Habitations of Spirit: Remediating Excarnation David F. White
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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). 4
