So Christ himself gave the apostles,
the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers,
to equip his people for works of service,
so that the body of Christ may be built up
until we all reach unity in the faith
and in the knowledge of the Son of God
and become mature,
attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.
Ephesians 4:11–13
So this old friend of mine and his good wife decided to leave the reservation, where, as a teacher, he’d lived happily for decades. They decided to depart the Southwest for the Northwest, the place they’d both grown up, the place he said the two of them would always call “home.” When they told their Native friends they were leaving the rez, my old friends explained the move this way: “we’re going back to our own reservation.” His Native friends, he said, understood totally.
I’ve lived on my reservation for almost all of my own threefourscore and five years. This Dutch Calvinist has lived among Dutch Calvinists – sometimes peaceably, sometimes not – for his entire professional life and more. One could argue – and some do – that our most bitter fights are those we carry on with those we love, with family; but I don’t think I’m overstating when I say that my life has been lived within the walls of a fort where life has been, at least for me, most familiar, if not accommodating, as a pocketful of peppermints.
Another friend, someone who has never lived on her own reservation but always on others’, once explained to me why she’d chosen to live the way she has, consistently among the world’s poor and misbegotten. I don’t remember her words exactly, but the gist of them went something like this: I know myself, and I know that if I weren’t engaged somewhere, well, dangerous, I honestly wouldn’t be safe – not from others, but from myself.
I translated that explanation in this way: my faith in God flourishes bountifully only on dirty streets and in woebegone hovels, places where it’s tough to believe.
Perhaps some fine psychiatrist could explain the darkness in the life, in the heart and soul of Mother Teresa, but I’m powerless. All I can do is sit in astonishment at how a woman so devoted to listening to Jesus could actually spend years never, ever hearing his voice. How could a woman who begged Christ to come and be her light, live so desperately in midnight?
Father Kolodiejchuk tries to explain it this way: “. . . it was only when she was with the poor that she perceived His presence vividly. There she felt Him to be so alive and so real” (212–213).
I think I could create a rack on which to torture myself when I stoop in the shadow of an assessment like that, for I haven’t lived among the poor, the homeless, the voiceless. I’ve been, after all, a professor, touting the importance of literature and writing. What I’ve witnessed of the degradation of poverty has appeared only from the ink on a page or photograph. Strictly speaking, I haven’t fed the poor, clothed the homeless, visited prisoners, or picked my starving neighbor from the ditch. I’ve lived my life in a fortress.
But then, even scripture says not everyone is called to Calcutta. Some are teachers and preachers and milkers and pastry chefs. Out here, some drive rendering trucks and all day pick up dead hogs. Some ride horses and others ride juries. Some practice law, others the oboe. Some sell used cars. Some raid meth kitchens. Some raise kids and some raise heck. Some live on mountaintops, others rarely leave the kitchen.
Just about the only law we all live with is the one about obedience. Those of us who confess the name of Jesus, give it our best shot on whatever acre of ground we’re called to, whether it’s inside the fortress or some scruffy place off the reservation.
Obedience is what the Christian life is all about, but it’s much easier to say than it is to do. Anywhere.
Good Lord, help us all.
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