Preface - Fabric of Faithfulness
(Expanded Edition)
By Steve Garber
Years ago I remember listening in on a conversation, and deciding that if I had ever had the opportunity to study again, that I wanted to spend some years trying to understand why for some people a young adult faith grows into a mature adult faith, and why others stumble and fall, discarding rather than deepening their beliefs about the way the world is and isn't, as their 20s become their 30s and 40s.
Several years later the question had grown, and I offered a fuller version in applications to PhD programs across the country, wondering if I could explore an answer at their university. I did spend a number of years working at that question, and when I finally finished my written comprehensive exams, my committee of senior professors responded with an unusual invitation, i.e. "We would like you to write a book, instead of the typical dissertation-- it will still need to have the look and feel of a dissertation, and pass the university's requirements, but please write a book instead, something for a wider audience." That was a grace, and I took it up.
The Fabric of Faithfulness was first published in 1997, and over the years has had many printings. This last year a decision was made to offer it in an expanded edition, and so I spent some time working at the manuscript again. As I read through its pages and paragraphs, I was intrigued by what I had written, now so long ago! Sometimes I was surprised, sometimes I was pleased. On both sides, I responded with, "I wrote that!?" But knowing that people all over the world were still reading it, and learning from it, I decided to try it again.
So, it is now out in an "Expanded Edition," as of February 2007. In our work at The Washington Institute, its thesis has become ours. In our writing and lecturing, teaching and mentoring, we are always offering one more account of its vision of a vocation sustained over life, believing with passion that a worldview, a mentor, and a community are the critical habits of heart that form faithful lives, in every century in every culture.
We are offering the first part of the Preface here.
Preface
Do you need to go? Can you talk to me? Bai Meng looked very much the artiste, with his very cool coat and cravat. But the words were weighty, and came from his heart; that was plain to see. In the blink-of-an-eye, I thought of having been out late the previous night speaking at St. John's College in Annapolis, talking late into the night with students there, and wondered-- but knew that I needed to stay.
So I told him that I was glad to talk with him. His next words surprised me: "I feel so guilty to be alive." For the next three hours we talked about his guilt, and at the same time, with unusual candor, about the possibility of grace.
That evening, in the company of 25 young Chinese ex-patriots, I had reflected on a question that has become the core of my own calling, viz. why is it, in the face of situations that seem too complex, too broken, that human beings sometimes still choose to enter in-knowing that they will suffer, knowing that it will cost them, that for love's sake they still choose responsibility?
I did so telling the tale of Tolstoy's "Two Old Men." In short story the great Russian novelist recounts the pilgrimage of two friends who decide that before they die they must make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Gathering supplies, they begin their journey-and they walk and walk and walk. At the end of a long day they enter a small village, but see no one. Wondering where the villagers are, they knock on a nearby hut. No one answers, and one of the pilgrims, Elisha, steps in. In the dark, he hears a groan, and smells death. He returns to his friend, gets water and food, and goes back into the hut, offering his gifts to the family that he has found.
What he discovers is that the family is starving, but even more starkly that the village is too. With great insight into what it means to have "eyes that see," Tolstoy allows us to ponder what it is that connects what Elisha knows with what Elisha does, that allows him to understand that he is implicated in what he sees and hears and smells. I finished by commending these young Chinese for the courage of their convictions, for understanding that they too had been implicated in history-as had Tolstoy's Elisha.
When we broke for the evening, my conversation with Bai Meng began. Rarely have I entered in so deeply into someone's hopes and dreams, griefs and sorrows, as I did with him. But it is also rare to spend hours like I did that night, and other nights like it, listening to the leaders of the Tiananmen Square protest, gathered together to wonder about the past and the future in light of the deepest questions that human beings ask and answer.
Bai Meng had been the leader of the student journalist association of China during the spring of 1989, and had been one of three carrying a banner leading thousands of students into Tiananmen Square for the initial demonstration in April. As he told me his tale, I winced in my heart, hearing about the unusual cruelty of the Chinese government as they suppressed the students in what we now call the Tiananmen Square massacre. His best friend had died, bloodied, in his arms. It took him two years to "crawl out of China" as he put it; several years later, when I met him, he was studying film at Columbia University.
This was my second time to meet with a group like this; a year earlier I had been asked by a noted China specialist to spend an evening with "the Havels of China," as she described them. They were the intellectual leaders of the Tiananmen generation, in diaspora, scattered across North America-from Vancouver to Boston. Not allowed to return because of the public character of their protest, some were working in journalism and business, others were studying in relevant disciplines that would enable them to return someday to China. One of them gave me his card, which included all of the needed information, with these words in italics on the bottom: China for the 21 st-century. Since Tiananmen, he had already done a first Ph.D. at UC Berkeley, and was working on a second at Harvard.
As I sat there listening to their stories, I was overwhelmed. On the one hand, they had suffered so much. The depth of their sadness ate away at my heart. But at the same time, the seriousness of their desire to return home, and its motivation, was amazing. They simply said: "We love China-and we want to go home and be part of the rebuilding of our culture." I heard that again and again.
But they had a question which brought them to Washington: "We have been reading the philosophers of the world, and are not satisfied. We want to return to China, and know that we might be imprisoned or die if we do. But we love China, and so we will go home. The more we read it seems to us that the Christian vision of human nature and history might give us a basis to return, a raison d‘etre that makes sense to us philosophically-what do you think?"
Nothing cheap could be said.
As I pondered their question, I thought back one week to the previous Thursday night, when I had taken my two older sons, Elliott and David, and some of their friends to a concert of the Smashing Pumpkins, during the "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness" tour. It was stunning, in many ways. The pulsing of the red/black/purple/green light show behind the stage, the energy of thousands of Virginia adolescents pressed together waiting to hear what was that year the biggest music in the world, and the skillful lyricism of the band feeling the feelings of their audience with incredible ability-all in all it was quite a show.
When we got home I asked my sons about the concert, particularly wondering what they thought was the "climax"-the high point of the play list of songs. In different rooms, so neither knew what the other had said, they quickly offered, "Zero." I had thought the same thing. With lines like, "I'm in love with my sadness," Billy Corgan and his band had tapped into the melancholy of the human heart at the end of the century-but with almost penecostal fervor. No song that night had as much energy as that one.
Much of Walker Percy's work reflects that same reality, viz. that we are a surprisingly sad people, "lost in the cosmos" as we are, with Prozac being the cultural drug-of-choice. Through pop culture eyes, the Pumpkins were seeing the "the homeless mind" of the sociologist Peter Berger; not being scholars but singers, and rock stars at that, they were shouting their critique across the arenas and auditoriums of America. I understood that part of their gift, and honored it.
What bothered me was that they were making so much money doing so. I told my sons, "The nihilism may be honest; I don't know them well enough to know. But it doesn't seem right that they should make a fortune off of sadness. If they really believe that ‘God is empty just like me' (another line in the song, ‘Zero'), then they should stop celebrating the sadness in huge concert venues-and live with its starkness."
That evening was still rumbling through my heart a week later when I sat in the room with the young Chinese. Sadness? Yes, again. But it seemed so very different from the "mellon collie and infinite sadness" of the Smashing Pumpkins, full of adolescent angst as it was.
Those Thursday nights still ripple across my soul, almost ten years later.
A few weeks ago a friend invited me to a dinner with a group of Chinese visitors. A former politician, he still has global interests, with China leading the way. He described them as leaders, and because of my history with the Tiananmen students, I was intrigued. Over a feast, I listened to their stories. It soon became clear that these were "Havels" too; in fact, one was the translator of Havel's work into Chinese.
Each one had put his life on the line for the sake of the future of China, literally. One was an attorney; another a professor; still another a human rights activist. In the literal handful, two had been named "Person of the Year in Asia" by Newsweek. Over dinner I sat next to Yu Jie, the translator of Havel, one of China's best-selling novelists whose work, ironically, is banned in his own country, and a pastor of an underground church in Beijing. Described in the International Herald Tribune as "the most courageous writer in China," he seemed so young to have such a reputation.
But the longer I listened, the more sure I was that I wanted to contact a journalist friend, one of the most respected voices in foreign affairs in Washington, DC. A couple years earlier I had written him, wondering about his "Havel-like" vision. Unlike almost every other writer who is predictably conservative or liberal, this man seems to have a different compass, a "north star" informed by notions like good and evil, truth and falsehood, justice and injustice, and therefore refuses to be put in a partisan box.
He invited us to meet him at his home in Georgetown later that week. For almost two hours he listened to them, asking clarifying questions which drew them out even more fully. Their central thesis was this: after the devastating disillusionment of Tiananmen, their generation had two choices, either to return to Communism or to embrace Confucianism. Neither seemed sufficient, given the yearning they had to engage history, to take up both the suffering and responsibility which was their common vocation. And overwhelmingly, these young intellectual and cultural leaders had come to believe in the gospel of the kingdom, embracing the Christian faith. It had given them a place to stand.
Given the question that I had been asked years earlier-did I think the Christian vision of human nature and history could provide a sufficient basis to return to China? -hearing the testimony of these men was astounding. They were the incarnation of the answer to the question I had been asked; it was being embodied in their lives. And I felt as if I was in the presence of saints.
Having known personal and political heartache, and knowing that any honest account of the present and future implicated them in more, they had found in their faith a way forward. For the sake of love-in imitation of Christ -they could suffer, even as they acted responsibly in and for history, hoping for the way the world ought to be.
