The Joyful Ministry of the Cross

Charge to the Graduating Class of Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary

20 May 2012

Father Alexander Schmemann, the late dean of St. Vladimir's Seminary, an Eastern Orthodox school in New York, once said: "I think God can forgive everything except a lack of joy." Dean Schmemann’s distinctive understanding of “joy” becomes apparent in light of a passage from the Orthodox liturgy, which reminds us that it is "through the cross" that "joy came into the world." Tom Currie, in his book The Joy of Ministry, observes, reflecting on this passage, that the counterintuitive but liberating news of the Gospel is that on the cross, Christ declares that the whole “grim” enterprise of human self-justification is "finished."[i]

Today, I want to welcome you to the joyful ministry of Jesus Christ. And as I do so, I want to reiterate a few things you already know, because you are masters of divinity and masters of marriage and family therapy. It says so right on that piece of paper you hold in your hands.

You have been called by God into this joyful ministry. This calling is three-fold, as you know: first, God called; second, you responded; and third, the church confirms. Theologians have long recognized this three-fold pattern.

Typically, we focus on stages two and three of the pattern: your response, and the church’s confirmation. Most often when we share our testimonies about our call to ministry—be it a ministry of word and sacrament, of counseling, of teaching, or of some other kind of service—we focus on our individual experiences, our journeys of faith that led to our response. This is natural and normal, and those of you who are under care of judicatories have related your stories of call again and again. Our official denominational bodies often emphasize the church's role in calling: its authority and responsibility through ordered groups to offer confirmation of God’s calling of particular persons to ministry.

Less often do we focus on the primary, fundamental truth that it is God and God alone who calls us. But this really is the case. And, the fact that it is God who has sought us out is the source of the joy we find in ministry, the joy of the ministry of the cross.

We could speak abstractly and impersonally of the events that have led each of us to the present moment: speaking in terms of fate and destiny, for example, or in terms of history being thrust upon us apart from any choice we make. But, as Christians, we prefer to speak of providence, and to speak of it as an intensely personal doctrine describing the intentionality and will of God, for each and every one of us as individuals and for all of us together.

We affirm that God places us in this moment, this time, this place—and does so for a reason. Moreover, the providence that led us to this moment has a face, the human face of God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth. Christ calls us from the cross. Christ calls us through the waters of baptism in which we are buried with him so also to rise with him. Allow me to illustrate these theological points with a story.

A few years ago, I sat in the study of a person whom God had called to a particular ministry. He looked bone tired, utterly world-weary. It was a day like so many others as the nation spiraled toward the brink of financial collapse. He shook his head and confessed how deeply saddened he was, how broken-hearted really, that the dreams of greatness he had held for his ministry, all the great things he was going to accomplish, now seemed dead in the water. He confessed that day-after-day he wished he had never been called to that ministry. "We don't get to choose our own moment, do we?" he asked, sadly shaking his head. Life is thrust upon us. History is thrust upon us. This is what he was saying.

This colleague labored on for months under the burden of feeling trapped by fate, trapped in his ministry. But one day we were talking again, and I noticed that something in his bearing and his tone of voice had changed. I asked him what it was.

He said that for months he had felt trapped. He had been angry and resentful, both at the people with whom he served and at God. The ministry he was engaged in was simply not the ministry he would have chosen if he could have foreseen what was going to happen. Then one day, quite suddenly, it occurred to him that this ministry was the ministry for which God had chosen him. Everything in his past had led him to be prepared for this particular task, hard as it was. He realized that this ministry was God's purpose for him. He decided the time had come to accept this ministry as his own. When he did that, he said that the life-depleting toil in which he had felt trapped was transformed into a spiritual discipline which he had affirmed by his own choice.

His story reminded me of an old saying, that God can save some of us only by making preachers of us. That could and should be expanded to include the whole range of vocations into which God calls us: pastors, counselors, denominational officials, professors, teachers, mayors. The list could go on and on. God saves us by calling us. Vocation is the principal means of God's grace and providence in our lives.

My charge to you graduates of Louisville Seminary today is this: Yield to God's calling of you to be and to go and to do whatever God wills; yield to the joy of ministry revealed in the cross of Jesus Christ. You did not choose your moment in history, the where or the when in which you have been placed. But now that it has been given to you, embrace God's moment; I urge you, embrace God's calling, because by answering God's call you will find joy and you will lead your people into the way of joy.

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[i] Thomas W. Currie, III, The Joy of Ministry, Thomas W. Currie, III (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 4, 6.

The Meaning of Pentecost

The miracle of Pentecost was a miracle of hearing. It still is.

Several months ago a report about current linguistic research caught my attention. The report began by asking the question: "Where in the world is the largest number of different languages spoken?"

Conventional wisdom, even among experienced linguists, the report went on to say would probably offer New Guinea as the answer. The island offers more than 800 distinct languages "scattered around its isolated, jungle-covered valleys." However, there is another place in the world that now surpasses the remote island when it comes to diverse languages. "The five boroughs of New York City," according to recent linguistic studies, “are reckoned to be home to speakers of around 800 languages, many of them close to extinction." (The Economist, Sept. 10, 2011, p. 93)

The world in all its startling and sometimes indecipherable diversity is no longer on the other side of the globe. The world, the whole wide world, is on our doorstep. This makes some people nervous and unhappy. Some people see the world of difference as a threat to their way of seeing the world, a threat to their own culture, their faith. Consequently, they sometimes try to bar admission to their society. Reacting with a fortress mentality, they may try to erect walls and dig motes to keep difference out. Not only is this reaction ill-conceived and counter-productive for all sorts of economic and social reasons, it runs exactly opposite the expansive message of the Gospel. In fact, I would propose that a fortress mentality is not an option for those of us who follow Jesus of Nazareth.

When the church was born, it emerged in a world almost as diverse as our own. The story of the church's birth is set amid a cacophony of different tongues, people chattering away in Aramaic, in Latin, Greek, and in tongues most of us only encounter when we draw the short straw and are asked to read the second chapter of Acts on Pentecost Sunday. People from language groups scattered throughout the ancient world were together on the day the church was born, "Parthians and Medes and Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the districts of Libya around Cyrene," as well as "visitors from Rome," Cretans and Arabs. There were people present whose language the Romans derisively called "barbarian," because to Roman ears it sounded like a repeated, "bar-bar-bar." They were all chattering at once. And, we are told: "when this sound occurred, the multitude came together, and were bewildered, because they were each one hearing them speak in his own language" (Acts 2:6).

This was the miracle of Pentecost. And it gave rise to the question: "How is it that we can each hear them in our own language?" Pentecost was a miracle of hearing, of comprehension, of listening.

That should give us pause in these days when so many people strain to shout their views at others, but seldom strive to listen. The church's birth is swaddled in listening to people who speak differently. And as any linguist will tell you, to speak a different language means to experience the world differently. A language marks the boundary between different cultures, different ways of understanding the world around us. Christian faith crossed these boundaries not by force of argument, but through the generous act of hearing, listening, entering into the ways others conceive of the world we all inhabit.

And when the church did utter its first words at its birth, they were words that bore witness to the fact that in Jesus Christ God has come into the world to seek out sinners, to forgive us, to redeem us. The church, at its birth, did not attempt to force others into rigid agreement. And the church certainly did not attempt to build walls and construct motes to keep out those who are different (that reaction came a little later, though the gospel broke through those barriers and even gentiles were admitted to the faith). At its birth, the church entered the language worlds of those around us so that it might articulate the good news of Jesus Christ in terms that could be heard and understood.

The miracle of Pentecost was a miracle of hearing. It still is.

Paying the Piper

Several journalists, scholars, and politicians have been looking at the proportion of Americans behind bars, how we got here, and what we might do about it.

Martha Teichner presented a story on this subject on CBS Sunday Morning, titled "The Cost of a Nation of Incarceration (April 22, 2012)." The facts are staggering. In the United States 2.4 million people are currently behind bars. That's approximately equal to the population of Chicago, or about half a million more than the population of metropolitan Houston, in jail. While the crime rate has actually dropped by 40% over the past twenty years, our rate of incarceration has increased to the point that we now have 760 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. As Fareed Zakaria points out in his CNN report, "Incarceration Nation” (March 30, 2012), this is the highest incarceration rate in the world. Zakaria found that when we count all of the persons in our country who are currently under correctional supervision (prisons, jails, parole, etc.), the number balloons to 7.1 million people. In fact, as Michael Jacobson of the VERA Institute of Justice explained to Teichner, although the United States has 5% of the world's total population, we have 25% of the world's prisoners.

So let's get to the costs—first the financial. According to Jacobson, it costs on average $47,421 per inmate per year. And in some states (such as Washington, Connecticut, and New York), it costs more: between $50,000 and $60,000. The total spent by United States taxpayers to support this system of incarceration is $63.4 billion, according to Teichner. The cost of incarceration is causing politicians to cross the red/blue divide, as Democrats like Jim Webb of Virginia and Republicans like Orrin Hatch of Utah seek to find a more just and financially sustainable solution.

An even more startling aspect of the incarceration issue relates to race and the devastating cost of incarceration to communities of color. Teichner interviewed Bryan Stevenson, Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative and a professor at New York University, who said that many of the people in prison are there because of drug-related crimes, such as drug possession. But, while African-Americans and whites use illegal drugs at the same rate, three out of every four people in prison for drug possession are black. We prosecute persons of color differently. The social cost of this fact is as staggering as the financial cost. One out of every three black men today between the ages of 18 and 35 is in jail or in prison or on parole.

As noted earlier, it costs between $47,000 and $60,000 per year per inmate, and state budgets for corrections have exploded by 900% since 1980. The amount of money states spend on prisons is now, according to Zakaria, six times what they spend on higher education. He zeroes in on California as an example. In 2011, California spent $9.6 billion on prisons while spending $5.7 billion on higher education. California built, he says, one college campus while building 21 prisons.

Is there a solution to this dilemma? Yes, there is, according to Linda Darling-Hammond, winner of the 2012 Grawemeyer Award for Education, for her book, The Flat World and Education: How America's Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future (New York: Teacher's College Press, 2010). And the solution is related fundamentally to the competition many see between the dollars available to incarceration versus those available to education.

Dr. Darling-Hammond, the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford University, invites us to do the math and to count the mounting costs for neglecting the funding of the education of children, especially the children in our society with the greatest needs and the least social support for success. As she observes:

States that would not spend $10,000 a year to ensure education for young children of color spend over $30,000 a year to keep them in jail. The strong relationship between under-education, unemployment, and incarceration creates a vicious cycle, as lack of adequate investment in education increases the need for prisons, which now compete with the funding available for education.

The spiraling costs of incarceration ironically are eating into the potential funding for the best viable option to solve the problem—education, says Darling-Hammond.

From a purely pragmatic perspective, it seems clear that we need to focus on putting our funding where it can do the most good, by educating people to compete better in the global economy. This means becoming number one in education again rather than in incarceration. From a perspective of faith, to invest in the education of all our children for rich and fruitful lives is a matter that goes well beyond fairness, well beyond justice; it is a matter of good stewardship of God's creation.

Agnosis in the Service of Faith

I’ve always had a soft spot for a particular kind of agnosticism. Not the sort of militant disbelief that demeans those who do not share its doubts, but the sort of humble uncertainty that says, “I don’t know. I doubt it. But maybe.” Perhaps such agnostics are not too far from the kingdom of heaven, if Doubting Thomas is any gauge.

Several years ago, I recall A. N. Wilson’s remarkable study, God’s Funeral: The Decline of Faith in Western Civilization, a historical and philosophical examination of doubt in Victorian England. Wilson, an Anglican, had previously written biographies of Tolstoy and C. S. Lewis. Indeed, it was while he was writing his biography of Lewis that Wilson soured on Christian faith. Ironically, it was while writing his massive study on unbelief in nineteenth-century England that Wilson returned to Christian faith, not least because of his engagement with the generous theological views of American writer William James.[i]

Wilson took the title for his book on disbelief from a poem by Thomas Hardy, one of the most compelling agnostics of all time. Hardy’s poem, “God’s Funeral,” is a bleak portrait of religious faith unveiled as pure projection. God, according to Hardy, is nothing more than humanity projected and enlarged onto a screen of eternal dimensions.[ii] Yet, even Hardy wrote a poem of poignant, aching, longing, entitled “The Oxen,” which recounts the legend that at midnight on Christmas Eve, in honor of the birth of Jesus, all the barnyard animals kneel in prayer.

Recently, the spirit of Hardy was resurrected in Julian Barnes’ remarkable essay on God and death, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, which opens with the words: “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.”[iii] In contrast to the militancy of the late Christopher Hitchens and other rancorous voices of unbelief, Barnes reflects sensitively and honestly on the boundaries of life and knowledge. In one anecdote, Barnes tells of his impatience with an atheist friend who summarily and unfairly dismissed persons of faith. At another point in his book, Barnes approvingly quotes Jules Renard, a French agnostic and anti-cleric, whom some wrongly believed was an atheist. To which Renard replied:

“You tell me I am an atheist, because we do not each of us seek God in the same way. Or rather, you believe that you’ve found [God]. Congratulations. I am still searching for [God]. And I’ll carry on searching for the next ten or twenty years, if [God] grants me life. I fear not finding [God], but I’ll carry on searching all the same. [God] may be grateful for my attempt. And perhaps [God] will have pity on your smug confidence and your lazy, simple-minded faith.”[vi]

Ouch!!!

It is easy to dismiss the militant atheist whose narrow-mindedness resembles nothing so much as a religious fundamentalist. But what of the contribution of the generous agnostic whose respect for truth won’t allow easy answers—answers that absolve us of responsibility to keep searching for better questions? It may be that such agnostics actually aid faith. Again, Barnes quotes Renard: “Irony does not dry up the grass. It just burns off the weeds.”[v]

Barnes, the generous agnostic, reminds believers and non-believers alike that when it comes to theological truths, our preferences are ultimately unimportant – a fact that we in the American Church seem to have a particularly hard time comprehending. To illustrate this point, Barnes reports a conversation between Edmund Wilson and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Singer, the writer of fantastical stories grounded in Jewish life, apparently told Wilson, the critic, that he believed in some form of life after death. Wilson responded that he didn’t want to survive death, “thank you very much.” To which Singer replied: “If survival has been arranged, you will have no choice in the matter.” To which Barnes responds: “The fury of the resurrected atheist: that would be something worth seeing.”[vi] 

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[i] A. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral: The Decline of Faith in Western Civilization (London: John Murray, 1999).

[ii] Ibid., 1-2.
[iii] Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of (New York: Vintage, 2008), 3.
[iv] Ibid., 188.

[v]  Ibid., 50.

[vi] Ibid., 64-65.

Where are our Roman roads?

One reason why the gospel spread so quickly across the ancient world was because of the Roman road system. Indeed, as Wayne Meeks observed, the missionary expansion of the early church follows precisely the network of Roman roads from Palestine across Asia Minor to Greece and on to Rome.[i] Dionysius of Halicarnassus and the Monty Python crew (See The Life of Brian) agree that paved roads were among the most extraordinary contributions of the Romans.

The Roman roads took three forms: simple roads of leveled earth; earthen roads with a gravel surface; and paved roads on a multi-layered foundation. The last of the three types of roads, the via munita, represented a technological marvel: generously proportioned roads, paved with stone and concrete (a Roman invention), which drained well. These roads carried troops, travelers, and merchants straight (and I mean straight) across hills and valleys and rivers (with the aid of some of the most elegant bridges ever constructed), from the southern and easternmost ends of the Empire to Hadrian's Wall at the northwestern extremities of Roman influence.

The earliest Christians used this vast, technologically advanced road system to carry the gospel across the empire. You can lay out the towns and cities named in the New Testament all along the road system.

Lately, I've been wondering where our Roman roads are. Where are the technological equivalents to these ancient roads—roads that we can use to bring the gospel to today's people? What are the social equivalents to these roads for bringing people together, or the cultural equivalents for crossing the boundaries that keep us apart? Where are our Roman roads?

Pondering this question, I remembered an episode from my own past. When I was a teenager, I listened to a lot of radio. Most young people of my generation did. Rock music and rhythm and blues, mostly. Wolfman Jack brought Percy Sledge, Booker T and the MGs, Aretha Franklin, The Rolling Stones, and others into my room night after night. This was one well-traveled Roman road!  By the time I was in high school, we even had a pretty decent radio station in town.

It occurred to me one day that if someone could produce very short and catchy "messages" for that local rock radio station, the gospel might get a hearing among young people who just happened to be tuned in. I visited the station manager.  He needed public service announcements, and he offered his station's recording facilities for me to produce them. Religious announcements would be just fine, he said, as long as they were positive and non-sectarian. So I wrote a couple of dozen simple messages, most based on core teachings of Jesus. I got a fellow with a great “radio voice” to read the announcements. We pulled together some appropriate intro music, retained an engineer, and produced public service announcements that were simple gospel messages. They ran for ages.  Cost: $0.00.

A few years later when I was in college, I was asked to help produce a new radio ministry under the auspices of our university's student association. A group of us (mostly music nerds) took a "radio ministry" that no one on campus listened to and turned it into a program that college students tuned in and talked about. Eventually, it expanded from the funky little AM station to an excellent FM station. It was wonderful to see how the gifts of friends, their love of God and music, and their lively personalities and sense of humor blended together to meet a real need in the community.

Now here's my point. In those experiences, the Roman Road that ran past our front door was the radio.

Today, when I hear frequent conversations about what we should do to communicate the gospel in this society, I keep thinking about the phenomenal spread of the gospel in the early church, in a society that was every bit as diverse, pluralistic, and secular as ours. The "latest technological advance" of that time, the technology that brought people together, was the Roman road.

There are people today who are exploring the Roman roads of our time. There is a group of recent seminary graduates in Brooklyn, for instance, who have started a fellowship on their own. They are savvy about social media. And their fellowship is growing, even without the official blessing of their judicatory. There are young people starting up gospel chatrooms, Bible studies in apartments and coffee shops. Some new ministries are organically related to existing congregations, but there are also others that are not. It seems to me that one of the things we most need is to identify, recruit, and support the kind of people who are good at noticing and taking advantage of the Roman roads in our culture. We could also find ways to walk with them and learn from them.

"Where cross the crowded ways of life," to borrow a phrase from a hymn, there is an opportunity for the gospel to be heard, for people to know and be known, for gifts and talents to be employed and needs to be met. Let's commit, then, for the sake of the gospel, to find the on-ramp to today's Roman roads.

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[i] Wayne A. Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 16-18.

A Favorite Book

I count many books among my favorites, and no doubt some of them are your favorites too. But one of the books on my list has been unknown to everyone I have ever asked.

I came across this book in the late nineties at a bookstore at Gatwick Airport in London. It was written by Theodore Zeldin, a senior fellow of St. Anthony's College, Oxford. The title is An Intimate History of Humanity. The library would probably put it in the social or cultural history section.

So far, I realize, I've said nothing to make you want to rush out to buy this book. Nor will you necessarily be motivated when I tell you it represents brilliant research by a scholar, who has been listed by a French publisher as one of the one hundred most important thinkers in the world today. What might pique your interest is the fact that Zeldin draws the case studies that prompt his forays into history and philosophy from the experiences of ordinary contemporary French women. But the reason I bought and love the book—and the reason I think you'll find it irresistible—is the unique way Zeldin articulates the various quandaries of human existence.

Each chapter responds to a different quandary. Here's a sampling of the chapter titles (and there are twenty-five chapters in all):

•  "How humans have repeatedly lost hope, and how new encounters, and a new pair of spectacles, revive them."

•  "How men and women have slowly learned to have interesting conversations."

•  "How people searching for their roots are only beginning to look far and deep enough."

•  "How some people have acquired an immunity to loneliness."

•  "Why there has been more progress in cooking than in sex."

•  "How respect has become more desirable than power."

•  "How people have freed themselves from fear by finding new fears."

•  "Why toleration has never been enough."

Reading this book is like having a series of meals with the most interesting conversationalist you've ever met. The turns of phrase, whether original to the author or derived from persons in his case studies, are breathtaking. Again, a sampling:

•  "Love is an unfinished revolution."

•  "To be put into a category is to be put into a coffin."

•  "A mood is more infectious than an idea."

•  "Without diversity of opinion the discovery of truth is impossible."  

•  "Toleration is not the modern medicine it is made out to be, but an old folk remedy, with only short-term effects."

There isn't a single unified theme to the book—except perhaps human existence in all its amazing variety. Zeldin moves from one subject to another with the ease of a polymath, yet with no hint of arrogance.

One of my favorite sections of the book reflects on moral philosophy. Zeldin's grasp of the subject is astonishing. "The most popular moral philosophies of the world, which give advice on how to live, are of six kinds, but since each believes it alone has the right answer, there has never been an equivalent of a tourist office to give visitors to life on earth a full selection of these possibilities." He then attempts to provide visitors to planet earth an overview of the six varieties of moral advice they are likely to receive here. Martians and Vulcans alike may rejoice.

The profundity as well as erudition of this book also bears mentioning. In a chapter on toleration, Zeldin profiles a gentle, open-minded woman who works hard to be in meaningful relationships with persons of different nationalities and backgrounds. Patiently, as he allows her story to unfold, he reflects on the superficiality of tolerance and the difficulty for even a very gentle, well-meaning person to live in relationship with significant differences. He describes toleration as “the reluctant acceptance of a burden, putting up with what one cannot avoid.” In contrast to toleration, Zeldin speaks passionately for a deep respect for difference, a respect that cannot be sustained merely because we fear the unpleasant alternatives to getting along, but that must emerge from what he calls the “doctrine of maybe,” a generous openness to possibilities that are beyond the experience of any one person or culture.

“Truth,” he writes, is “many-sided.” Thus, Zeldin demonstrates the difference between toleration (a kind of grudging forbearance that assumes that I am right, but that I will tolerate you and your ideas wrong as they are) and pluralism (the assumption that the truth about reality is so large, so complex, that none of us can possibly discover or express it on our own, thus we need one another in order to understand the world around us).

This chapter on toleration is just one among many profound explorations of subjects at the heart of human experience. As when eating potato chips, once I start sampling passages and insights from the book I find it hard to stop. But individual passages, wise and sometimes witty as they are, only scratch the surface of what this remarkable writer discovers in and through the lives of the women with whom we become acquainted in his study. If you have read this book, please let me know. If you haven't yet, you might look for it.

Free Finally

Long before Rudolf Bultmann preached about the existential power of the Easter message, slaves in the American south lived it. Like the earliest Christians, driven to the catacombs, these enslaved men, women, and children lived in hope that earthly chains could not hold them forever, that no earthly tyrant could finally enthrall a people created by God for freedom. They heard the story of Moses liberating the people of Israel as a clear and direct promise. And they held to the hope of Jesus whom even a grave could not imprison forever. Slave owners in many places were, in fact, so concerned about the liberating power of the gospel that unsupervised Christian worship for slaves was forbidden.

Without a doubt, the secret midnight prayer meeting was the most daring practice of enslaved persons in the South, according to Sydney Nathans, Professor Emeritus of History at Duke University. He elaborates: “Forbidden to meet for unsupervised ‘prayer & singing & reading the Bible,’ they arranged their gatherings ‘with the greatest care & secrecy’ in ‘some lone hut, where one or two are stationed outside . . . to warn them if their voices rise too loud.’”

In his superb new book, To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker (Harvard University Press, 2012), Nathans invites us to understand something of the experience of enslaved African Americans in the nineteenth century through the prism of the life of one particular woman, Mary Walker. In her youth, Mary refused to attend the secret worship services on account of her fear regarding the fate of those slaves who were caught in the underground services and who suffered imprisonment and the lash. Yet, she later found the courage to escape slavery; make a new life first in Philadelphia, then in Cambridge, Massachusetts; gather her previously enslaved children together in safety after the Civil War; and, at long last, find peace and redemption in her faith.

In those secret gatherings, the elders had sung the lines, “Our bondage it shall end . . . Jesus shall break the chain . . .”, from a hymn slave-owners found “especially obnoxious.” As she continued to avoid the worship services a gulf formed between Mary and her mother. When, however, in August 1848, Mary escaped while on a trip to Philadelphia with the family that enslaved her, perhaps without realizing it she set herself on a torturous journey that closed the gap between her mother and herself. It was a journey that would lead Mary to her own spiritual awakening and the spiritual rebirth of the white family that offered her protection from the authorities, who were seeking to return her to slavery, along with assistance in securing the freedom of her family still in chains.

The story that Nathans tells is searingly honest. The sometimes subtle racism and condescension of even Mary's champions (abolitionists and emancipationists included) is on display, along with the venality, bigotry, and manifest cruelty of the powers that justified slavery and subverted human rights to economic and social privilege. But, because the story is told with such honesty, one gains a real sense of perspective, not only on a pivotal historical period, but on the human condition.

Because To Free a Family makes no pretensions to a faith perspective, the story of Mary Walker's own faith struggle is all the more compelling. She struggled with the guilt and shame of leaving her children in bondage when she escaped slavery. No amount of rational reflection could assuage this guilt, a fact with which any parent can identify. Her guilt as well as her love motivated her to redeem her children. Her fear over what would become of her daughter, approaching puberty, drove her to scrape together whatever she could earn to commission one failed attempt at negotiation and escape after another.

When, in 1855, after a long illness and years of separation from her enslaved family, Mary was baptized, she "at last experienced the rapture felt by her mother at secret midnight prayer meetings in slavery, where they had sung, "Jesus shall break the chain . . . And they shall part no more, who have loved, who have loved."

The story of Mary Walker's journey takes us from the depths of bondage on a North Carolina plantation to the lofty social circles of New England, from the cruel caprices and breath-taking rationalization of slave-owners to the well-meaning, but sometimes doomed, idealistic schemes of white social reformers in the wake of the Civil War. Through Mary's eyes we see a country struggling to come to terms with what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as the unredeemed "promissory note" of American freedom. We also see through Mary's eyes the personal and spiritual dimensions and the familial cost of slavery and its aftermath.