Texts: Isaiah 9: 2, 6-7; Joel 2: 28
Restless Children of the Promise
“For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given,
and the government shall be upon his shoulders,
and his name shall be called,
Wonderful, Counselor, Almighty God, the Everlasting Father,
The Prince of Peace”
-Isaiah 9:6
Those of you who have read the December newsletter know that I’ve lately become fastened upon Isaiah’s words proclaiming the arrival of a prince of peace. Isaiah’s prophecy stands as an exemplary piece of imaginative fiction, a utopia in the best sense of that word, which is a topic I’ll soon be exploring in a seminar at Harvard Divinity School. Throughout those early chapters, Isaiah is busy imagining a world without violence, a world where mutual respect and shared concern govern human interactions, where long-standing animosities are tamed, where adversaries learn to trust one another. “The wolf shall lie down with the lamb, the leopard with the kid,” Isaiah writes in one famous passage. “They shall beat their swords into plowshares…nation shall not rise up against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore,” he writes in another passage. And at the center of it all, we find the unnamed child, the prince of peace, a character we’ve come to celebrate every year during the Advent season.
Christians have come to identify the Prince of Peace with the Christ-child, and with the ministry of Jesus. And indeed Isaiah’s words are a worthy description of what we know to be true of Jesus – the practice of non-violence was central to all that he did, as was his commitment to building a world in which hostilities between people, between people and God, between people and the earth, would all cease. We’ll get to the manger, to that child, to that Prince of Peace soon enough.
The curious thing about Isaiah’s words is that no specific personage is ever named in his description. The words were written several hundred years before the birth of Christ, and so he wasn’t thinking of Jesus specifically – that’s an attribution that later writers assigned to Jesus. There’s something freeing about imagining that that designation might be open to any number of people, that there could be not one singular, but perhaps multiple princes of peace, or better, children of peace. Even if that claim seems theologically suspect, even if you think that the prince of peace should only be applied to Jesus, there are plenty of biblical passages to suggest that one consequence of Jesus’s ministry is to proclaim that we are all beloved sons and daughters of God, that we’re all meant to participate in the status that Jesus is said to have held. As C.S. Lewis once said, the point of Christianity is that we should all become little Christs. Which is another way of saying that perhaps you stand a chance of becoming a child of peace every bit as much as Jesus.
What I’d like to do over the coming weeks is to take Isaiah’s imaginative possibility seriously. Now more than ever, when apocalyptic and dystopian visions are the norm, I believe we need to cultivate an imagination not of the worst that might befall us, but the best that we may yet become. And we need to recall the stories of individuals who allowed themselves to become little Christs, restless children of the promise. I have several reasons for saying so. The first is that the news cycle is so unrelentingly gloomy these days that we need antidotes to overcome the centripetal forces of cynicism and despair. But second, we need such an imagination because for decades now, the public mythologies we’ve ingested and trusted most deeply have been dystopic: from 1984 to Brave New World, from The Walking Dead on TV to Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, along with hundreds of other examples that we could all name. It’s as though we all ingested Hobbes’s Leviathan on a winter’s night, and woke up certain that human life was, as Hobbes imagined, poor, short, nasty, and brutish. That description usually goes hand in hand with another cliché, also borrowed from Hobbes, that civilization is a thin veneer – break the surface and you find beneath it a savage and bestial animal scrounging for food and shelter. That description is one facet of what can manifest among humans in certain times and places, I suppose, but there are other facets as well, and other, better accounts of human life available to us. Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man would be one, to cite a contemporary, but opposite, account to Hobbes. Another would be the book of Isaiah.
But then finally, my third reason: I’ll admit that I do worry about the drift toward far right populism all over the world. I wonder what it’s doing to us ethically and spiritually, and I’m uneasy about what it portends for the future. Which is why we need Advent stories and Advent dreams of a time when swords will be beaten into plowshares, when lions lie down with lambs, when we won’t study war any more. We need encouragement to believe that we all have a part to play in God’s redemptive drama. Jesus is rightly called the Prince of Peace every Advent Season, but we’re all invited to become restless children of that promise.
In the coming weeks, I’ll suggest several such children of peace for you, among them an African environmentalist, a New York bohemian turned a firebrand pacifist, and a humble ancient, who set aside his honor in order to nurture a child of peace. But today, I’d like to tell you the story of another restless child of the promise, a New England intellectual that I consider to be one of our spiritual forbears here at FCCOL. I’m speaking of William James.
He’s familiar to those of you who have taken classes in psychology, or philosophy, or religion. He was the son of a theologian, born in the middle of the 19th century. His brother Henry was an eminent novelist, and his sister Alice was a noted diarist. William himself was trained as a physician, but his omnivorous intellect led him to teach philosophy at Harvard for most of his career, though he soon branched into psychology and religion. He took an expansive view of the world, and he possessed a form of what I’ve called “stretch theology,” where religion became a porous and elastic and enlarging experience, rather than a confining one. His book The Varieties of Religious Experience testifies to that expansiveness, as he seeks to account for a pluralistic world, and for the many ways that humans have organized the phenomena of the universe into meaningful wholes. Rather than closing down transformative or ecstatic experiences because it didn’t conform to a predetermined set of doctrines or beliefs, James reveled in the possibilities inherent in all of those experiences. That’s what makes James so important for us, so important to who we are at FCCOL. He thrived in a world of difference, and sought to learn from all of it.
But he’s important for another reason as well. As a lifelong observer of human behavior, he was keenly aware of just how seductive narratives of redemptive violence could be. That’s what made James a lifelong pacifist. He knew that warfare had the capacity to unify communities around a common cause, and he observed how ordinary people in such conditions could transcend themselves in service to a powerful ideal. He understood that human beings long for meaning, social purpose, and shared projects, and he knew how transformative those experiences could be when they occurred. It wasn’t that he rejected the experience of social and personal transcendence that comes from warfare. He embraced those experiences as powerfully real, and affirmed those who had them. He simply wondered if it was possible to achieve that kind of transcendence without violence, without guns, cannonballs and bombs. His answer, ultimately, was that such a thing was possible.
In 1906, James was invited to teach at Stanford University for a semester, and it was there that several events unfolded that had profound implications for those of us who orbit around Isaiah’s Advent prophecies. First, James delivered a landmark lecture entitled “The Moral Equivalency of War,” in which he argued that there were indeed ways of achieving social cohesion and mutual concern without violence, and without warfare. In a few short pages, James laid the intellectual groundwork for what would soon grow into the Civilian Conservation Corps, or the CCC, as well as other national and international organizations like the Peace Corps, Americorps, and later still, Teach for America. James understood that compulsory service for the young could achieve the same transformative effects for individuals as combat.
Surely that’s part of the genius of the Mormon tradition, which requires two years of service among all their young people. We can quibble with the particulars of Mormon theology, or even the particulars of that service, but the principle is a compelling one. Is that part of why the Mormon tradition is growing, while mainline denominations are struggling? Is it because they take seriously the need to find avenues of social cohesiveness and belonging? Another way to pose the question is this: is nationalism and warfare so seductive, at least in part, because we in the churches and other religious institutions have failed to suggest other, more compelling horizons of transcendence and belonging? James suggests as much in his essay. As people who seek to inhabit Isaiah’s Advent vision, as people of faith and conscience, I wonder if it’s time to begin articulating visions of compulsory service that orient the young and old alike to a wider horizon of concern. Perhaps now is the time for a renewed vision of the CCC or the PeaceCorps or some as yet unrealized ecological initiative that would unite participants in a shared horizon of engaged participation. Would that not be in keeping with Isaiah’s Advent dream?
But a second thing happened when William James was residing at Stanford. Six weeks after delivering his lecture on the moral equivalency of war, a massive earthquake devastated San Francisco. It was Wednesday, April the 18th, and James was awoken by buildings shaking and falling, even in Palo Alto. The day after the quake, James visited San Francisco, and amid the rubble and ruin, he found precisely what he had articulated in his essay. Though the damage was extensive, though the suffering was immense, he noted in a later essay that everyone he encountered seemed almost cheerful, as they found common cause in caring for those around them, and doing what needed to be done. Two things struck him about that moment, James later said, both of which were reassuring as to human nature. The first was the rapidity of the improvisation of order out of chaos, how people took initiative without leadership or coordination for much of what needed to be done. The second was the near universal equanimity. “I heard not a single really pathetic or sentimental word in California expressed by anyone,” James wrote. Much of that had to do with the quality of shared experience that occurred after the earthquake, and the ways people found one another in the common work of rescuing and rebuilding. “Surely the cutting edge of all our usual misfortunes comes from their character of loneliness,” James wrote.[1] Ironically, it was in the aftermath of the earthquake that James found his moral equivalent to war, a situation that, in his words, “inflamed the civic temper as past history has inflamed the (temper for redemptive violence).”[2]
I love that phrase, “inflaming the civic temper.” I love it because it hints at other loves, deeper loves, than those of the self, or romantic love, or loyalty to one’s family or tribe. It hints of the deep pleasure to be found in the ordinary work of building communities, building networks of service and engagement that call forth the best in who we are. So often we speak of the duty, or obligation, of public service, but what if it was also a joy, an exercise of impassioned love for the ways in which we’re able to connect with one another, to care for one another, sometimes across vast ideological differences? We barely have a language for such a love, but James’s moral equivalency, with its inflamed civic temper, is a profound movement in that direction.[3]
In a culture as armed to the teeth as we are, I do worry that armed conflict is never far off. And in a moment as polarized and divided as ours, I also worry that ultimately, some conflict or other will be the mechanism around which we’ll all of us be asked to unite. All it would take is a Reichstag fire or some other perceived crisis. I worry that the kindling has been arranged all about us, and that it would require but a spark for the fire to ignite. Maybe that’s crazy talk, but it seems necessary to give voice to it, in order to remind us all that there are other ways and other paths available to us. Isaiah reminds us of that. The prophet Joel reminds us of that, where young men have visions, and old men dream dreams. Jesus reminds us of that. But William James and countless other children of peace do as well, those who have been inflamed by other loves, by other passions – for altruism, for idealism, for purposeful work, for solidarity, for communion with others, for concern for the least of these. Perhaps now is the time to cultivate such visions and to dream such dreams, before external circumstances corral us in other, more destructive, directions.
That’s something we in the churches have a stake in. “The church on Sunday morning,” writes Walter Brueggemann, “may be the last place left in our society for imaginative speech that permits people to enter into new worlds of faith, and to participate in a joyous form of life.”[4] I don’t know that it’s the only place – I do believe there are others – but the church is an exemplary place where such imagination is cultivated, and where such participation can occur. That’s how it is around here at any rate. Advent insists upon it. Isaiah and Joel and all the prophets of old invite us to keep on dreaming dreams, that we too might become children of peace.
There are reasons to be gloomy, I suppose, to say nothing of anxious or afraid. But I’m not having it. Advent, Isaiah, and all those impassioned children of peace won’t permit it. There is in the world a joyous, hopeful, optimistic, contagious, exuberant, welcoming and non-violent Spirit, and it refuses to leave us alone. Thanks be to God.
[1] Both James quotes found in Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell, (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), pg. 55.
[2] William James, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” found online at: https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/moral.html
[3] Portions of this paragraph drawn from Solnit, pg. 57.
[4] Brueggemann, Walter, Finally Comes the Poet (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), pg. 3.
