where Azimu (the living dead) are pleased.

In Chewa cosmology, God is not only known through many names reflecting particular attributes, but also as the “Supreme Spirit” (Mzimu Wamkulla) in contrast with lesser spirits (mizimu yaying’ono or mizimu yocepa) of humans, animals, or creation in general. Thus, a Chewa listening to biblical texts such as, “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph 6:12), does not struggle to understand because spirits of the sky (mizimu ya mumlenga-lenga or ya m’zakumwamba) and demonic forces (mizimu or ziwanda) are embedded in the Chewa cosmology. “Supreme Spirit” (Mzimu wamkulu) rules over all, in providence protecting but also allowing or disallowing the lesser and evil spirits to attack people of God.

Spirit and Culture Culture provides the lens through which anything, including the Spirit, is understood. In Chewa culture, the work of spirits and of the Supreme Spirit is communicated through dances, song, food (all celebrations include good, communal food!), birth rites, rite of passage, death rites, annual festivals and celebrative rituals, prayers, liturgies, sacrifices, and offerings. The communal, joyful celebrations form practical linkages between the Supreme Spirit and the people, between the living dead and the living.

Works of the Spirit In Chewa cosmology the spirit always affects people concretely, operating in the lives of people in visible ways. Whether the spirit or spirits are evil (mizimu yoyipa) or good (mzimu wabwino), or even if it is the Supreme Spirit, the spirit is understood in terms of its impact on life here and now. In Chewa Christian understanding the Spirit is inseparable from the church as the body of Christ, the ecclesia or ekklesia of God at work in the world. The body metaphor is Christocentric. The ekklesia 20

Banda concept is Theocentric. In Chewa understanding the Christocentric and Theocentric are supplemented by vibrant awareness that true ecclesia is infused with the Spirit. The Spirit can also possess an individual, but the truly possessed individual will always work for the community. In sum, for African Christianity there is no question about the reality and power of the Spirit, there is only the vital question of discerning where that Spirit is working. In that regard, consider the stories of two influential Africans.

Alice Lenshina Mulenga of Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia) Alice Lenshina Mulenga, known to many just as “Lenshina,” founded a movement in the 1960s at the peak of Northern Rhodesia’s fight for political freedom. Against all odds, a woman in the context of male dominance, pride, and arrogance, Lenshina mobilized an independent movement so powerful that it was mistakenly taken as a political movement. In the Chinsali district of Zambia (Northern Rhodesia), the colonial authorities perceived her movement as a nationalist threat. The missionaryestablished churches likewise perceived her as a threat. Even the United National Independence Party, which finally achieved Zambian independence, had misgivings because Lenshina did not allow her members to own political party membership cards. Lenshina and her members were subjected to torture and martyrdom, yet that did not crush the movement. The church survived exile and endured as an underground church in the Congo for decades before returning to Zambia in the 1990s as the Lumpa Church, which still commands a large following. Today Lenshina’s burial place is a shrine for the members of her church and the local people and is a protected heritage site. Lenshina managed to raise a movement that survived her in ways similar to the way that the New Testament church survived Jesus. In the eyes of many Zambians, the Holy Spirit led Lenshina and those in her movement to be courageous and fearless. She was Spirit-filled, so filled that she served her movement with dedication.

Simon Kimbangu of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) (Zaire)

Simon Kimbangu was the founder of the Kimbanguist Church and a symbol of Congolese nationalism.4 He was said to cure the sick and to prophesize the future, including the liberation of Black people. The Kimbanguist Church is a member of the Council of Churches in Zambia and a member of the World Council of Churches (WCC). In Zambia, Kimbanguists are mostly in Lusaka and the Copper belt towns.

The Kimbanguists are trinitarian in their faith, yet what shocks some is that they believe the Holy Spirit was incarnate in Simon Kimbangu. Songs and stories about Kimbangu project him not only as possessed by the Holy Spirit but as the Holy Spirit incarnate. All this is attributed to him because of the way he worked for and achieved the social liberation of his followers. Because of his service to others, even in the face of the persecution of the colonial state, people attribute to him a life closely linked to the Spirit.

These are but two of a multitude of examples of how Africans relate to heroes possessed by the Holy Spirit. While none is perfect, they are considered to be pos21

Honoring Professor David White sessed by the true Spirit insofar as they are possessed like Samson was possessed, not for personal prestige and benefit but for the liberation of the people of God (Judges 16:1–22).

Conclusion In sum, Africans are Spirit or Holy Spirit aware. They believe the Supreme Spirit is invisible but becomes visible in individuals whom he empowers not for personal prestige and benefit, but to serve real people against all odds for the liberation of the people of God over the whole array of spiritualties, including not only church ministries but in overcoming health impediments or for political and social liberation. Africans believe that only the Holy Spirit could transform ordinary people with traceable parentage and family lives like Alice Lenshina Mulenga and Simon Kimbangu, to render selfless services and meet the needs of the people in their contexts. African Spirit awareness and consciousness in transforming individuals and communities is the basis upon which the evangelical and charismatic movements, including tele-evangelism programs, succeed in Africa (Graham 1978).5 From grass-thatched shrines to brick churches, the Holy Spirit is celebrated in community socialization through special songs and exuberant dances using drums or modern instruments and keyboards that invoke and invite the Spirit. By any name, this Spirit is welcome to African Christianities, religions, and culture.

NOTES 1. J. S. Mbiti, Introduction to African Religion, 2nd ed. (Nairobi: EAEP, 1996), 14 2. S. Paas, English Chichewa-Chinyanja Dictionary (Blantyre: CLAIM, 2003), 146.

3. Mbiti, 70.

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Kimbangu 5. Billy Graham, The Holy Spirit: Activating God’s Power in Your Life (Waco: Word Books Publisher, 1978).

BIBLIOGRAPHY https://www.africabib.org/rec.php?RID=189172347. Downloaded on 01/08/2023 at 06:20 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/j.ctt1wf4cr0.10?searchText=Simon+Kimba ngu&searchUri=2Facion%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3DSimon%2BKimbangu& ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly default%3A6c4 3319b4fd0bf945142d78ed17e81ab&seq=3. Accessed 01/08/2023 at 07:10

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Care Amidst Discrimination Van Cliburn M. Tibus

“Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be as wary as serpents, and as innocent as doves.”

- Matthew 10:16

I

magine yourself being uprooted from your homeland, separated from your family and community to provide care to foreigners who resent you for being there. You look different and you sound different, yet the other person completely depends on you because you are a nurse or a caregiver. The irony is you left your family and even left your children to the care of your grandparents or other relatives because your professional skills are needed in other countries which pay better than your homeland. Like the Jewish people scattered into a diaspora after they were defeated by the Babylonians, the Filipino people are forced to serve in developed countries out of economic need. This is why there is a diaspora of Filipino nurses and caregivers across the world.

When the global pandemic hit, our people were lauded as heroes and at the same time subject to discrimination, especially when they were working in a foreign land. Yet despite the obstacles facing our people, they were instruments of God reflecting divine love, care, and sacrifice, especially our Filipino nurses in the United States, who were at the forefront of the COVID-19 pandemic. Faith enabled them to overcome the challenges of racism, anti-vaxxers, discrimination, stress due to mental health, and serious health concerns. The caring spirit of the Filipino for the sick and the elderly embodied the healing characteristics of the Holy Spirit. We will discuss three themes of this journey. First, the diaspora of the Filipino people.

Van Cliburn Tibis, PhD, is dean and assistant professor at Silli-

man University Divinity School in Dumaguete City, Philippines. He earned his PhD in missiology from Stellenbosch University in South Africa in 2022.

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Honoring Professor David White Second, the challenges of the global pandemic brought about by COVID-19. And finally, the resiliency that derives from Filipinos’ Christian faith and reflects the empowering and healing presence of the Holy Spirit.

Diaspora of the Filipinos The word “diaspora” comes from the biblical experience of the Jewish people when Babylon conquered Judea and displaced the Jews, scattering them across the Babylonian Empire. As globalization became a reality in the modern era, more people began migrating from one country to another. This is how biblical scholars Shively Smith and Zoe Towler understand diaspora: In its Greek noun form, diaspora means the condition of living as a scattered or dispersed collective group spread widely across a region or regions.

Yet diaspora has grown to mean more than simply a state of being spread across a vast territory or having to live “elsewhere” while connected and committed to an original homeland. Diaspora also conveys the experience of managing multiple land and kinship group identities. It is a state or discourse of a people that engages matters related to space, place, time, culture, etiquette, and experiences of being a collective group in lands beyond the lands of their kinspeople or origin.

The experience of the Filipino people falls under this category. The Philippines is currently ranked fifty-second out of sixty-four economies in the world, so many Filipino professionals seek greener pastures abroad, especially in the United States.

One of the most lucrative job opportunities is in the field of nursing, where the monthly pay in the U.S. is $6,416 compared to $625 in the Philippines. While technically the Philippines was a former colony of the U.S., after World War II when both Filipino and American forces resisted and drove out the Japanese, the relations between the two countries deepened, and the majority of the Filipinos look up to and even dream of making it big in America. Hence, the field of nursing and a job in the U.S. is a ticket to a better life. According to “Asianews” out of nearly one million nurses in the Philippines, one third work abroad; meanwhile, the Philippines is experiencing a shortfall of some 130,000 nurses, with some nurses taking care of twenty to fifty patients per shift.

Challenges of the pandemic When the global pandemic hit and the United States was leading the world in terms of cases and even deaths, none were hit harder than Filipino nurses. In a revealing article, Usha Lee McFarling, a national science correspondent for STAT, wrote that Filipino workers were at the forefront of the fight against COVID-19. Working without protective equipment, putting in long hours of overtime, and being assigned to extreme medical cases, Filipino nurses took the brunt of the pandemic.

Many senior nurses succumbed to the disease when they were only a few years away from retirement. They took on the cases because Filipinos are generally hardworking, follow authority, and would rather obey than complain. Because they tend to agree to take on long hours and just do the job, they are subject to abuse by their 24

Tibus fellow workers and even racially discriminated against. Because Filipinos are from Asia and can have Asian features, they were viewed suspiciously by their patients, especially since the virus was believed to have originated in Wuhan, China.

I experienced this studying for my PhD in South Africa and having an Asian appearance; people called me “Chinese” when the pandemic hit. At the height of the pandemic and in isolation far from home, my wife and I managed to have an online Bible study group with fellow Filipinos who found themselves abroad, and most of them were Filipino nurses. Our friends were telling us their stories of being assigned to isolation units, the constant overtime since their fellow nurses did not report for work, and praying every day that they are safe while continuing to perform their duties as nurses. Nurses were looked upon as potential carriers of the virus and every time they come home, their neighbors were wary of them. Even back in the Philippines, worried neighbors and others avoided nurses, and the worries and even suspicion appeared to be worse in foreign countries like the United States, where racial tensions were very strong. Filipino spirituality and Christian faith enabled these Filipino nurses to overcome these circumstances.

Caring spirit of the Filipino Now we might say, “Why don’t the Filipino nurses just speak out and demand their right to safety in order to avoid the unnecessary risk of being contaminated?” Of course, they have the choice, yet when it comes to providing care, Filipinos are really selfless. It is in our culture to have a caring spirit. In the Philippines a vitally important character trait is malasakit. As Ferdinand Tablan explains: [Malasakit] is the virtue of selfless concern for others’ well-being through caring, emotional involvement, compassion, and commitment without demanding anything in return … Thus, Malasakit is often translated as emphatic caring. Although Malasakit comes during times of tragedy, it is also practiced in daily activities. It is all about alleviating pain, even if no successful solution is found to a problem … Malasakit does not involve reciprocity and it can be directed to non-persons (institutions or physical objects) and even to strangers and enemies. It is a virtue that is shown to anyone, including those who do not deserve our caring, and even to those who do not ask to be cared for or be helped.6 Research has shown that when managers and teachers exhibit malasakit to their workers and students, they are effective in their governance as their subordinates show their full support and respect.7 As Tablan says: Like the parent-image in the family, business leaders are supposed to be nurturing and firm, able to show [solidarity] and Malasakit and at the same time, capable of disciplining members who are stubbornly self-centered and uncooperative. Management should welcome employees when they share family concerns at work. While they are not expected to solve personal problems of their employees, the mere act of listening, coupled with comforting words and expression of empathy, is already an example of Mala25

Honoring Professor David White sakit of managers that employees will deeply appreciate.8 Despite the intense challenges they faced, Filipino nurses were able to show malasakit to the patients. It is interesting because the word “sakit” literally means pain.

Putting the word “ma” and “sakit” for the word “malasakit” literally means “shared pain.” Thus malasakit is defined as emphatic caring because we Filipinos “share the pain,” highlighting the communal nature of our identity as a people. This is the reason that during the COVID-19 pandemic, Filipino nurses took on the task of the enormous burden of caring for patients, because it is deeply ingrained into our cultural identity to provide care. I believe this malasakit spirit comes from the caring and healing spirituality of the Holy Spirit. This cultural characteristic is the reason why Christianity took root in the Philippines, because it closely coincides with the “shared pain” or malasakit of Jesus with humanity on the cross. During the pandemic and in the face of racial discrimination, Filipino nurses reflected God’s love to all who desperately needed it.

Conclusion Matthew 10:16, cited at the beginning of this article, addresses the plight of the Filipino nurses who are being sent out as “sheep in the midst of wolves.” In the face of discrimination and an atmosphere of distrust and bigotry, which was especially powerful in the divisive political sphere of American politics, Filipino nurses and caregivers were sustained and remained faithful to the cultural characteristic of malasakit, the shared pain or empathetic caring that is a reflection of God’s unending love to all of creation. While the pandemic highlights the suffering and brokenness of this world, God continues to send faithful witnesses to remind all of us of the unchanging, divine love which we receive and which we share through Jesus Christ.

NOTES 1. https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo9780195393361/obo-9780195393361-0294.xml Accessed in July 15, 2023 2.https://www.bworldonline.com/top-stories/2023/06/20/529563/phlcompetitiveness-ranking-dips-report/#:~:text=In%20its%202023%20World%20 Competitiveness,from%2048th%20in%202022.&text=This%20year%27s%20drop%20marked%20the,in%20the%20Asia%2DPacific%20region. Accessed in July 15, 2023 3. https://yaledailynews.com/sjp/2022/09/12/longer-hours-smaller-numbers-filipino-nursesand-mass-migration/#:~:text=Nurses%20working%20in%20public%20hospitals,Bureau%20of%20 Labor%20and%20Statistics. Accessed in July 15, 2023 4. https://www.asianews.it/news-en/Out-of-nearly-a-million-registered-nurses-in-thePhilippines,-one-third-work-abroad-58601.html#:~:text=The%20Professional%20Regulation%20 Commission%20puts,Singapore%2C%20and%20the%20United%20States. Accessed July 21, 2023.

5. https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/28/coronavirus-taking-outsized-toll-on-filipino-american-nurses/ accessed in July 15, 2023 6. Tablan, F. 2021. “Filipino Virtue Ethics and Meaningful Work,” Humanities Bulletin, 4(1):27.

7. For further discussion look at the studies of Tablan; Peregrina, H. N. 2019. “Malasakit: The Unexamined Pedagogical Practices And Emotional Care Work Of Pin@Y Educators,” Unpublished master’s thesis. San Francisco, California: San Francisco State University.; and Selmer, J. & De Leon, C. 2001. Pinoy-style HRM: Human resource management in the Philippines. Asia Pacific Business Review, 8(1):127-144.

8. Tablan, 37.

26

Reminiscences

The Teacher Paul Hooker

For David F. White, on the occasion of his retirement: A quiet soul, forged in hardship’s fires yet full of stillness even if in pain, he dwells in Beauty, and as thought requires would have us see, would to the world make plain how Beauty streams beneath this earthly crust, how passing time cannot its flow constrain.

An aquifer of glory ’neath the dust of mortal life, a vision few may see, he would to our benighted eyes entrust metaphors of Beauty (as must be)— the crack of bat, the smell of new-oiled glove, a golden dog off-leash and running free: these are the passioned, pulsing heart of Love, Beauty’s other name, in which we share as birthright, gift incarnate from above.

His quiet words, mere ripples in the air, are more than words alone; they are the Way by which the Dark cedes place to Light made fair and night yields up its power to dawning Day. David White is the consummate teacher. Part of what makes him so is that he

Paul Hooker is an Old Testament scholar, musician, Presbyterian

Polity expert, and poet who served with Professor White on the Austin Seminary faculty and administration for a decade. His most recent book of poetry is called The Hole in the Heart of God: Stories of Creation and Redemption (Resource Publications, 2021).

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Reminiscences teaches even when he is not conscious of teaching. I know this because I have been his pupil for ten years.

I first met David shortly after coming to Austin Seminary in 2012. In our first conversation which, as I recall, started about his plans for a course in the upcoming DMin term, we discovered a mutual love of jazz guitar. It wasn’t long before we were playing together over lunch hours, he soloing over chord progressions and me doing my best to keep up. David probably thought he was teaching me about the relationship between improvised melodies and basic chord structure. He probably wasn’t aware that he was also teaching me about the theology of jazz.

After playing guitar, we would go out to lunch. We discovered a mutual love of Korean food, and our conversations to, over, and from Korean lunches quickly became another classroom. David was working on drafts of his book, Tending the Fire at the Center of the World, and as we talked about what he was learning from PseudoDionysius and Maximus, from Aquinas and David Bentley Hart, from Milbank and Pickstock, and most of all, from Hans Urs von Balthasar, I was introduced to the world of theological aesthetics and Christian spirituality. He probably thought that he was just rehearsing what he was reading. He probably didn’t know I was furiously taking lecture notes.

As we have both approached retirement, our conversations have explored new questions. How does it feel to end a career? What happens when you cease doing something the doing of which has identified you for a lifetime? He would probably say we’ve been teaching each other about this, but I suspect it’s truer that once again he is finding depth and beauty where I see only change.

There is still more learning for me to do: about jazz, beauty, what it means to become someone new, and who knows what else. I cannot imagine learning those lessons without my teacher. Fortunately, I don’t have to.

Thanks, David. v

Coming in the Spring 2024 issue:

President José Irizarry on “Celebrating Christ and Culture” 28

Reminiscences

The Influence Chuck Frost

I

n my early days of church ministry, while I was still learning how to be leader in the church, if I encountered a situation where I wasn’t quite sure what to do, I would ask myself, “What would David do?” That sums up the immeasurable influence David White had in my life. To this day his impact continues, for one of the reasons I chose to apply and enroll in the Austin Seminary Doctor of Ministry program was to continue to benefit from his wisdom reflected in the Leadership for Wonder track.

I met David while in high school after my girlfriend (now wife!) invited me to attend a youth group meeting at First United Methodist Church in Pascagoula, Mississippi, where David was associate and youth pastor. I was not raised going to church, so I was understandably nervous about the whole thing. My first memory of David is him standing in front of the group with a guitar strapped around his neck leading us in the standard youth group songs of the early 1980s. The first song he led was “I’ve got a river of life flowing out of me …” David indeed had a river of life flowing out of him and I, along with many others, benefited from that wellspring of love and joy.

After Christmas in 1984, I attended a retreat called “Break Thru” with David and the Pascagoula youth group. It was there that I discovered the joy of following Jesus Christ and soon after began to sense God’s calling into full-time ministry. David fully supported and shepherded me during my candidacy for pastoral ministry.

And when David left Mississippi for Alaska, he continued to take ownership in my calling by inviting me to be a youth ministry intern with him the summer before I attended seminary in 1990.

I have always known David to be a studious and reflective person with a big Continued on page 31

Chuck Frost is pastor at New Hope and Purley United Methodist

Churches in Blanch, North Carolina. He has been in pastoral ministry for over thirty years in both Methodist and Catholic settings.

He is currently working on his Doctor of Ministry degree at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

29

Reminiscences

The Doorkeeper Sharolyn Browning

T

here are some days in my life I can look back on and recognize the moment when everything changed. Certainly, I have had some days when big things happen, and they understandably change life forever. The day I’m thinking about was not one of those. Until recently, it resided in the memory, filed under “ordinary days,” and only upon reflection and the perspective of hindsight can I see what a vocational threshold it was for me. And little did I know this doorway would have a quiet and constant doorkeeper.

My first visit to Austin Seminary was in fall of 2007, as a Godly Play Trainer for David White’s Christian Education “lab day.” David hospitably brought his clay pitcher of water and helped set up the little wooden “people of God,” golden parable boxes, and art supplies in the worship lab. He then went upstairs to begin class, with a promise of returning to the threshold with a group of seminarians.

He brought them to the door and sat quietly in the corner outside of the circle. As I told the Good Shepherd and World Communion story, I could see him lean in, to see or hear better, but for the most part, his only participation was that of a dutiful doorkeeper, listening carefully and supporting the circle of “children” or, in this case, seminarians. Toward the end of our time, he “climbed to the balcony” to reflect with the class on their Godly Play experience. This played out similarly, almost every semester he taught a Christian Education class since that fall of 2007.

As the semesters went by, I began to sit in the back of his lectures, before the Godly Play lab. It was my turn to sit by the door, outside the circle, as the class was gathered around a candle, encircled with books by the likes of Walter Wink, and

Sharolyn Browning (MDiv’14) is a minister of Word of Sacrament in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. She works with congregations in transitions, a ministry that springs from her work as a Godly Play Trainer and is guided by the wisdom and wonder of children in story and at play.

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Reminiscences lean into the pedagogy and wonder. In 2011, I officially became an Austin Seminary student and was invited to David and Melissa’s home for new student welcome, where I met the real Wink … furry and four-legged. Over the next three years I was both in the circle of learners and continuing to witness that one day in Christian Ed when the wonder moved to the floor and notes moved to watercolors.

I have continued to slip into the back of David’s lectures before my Godly Play time with them, with an ever-changing vocational vantage point … to inquirer, to seminarian, to graduate, to pastor continuing as Godly Play Trainer. Likewise, David has continued to bring his class to the temporal Godly Play room (once, even on Zoom!), to sit on the floor and wonder over Exile and Return and chocolate chip cookies. Time and time again, he would reflect with these adult learners how it all connects … worship, play, flow, beauty, contemplation, wonder, silence, candles, vocation, ministry, life, death, new life, time.

Tuesday, September 27, 2022, was my last Godly Play lab with the Reverend Dr. David White’s Christian Education class. Marked clearly on my calendar, but observed as ordinary among the rest, without undue fanfare. I trust David and I will meet again at a different Godly Play threshold, as he shared one of his hopes for retirement might be to sit inside the Godly Play circle as the storyteller with children. I will be happy to sit by the door. v

A photo of Sharolyn with David and Wink at a Blessing of the Animals service is found on page 33.

The Influence Continued from page 29 heart for young people and a life dedicated to their Christian formation. His gentle and thoughtful mannerisms made me conscious of my own way of interacting with others.

David has also been a good example for me in handling adversity. Rather than letting adversity derail him, he instead seeks new ways to live an abundant and creative life. In fact, after a period of adversity in my own life, one of the first phone calls I made was to him. It is my honor to be able to write this tribute on the occasion of David’s retirement since not only is his life and work a gift to me and my wife, Julie, but to the church of Jesus Christ. Thank you, David! v 31

Reminiscences

Teaching Vulnerability Matt Cardona

I

n seminary, I found myself in a classroom with a man who enthusiastically began claiming that the world is an enchanted place, dripping with the glory of God. He would then usually—I heard it many times throughout my seminary experience, not only because he sometimes repeated himself, but also because I proceeded to sign up for every available class with him that was offered—move his hands in a dripping motion and provide the etymology of the word glory, which led to a conversation about Doxa, which somehow came back to dripping. I usually found my mind wandering by this point … he had me at enchanted.

He had also referenced an essay by J.R.R. Tolkien called “On Fairy-Stories.”

Immediately, I knew that my path had crossed with a fellow pilgrim, and he must know the way back to Middle-Earth.

In one particular classroom moment, he exclaimed that we would have to do an exercise in which we had to move our bodies. Like this older wiry white fellow is going to show us how it’s done, I thought. I was dumbstruck when he led the charge with a street stomp dance, in which one group of students would force another group back with their awesome bodily movements until one side yielded. The audacity of this man!

Actually, what I initially perceived as ridiculousness was a cover for my own fear. Oh, the vulnerability!!! How dare he suggest that rote memorization and profound insight would not be enough to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, that our bodies themselves must come to know the friction that arises when Heaven meets Continued on page 36

Matt Cardona (MDiv’19) is an ordained elder in the United

Methodist Church. He is currently serving as pastor of Buda [Texas] United Methodist Church. He studied with Professor White from 2016-19.

32

On Beauty and Beer, Dutch Masters and Dogs Helen Blier

E

arlier this year, I took a detour on my way home from a conference in Copenhagen and flew to Amsterdam just to see the Vermeer exhibit at the Rijksmuseum. It was a show all of the major news outlets called “once in a lifetime.” Twenty-eight of his thirty-something extant works were going to be displayed together, and I needed to be there.

This was a watershed decision for me. I do travel a lot, but almost always for family or work. Doing something so extravagant and indulgent is not part of my vernacular. But it was Vermeer—an enigmatic, mercurial Dutch master whose capacity to evoke the holy in the ordinary and render light in oils has captivated me since my formative early adult years.

I brought one traveling companion with me: David White. Well, I brought his

Helen Blier is the director of Lifelong Learning at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. She also serves as the president of the Association of Leaders in Lifelong Learning of Ministry. She earned the PhD from Emory University, the AB in theology and the MEd from Boston College. Like David, she enjoys Belgian beer and good dogs, and she is learning how to be a bit better at chasing beauty.

33

Honoring Professor David White book Tending the Fire That Burns at the Center of the World. I read it at the brew pub the day before my timed Vermeer entry ticket and found it paired excellently with a Belgian-style dubbel. When I later told David this he said, “Beauty is made more perfect with Belgian beer. I believe Balthasar said that. If not, he should have.” I read it like lectio before boarding the tram to the museum.

I recall visiting a show of Dutch painters in my late teens that included works

by Vermeer. But I remember vividly the first time I really saw one of his paintings.

It was nearly forty years ago, and the painting was The Concert. One woman plays a harpsichord while another woman sings. A man, back turned, sits between them holding a lute. The scene is intimate, ordinary, yet transcendent. Sunlight filters in from a window behind the harpsichordist and plays on the black and white tiled floor. The singer raises her hand to start, fingers barely splayed. I caught my breath and suppressed a desire to touch the rug portrayed in the foreground. I just knew the wool was rough and warm, just as the marble floor was smooth and cool. The painting ignited a fire within me, and in the years since I’ve tried to see as many Vermeers as possible.

The Rijksmuseum show did not disappoint. The gallery evoked the hush and wonder of a sanctuary. Dark backdrops and spotlights drew all the attention to the master’s works, hung singly on each wall so that each piece invited the viewer into singular conversation. Vermeer’s subjects often appear as though they were caught unawares at a private, threshold moment: a milkmaid pours milk from a jug; a young woman looks up from her writing table, mid-note; an ensemble of musicians pauses during rehearsal. I had the sense of being given privileged access to the everyday lives of his subjects. And oh, the detail with which he rendered these captured moments! A pinpoint of light on a pearl earring. A spot of blue rubbed away on a windowpane. Such precise, deep attention is rooted in love and manifests in beauty. One painting drew me to tears. The viewer looks past a green velvet curtain to a young woman who is catching her breath as she reads a letter. What does it say? It’s not clear. But we sense we are glimpsing one of those moments that clearly demarcates an irrevocable before and after. Vermeer did not simply paint domestic scenes; he rendered them holy, suffusing them with a surplus of meaning.

I re-read sections of Tending the Fire after walking the exhibit. And I recall texting David, and telling him that I felt as though my face was shining like Moses’s after descending from Mt. Sinai. “Vermeer was like going to church,” I said. “But better, because in this church eucharist was a charcuterie tray and more beer afterwards. I like this religion.” The exhibit did for me what institutional religion—and its liturgical rites—have of late struggled to do for me. For an afternoon, I was reawakened and the world was reenchanted. I had experienced, as David describes it, “a real, if invitingly brief, glimpse into the deep truth of the world’s absolute contingency … given precisely as gift.”

I first met David in the mid-’90s when we both served as faculty for Candler’s Youth Theological Initiative. He was teaching the teens about discernment. I was teaching metaphorical theology. My first impressions were of someone with a rich interior life, someone who paid close and affectionate attention to who and what 34

Blier was around him. Our professional and personal friendship grew over the years, and his book Practicing Discernment with Youth became a mainstay in my youth ministry classes. Students were transformed by the possibility of doing theology with young people instead of teaching them about it. This has been David’s gift to the world of youth ministry—reminding all of us that youth have vocations as young people, not as adults-in-waiting. He reacquainted us with the curiosity, wonder, and joy that are the hallmarks of adolescence, gifts sorely needed in a world flattened by modernity’s transactional and instrumental logic and a church that has fallen victim to the same. To this end, it’s no surprise that his scholarship has wended its way to an exploration of beauty, which has been the ever-present muse in all of his teaching, writing, and—well, living.

David has not only invited people to explore the fire that burns at the center of the world. He has created spaces that welcome them into the experience of that beauty. And he regularly seeks those spaces out. If the world is full of epiphanies of God’s creativity and glory, “God’s beautiful poem,” why not chase them down and let ourselves be part of them? To this end, it took surprisingly little convincing to get him to change his plane ticket at the last minute and accompany a few of us to Edinburgh after a conference (he clearly has a higher comfort level with spontaneity and indulgence than I do). From windy moor to whisky bar, the four of us made our way through the city with delight, reminded of the transcendent power of good friendship and the Holy One eternally at play.

I recall a story he told me once about his beloved border collie, Wink. He was walking Wink off-leash in a parklet near his house. Wink ran ahead to greet a man who was likely living in the park. The man thoughtfully stroked the dog’s ears and held his gaze. Meanwhile, David hustled up to rescue him from his off-leash animal; the man demurred. “This dog is holy,” he said solemnly. Those of us who knew Wink agreed that he was a theophany. What strikes me about this story is how this man could see it, too. David’s care for this remarkable beast provided space that allowed Wink’s beauty to be evident and compelling enough for a stranger living on the margins to recognize—a beauty that drew the two to each other, and then drew in a third, and generated a sacramental moment of recognition. The kind of beauty David writes about demands this kind of fidelity and care, and he does it so well— well enough to let a surplus of glory and meaning shine through the most ordinary moments. Not so different from Vermeer, to be honest.

David tells me that his retirement will be spent visiting with his granddaughters, cycling, practicing jazz guitar, enjoying the company of his wife. None of this is surprising, and all of it promises to immerse him fully in those places and practices that put him in the crosshairs of joy and creativity and wonder. Encountering the Holy One at the speed of two wheels, through the eyes of a young child, or while making music all sounds to me like the best way to gather up the strands of a vocation committed to beauty, truth, and goodness.

I’ve asked him to add one more thing to the list of post-retirement activities— an epic road trip to visit beloved colleagues and friends. I can just picture it: David going from house to house, friend to friend, making his way across the Southeast, 35

Honoring Professor David White then the mountain states, over to the West Coast. At each stop, he’ll sit on the porch or by the fire, share a good beverage, and have the kinds of conversations that follow Mary Oliver’s instruction on how to live a life: “Pay attention. Be astonished.

Tell about it.”

In suggesting this pilgrimage, I have an image in mind of my favorite liturgical moment—something that brings me to tears every time, like Vermeer. It’s the start of the Easter Vigil service. The sanctuary is dark. The Paschal candle has been lit and carried with song down the aisle, announcing (again!) Christ’s victory over the tomb. The community is drawn (again!) into the holy act of anamnesis that proclaims the Incarnation full circle. A single taper is lit from the candle and the flame shared with the people sitting in the first pew. The flame is passed from congregant to congregant, hopeful believer to hopeful believer, as the wave of Light that dispels the Darkness fills the sanctuary from front to back. The Exsultet is sung and we hold our candles, accepting with joy the invitation (again!) to tend the fire that burns at the center of the world. v

Teaching Vulnerability Continued from page 32 Earth. How dare he suggest that receiving and entering the extraordinary story of God comes much easier when we do not take ourselves too seriously, when we see, touch, feel, and receive the world vulnerably.

Perhaps the most touching lesson I learned from this man was the realization that he was somewhat of an introvert. It made it even more amazing to realize the courage and energy he would summon to be in front of people in ways that even I, never really shy for the spotlight, struggled to be. What the heck was I doing with my life?! What call was I ignoring because it seemed hard?!

I will always treasure the countless hours of playing, acting, improvising, and creating alongside Dr. White. Thank you for constantly reminding me that there is something magically good about the world, that we are somehow invited into it, and that beauty shows us the way. v 36

AUSTIN PRESBYTERIAN

THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY José R. Irizarry, President Board of Trustees Keatan A. King, Chair James C. Allison Lee Ardell Janice L. Bryant (MDiv’01,DMin’11) Kelley Cooper Cameron Gregory Lee Cuéllar Thomas Christian Currie James A. DeMent (MDiv’17) Jill Duffield (DMin’13) Britta Martin Dukes (MDiv’05) Peg Falls-Corbitt CIM’20) Jackson Farrow Jr. Beth Blanton Flowers, M.D. G. Archer Frierson Jesús Juan González (MDiv’92) Cyril Hollingsworth (CIM’16) Ora Houston

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