Embedded Agents of the Holy Spirit

Brian J. Mahan

Eleazar 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.

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 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 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.”

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.