In
the Belly of a Paradox:
Reflections
on the Dubious Service
of
Reflecting on Service
Gerald
W. Schlabach
First published in the Journal of
Peace and Justice Studies 10:2 (2000) 65-78.
Reprinted in
the Conrad Grebel Review 19:3 (Fall 2001) 41-53.
Mennonites have had perhaps the most substantial
experience of any Protestant tradition in the deployment of people for service --
over against more conventional missionary work. Yet we have failed to
produce one single monograph which could be called a theology of service.
Some of us have speculated that this datum in itself says something important.
Wilbert
R. Shenk[1]
Once upon a time I was
young -- young, but perhaps not young enough. Twenty-six, a student of
Mennonite history, a product of Goshen College,[2] a protege of Mennonite Central
Committee's executive secretary through two years of weekly meetings, a seer of
the "Anabaptist Vision,"[3]
and a would-be practitioner of the "Politics of Jesus,"[4] I thought I could speak for a tradition,
even amid a revolution. I thought I could write the first Mennonite
theology of service. I thought service could be written.
What follows is a
confession of sorts. Like any confession, it is deeply rooted in one
particular story. Yet I would hope that it is also a catholic
story. After all, catholic really does not mean universal
except as an eschatological longing for the day "when God will be all in
all" and we find that God has woven all our stories into the one story of
Christ's Church. Short of the eschaton, Christians still (but only) are
already catholic as they recognize one another to be witnessing truthfully
(though always partially) to the God of Jesus Christ, out of their particular stories,
across locales, across time.[5]
The story that follows, then, tells of embracing the gifts of other Christian
traditions more widely precisely by living out my own particular tradition most
deeply. Its catholic hope is that there are also gifts here for others to
embrace.
As a confession, what
follows is no less about sin because it is also about gifts. Eventually I
did write "a monograph which could be called a theology of
service." If sales are any indication of the success of my book, To
Bless All Peoples,[6]
then I may have to confess failure of the most abject kind. More
seriously, renewing my reflection on service with this present paper risks
again the very sin it will worry about -- that the act of writing about service
may serve as rationalization for failing to serve. From this dilemma I
have no sure escape but God's mercy. Mercifully, I can at least assure
the reader of this: what will be most painful about my confession is that I am
now a professor who discourages students from using the first-person singular,
and I see no way but to violate that rule here. Thankfully, by now I have
learned from lingering over the Confessions of St. Augustine that in the
very failure of words, confession may at last take its most truthful shape,
giving way and pointing beyond itself to praise of God.
In any case, the
pretense was not mine alone. At many points, the story of Mennonite
Central Committee has been a story of audacious young men and women who have
gone out into our bloody, turbulent, and arrogant century not so much with
expertise as with a certain intangible gift of character -- a character that
must be called a gift because it has not been their own production, but the
product of their communities and their inheritance. With a strange
mixture of subjective humility and objective brashness, MCC workers have
regularly gone into war zones -- and into zones of cultural, social, economic,
or religious complexity. With just enough naivete to serve them well,
they have (at their best) immersed themselves in local communities and become
expert in the dignity, suffering, and potential of those communities -- often
surpassing by far the expertise of well-officed technocrats. This they
have done because they have had a communion of churches behind and before
them.
And theology of
service is part of what has made all this possible. But there is a
catch. Mennonite theology of service has not so much been written as
interwoven into practices of mutual aid, into alternatives to military service,
into ways of hospitality, and -- when written after all -- in hundreds of
articles and pamphlets ostensibly about other matters.
"War, peace, and nonresistance."
"Discipleship." "Concern." "Social
problems." "Politics of Jesus." As in the metaphor
of a sacred canopy, by which sociologist Peter Berger has described the religious
worldview of traditional societies, Mennonite theology of service has been part
of a tapestry that we risk shredding when we name it as something discrete.
In the early 1980s, in
revolutionary Nicaragua, amid a region of social injustice and surging
reaction, naming it was part of my assignment. My wife Joetta and I were
MCC country representatives. The Mennonite and Brethren in Christ
churches of Nicaragua wanted to preempt standard charges that they were
shirkers -- or in this case, counterrevolutionaries -- and do more than they
had sometimes done to help their communities develop in ways that benefited the
poor. In other words, they worked from an understandable mixture of
compassion and self-interest not unlike that of other Mennonites in other times
of war and social upheaval. Not of one mind about revolution itself,
church leaders mostly agreed nonetheless that the failure of Christian churches
to work courageously for social justice might have made a Marxist, Sandinista
form of social change historically necessary. Part of the problem (said
enough local church leaders to get MCC's attention) was that Mennonite
missionaries had postponed talking much about Anabaptism or peacemaking until
it was almost too late. But better late than never. My long-term
assignment was to devise some kind of regional MCC "peace portfolio."
But first, amid our characteristically vague MCC assignment, one thing Joetta
and I knew we were supposed to do was develop workshops and materials on
Mennonite theology of service.
Unfortunately, service
itself kept getting in the way.
Like the prophet
Jonas, whom God ordered to go to Nineveh, I found myself with an almost
uncontrollable desire to go in the opposite direction. God pointed one
way and all my "ideals" pointed the other. It was when Jonas
was traveling as fast as he could away from Nineveh, toward Tarsis, that he was
thrown overboard, and swallowed by a whale who took him where God wanted him to
go.... Like Jonas himself I find myself traveling toward my destiny in the
belly of a paradox.
Thomas
Merton[7]
Through his writings,
the Trappist monk Thomas Merton would mentor me in coming years in more ways
than I can begin to understand or recall. I know that in the press of
administrative demands, unexpected visitors -- and the sheer burden of ordinary
life in the strange shell of a city that was earthquake-ravaged Managua even
before the years of insurrection and counterrevolution -- I often longed for
solitude as Merton had done. That is not exactly my topic here, but it
does pertain. For Merton's journals offered a voyeuristic yet salutary
delight, as I read him struggling in the belly of a paradox that was just
enough like my own to reassure me.
Merton's
problem was that writing about his contemplative, monastic life actually seemed
to have jeopardized that life. The unexpected success of his
autobiographical Seven Storey Mountain had helped attract new postulents
to his silent Cisterian monastery in Kentucky, filling it with the bustle of
new construction and communal tensions. "If I have broken this
silence," Merton remarked at one point, and if I have been to blame for
talking so much about this emptiness that it came to be filled with people, who
am I to praise the silence any more? Who am I to publicize this
emptiness? Who am I to remark on the presence of so many
visitors...?"[8]
Merton kept wanting to flee to some other monastery or even to become a hermit,
but his monastic vows of stability and obedience required him to seek the
permission of his abbot. His abbot, however, required him to keep
writing. Only slowly did he come to recognize where this whale of an
impasse had taken him, for writing allowed him more solitude than most of his
brothers, and eventually he learned he could pray while writing. That
resolution sounds too happy in the short re-telling, however, for midway he had
to confess, "My life is a great mess and tangle of half-conscious
subterfuges to evade grace and duty. I have done all things badly.
I have thrown away great opportunities.... If I were more absorbed in the
Presence of God, I would be a better writer and would write much less."[9]
The analogy between
Merton's problem and mine will not hold if pressed too far. No best
seller, to be sure! -- and a different set of misgivings about the place of
writing within a call to service, discipleship, and stable consecration to
God's work. But I wonder even now about the opportunities I missed
because I resented the demands they might make upon my time. I wonder
about the grace I evaded by preferring texts while treating time spent out
among churches, pastors, and development promoters in this oral culture as more
duty than grace. And even today, I still cannot disentangle myself from a
dilemma, whose explaining might involve yet another "half-conscious
subterfuge" or might yet offer a real service to others.
If nothing else, the
dilemma was one that church workers of many kinds will recognize as the
recurring tension between the urgent and the important. The urgent was
obvious in the headlines of La Barricada only a few weeks after we had
assumed our duties as MCC country representatives in 1983. No longer
simply a cross-border nuisance, the U.S.-backed contras were now
striking in the heart of the country. MCC administrators had originally
chosen to locate us and our "peace portfolio" in Nicaragua because it
had had its revolution and seemed relatively free from the kind of repression
that constrained our colleagues in Guatemala and El Salvador. Now,
however, a low-intensity war was heating up, laying siege, and inflicting many
things far worse than our own urgent, unexpected, unwelcome new tasks.
But it did inflict those too. Even as the Nicaraguan economy began to
grind down, making every bus ride for every administrative errand more
tiresome, we could hardly claim to be serving "in the name of Christ"
if we ignored the needs of a growing population of displaced persons.
What time we had for writing went increasingly to articles against U.S. policy
toward Central America. What time we had for developing a "peace
portfolio" went increasingly to consultancy with Nicaraguan evangelical
leaders negotiating on behalf of conscientious objectors.[10]
Certainly these urgent
demands offered opportunities to network and teachable moments for reflecting
on our theology of peace and service together with fellow believers in
Nicaragua and the Central American region. But even as urgent tasks
tended to preclude attention to important ones they also called attention to
their very importance. Central American evangelical leaders, and
activists in fledgling networks of nonviolence such as Servicio Paz y
Justica, regularly lamented that Mennonites had not begun sharing and
applying their peace theology in previous decades. Central American
Mennonite leaders regularly wished they had biblical and theological resources
already in hand, in Spanish, at appropriate education levels, to meet this need
even among their own people, now that the need was obvious. Somewhere
along the line I conceived of writing not just workshop materials on service
but that first "single monograph" on Mennonite theology of service,
which we wished we had available now, ˇya! The important was no
less important because it was being recognized a decade or so too late.
Still, to write theological materials on service and peaceable social action --
was it important enough to justify writing rather than serving, in
solitude rather than in action?
Eventually our
assignment did evolve in such a way that I could dedicate full time to the
"peace portfolio" in Honduras. Meanwhile SEMILLA, an Anabaptist
seminary in Guatemala that holds classes throughout the region, was beginning
to gather new resources and offer new possibilities that complemented what MCC
could do. But within a year of moving to Honduras Joetta and I were
facing the fact that we were burned out. Or should I say ... being
regurgitated, soon to be strewn from the belly of the paradox, back on the
shores of North America? Not a particularly pleasant image but perhaps a
consoling one -- if only I knew where Nineveh is, much less could say I've now
preached there to some effect. Maybe I had actually fled Nineveh
for Tarsis. For when I finally had opportunity to write more
extensively on theology of service, I hesitated over another layer of the
paradox.
Was it only for
dramatic affect that Jesus went out of his way to show, not only what the
Samaritan did, but also what he did not do? The story arose, after
all, because "a lawyer, wanting to justify himself, said to Jesus,
'And who is my neighbor?'" Jesus recognized that when service to
fellow humanity becomes a point for debate, the debaters may have already
missed the point. And so he not only presented the outcast Samaritan as a
jarring example of right human relations, he also confronted our patterns of
self-justification. He showed us how properly "holy" people may
be the most adept at avoiding responsibility for human suffering.
Unpublished
notes for a "theology of service," 1985
Could something be
going very wrong when we have to write about service? The urgency I felt
to write was not just for Central Americans. It also grew from anxiety
about the North American Mennonite church.
Even now I can barely
imagine serving in revolutionary Nicaragua without the support of a
peoplehood. Obviously financial support was necessary, but more
intangible forms of support were absolutely crucial. To have a family
that is proud not disappointed when one pursues vocational goals that are not
particularly lucrative, a family that does not panic at every rumor of war; to
grow up in churches where enough stories of conscientious objectors and
overseas workers circulate to make service seem a normal thing to do; to
accumulate the wisdom of past MCC workers who have tested the ambiguities of
service in places like Vietnam -- these are great gifts. Called upon to
speak for nonviolence amid a revolution and in conversation with liberation
theologies, I would have lost hope under the pressures of injustice if I did
not know that my people had been confronting hard questions for
generations. We could work from a calm and respectful assurance that our
church, however imperfectly, had not only stood for alternatives to
exploitation and warfare, but had constituted an alternate history that gave us
an identity other than simply "U.S. citizen."
Simultaneously,
however, we accumulated troubling warnings that we dare not idealize our tradition.
An embarrassingly large number of Mennonites had voted for Ronald Reagan and
seemed convinced by his gross distortions of the Sandinistas' record.
Debates with fundamentalist Mennonite missionaries in the region over whether
and how Christians ought to participate in struggles for social justice seemed
to go over the same tiresome ground again and again. Trips back to the
states to speak on Central America might reassure us of how many people were
providing sanctuary and opposing U.S. policy on one day, but remind us of our
church's affluence and acculturation the next day. Whatever the balance,
this mix itself suggested fragmentation -- at precisely the moment when we
sensed a greater need for collective peoplehood witness than ever. For
even while struggling to write about "service," the limitations of
that concept were becoming increasingly clear, at least if service meant
individual acts of "charity" and volunteerism.
Even when we had only
sought the response of one or two individuals, after all, we had really been
seeking the faithful communities that had nurtured them in a servanthood
tradition. This, at least, was my conclusion after participating in a few
MCC personnel searches and observing many more. We often needed a certain
right kind of person with a mix of specialized skills and general
adaptability. That much could be said of many organizations, but more
than this, the mix also needed to include a modest lifestyle, social awareness,
and -- to sustain their commitment and struggles -- an authentic Christian
piety. In my unscientific reading, these seemed to be the kind of people
whom MCC could send into difficult situations and trust to find their
way. These seemed to be the kind of people who could push forward
creative new projects even while respecting local communities and working
patiently with local churches. We met lots of internacionalistas
visiting or working in "solidarity" with the Nicaraguan people.
But beyond MCC circles it was most consistently among people who worked for
social justice out of deep roots in their respective Christian traditions that
we consistently found similar combinations of commitment and openness,
apparently because they were responding from something more than ideology or
the press of headlines.
So while some MCC
workers return to North America with an urgent and prophetic sense of calling
to work for social change back here, I returned with a more pastoral sense of
the need to sustain communal traditions that could work and witness over the long
haul. My nagging, growing, sense was that we dare not take the traditions
that have nurtured us for granted. Even activists who chafe at the slow
pace of change in their apparently unresponsive traditions are often drawing on
the resources of those traditions; their activism thus proves parasitic if they
do not help replenish its sources.
Of course even at this
point my first instinct as an intellectual and as a writer was still to warn,
to write, and to propose a vision that would be so elegant yet explanatory that
any reader must instantly say, "Yes!, so we must live and be and
do." I had come to see God working in the world preeminently through
"Abrahamic communities" -- creative minorities in all societies who
receive God's blessing to them as an invitation not to self-satisfaction but to
bless other peoples by taking the risky lead in living out the social
transformations God desires for every larger whole.[11] The vision was my synthesis of
what I had learned from people like Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder,
veteran Mennonite missionary David Shank, and Archbishop Helder Camara of
Brazil. It held promise for providing an integrated response to problems
bedeviling Mennonite social ethics. It articulated the best of what
Central American congregations were doing in their own neighborhoods and
villages. Above all it made clear that our calling is not just to do
service activities but to be a people of service. And I still
stand behind it. But it has carried me "toward my destiny in the
belly of a paradox."
For the warning and
the theory have raised the question: What really does motivate, form, and
sustain an Abrahamic community or peoplehood? Telling people they should
form one, join one, or be one is insufficient. If we have been such a
community without calling ourselves one, but now have to insist that the point
of our communal identity is to be one, have we already missed the point?
Could writing out the vision actually be a kind of rearguard action within a
disintegrating tradition? When I finally had time and support for
writing, such questions nagged. If I or my church now needs an explicit
theology of service in order to serve, could that be a sign of deep and humanly
irreversible unfaithfulness?
The truth that
Augustine made in the Confessions had eluded him for years. It
appears before us as a trophy torn from the grip of the unsayable after a
prolonged struggle on the frontier between speech and silence. What was
at stake was more than words. The 'truth' of which Augustine spoke was
not merely a quality of a verbal formula, but veracity itself, a quality of a
living human person. Augustine 'made the truth' -- in this sense, became
himself truthful -- when he found a pattern of words to say the true thing
well. But both the 'truth' that Augustine made and the 'light' to which
it led were for him scripturally guaranteed epithets of Christ, the
pre-existent second person of the trinity.
James
J. O'Donnell[12]
Apparently others too
were struggling to find new approaches. As Joetta and I returned to live
in the U.S., MCC commissioned me to write a book on Christian responses to
poverty -- the book that became And Who is My Neighbor?.[13] The idea was that too much of what
MCC was doing to educate its constituency concerning global justice issues had
ended up preaching to the converted. Beyond their circles, others were
hearing MCC's concerns as "guilt trips." And even when people are
guilty, guilt alone is a poor motivator. MCC workers and their
guests often testified that what really had changed them was personal encounter
with the poor. So MCC Information Services had begun collecting stories
from the poor themselves. The challenge was to combine these with Bible
studies in order to replicate personal encounter with the poor in ordinary
Sunday school rooms. Of course, even while the assignment recognized the
limitations of writing, it inevitably took recourse in writing once
again.
And if writing service
is tricky, then editing the voice of the poor may be trickier still. One
of the unobtrusive but crucial gifts I have received in life was my editor for
this project -- John Rogers, a gently incisive African-American who was working
for Herald Press at the time. Quit writing detached biblical and
social analysis, he insisted. You're still writing from a position
of power, he implied. Tell the story of your own poverty; help people connect
with their own. If anyone else had told me this I would have
dismissed it as another attempt to spiritualize poverty. The book that
resulted sought to expose the structural isolation, fearfulness, and
impoverishment of our lives when we live in affluent separation from the
poor. It invited middle-class Christians to take the risks that might
bring the true wealth of human relationships that the poor often experience
more deeply than the affluent. But under John's guidance, the project
also drew me back toward our common human need for God's grace.
"We love because
God first loved us" (1 John 4:19). Why had this been so hard
recognize? Service, response to the poor, commitment to struggle for
justice, love of neighbor extended even to enemies -- call it what you will,
but it is not finally a "should" so much as a "therefore,"
a response to God's prior work in our lives. It is a response to God's
grace. The pattern traces throughout the whole biblical story. The
family of Abraham and Sarah became a blessing to the peoples as it trusted in
God's blessing (Gen. 12:1-3). The commandments of the Torah all found
their premise in "the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of
Egypt, out of the house of slavery" (Ex. 20:2). Faithful Hebrews were
to host strangers, free their slaves, and bring gifts for the poor to the
altar, remembering how God had first treated them when they were strangers,
slaves, and afflicted (Ex. 22:21-22; Deut. 15:15; Deut. 26:5-13).
Likewise, Jesus' first disciples could learn to forgive one another only when
they remember the exorbitantly greater mercy God has shown them (Matt.
18:23-35). Likewise, Jesus' call to bear the cross became intelligible as an
act of hope not capitulation because they had already experienced his healing
touch, his deliverance, and most of all the life-giving magnetism of his very
person. We have been freed and empowered to love our enemies and perforce
our neighbors because, as Paul put it in Romans 5, God acted first to reconcile
us while we were not only weak but outright enemies of God.
Well, I do know
one thing that had made it hard to trace Christian service back to its source
in God's grace. Even after I had charted this pattern in two different
books, it long bothered me that I was starting to sound like Martin
Luther. Luther's argument was that authentic love of neighbor must always
be a grateful response to God's prior work, and will in fact flow spontaneously
from any true believer.[14]
I'm sure I had heard too many evangelicals who had claimed that service and
social change would flow spontaneously from personal trust and gratitude for
God's love, yet had not convinced me with their lives. To make a long and
unfinished story short, if "faith seeks understanding" then the
conviction I am now trying to understand is this: We should be
able to affirm what is right and biblical about Luther in a way that draws
(with Catholicism) upon a more communal, embodied, and sacramental notion of
grace, and that does (with Anabaptism) more to train us to follow Christ in
life as disciples. Almost everything I have written and begun to work on
since I finished writing self-consciously on "theology of service"
has in some way related to this project. Even my doctoral dissertation on
self-love and self-denial in the thought of St. Augustine responded to
background questions about what makes lives of service sustainable, and has
prompted emerging questions about how best to express the relationship between
grace and discipleship. But perhaps those questions still fail to state
the task of sustaining a servant peoplehood communally enough.
Amid my initial work
on theology of service, MCC Executive Secretary John Lapp gave me a slender
book by Metropolitan Paulos Mar Gregorios of the Orthodox Church in India
entitled, The Meaning and Nature of Diakonia. In it Gregorios
chided Protestants and their "basic prophetic-preaching emphasis" for
failing to root their message in "a community deeply rooted in the mystery
of the tabernacle, the presence of the Christian community not only as the
people of God, but also as participating in Christ as High Priest of the world,
... a priestly kingdom."[15]
I probably was not ready for this message, however, for I still wanted words to
do too much of the work of service, and service to always be the kind that
demonstrably does work. Only now do I begin to understand
Gregorios' insistence that "the prophetic and the cultic are not opposed
to each other. The cultic is the true matrix of the prophetic."[16]
These rites, baptism
and eucharist, are not just "religious things" that Christian people
do. They are the essential rituals of our politics. Through them we
learn who we are. Instead of being motives or causes for effective social
work on the part of the Christian people, these liturgies are our
effective social work. For if the church is rather than has a
social ethic, these actions are our most important social witness. It is
in baptism and eucharist that we see most clearly the marks of God's kingdom in
the world. They set our standard, as we try to bring every aspect of our
lives under their sway.
Stanley
Hauerwas[17]
In other words, the
journey I have travelled in the belly of that paradox which is the dubious
service of writing about service, has marked a return. Writing theology
of service (like any systematic writing of theology) may provide a real service
-- but only as it participates in an interwoven ecology, an interdependent web,
of serving and being served in the people of God. And of course, such a
people would not be a people at all if God in Christ had not first come to us
incarnate as a human servant, obedient even to death on a cross (Phil.
2). No one idea will sustain such a people; no elegant teaching or
prophetic harangue will motivate faithful service; no single correction in
ancient Christian theology will set God's people right. In the ecology of
Christian peoplehood, we need all that weaves us together -- all of the
liturgy, all the stories, all the mentors, all the acts of forgiveness and
mutual aid, all the prayer, all the patience with annoying brothers and
sisters, all the sacraments, and (finally, yes, in the context of Christ
embodied) all the teaching that names and writes the pattern of God's grace,
evoking our grateful response. For it is the triune God who creates,
reconciles, and sustains this people even when part of the web is still being
woven or has perhaps been cut. All the rest is reenactment.
Notes
[1]Wilbert
R. Shenk to Gerald Schlabach, 23 December 1983. Shenk is a leading
Mennonite missiologist who has served as overseas secretary for the Mennonite
Board of Missions and taught at the Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary in
Elkhart, Indiana. Shenk is now Professor of Mission History and
Contemporary Culture School of World Mission at Fuller Theological
Seminary.
[17]Stanley
Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame,
Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 108.