The Third Who Walks Always Beside Us
Response to “In Chapel Perilous” a paper by Nicole Kirk
Dr. Brent A. Smith, Minister
All Souls Community Church (Unitarian Universalist)
Grand Rapids, Michigan
Scene: At bedtime in the still house of the Smiths, circa 1993. The wife, Pat, and
the husband, Brent, are in bed after a long day:
Pat: Listen to this, from Wilma Mankiller’s autobiography: “In our tribal stories,
we have heard of a Women’s Council, which was headed by a very powerful
woman, perhaps the Ghigau. This oral history is frequently discredited by
Western historians as ‘merely myth.’ I have always found their repudiation
fascinating. An entire body of knowledge can be dismissed because it was
not written, while material written by obviously biased men is readily
accepted as reality… How I long to hear their voices!” (Mankiller: A Chief
and Her People, Wilma Mankiller & Michael Wallis, St. Martin’s Press,
New York, 1993, pp 19-20.)
Brent: How would she know it is their voices she hears and not really her own
back at her? There is no possibility of a Cherokee historiography until
1821, when the tribe adopted Sequoyah’s alphabet and could write things
down. Until then there is only oral history which, while a history of a sort,
is even more susceptible to the distortion of self-interested ideology, pouring
one’s own words into the mouth of the past. Oral history is like the “ether”
where all past emails are relegated after they’ve been read and erased.
Pat: Go to sleep.
* * *
The man fires a rifle for many years, and he goes to war, and afterward he
turns the rifle in at the armory and he believes he’s finished with the rifle.
But no matter what else he might do with his hands – love a woman, build
a house, change his son’s diapers – his hands remember the rifle and the
power the rifle proffered.
- Jarhead, Anthony Swofford, Scribner, NY, p 123
In the Introduction to her paper, “In Chapel Perilous,” author Nicole Kirk
states that the purpose of her contribution is to outline and comment upon “the
Unitarian Universalist relationship to the hero myth.” She begins her task by
refining her focus on this relationship, noting to the reader, “The hero myth is a
popular symbol for leadership in the mythological imagination.” Next, she
observes that the mythic model of the hero “finds a welcome audience among
Unitarian Universalists… [in] The oft-utilized nomenclature of ‘journey,’ ‘quest,’
and ‘discovery’ [which] focuses on the leadership resources of the individual
rather than a community,” and in the nature of understandings of ministry “as an
exemplary individual who leads through good preaching and other sundry skills.”
And, finally, she begins her quest in earnest by suggesting that in the Unitarian
Universalist fascination with “UU heroes,” we have the consummation of the
mythic model of the hero as exemplified in the Grail legends, with UUism and its
most widespread paradigm of leadership.
The Lady Kirk’s travels take her to Princeton and bronze plaques
commemorating, among others, Elijah Parish Lovejoy and James Joseph Reeb.
Why our faith tradition’s Calvinist rival honors these two is answered in the
plaques’ texts. Next, she is swept up and onto the modern Grail trail, the internet,
where she stumbles upon our Round Table. But The Lady Kirk uncovers a
disquieting, hidden truth: “One key problem plaguing many of the strong leaders
featured on “Famous UU” lists: the relationship of the leader to the Unitarian
and/or Universalist faith is questionable, and thus his or her leadership within
Unitarian and/or Universalist tradition is lacking.” This has unfortunate, maybe
even dire implications for the authority of the mythic model of the hero within a
faith tradition that at this time is struggling not very successfully with a “language
of reverence” that is self-referent and transcendent; that is, metaphoric religiously.
Employing “Famous UUs” as leadership examples also pushes away from
the concept of metaphor to the trap of a model. The metaphoric aspect of
a leader’s work is often lost among the details of the individual’s
personality and peculiarities. Although such leaders are touted for the
very reason of religious association, how being a Unitarian Universalist
may or may not shaped their work of fame is not included. In this way,
they are sanitized leadership metaphors and models. Ironically, the very
same challenge of religious metaphors with the tendency to make them
into fixed models, or even idols, is the exact same danger for “Famous
UUs.”
Not inherently mythic, “Famous UUs” accrue mythic stature… But
“Famous UUs” are not mythic heroes in the sense they are not multivaliant symbols filled with mystery such as the mythic heroes of the Bible
or Homer’s epic poems.
And finally she asks:
What does it mean for a tradition to so fervently claim men and women
whose relationship to the faith tradition is tenuous at best? What does it
say to claim adherents whose only association with one of our
congregations may have been the mistake of seeking shelter in the
doorway during a rain storm or standing on the steps to straighten a piece
of clothing. The subtext of these claims points to a leadership that accepts
and honors those whom do not commit to a Unitarian Universalist
community as viable Unitarian Universalists. In addition, falling into the
habit of accepting “anonymous Unitarian Universalists” translates
“commitment” into something taken lightly. Further, leadership that is
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valued happens outside of our congregations, and if it involves leaving the
tradition, then so be it. Even with the potential of a vital link between a
famous or notable Unitarian Universalist’s actions with their religious
faith, this information is missing from most biographical accounts.
Once a parishioner urged me to challenge the creator of one “UU Heroes”
web site on the accuracy of a “Hero” whose rebellious disdain for our faith
tradition was well documented, and who wasn’t in covenant with any faith
community in our tradition while alive. The creator assured me, “He confided to
me that he was Unitarian.”
I think the meaning of Nicole’s quest can be succinctly stated: Our current
view of leadership is the mythic model of the hero, Romantic in character,
rebellious in mood, and capricious by selection, evidencing an historiography
more appropriate to oral history. It may also be how we conceive of and respond
to leadership, and its responsibilities, authority, accountability, and outcomes. It
is individualistic and subjective and, therefore, inherently charismatic.
Conceiving of religious leadership in this way produces a Round Table. In this,
are we evidencing what is so prevalent in other spheres of society?
Ever since the beginning of the Romantic movement the dominant belief
has been that a true poet or artist, whatever his genre, must be a rebel
against the established order of society… André Malraux said that "All art
is a revolt against man's fate." Malraux seems to me to reflect the
Romantic view that is determined to see the artist as an individual apart
from, superior to and in rebellion against the established order.
-In Defense of History, Donald Kagan, 2005 Jefferson lecture
What does it mean for a tradition to claim so fervently men and women whose
relationship to the faith tradition is tenuous at best? Perhaps a metaphor might
suffice. Colleagues have with pride told me that Elijah Parish Lovejoy was a
Unitarian, a pride I too adopted. He was a Presbyterian minister, and Reeb started
out as one. Are they wellsprings of our faith or Donacon springs?
There is a peculiarly a-historical and un-redemptive quality in this mythic
model of the hero because there is no sense of the individual being part of a
“people of faith” walking together through time. There is little sense of the
spiritual life involving devotion to a particular faith community proclaiming a
distinctive gospel. It is a private journey of trial and travail, through which others
can be uplifted vicariously. Ironically, the ordinary individual’s consent is to
identify vicariously with the hero’s atoning example, rather than consenting to
covenant equally with others in a faith community of memory and hope. It is an
understanding of the spiritual life as a “free and disciplined search for truth,” but
it is a freedom largely outside of or over against covenantal commitment, and a
disciplined search shaped predominantly if not exclusively by individual self-
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interest. Is it a sign of walking away from a faith tradition’s path, or of forging a
new one altogether?
The mythic model of heroic leadership, as fashioned in the Grail legends and
embodied in the proclamation of “Famous UU’s,” perpetuates an historiography
in servitude to the projections of the self and rife with political ideology. How
would she know it is their voices she hears and not really her own back at her?
That may be its larger and hidden implications. Despite collecting and
enumerating “our heroes,” “UU’s” continue to wander in an aimless ennui in
search of a distinct faith identity. The fortunes of this faith seem to rise and fall
with the public’s political predilections. We yearn to have an identity as a
“people” using an individualistic model as an archetype and metaphor!
I couldn’t help but wonder whether in Nicole’s juxtaposition of the mythic
model of the hero and the Grail legend of the search, with the example of the
Iowa sisterhood, she uncovered an ideology so deeply embedded in
Unitarianism’s religious identity from the Transcendentalists to our own day that
it is difficult to admit. Yet, in continuing to conceive of leadership in the mythic
model of the hero and the spiritual life in terms of a Grail-like search, is it a
blindness we are doomed to perpetuate? And is it a turning away from a faith
tradition that once declared the revelation that all souls are made in a likeness to
God, and lifted up “covenant” as the form of the spiritual life?
What if the spiritual life is conceived of not as the individual searching for the
Holy Grail of truth, but as being faithfully devoted to a covenant; to self, other,
and a Lord of History who judges us in a manner we are in want of in judging
ourselves?
I suggest this because the mythic hero on a quest for the Holy Grail of truth,
as a model for the spiritual life, takes moderns past ideology and towards
clutching a prize that today threatens human connectedness. Nicole explains:
My new favorite version of the re-telling of the Holy Grail story… is a
novel written by Naomi Mitchison… where two rival reporters in a
medieval setting wound with modern motifs. Camelot has a newspaper
industry and the art of reporting is layered with the ideas of chivalry. The
hero and heroine work for rival papers. They are sent to the Chapel
Perilous to investigate the strange occurrences there. There they find not
one Grail, but five. And there is a possibility for more grails. The three
Grail knights from tradition, Perceval, called Peredur, Galahad, and Bors
arrive at the chapel to find and leave with their own particular grail.
Other knights from the Grail stories appear, Lancelot and Gawain the
anti-hero, leave with grails too…The burning question of the journalists,
of course, is similar to ours. Which one is the real Grail?
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Today, the quest for the “real” Grail yields murderous terror, as various
knights with their grail in one hand and a rifle or bomb in the other, clash inside
the Chapel Perilous and out. We struggle in disbelief. How can sincere (they so
confided to me), heroic knights on a sacred quest for truth do such terrible things?
There are three general roles yielded by the mythic model of the hero: the
martyr, the conqueror, and the impotent. The martyr dies, and at best is
remembered, although memory, as exemplified in the famous UU’s site, is fickle,
narrow, subjective, elusive, and capricious; that is, finite. The conqueror, the one
who fulfills the quest, risks the hubris of self-interest, of being blinded in the glare
of holding the shiny chalice aloft. The impotent is the one who goes on the
pursuit and returns empty handed, having not arrived at the aimed for destination
by the measurement of questing and journeying itself. He neither gains the prize
nor dies trying, a modern misfit born of the despair we now see in “jousting with
windmills.” He’s left with scraps from the table; the meaning was in the journey!
Nicole draws out the conqueror and hints at the impotent:
Standing at the threshold of the Chapel Perilous in a far off corner there is
a knight kneeling before a candlelit altar. In the Grail romances, our hero
always, eventually, succeeds. The Grail is found, and the knight asks the
correct question, or performs the correct ritual to embrace the Grail’s
power. In our contemporary times the Grail is understood differently. It
is often unobtainable and out of reach or bespeaks of nothing of the
ordinary but only the spectacular.
The mythic model of the hero and the quest is theologically bankrupt because
it is not redemptive.
Today the journey of discovery at the root of the meaning of the mythic model
of the hero can yield no prize, except, I would argue, the theological “bait and
switch” of “the journey is the meaning.” Or, the quest yields self-delusion, or
worse, cynicism and despair. Redemption is completely different. It requires
something different of the self. It requires a view of the self as a part of a
redemptive history, and history understood as more than biography. Redemption
requires the self in covenant with others to form a community which itself is part
of a larger tradition of “walking a path that in covenant redeems.” It requires a
community that is part of a faith history and tradition, a redemptive story as it
were which the self can be located in and can help shape, but ultimately is larger
and differentiated from the self. It requires a covenant of Being yielding a new
being. Or, as one past President said to me while reflecting on our religious
community’s conception of the spiritual life as a covenanted walk: “A walk with
others doesn’t need a destination like a journey does, but it is not aimless
wandering, either. It is something completely different.” (Conversation with Dr.
Roger Gilles, Professor of Writing at Grand Valley State University.)
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If ever there was such a thing as a knight who went on a quest for the Holy
Grail, rest assured that in the solitariness of his dotage, his hands would remember
the lance and the power the lance proffered. His dreams would be nostalgic and
chivalrous, but awake his days empty and long. Today he would write about
Jarheads trained as snipers, whisked off to contend with an adversary they would
not encounter, ending their “triumphant” quest with rifles ejaculating their bullets
into the empty desert air.
* * * * *
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
-But who is that on the other side of you?
-The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot, lines 360-366
Why this topic by this group at this time? I began asking myself that during
the long drive home last year, a question similar to the one I always ask coming
home from the cinema. Why study the Grail at a time in our country’s history
when civil liberties are being radically redefined, separation of church and state
redrawn, abortion and euthanasia prominent, the Bible and God shape national
and international policy with Biblical illiteracy rampant, terrorism abounds, and
we have emerged from a troubled century that included such luminaries as Barth,
Tillich, Niebuhr, Camus, Adams, Hartshorne, Ricouer, and others whose thoughts
have shaped our concepts of ourselves and of meaning? Why study something
from which the knowledge gleaned only begs the question of history and
ontology?
“Insofar as critics have sought to establish a dialogue between modern
thought and medieval romance, psychoanalysis has been the popular option.”
(“The Ethics of ‘Writing’ Enigma: A reading of Chrétien de Troyes’ Conte du
Graal and of Lévinas’s Totalité et infini’,” Kathryn Banks, Comparative
Literature, Spring 2003 (55, no. 2), pp. 95-111) The modern genre of literature
most like Chretien de Troyes’ original poem would be the fantasy literature of
Tolkien or Lewis. What can be made of an interest in literary fantasy or in the
psychoanalytic analysis of the self? The day is awash in them, drowning any
authoritative voice that might sound from something distinct from them and
which is our particular calling: the theological task.
The existential situation as I read it was recently described thus:
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More than 60% of the American people don’t trust the press. Why should
they? They’ve been reading “The Da Vinci Code” and marveling at its
historical insights…We’re happier to swallow a half-baked Renaissance
religious conspiracy theory than to examine the historical fiction we’re
living (and dying for) today. And not only is it remarkably easy to believe
what we want to believe. It’s remarkably easy to find someone who will
back us up…
This week The Los Angeles Times announced its intention to exile the
square and stodgy voice of authority farther yet. The paper will launch an
interactive editorial page. “We’ll have some editorials where you can go
online and edit an editorial to your satisfaction,” the page’s editor says.
[They have taken as their] model Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia
to which anyone can contribute, and which grows by accretion and
consensus. Relatedly, it takes as its premise the idea that “facts” belong
between quotation marks…
What is new is our odd, bipolar approach to fact. We have a fresh taste
for documentaries. Any novelist will tell you that readers hunger for
nonfiction, which may explain the number of historical figures who have
crowded into our novels. Facts seem important. Facts have gravitas. But
the illusion of facts will suffice [today]. One in three Americans still
believes there were WMD’s in Iraq.
-“The Interactive Truth,” Stacy Schiff, NY Times, June 15, 2005
Are we happier to study a Medieval based legend than to examine the
historical fictions we’re living and dying for today? The theological task is to
correlate the existential situation with the revelations of ultimacy represented by a
particular faith community and tradition. It is a creative task within a community
of memory and hope, and in the liberal theological tradition its creativity is aimed
at understanding human nature in order to speak to the human condition as part of
the ongoing story of humanity’s covenant of Being. “Theology stands on the
boundary between philosophy and literature... The task of the theologian is to
distinguish the responsible and appropriate development of images from their
perversion.” (Christ in a Pluralistic Age, John Cobb, chpt 3, number 1, 1975)
The theologian’s path is between the understandings and perversions of
philosophy and literature, gaining from the understandings but resisting the
perversions, all in order to fulfill a distinctive role in humanity’s quest for
meaning.
While it must consider seriously the questions of philosophy, theology puts
those questions to use to find meaning in the ongoing events of humanity and
creation. Without theology philosophy becomes a series of concepts that distorts
the real sufferings and trials and burdens of real human existence by constructing
a unitary metaphysics of resolution, a Merlinesque spell that Medieval
scholasticism fell under and pragmatists abhor. “The being of entities repeatedly
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eludes the philosopher's grasp.” (IBID) Philosophy gets lost in a Cosmic Mind.
Likewise today, without theology, literature becomes a series of metaphors and
myths that distorts the story of real events. It threatens to transform them into
Romantic, idealistic archetypes, wherein their resolution lies in the illusion of the
“unitary self” that rewrites history to its own liking. “Life in the midst of images
tends to become dissociated from the actual facts of the world and to overlay
those facts with a vision that both illumines and obscures them.” (IBID)
Theologian John Cobb further explains the modern theological task:
Theology must resist this tendency in both philosophy and literature.
Christ is not a concept or fluid nexus of concepts. "Christ" does not
designate Jesus as such but refers to Jesus in a particular way, namely, as
the incarnation of the divine. It does not designate deity as such but refers
to deity experienced as graciously incarnate in the world. To abstract the
designative element from the conceptual would be to distort the meaning
of "Christ" beyond Christian usage. But to abstract the conceptual
meaning from the designative one is equally unacceptable. The
responsible development of the conceptual side of the meaning must be
checked by repeated reference to both history and ontology. (IBID)
The impotent expeditions of our time are all about us. It is time for religious
liberalism to abandon the spiritual life as a “free and disciplined search for truth,”
and take its place in the revelation history of a covenant of Being.
The inspiration for the frontispiece of this final section came from
Shackleton’s Antarctic voyage whereby it was recorded that, walking in a stupor
of exhaustion and hopelessness they spied a hidden companion constant with their
journey, an attendant who, when they were in full possession of themselves, they
could not distinguish. But, one who, apparently, had accompanied them all along.
The party of explorers finally saw this shadowy figure as a delusion that “there
was one more member than could actually be counted.”(T.S. Eliot: The Complete
Poems and Plays, T.S. Eliot, Hardcourt, Brace, & World, p. 54)
To those of us who conceive of the spiritual life as a walk instead of a
journey, the third is not a delusion but a haunting spiritual reality with a real
history. There is always one more member to the party than can actually be
counted. But who is that on the other side of you? The more entrepreneurial
among us might say, “The potential new member and next ‘famous UU,’” a
response the consumerist culture venerates. Others might answer, “A projection
of the individual or Collective self.” Still others, “An imaginative product of the
Cosmic Mind.” I think the third is a figure from the past whose witness we leave
locked up in the sanctuary of still, small Houses. Would that we would see it, or
at the very least hear its voice as that of all souls still waiting to be redeemed.
We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning.
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