Standing in the Need of Grace

David Brooks' gracious tribute to Tim Keller in Tuesday's New York Times was the kind of deep lament that manages to bring light into and through the darkness. Brooks' praise is unequivocal: "one of the most important theologians and greatest preachers of our time," he says, even though his judgment is based on characterization that begins with a goofy metaphor: "Tim Keller was a recliner."

Dozens, maybe hundreds readers of "The Twelve" know Keller and/or his writing far better than I do. The only theology I read comes up when the book club to which I belong ventures occasionally into "the queen of the sciences." That I don't read much, not even pastoral theology, you will note amply from what I'm about to say.

I don't remember the title of the Tim Keller book I did read, because I had the general feeling--a kind of yawn--that most of what I'd found there I'd known already. His was a familiar voice, a thorough-going Reformed voice that took the revelations of this world as seriously as the revelation of the Good Book.

One line in David Brooks' eulogy stuck hard and fast, however a line he located in a book the Kellers wrote together, The Meaning of Marriage. Here's how Brooks uses that salient line:

The only way forward is to recognize that your own selfishness is the only selfishness you can control; your self-centeredness is the problem here. Love is an action, not just an emotion, and the marriage will only thrive if both people in it make daily sacrificial commitments to each other, learning to serve and, harder still, be served. “Whether we are husband or wife,” the Kellers wrote, “we are not to live for ourselves but for the other. And that is the hardest yet single most important function of being a husband or a wife in marriage.”

I'm of the age when looking back is less difficult than looking ahead. Whatever OT prophet ever had a footing in my soul long ago departed, I've never been much of a king, and, nowadays, if I'm at all a priest, think Friar Tuck. 

But I'm old enough to recognize truth when I see it, and the Kellers' injunction that "we are not to live for ourselves," most certainly hit a Calvinist chord in my soul. After all, there are mornings down here at the keyboard when I can't help but wonder if I have spent too much of my time and myself watching letters my fingers tap out on the screen, trying to determine whether I was a good Dad or an absent one, whether I might have been a more devoted writer than husband. I don't need the Kellers to awaken those soulful questions, but Brooks eulogy, once again, most certainly did and does.

It seems there is no end to the mirrors in Pieter Bruegel's depiction of Pride in his series of woodcuts on the Seven Deadly Sins. The female personification, who appears in each of the "sins," seems here, in "pride," incapable of looking at anything other than her own image. The ogres use the mirrors to admire themselves too, their own nether parts. 

Bruegel throws in a peacock too, but that fan of feathers isn't the species of pride the Kellers are documenting. That pride is, simply enough, our tendency, unremittingly, to put ourselves first. It's the original sin, isn't it?--Adam and Eve cashing in on the splendid promise for what the Satanic snake sells as greater glory. It's all about what we want--me first. It's all about what lights our passions--no, my passion. That's depravity that's both human and total.

It seems to this Calvinist that we're all victims and perps, we're all sinners, finally. Black and white and red and gold, grandpas and grandmas and grandkids, gay and straight and queer and whatever new identity was born this week and I missed.

The real sin is all of ours. "We are not to live for ourselves but for the other," or so spoke the Kellers, "and that is the hardest yet single most important function of being a husband or a wife in marriage." Yea, surely, and the most identifiable function of being human.

Which is why all of us, every last one is standing--and not even upright--in the dire need of grace.