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by Ken Sehested

My mentor-cum-friend Walker Knight has died. It wasn’t a surprise—his health has been poor for several years. For him, and his family, it is likely merciful.

Acknowledging as much, though, doesn’t ease what appears to the living as a certain dimming of the light.

Having said that, it is significant that Walker breathed his last on the First Sunday in Advent.

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Among my earliest childhood memories is an especially vivid one on a Christmas Eve. I was so eager for Christmas morning to arrive that it was nigh impossible to sleep. Even in our hard scrabble household, I knew some toys would be under the Christmas tree. Sometime in the night, I pretended going to bathroom, pausing to peer into the dark living room to see if I could make out what was there.

It was a “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” episode, with something like “visions of sugar-plums” dancing in my head. I didn’t know then that sugar-plums had nothing to do with fruit. They are small sugar balls. Sugar intake always escalates at Christmas. My Mama’s fudge was an annual extravagance.

Walker knew the taste of Advent wasn’t sweet; that the Gospels’ birth narratives are not candy-coated. Jesus was born in the context of state-sponsored terrorism. Mary’s famous “Magnificat” (banned for periods under US-supported military dictators in Chile, Argentina and Guatemala) was ripe with piety but culminated in politically seditious language, a full-throated announcement of God’s design to humble the powerful and raise the refuse.

Mary and Joseph and their swaddling-wrapped baby were targets. Walker knew there was an ideological struggle going on in Scripture’s Christmas story. All the honorific terms ascribed to Jesus—Lord, Savior, Prince of Peace—were titles assigned by Rome’s governing elite to Caesar. A dispute over lordship was brewing. Advent’s backdrop is danger, political intrigue, and insurrectionary fervor.

The occasion which drove Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem was Caesar’s census, whose results were used to establish tax impositions. It was a source of Palestinian hatred and riotous outbreaks.

About the time Jesus was born, some 2,000 of his fellow Galileans were crucified for their political insurgency in a single day in Sepphoris, an hour’s walk from Nazareth, by order of Quintilus Varus, the Roman military commander. That infamy surely had a formative effect on Jesus.

After being alerted by the Magi’s Roman customs declaration form, of their search for a predicted new king of Israel, Herod ordered the preemptive murder of all male infants in the region around Bethlehem, just after Mary and Joseph’s refugee flight through the desert to Egypt.

Most Protestants do not observe the Feast of the Holy Innocents on 28 December, so the massacre it attests is largely hidden from contemporary view by the mounds of scrap giftwrapping, strands of ribbon, and stacks of cheery Christmas cards destined for recycling.

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Walker’s 1969 book, The Struggle for Integrity, is the reason my wife and I moved to Atlanta after finishing seminary in New York City. We had no jobs waiting; we just wanted to be part of Oakhurst Baptist Church in Decatur, whose pastoral leadership (clergy and lay) refused to move to the suburbs when the neighborhood de-gentrified. It was a risk-your-assets moment, resulting in substantial membership loss. The refusal to comply with Jim Crow almost killed the church. But then came Epiphany’s visionary renewal. Clarity is often reserved for those with their backs against the wall.

Right: Walker L. Knight, photo by Lynn Farmer.

Over the ensuing years, Walker’s insightful voice helped lead the congregation through a longer series of dramatic decisions about its ever-deepening grasp of its mission as a countersign to larger cultural values. But not without renewed conflicts.

Walker knew that faith is often clarified not in the absence of conflict but within and through it. In a long prose poem printed in the December 1972 issue of Home Missions Magazine, which he edited, Walker dwelled at length on the risk of Advent and the fact that peacemaking entailed an active, even provocative engagement—whose practice is not for the faint of heart.

“Peace plans its strategy and encircles the enemy. / Peace marshals its forces and storms the gates. / Peace gathers its weapons and pierces the defense. / Peace, like war, is waged. / But Christ has turned it all around: / the weapons of peace are love, joy, goodness, longsuffering; / the arms of peace are justice, truth, patience, prayer; / the strategy of peace brings safety, welfare, happiness; / the forces of peace are the sons and daughters of God.”

Seven years later, then-US President Jimmy Carter quoted some of those lines in his speech marking the signing of the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, which he worked so hard to accomplish.

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As the author of Hebrews aptly says it, following an extended summary of courageous faith figures, “For time would fail me to tell” the whole story of Walker Knight—not to mention his dearly beloved wife, Nell. The Knight household practiced “simple living” long before that was a thing; helped guide the church in giving full welcome to African Americans, to refugees, to the queer community, to speaking out—and enduring the resulting fallout—on a variety of justice, peace, and human rights commitments. (The church even voted to put the title to its building up as bail bond when its custodian suffered a brush with the law.) My wife Nancy and I were jointly ordained by this community, long before female ministers were considered legitimate.

When Seeds magazine was formed, focused on mobilizing faith communities to address the scourge of world hunger, we didn’t know a pica ruler from a peacock. Walker was our devoted teacher in the arts of editing and layout and design, vital consultant to our organizing work, and experienced tutor in articulating the theological vision undergirding our labors.

When I opened the Baptist Peace Fellowship office at Oakhurst, Walker allowed me to interrupt him at any time with questions and let me use the typesetting equipment he used for the final chapter of his professional career—writing, editing, and publishing an independent news journal to address the fallout of our denomination’s abduction by fundamentalist racketeers and rallying the plans and hopes and dreams of the displaced remnant.

Walker’s courage in composing poetry later inspired me to attempt the same. One I’m remembering—“Portal of praise: Praise as presage to Advent’s treason”—includes these lines.

“The Manger’s trailhead opens at / the portal of praise and genuflecting / thanks. Not because heaven arises to / piety’s incense. But because Advent’s / brush with mortal flesh is a perilous journey, / fraught with insurrection’s threat, / pregnancy’s scandal, birthed from / stabled bed, and Herod’s foam and fury. / The innocents take it in the chops every / time. Yet Advent threatens treason to / every Herod-hearted arrangement. . . . / Only praise can / leverage the earth’s maddening orbit back / to its Rightful Tender. No longer shall / the beggarly be auctioned to satisfy / ravenous demand, but they shall find / refuge, deliverance, in secured / Promised Land. For the Blessed One / has vowed a ransomed release from / misery’s increase: healing the lamed, / gathering the shamed, transforming / their weeping to a torrent of praise.”*

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*Read the entire text of "Portal of praise."
For a news story with details of Walker Knight's life, see this piece in Baptist News Global. In 2013 Walker published a memoir, "From Zion to Atlanta."
©ken sehested @ prayerandpolitiks.org

 

by Ken Sehested

“I believe the light that shines on you will shine on you forever . . .
though I can’t guarantee there’s nothing scary hiding under your bed.”
—Paul Simon, lyrics in “Father and Daughter”

This Advent I feel more like the dumbfounded cleric Zechariah, of Luke’s nativity drama, than any other character. I have little more to say to supplement the abundance of commentary on this season’s reckless folly. Here are but a few footnotes.

1. Presidential candidate Donald Trump is a buffoon—a dangerous one, to be sure, but no less a caricature. It would be a mistake, though, to thus characterize those who find his screech appealing. They are a symptom of incendiary political forces—of disaffiliation and cynicism—which tear at our social fabric. Trump incarnates what the Apostle Paul referred to as “principalities and powers,” transpersonal realities which wreak havoc in our body politic and beyond. Such forces cannot be squelched. They cannot be drained or addressed before they are mapped and root causes attended.

2. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ISIS’ Muslim caliphate contender, is a beast—a deadly, dangerous one, but no less a caricature. It would be a mistake, though, to thus characterize those who find his screech appealing. They are a symptom of incendiary political forces—of disaffiliation and cynicism—which tear at our social fabric. Al-Baghdadi incarnates what the Apostle Paul referred to as “principalities and powers,” transpersonal realities which wreak havoc in the Middle East’s body politic and beyond. Such forces cannot be squelched. They cannot be drained or addressed before they are mapped and root causes attended.

3. The photo of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi’s body, which galvanized global attention to what is now our globe’s largest forced-displacement in history (55 million as of the end of 2014, according to the UN Refugee Agency), represents a parallel nativity scene for the Christian season of Advent. His posture on that Turkish beach, surreally like that of a child peacefully asleep, is the appropriate lens through which we should read the baby Jesus story. The terrifying backdrop of Palestinian misery—of Mary’s travail, Joseph’s confusion, the shepherds’ shivering and the Magis’ dangerous pilgrimage amid Imperial Rome’s occupation and Herod’s rage—have largely been purged from our decorative props.

4. The first Advent was a time of terror. Which is why minor-keyed music is Advent’s signature choral fare. Such music is for people capable of singing in spite of, rather than because of, facts on the ground. Then as now, the future was up for grabs, stakes were high and messianic claims multiplied. In our day, Trump and al-Baghdadi have two of the louder trumpets. Santa Claus, with his apparently bottomless bag of goodies—Dow Jones bounty for the righteous, Hellfire missiles for everyone else—rules December’s festivals as well as its funeral processions.

5. Then as now, there is little-or-no room in the inn for displaced Semites like the Syrians and others from kindred conditions in other conflicted regions. Reports of hijab-snatching assaults on Muslim women (as young as a sixth-grader on a school playground) now come from across this nation and around the Christian-flavored world. The reason for the season has devolved to tribal loyalties, racial-ethnic assessments and fearmongering done in the name of national god-pretending mascots and public polling trends.

6. When the saving work of Christ is stripped of the servant practice of Jesus, God becomes yet one more carnival barker selling snake oil and striptease; yet one more bullying deity in a neighborhood already crowded with calloused buffoons and beastial saviors.

7. Not even devoted warriors believe we can “kill our way to victory,” as Admiral Michael Mullen, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in testimony to Congress in 2008. That sentiment was repeated this past February by State Department Deputy Spokesperson Marie Harf, saying “we cannot kill our way out of this war [against ISIS].”

Truth is, we are making enemies faster than we can kill them. What we need to mobilize are poets and lyricists and storytellers, to tell a different narrative. “The shortest distance between a human being and Truth,” as Anthony de Mello wrote, “is a story.” Our destiny is shaped less by wars won and lost than by stories loved and lived. As that revered missionary hymn says, “We’ve a story to tell to the nations,” one that “will shatter the spear and sword.”

Maybe we should elevate one of the church’s ordinary-day hymns—“This Is My Song (O God of all the nations)”—to Advent status.

“My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean / and sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine; / but other lands have sunlight too, and clover / and skies are everywhere as blue as mine.”*

Maybe we could learn that cherishing one’s nation—one’s people, tribe, land and tradition—does not require denigrating others.

Maybe the tragic image of Aylan Kurdi’s surf-lain body will reinvigorate the story of baby Jesus, reminding us that Herod-hearted massacres are still the way of a world in need of a different story. The most effective complaint against the sway of buffoonery and beastly rule is costly devotion to the things that make for peace.

“Nothing can save us that is possible,” the poet W.H. Auden wrote amid the darkest days of World War II. “We who are about to die demand a miracle.” But his lines were not a call to passivity in the face of calamity. “All I have is a voice / to undo the folded lie.”** Turns out, that’s all we need, for the universe has a corresponding Word that, when joined to ours, has wonder working power.

Advent’s waiting is not listless. With training, death’s threat need not unnerve us. Fear not, though folded lies await.

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*Read Ken Sehested’s new lyrics to “This Is My Song” /litanies-prayers/2015/12/10/this-is-my-song-o-god-of-all-the-nations.1789433
**The first Auden verse is from “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio,” written in 1942. The second is from “September 1, 1939.”

©Ken Sehested @ prayerandpolitiks.org

by Ken Sehested

Another school shooting. Sirens wail. First responders race.

Video shows the now-common recessional, with rifled law enforcement escorting a parade of students from school grounds. So oft repeated it’s now a kind of ritual liturgy.

Then a repeat of the predictable press conference, where scads of local elite get their turns in repeating the mantras. Sheriff, police chief, mayor, FBI agent, school superintendent, hospital administration, all chiming in: awful, tragedy, distress, heartbreak, failure, regret, unimaginable.

Cross out “unimaginable.”

Cable news channels muster their contacts list to orchestrate commentary from a parade of anyone with a title and a video link. Not even presidential impeachment hearings generate more product placement viewership.

From the makeshift podium the press conference moderator begins. “Here’s what we know. . . .  Here’s what we don’t know. . . . We’re doing lots of things.” Lots of things. Lots. Of things. And still more things.

“We’re a strong community. We need to hold each others’ hand. Say our prayers. Say ‘never again.’” (The actual words of this afternoon’s moderator.) Again and again and again.

But never ever comes.

Such vivid, heart-felt perorations of remorse and mourning and lamentation and contrition.

But no repentance. No amends.

Only vacuous remorse. Sentimental mourning. Ethereal lamentation. Vaporous contrition. The gun lobby won’t allow actual penitence. The senate majority leader won’t allow gun safety bills to be considered. Political “realism” triumphs.

One actual Fox News commentator is on record saying, after an earlier, even worse slaughter, “This is the price of freedom.”

Too high a price, this “freedom”—there’s that word, of hallowed memories and hard fought struggle, the altar in our national cathedrals of patriotism, now officiating as pimp to politicians who know where the money comes from.

You gotta’ know who butters your bread, we profess, in light of Mammon’s dominion.

If the Supreme Court says (“Citizens United v. FEC”) campaign finance freedom can be bought by the highest bidder, who are we to blush?

Lo, and “they did not know how to blush" (Jeremiah 6:15).

Not unlike the stones’ authorized cry, the schoolyard itself demands to know: “Oh, who will bless, / Bless and redeem the blood-stained, tear-drenched ground / So once again the healing sun will blaze, / The small birds sing, the flowers be found, / And lion and lamb in loving joy may graze?”*

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*excerpt from Madeleine L’Engle’s “The Other Side of the Sun”

©ken sehested @ prayerandpolitiks.org

by Ken Sehested

§ "Don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed that easily.” —Dorothy Day

 § “The world is waiting for new saints, ecstatic men and women who are so deeply rooted in the love of God that they are free to imagine a new international order. . . . Most people despair that [it] is possible. They cling to old ways and prefer the security of their misery to the insecurity of their joy. But the few who dare to sing a new song of peace are the new St. Francises of our time, offering a glimpse of a new order that is being born out of the ruin of the old.” —Henri Nouwen

§ “[T]he difference between being at peace and being complacent is one of the most basic lessons saints can teach us.” — Charles Mathewes

§ “A saint is simply a human being whose soul has . . . grown up to its full stature, by full and generous response to its environment, God.” —Evelyn Underhill

 § “When I give people food, they call me a saint. When I ask why there is no food, they call me a communist.” —Dom Helder Camara, former archbishop of Recife, Brazil

§ “In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a pocket handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints." —Frederick Buechner

§  “And thus I clothe my naked villainy With old odd ends, stol'n forth of holy writ And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.” —William Shakespeare

§ “I am a violent man learning to be nonviolent.” —Cesar Chavez, a “folk saint” in the pantheon of Mexican Americans, whose birthday, 31 March, is a federal commemorative holiday in the US

§ “Christ moves among the pots and pans.” —Saint Teresa of Ávila, 16th century Spanish mystic, Carmelite nun

§ “Let us plant dates even though those who plant them will never eat them. We must live by the love of what we will never see. This is the secret discipline. It is a refusal to let the creative act be dissolved away in immediate sense experience, and a stubborn commitment to the future of our grandchildren. Such disciplined love is what has given prophets, revolutionaries, and saints the courage to die for the future they envisaged. They make their own bodies the seed of their highest hope.” —Brazilian theologian Rubem Alves

§ “I am not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.” ―Nelson Mandela

§ “In truth, all human beings are called to be saints, but that just means called to be fully human, to be perfect—that is, whole, mature, fulfilled. The saints are simply those men and women who relish the event of life as a gift and who realize that the only way to honor such a gift is to give it away.” —William Stringfellow

§ “From somber, serious, sullen saints, save us O Lord.” —Saint Teresa of Ávila

§ “The key question that every school of spirituality must answer is how to reconcile presence to the world with presence to God, or however you prefer to formulate it. How are we to overcome the duality and interrelate the two presences? This question runs through the history of spirituality.” —J.C. Guy, writing about St. Ignatius of Loyola

§ “Every saint has a bee in his halo.” ―Elbert Hubbard

§ “Maybe more than anything else, to be a saint is to know joy. Not happiness that comes and goes with the moments that occasion it, but joy that is always there like an underground spring no matter how dark and terrible the night. To be a saint is to be a little out of one's mind, which is a very good thing to be a little out of from time to time. It is to live a life that is always giving itself away and yet is always full.” —Frederick Buechner

 § “In a church where holy people were supposed to be perfect, austere, and forbidding, she prayed to be delivered from sour saints. An admirer once remarked on her voracious appetite: ‘For such a holy woman, you sure pack it in.’
        “‘Listen,’ Teresa shot back, ‘when I pray, I pray; when I eat, I eat!’” —St. Teresa of Ávila, quoted by Mary Luti

§ “There is no saint without a past, no sinner without a future.” —St. Augustine

§ “The whole case for Christianity is that [one] who is dependent upon the luxuries of life is corrupt, spiritually corrupt, politically corrupt, financially corrupt. There is one thing that Christ and all the Christian saints have said with a sort of savage monotony. They have said simply that to be rich is to be in peculiar danger of moral wreck.” —G.K. Chesterton

§ “Keep me reasonably sweet; I do not want to be a Saint—some of them are so hard to live with—but a sour old person is one of the crowning works of the devil. Give me the ability to see good things in unexpected places, and talents in unexpected people. And, give me, O Lord, the grace to tell them so.” —17th century “Nun’s Prayer,” St. Albans Abbey

§ “Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take, / The clouds ye so much dread / Are big with mercy, and shall break / In blessings on your head.” —William Cowper, 18th century English poet and hymnodist

§ “Big churches, little saints.” —author unknown

§ Short story. “I arrived for a cut at the very end of their workday and witnessed them provide a warm and very human circle of care for the only other client. This was a woman past my age who had called in a panic when her long wavy hair started coming out in handfuls as a result of her cancer treatment regimen.

        “Now this was not my first time here, and in the past I've heard these women pass on some vicious gossip and fling barbed zingers at one another with glee. There was none of that this evening. Neither was there saccharine sentiments nor empty platitudes.

         “Instead, they lovingly washed her hair and efficiently shaved off what remained, completely following the woman's lead in conversation topics, which ranged from family doings to treatment experiences and side effects to the best way to fashionize her new look. Perhaps she would wear black lipstick and go Goth or maybe wear only one of her large hoop earrings for more of a pirate statement. They cut some stretchy black silky material into a headscarf and tied it into some beautiful stylish knots.

         “And they held steady when she teared up as she faced her self in the mirror without her hair.

         “It was beautiful. They were beautiful. She was beautiful.” —Amy Smith

§ “I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints—the sinners are much more fun.” —Billy Joel

§ “It is great wisdom to know how to be silent and to look at neither the remarks, nor the deeds, nor the lives of others.” —Saint John of the Cross

§ “You may never enter a lion’s den, or travel through a war zone, or hear a prison door close behind your act of conscience. Mostly, you don’t get to custom-design the witness you bear, the woe you endure, or the promises you make to mend the world as it crosses your path.
      “By and large, you weigh the choices that come your way without the fanfare of stardom’s spotlight, your picture in the paper, or even angels whispering in your ear. Saintly work is more common than you think." —Ken Sehested

§ “There is no sinner like a young saint.” ―Aphra Behn

§ “Every town in the country has people like these folks [who do extraordinary things in ordinary ways].  Nobody gives them prizes, writes articles about them, but they demonstrate in their lives the truth of what Karl Rahner once noted about saints: saints, the German theologian once said, show us that in this particular fashion one can be an authentic Christian.” —Lawrence Cunningham

§ “Truly! Truly! By God! Be as sure of it as you are that God lives: at the least good deed done here in this world, the least bit of good will, the least good desire, all the saints in heaven and on earth rejoice, and together with the angels their joy is such that all the joy in this world can’t be compared. For truly, God laughs and plays.” —Meister Eckhart

§ “But the dark night of the soul / Will come round again / And that ability to meet it / once more / Will make saints of us all.” —Abigail Hastings, “Hallowed Week”

§ “Sanctify yourself and you will sanctify society.” ―Francis Of Assisi

 § “I should like a great lake of finest ale for all the people. / I should like a table of the choicest foods for the family of heaven. / Let the ale be made from the fruits of faith, and the food be for giving love.” —St. Brigit of Kildare (Ireland)

§ “He that falls into sin is a man; that grieves at it, is a saint; that boasteth of it, is a devil.” —Thomas Fuller

§ “Something in [the saints] so loves the world that they give themselves to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, they trace with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. Their houses are dangerous and finite, but they are at home in the world. They can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such people, such balancing monsters of love.” —Leonard Cohen

§ “Saintliness is also a temptation.” —Jean Anouilh

§ “A saint addicted to excessive self-abnegation is a dangerous associate; he may infect you with poverty, and a stiffening of those joints which are needed for advancement—in a word, with more renunciation than you care for—and so you flee the contagion.” —Victor Hugo

§ “It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.” —George Santayana

§ “Now that [Martin Luther King Jr.] is safely dead let us praise him, build monuments to his glory, sing hosannas to his name. Dead men make such convenient heroes. They cannot rise to challenge the images we would fashion from their lives. And besides, it is easier to build monuments than to make a better world. So now that he is safely dead we with eased consciences will teach our children that he was a great man . . . knowing that the cause for which he lived is still a cause and the dream for which he died is still a dream, a dead man's dream.” —Carl Wendell Hines Jr.

§ “You venerate the saints, and you take pleasure in touching their relics. But you disregard their greatest legacy, the example of a blameless life. . . . No devotion is more acceptable and proper to the saints than striving to imitate their virtues.” —Erasmus

§ “So the great Church of Christ came into being by ignoring the life of Christ. . . . The Fathers of the Church were good men, often saintly men, sometimes men who cared enough for Christ to die for him, but they did not trust him. They could not trust the safety of his church to his way of doing things. So they set out to make the church safe in their own way. Creeds and theologies protected it from individual vagaries; riches and power protected it against outside attacks. The church was safe. But one thing its ardent builders and defenders failed to see. Nothing that lives can be safe. Life means danger. The more the church was hedged about with confessions of faith and defended by the mighty of the earth, the feebler its life grew.”—Edith Hamilton

§ “And the gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ, until all of us come to . . . the full stature of Christ.” —Ephesians 4:11-13

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©ken sehested @ prayerandpolitiks.org