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A Wound in My Heart Has Been Healed
On Kenya, Kazakhstan, and K Street too
By Steve Garber
At that point I introduced the paradigm which is the core curriculum of The Washington Institute. Articulated most clearly in The Fabric of Faithfulness, we believe that there are habits of heart that develop and sustain visions of faith and the vocations that grow out of them, so that over time our convictions deepen and our callings are clarified— rather than discarded because we find ourselves face-to-face with Lord Bismarck’s insight about sausage and law, sausage and business, sausage and education, sausage and the arts, sausage and medicine, sausage and international development, sausage and architecture; and in that encounter, become cynical about the very possibility of a coherent life.
What are these habits of heart? Forming a worldview that can make sense of my life in the ever-secularizing, ever-pluralizing world, of my beliefs about God and truth, the human condition, good and evil, joy and sorrow; finding a mentor who embodies these convictions, as the truest truths are taught and learned only as we look over-the-shoulder and through-the-heart of someone who shows that the words can be made flesh, that the ideas can have legs; and making the choice time and again to link up, heart and mind, with a community of kindred spirits, people who together are committed to a coherent life where liturgy, life, learning, and labor is understood as seamless. (See Ray Blunt’s articles on Wilberforce and Jefferson on our website, for a comparison of these two men through the prism of this paradigm.)
Wilberforce’s worldview offers another vision of the ways that faith, vocation, and culture affect each other; in sum, of course, this is what every worldview is and does, viz. provides a way to understand the meaning of faith, vocation, and culture—from the most secular understanding of life and the world to the most transcendent. Born into a home much like Washington’s, the merchant and landed class of the18 th-century British empire, he was raised in an Anglican world. Among those he met as a young man was the former slave captain and now pastor, John Newton, who was a friend of Wilberforce’s relatives. He was sent off to Cambridge and lived a fairly dissolute life during his university years: drinking, playing, and sometimes studying. Upon graduation he entered the House of Commons, representing his home district. A few years later he took a trip to the continent, and employed Isaac Milner, a Cambridge don, as a traveling companion. Over the miles of travel they talked long and hard about all sorts of topics, religious faith among them. Milner was a devout follower of Christ; “awakened” in his Anglican faith, what today might be called an evangelical.
By amazing grace Wilberforce found his way to faith, and his first inclination was to leave politics—ungodly, unholy mess as it was (and is). How can I, now a serious Christian, be involved in something as dirty as politics? Perplexed, he sought out his old friend, knocking on the door of Newton, wondering what he should do. The old and wise man pleaded with him to stay engaged in his vocation, but to do so fired by his new faith, Queen Esther-like—for just such a moment as this— “to take up the abolition of slavery.”
It is a long story, well-told in several books, but for us, the way that Wilberforce so purposefully pursued the formation of a Christian mind is instructive, reading and reflecting over many years, learning to think critically and carefully as a Christian whose vocation was public justice, the work of politics. Quite deliberately he apprenticed himself to Milner and to Newton, opening his heart and hopes to these godly teachers who walked along with him as he was learning to live within the contours of Christian faith. And finally, and this was crucial, he also gave his life to a community of like-minded, like-hearted companions, fellow pilgrims of diverse vocations—business, banking, education, the clergy, politics –who determined to live near each other in a neighborhood called Clapham, day by day eating, talking, praying, playing, thinking together.
To what end? They had two great objects: the reformation of manners and the abolition of slavery. The first is what we would call the renewal of the social fabric, as they understood that there would be no political address of slavery without the culture believing that it was no longer acceptable for human beings to buy and sell other human beings. Among my friends here in Washington we put it this way, paying careful attention to his Clapham community: culture is “upstream” from politics. The second was a huge undertaking, as the slave trade, and its related enterprises, was the primary economic engine of the British empire. No small thing.
In the story of Wilberforce do you hear the habits of heart that give us the skills to keep at our posts over a lifetime, deepening convictions and commitments as we live into the meaning of our vocations and occupations? Simply said, for Wilberforce as for each of us, they are a worldview, a mentor, and a community.
Comparing and contrasting our two patron saints at these three decisive points, Wilberforce’s life was more coherent than Washington’s—even while we deeply honor both. Ponder their respective communities. The Mount Vernon setting of Washington’s life, the beautiful plantation along the Potomac which is now a national treasure, is a very different place from Wilberforce’s Clapham neighborhood, now subsumed in the suburb we know as Wimbledon. While Washington’s table had regular visitors, he had no friends and neighbors, men and women thinking, praying, working together on the founding of a nation. Adams was in Boston and Jefferson was at Monticello, hours and days away from Mt. Vernon; but even more sadly, they were not kindred spirits, caring for each other as they together cared for their culture.
Well, the story goes on. We find ourselves telling it again and again. My colleague Ray is especially good at doing so in public sector settings, in courses and conferences across the country creatively and winsomely engaging people in consideration of these two lives, and what we can still learn from them.
I finished my time with the lawyers by acknowledging that “few of us will be a Washington or a Wilberforce”—even as we learn and listen to the ways that they held together Christian faith, a strong sense of vocation, and a compelling understanding of their responsibility for culture. And we do not need to be. Our callings will take us to different places, to different relationships and different responsibilities. Our lives feel more ordinary, and that is the way it ought to be.
Kenya , Kazakhstan, and K Street too? Yes… that all of God’s people might love and serve him with gladness and singleness of heart, in our various vocations taking the wounds of the world into our hearts— and finding in that calling that our own hearts are healed too. In N.T. Wright’s theologically rich image, becoming healed healers. May it be so.
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