Remembering Reyolds Price

Reynolds Price, Novelist
(picture courtesy of Duke University)

I note with sadness the death of Reynolds Price, one of my favorite novelists.  He carried the second half of the 20th century as the essential North Carolina storyteller and thus Southern Writer.  His prose was always a delight to the ear and eye, his characters always carefully observed and developed, his description of culture and family and human nature in his particular time and place always universal. For me he articulated a both a deep sense of the irony of life and an abiding conviction that human life is precious to the creator.

He has helped me to articulate my sense of human nature as essentially good but prone to slip into destructiveness.  For example he referred to  many of his characters as "decent outlaws"--a phrase I have often used to describe several of the characters of the Hebrew Scriptures such as Jacob the Patriarch, and implicitly myself and other members of my tribe.

I was consistently drawn to and warmed by his underlying spirituality, drawn from his own experiences of mystical awareness.  In his book Letter to a Man in the Fire (Scribner, 1999, p. 27), he wrote:

"Starting on a warm afternoon in the summer of 1939, when I was wandering alone in the pine woods by our suburban house in piedmont North Carolina, I've experienced moments of sustained calm awareness that subsequent questioning has never discounted.  These moments, which recurred at unpredictable and widely spaced intervals till some thirteen years ago, still seem to me undeniable manifestations of the Creator's benign, or patiently watchful, interest in particular stretches of my life, though perhaps not all of it.  And each of these moments--never lasting for more than seconds but seeming, in retrospect, hours long--has taken the form of sudden and entirely unsought breakings-in upon my consciousness of a demonstration that all of visible and invisible nature (myself included) is a single reality, a single thought from a central mind."

Because I am one who relishes experiences of the Holy, I have appreciated the consummate word-smithing of Reynolds Price that has helped me  make sense of them in light of the Christian tradition. 

Not having Reynolds Price alive and writing is a loss!

Thinking Again about Missional Ecclesiology

Reading the proposed "New Form of Government" of the PC(USA) again in preparation for last weekend's Lay Diploma School in Western Kentucky, the starkness of the missional ecclesiology hit me harder than before.  I'll vote for it because I believe we need to streamline the denomination's constitution and this is a fair and balanced approach to that task.  I'm sorry we have bought the missional perspective as the primary model, however. 

What struck me this time is the heavy emphasis on hierarchical thinking in the missional model.  My concern is that missional theology is based firmly on neo-orthodox doctrine, whose notions of revelation are carefully argued from the scriptural witness to Jesus as Christ and who avoided fundamentalist orthodoxy by including the response of the faithful through the witness of the Holy Spirit.  Neo-orthodoxy grew in the soil of European rationalism of the 20th century with its assumption of male dominance and hierarchical order.  Without question these assumptions and values fit nicely into the traditional Presbyterian ethos as reflected in the constitutional documents already, so it's hard to argue against them.  The sense of hierarchy is there in the traditional words: Christ is Lord of All and everything is done in "obedience" to Christ.

I only wish we could have more openness to more relational terms and more breadth in our theological underpinnings.  I long for my denomination to recognize that the richness of human experience, particularly the witness of the creation, and the wisdom of science and the humanities play a partnering role in understanding our faith.  Other 20th century theologians such as the process, liberation and black and womanist theologians speak more from the heart of the human experience and approach hierarchy with more hard-earned skepticism. 

I wish Presbyterians would wake up to the movement of that same Holy Spirit calling us from the margins of the 21st century to really (and I mean really) reform our practices of governing and our theological assumptions.  I keep praying!