Be Still!. Gordon C. Stewart
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upon which a speaker depends. To be human is to die. And to die is to live with what Rudolf Otto called the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the larger mystery that both causes us to tremble and that draws us irresistibly, the whence and whither of existence itself.
Elie Wiesel and Walter Brueggemann challenge the collective madness that often passes for sanity. But their insights into the depths of collective madness are anchored in the deep stillness of Psalm 46. Kosuke Koyama, to whom this book is dedicated, knew collective madness as a youth in Japan and again in his adopted home in the United States. Over lunch one day, he made a statement that added to how I look at the world. “There’s only one sin,” he said. “Exceptionalism.” I’ve been thinking about that ever since in relation to the manifold ways in which this one sin manifests itself: religion, race, nation, gender, culture, and, finally, species exceptionalism.
Perhaps a picture of a moment in time with Kosuke will whet your appetite.
The day I’m remembering, Koyama was scheduled to deliver the inaugural address for a new speaker series in Chaska, a forty-minute drive from his home in downtown Minneapolis. Shortly after we left his apartment, the car broke down on the entrance ramp to the interstate. It just quit! Neither one of us had a phone. While I ran back to get help, frantic because we were going to be late, Ko stayed with the car. I had forgotten what Ko had written in Three Mile an Hour God:
We lead today an efficient and speedy life. . . . There is great value in efficiency and speed. But let me make one observation. I find that God goes “slowly” in [God’s] educational process. . . . “Forty Years in the Wilderness” points to [God’s] basic educational philosophy. . . . God walks slowly because [God] is love.1
When the mechanic and I returned to the car, Ko was sitting in the passenger seat like the Buddha himself—calm, cool, and collected. I asked whether he was OK. He smiled and said, “Good meditation.”
I hope in some way the still shots of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness offer you an opportunity or two for a “good meditation.”
1. Koyama, Three Mile an Hour God, 6–7.
Acknowledgments
Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) and MinnPost (minnpost.com) aired a number of these essays on All Things Considered or published them online. This collection would not exist without the All Things Considered former Producer Jeff Jones, who first welcomed a submission following the Nickel Mines school house massacre. Former assistant MPR News Editor Eric Ringham, whose gracious foreword appears here, encouraged continuing submissions for the commentary page. MinnPost Managing Editor Susan Albright rarely declined a request and, like Eric, offered a wise editor’s pen that improved each essay.
Wipf & Stock has been a joy to work with, thanks to Administrative Assistant Brian Palmer and my editor, Assistant Managing Editor Matthew Wimer, who were a quick email or phone call away during the publishing process.
Professors Esther Cornelius Swenson’s and Willem Zuurdeeg’s collaborative work in the field of analytic philosophy of religion is the indelible ink in which Be Still! is written. Likewise, Kosuke Koyama’s metaphorical theological method and observation that exceptionalism is humanity’s one sin altered the lens through which I have come to see the world. Koyama’s provocative statement is applied here to racial, cultural, religious, national, gender, and species forms of exceptionalism. Thanks to Mark Koyama for permission to include his late father’s faithful testimonies to the reign of God in this collection.
Life is nothing without good friends. Carolyn Kidder and Mona Gustafson Affinito pored over every word, improving the text with valuable comments and the eyes of a copyeditor, although it was the final copyediting of Gillian Littlehale (Gilly Wright’s Red Pen) who whipped the manuscript into final shape. Emily Hedges, Courtenay Martin, Austin Wu, and Dennis Aubrey encouraged me to believe writing and publishing were more than exercises in vanity. Steve Adams, Faith Ralston, Chuck Lieber, and old friends and seminary colleagues Wayne Boulton, Don Dempsey, Dale Hartwig, Harry Strong, Bob Young, and Steve Shoemaker have sustained me through thick and thin. After ten years of sharing our blog, Views from the Edge, Steve Shoemaker’s verse and poetry appear in Be Still! Wayne Boulton, my seminary roommate—fellow Presbyterian teaching elder, scholar, author, faithful friend, and cheerleader—graciously consented to write the introduction for the book.
My deepest thanks goes to my spouse, Kay Stewart, who spent as many hours working on this project as her sometimes cranky, absentminded husband. This collection would not have made it to the publisher were it not for Kay’s daily encouragement, patience, mercy, guidance, and extraordinary wisdom. Kay’s good cheer over morning coffee and interruptions of obsession rescued the text and the author from solitary confinement. Every page has Kay’s fingerprints all over it.
Last, but by no means least, is a group of men who would be shocked to find themselves mentioned anywhere but in a courtroom. “The Brothers of Opal Street,” as they called themselves—eight black homeless former inmates of Eastern State Penitentiary in North Philadelphia—had a farewell conversation in late August 1962, with me, a naive nineteen-year-old church street outreach worker. As we sat on the stoop of a boarded up tenement on Opal Street, they said good-bye with the startling instruction not to return to the ghetto. “Go back to ‘your people’ and change things there. Only when things change there will there be hope for the people here.” What they called “my people” were in the white western suburb of Philadelphia. I have come to believe that last day on Opal Street was its own kind of ordination. This book is in memory of them.
Introduction
by Wayne G. Boulton
I first met Gordon Stewart at a Christian seminary in Chicago. We were roommates and became fast friends. But I still remember missing much of what he said. This guy knew more about church than I did, about religion than I did, about philosophy than I did, and—above all—he knew much more about theology than I did.
And since my roommate was a winsome conversationalist even back then, there was no avoiding dialogue with Gordon about matters broadly intellectual and religious. The point of thinking was talking . . . as in talking with. If there is a single characteristic that marks Gordon Stewart to this day, it would be the same one I saw early on in seminary: a passion for engagement.
Shaped and formed over a lifetime, Be Still! has a pedigree. It is a book written in the tradition of public theology. Don’t worry overmuch about the phrase. What sociologist Max Weber wrote about defining “the Protestant ethic” in his famed The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) applies in full to Be Still! as public theology: you will have grasped what the term means as you finish the book now in your hands.
To see clearly, to see clearly, to see clearly—such is the great impulse and drive you meet on each page. In the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico years ago, how are we to see what really happened there? With noble manatees in Florida, how are we homo sapiens to grasp something of the mystery of what it is to be other creatures with us in our modern, capitalist society? As a boyish ruler in North Korea plays with weapons of mass destruction, what now has become of our “national system”? . . . system for what? As the number of oysters in Chesapeake Bay drops dramatically, what do we see or even what do we hear being said here?
Though the religious roots of this vision and struggle are sometimes hidden, the thrust is public theology through and through. By the late nineteenth century, Christianity had produced only two major social philosophies: medieval Catholicism and Calvinist Protestantism. Within this recent period, however, the modern social gospel movement originated and developed a third—namely Christian socialism.
As a great cloud of witnesses, the women and men surrounding this fine book are not difficult to bring to mind: Wendell Berry, Jane Addams, Cornel West, Walter Rauchenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, James Luther Adams, Dorothy Day, James Gustafson, Paul Tillich, Jim Wallis, and many others.
The movement is novel