Texts: Proverbs 8
Oh Mercy
To begin, a series of questions: Where do you experience awe? When have you experienced wonder? Have there been moments in your life that have made you feel as though you’re in the presence of something holy, something sacred? Have there been moments when you, like Moses before the burning bush, have wished to remove your shoes, for you are standing upon holy ground?
For many of us, such moments, if they occur, take place in the natural world. For some of us, they take place in intimate conversations, where our hearts are exposed before one another. Others among us experience that sense of awe and wonder in the world of aesthetics, while experiencing a work of music, say, or theater. Still others might discover that sense of awe in the world of ideas, where the elegance of an explanatory argument startles into a new kind of awareness. I don’t know for sure, but I’m fairly certain that in one form or another, those kinds of experiences are common to us all as human beings. They’re what the scholar Robert Farris Thompson calls “a flash of the spirit,” when our being, and that of the world around us, is illuminated in a fresh way. To be a person of faith is to pay attention to those flashes, those moments of illumination, and to follow where they might lead.
I’d like to share one such moment that happened to me recently. I do so because I’m convinced that as often as not, the most deeply personal is actually what is most universal. And I do so in hopes that you’ll be prompted to listen for, to watch for, to notice where and when such flashes occur in your own lives. I’m convinced that they do. But I’m also convinced that, important as they are, those moments are crowded out by the ordinary and mundane tasks that structure our days.
Here’s what happened. Last summer, I made it my business to read, or in some cases to reread, all of Toni Morrison’s novels. I had been prompted to do so by a conversation with a student in my class last year, and by an encounter with another professor, who shared his passion for her entire body of work. In work after work, her composition of words, her unwillingness to shrink before the gaping wounds of our collective history, and her insistence upon a hidden but palpable grace somewhere beneath or beyond the very real traumas of life moved me toward wonder. Not only that, she composes scenes of mending, scenes of healing, that are so vivid, so powerful, that something like a hush would fall upon my heart, where something like awe would set in. The source of that awe doesn’t reside in the words themselves, or in her artistry, important as those are. Instead, Morrison’s artistry creates such powerful scenes of grace that, at least for this reader, I’m left with the sense that what she’s describing is real, is true. It’s not hyperbole to say that at times, I wished to fall on my knees, for her words were actually creating, performing, a sense of the holy.
If I were asked, right now, who was the one theologian I would require all seminary students to read, I would answer like a shot: Toni Morrison. But I wouldn’t limit that recommendation to students. I would offer it up to all people of faith, sitting in churches like this one. More than Augustine or Aquinas, more than Kierkegaard or Schleiermacher, more than Bonhoeffer or Tillich or Barth, I would argue that Toni Morrison’s is the spiritual vision that we need right now.
I could preach a series of sermons on each of her novels, and I may yet do that. But today I’d like to concentrate on one that made a powerful impression on me last summer, so powerful that I assigned it in my seminar at Harvard Divinity School this spring. The book is Paradise, published in 1997, just a few years after she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. It has to do with a group of women living in an old house that had once been a Convent at the edge of an Oklahoma town. The women who find their way to the Convent have been damaged by life. They’ve experienced domestic violence and betrayal. They’ve hurt others and themselves. They’ve had to flee their past, and Morrison tracks each of their journeys, tracing the path that leads them to the house that had once been a Convent. Consolata is the sole remnant of that previous religious orientation, and over the years she receives each of the women who show up in her kitchen, giving them work, giving them a place to rest. It’s not a paradise, not really. The women living in the Convent are trapped in their own pain, and so they’re constantly at one another’s throats. They can’t imagine themselves out of their own pain. They’re even less capable of imagining the world of another human being, or of entering that world with a sense of empathy or compassion.
Until Consolata begins conducting strange ceremonies that the women themselves don’t fully understand, but that they come to call moments of “loud dreaming.” Candles are arranged in the basement, chalk lines are drawn, and the women are each asked to lay within one of the spaces chalked on the floor, sometimes for long stretches of time. And Consolata speaks to them, only her words seem to come from another place and another time. She speaks in the voice of one called Piedade, an African figure, whose name derives Pieta, Latin for Mercy. Piedade speaks to them of giving birth. She speaks to them of pain, of their pain. She speaks to them of mercy. And then, little by little, over the course of repeated ceremonies, the women begin to speak to each other. They’re enabled, for the first time, to tell their most painful stories, the ones they’ve kept hidden, even from themselves, and to enter into the stories of one another. And somehow, in that ceremonial space, they’re able to withstand that pain, to not withdraw from it, and to hold one another in the midst of it. The ceremony is a deeply imaginative act, and it allows them to imagine themselves into a space of healing that soon becomes more than imaginary. It becomes real. After one such ceremony, the women step outside into a long awaited rain, and they let it fall upon their heads. It’s a cleansing bath—a baptism, really, and it allows them to discover the beloved that exists within each of them, that exists, Morrison insists again and again, within each of us. But it’s the figure of Piedade, Mercy, mentioned by name only once, who seems to preside over that healing.
As I was preparing to teach the book last month, I discovered that Morrison was inspired to write this novel during a visit to Brazil, where she encountered the story of several nuns who also practiced the Afro-Brazilian religion called candomble, which blends aspects of Judaism and Christianity with traditional West African beliefs. Candomble is to Brazil what Vodou is to Haiti, and what Santeria is to Cuba: a spiritual system of beliefs and rituals that have a life orienting significance for millions of practitioners, but which has been distorted and mischaracterized by generations of colonial encounters that label it as weird, spooky, dangerous, or occult. My own limited experience with such spiritual systems suggests the very opposite. I believe I have glimpsed a healing and generative source of creativity and life within those systems, which are ingenious instances of what I have called “stretch theology:” a creative admixture of African, Jewish, Christian, European, Latin, and indigenous influences that have sustained millions of people through indignity, hardship and indeed, terror. We dismiss those spiritual systems to our own impoverishment.
The scene of loud dreaming, it turns out, is modeled after a candomble ceremony in Brazil. And Piedade, Mercy, is a composite figure, emerging from candomble, but with features that make her recognizable to those within the Christian faith, the Jewish faith, the Muslim faith, and many others besides. She is a presence that heals, that soothes, that gentles, that nurtures. Piedade, Mercy, is a mothering figure, one who draws suffering humanity unto herself, freeing individuals from their ghosts, their terrors, their nighttime tremors, insisting that each of us is beloved.
It wasn’t until I taught the book that I noticed that Piedade makes one other appears one more time, on the final page of the book. A tragedy has occurred, and the time and space of the final scene are uncertain. But a figure sits on a beach somewhere, watching a ship float toward the shore. The figure, it turns out, is Piedade once again – Mercy herself. And Consolata rests her head in the lap of Piedade, while this beautiful mother figure strokes her hair, singing to her, comforting her. At the conclusion of the class, we talked about that scene. Who was Piedade, I asked them? And as we talked, I swear to you, a kind of sacred awe descended, a holy hush. One student ventured that maybe Morrison was conjuring something not only in the space of the novel, for her characters, but for her readers, for all of us as well. She ventured that maybe Piedade was there to heal us. Another suggested that maybe the novel itself was Morrison’s own ceremony, and that Piedade, Mercy, was being summoned for readers, as well as for the characters. And then someone said, “What if Piedade is real?”
With that the class was over. But I’m telling you, I felt dazed and awed as I packed up my things, nearly unable to speak. I made my way to the door. I walked across campus, toward the Mexican restaurant I always, always go to after class. But I did so slowly, because I felt certain that in the space of the novel, and in the space of that conversation, something holy had occurred. I felt certain that it had something to do with that mysterious presence hidden at the core of the novel. What I’m saying, what I’m testifying to right now, is that I felt that we were visited in that moment, by a kind of presence that the novel made real. That presence might be named Piedade. It might be named Mercy. It might also be named Wisdom, as she is in the book of Proverbs. She might be the feminine Christ, suffering for her children, or she might be Mary, a mother loving the world into being. She might be an African spirit, or a Latin spirit. She might be none of those, or all of them. Who can say? I only know that in that moment, nothing felt more powerfully real to me than that Piedade, Mercy, was at the very heart of the world.
It’s funny how those moments work. It can feel as though a window in the universe opens up, but then it closes again. Eventually I began eating and my mind wandered elsewhere. Eventually I got in my car and began driving, and my mind went elsewhere. Eventually I responded to some messages, and made a few calls, and my mind went elsewhere. I went to bed that night, and my mind was elsewhere. But in the morning, I ran, and once again, Piedade, Mercy, felt near. When I returned home, the kids needed attention, there was a meeting to go to, there were people to see, and I realized two days later that I hadn’t thought about Piedade since then.
Has that ever happened to you? I think that experience is somehow emblematic of the spiritual life. Something flickers on inside of us, and for a time nothing feels more urgent than to shelter and to nurture that small flicker, in hopes that it grows. But then we forget. The cares of the day crowd it out until we barely remember that we had a question, that we encountered a spark, that we were ever dazed or awed by something. How can that be? How could we possibly let that occur? I note that simply to say that if such a thing has ever happened to you, you’re not alone. I note it simply to say that tracing the life of the Spirit, chasing Mercy, finding Piedade, finding Christ within our lives, is a matter of immense concentration and discipline. Nobody’s going to encourage you to unhook and unplug and to follow that intuition, but I want you to hear, at least from me, at least in a space like this, that maybe the best thing you can do in such a moment is to cordon off your obligations at least long enough that you can chase whatever it is that’s happening within you, feel whatever it is that’s happening within you. Have a conversation about it. Ask someone wiser than you about it. Read about it. Seek out others who can relate to what you’re talking about. Maybe the most important thing in all the world is to be among those who are willing to pursue the implications of such moments, wherever they might lead. Maybe our sacred calling as human beings is to be hounds following that sacred trace.
But then another set of questions began to emerge as I reflected on what seems to me to be the miracle of Morrison’s prose. If you wish to address the human condition, if you wish to address the very real traumas of human life, and if you wish to create an imagination of human flourishing and well being, what symbols, what stories, will you tell? They’ve got to be some powerful stories to set people in motion, to help them imagine something beyond their present. What stories do you know that can not only compete with the narratives of capitalism, of empire, of consumption, of success, of getting around the monopoly board, but that actually have the capacity to nourish our dreams, that have the capacity to heal and help human lives to thrive? I would submit to you that you might find them on Netflix, and you might find them in the local multiplex. It happens. But it’s no accident that Morrison reaches for older stories, for ceremonies and teachings that date back centuries, and even millenia.
Which brings us to this thing we do called church. One of the primary functions of this endeavor is to let ourselves be shaped by stories that can help tell us who we are and how to orient ourselves within the world. That’s the deepest meaning of this thing called “theology.” For me, that’s never meant explicating doctrines or creeds. Instead, to be engaged in the work of theology is simply a way of paying attention to the deep stories that human beings tell about themselves, and then learning to think about those stories critically. As people of faith, we have access to some of the deepest and best stories ever told. Can it be an accident that most often, the Bible resorts to stories to tell its deepest truths? Can it be an accident that Jesus himself, when confronted with the most difficult and perplexing questions, resorts to stories in order to answer his interlocutors? As human beings, we are storytelling creatures, and we need good stories, deep stories, powerful stories, if we are to survive and flourish in the world.
The sad truth, however, is that most people don’t have stories anymore. Oh, there are stories, but not the deep, nourishing kind that have the capacity to orient you. In part, that’s because for many of us, the older stories, the ones embedded within our religious systems, have failed us. Those stories can feel wrung out. They can become dull from overuse, or from being reduced to platitudes. Add to that the fact that Christianity has been the language of empire and of nationalism, and it’s no wonder that it becomes difficult to trust them.
I hear that concern. I resonate with it deeply. But I continue to believe that underneath the layers of misappropriation and the idolatry of Christian texts, stories and beliefs, there is a deeper and better story, where the authors are attempting to gesture toward the reality of Piedade, Mercy, a healing source at the core of the universe. After centuries of mishandling, it can be hard to peel back the layers, to brush off the accretions, in order to find that vision of Mercy. But I’m convinced it’s there. I’m committed to finding it.
But sometimes we have to get there sideways, slantways. Sometimes we need we need figures like Toni Morrison to tell us healing and life giving stories that bring us back to ourselves, that bring us back to our core, that bring us back to the truest and best things in the world. Sometimes we need figures like Toni Morrison to help us find our way back to Mercy.
