An Advent Reflection on Isaiah

Response to Ghandi

Will there really be a day
when men will beat their swords into plowshares
and the lion will lie down with the lamb
and Righteousness will rule?

I see myself
and wonder if, first,
I must not be annihilated

For all my queries about the power of God
in a world of starving children
and murderous appetites
and well-fed hatred
are ultimately doubts about
my own gluttonous soul.


Mom found this in the book, Ghandi, after Dad’s death. Perhaps, she says, I had shown Dad this piece which (she says) I wrote--though I certainly don't remember writing it. It must have been sometime around 1978 or 79. He had copied it down and placed it in the book.

Hidden Lives

I thought I'd post a piece I wrote last year for Alumni Alert just to test the email posting function...

On Vocation: Hidden Lives

Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. (George Eliot, Middlemarch, 799)

Thus George Eliot concludes her novel about Dorothea Brooke and the various and curious inhabitants of Middlemarch: Mr. Balustrode, the Vincys, her sister Celia, handsome and honorable Will Ladislaw, tired and bitter old Mr. Featherstone. Living among these enlivened humans of mingled moral natures, Dorothea Brooke sustains her life at the margins, as appropriate for a young woman in that age. Hers is "a hidden life," showing itself from behind the curtains, as those heavy velvet drapes are gathered back and held in the sure hand of Ms. Eliot.

What is the value of a hidden life? Is it something we choose? Or is it chosen for us? Perhaps it is irrelevant, for surely the key phrase in these final words of Middlemarch, is not those two words "hidden life," however attractive or repulsive they might be, nor even that final image of those unvisited, if honorable, tombs. The laser ray of clarity lies, rather, in that less graphic, untragic and unexcitable phrase: those "who lived faithfully." Neither fanfare nor the potent effect of tragic vision inhere in these small words.

Will Campbell, that crotchety old southern novelist and sometimes Baptist preacher, says in his preface to Cecilia's Sin that one's only vocation is an act of faithfulness. He has no doubt read Middlemarch himself.

Such a view of things is boring, without sure measurement, no heralds or milestones along the way. The steps are small, almost unworthy of effort, for they carry you but four inches forward, or less. One barely notices. Collars, grand commencements, titles and colorful stoles fade quickly. These "unhistoric acts" of which Ms. Eliot wrote (she wrote 799 pages of such acts in Middlemarch), are they not descriptive of our own experience of life, of our own mostly mundane hours and days?

A fictional life is, of course, made up of unhistoric acts. But there, at least, the curtain has been drawn back, on Dorothea Brooke, on Clarissa Dalloway (who is not so shallow after all), on Lucy Snowe. Alas, our own lives are not the beneficiaries of such curtain holdings. No finely-wrought tales will be spun and held aloft to shed light on our own hidden lives.

And yet, perhaps this is precisely the ministerial vocation: that we might see the "hidden lives" in the world, that we might honor those many silent acts of faithfulness among our people-and among those who are not our people-that we might faithfully draw back the curtain to display, not our own hidden lives, but the hidden face of Christ among the various and curious inhabitants of this world.