Intégrité SP 2020

VOLUME 19 NUMBER 1

INTÉGRITÉ SPRING 2020

PUBLISHED SEMIANNUALLY BY

MISSOURI BAPTIST UNIVERSITY Saint Louis, Missouri 63141-8698 www.mobap.edu/integrite

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Editor John J. Han, Missouri Baptist University

Editorial Review Board Matthew Bardowell, Missouri Baptist University Todd C. Ream, Taylor University C. Clark Triplett, Missouri Baptist University

Advisory Board Bob Agee, Oklahoma Baptist University & Union University Jane Beal, University of La Verne Andy Chambers, Missouri Baptist University Jerry Deese, Missouri Baptist University Arlen Dykstra, Missouri Baptist University Hyun-Sook Kim, Yonsei University Darren J. N. Middleton, Texas Christian University Janice Neuleib, Illinois State University

Editorial Assistants Mason Arledge

Mary Ellen Fuquay

Aurora McCandless

Webmaster Erin Roach

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal (ISSN 1547-0474 and 1547-0873) is published in spring and fall by the Faith & Learning Committee and the Humanities Division of Missouri Baptist University, One College Park Dr., St. Louis, Missouri 63141. Published both online <http://www.mobap.edu/ integrite/> and in print copy, the journal examines historical, philosophical, theological, cultural, and pedagogical issues related to the integration of Christian faith and higher learning. All submissions are critically reviewed for content and substance by the editor and the editorial review board; in some cases, scholars in specific fields are invited to evaluate manuscripts. The opinions expressed by individual writers in this journal are not necessarily endorsed by the editor, editorial board, or Missouri Baptist University. Intégrité (pronounced IN tay gri tay) is a French word translated into English as “totality,” “integrity,” “honesty,” “uprightness,” or “integration.” Publication of the print edition of Intégrité has been made possible by funding from Missouri Baptist University.

SUBMISSIONS: Submissions of scholarly articles, short essays, review articles, book reviews, and poems are welcome. Send your work as an e-mail attachment (Microsoft Word format) to the editor, John J. Han, at john.han@mobap.edu. We accept submissions all year round. For detailed submission guidelines, see the last two pages of this journal.

SUBSCRIPTIONS & BOOKS FOR REVIEW: Intégrité subscriptions, renewals, address changes, and books for review should be mailed to John J. Han, Editor of Intégrité, Missouri Baptist University, One College Park Dr., St. Louis, Missouri 63141. Phone: (314) 3922311/Fax: (314) 434-7596. Subscription rates: Individuals $10 per year; institutions $20 per year.

An additional shipping fee ($5-15 per year) is charged for international subscription.

INDEXING: Intégrité is listed in the Southern Baptist Periodical Index and the Christian Periodical Index.

Volume 19, Number 1, Spring 2020 © 2020 Missouri Baptist University. All rights reserved.

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Volume 19

Number 1

Spring 2020

CONTENTS ARTICLES 3

For Heaven’s Sake: Appalachian Christians in Academia Kathy Brashears and Melissa Comer

14

Powerlessness: Redeeming the Memory of Trauma in Patience Jane Beal

BOOK REVIEWS 37

Kate Bowler. The Preacher’s Wife: The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities Julie Ooms

40

James K. A. Smith. On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts Julie Ooms

43

Fyodor Dostoevsky. Crime and Punishment: A New Translation.

Trans. Michael R. Katz.

John J. Han

47

Herman Hesse. Narcissus and Goldmund. Trans. Leila Vennewitz.

John J. Han

THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS 50

Young Refugees Kyung-ok and In-kyung Sung

2

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

PHOTO ESSAY 66

The Chinese Baptist Church and Mission School in Cleveland, Mississippi John Zheng

POEMS 75

Two Poems Philip C. Kolin

77

“A Psalm of Ed” and Other Poems James Fowler

81

释经者的祷告 — The Prayer of an Exegete Scott N. Callaham

82

“A Parable” and Other Poems Todd Sukany

85

A Spring Liturgy Rebecca Duke

86

The Novel Coronavirus: Haiku John J. Han

88

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

92

CALL FOR PAPERS AND BOOK REVIEWS

Kathy Brashears & Melissa Comer

3

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring 2020): 3-13

For Heaven’s Sake: Appalachian Christians in Academia Kathy Brashears and Melissa Comer

Amidst family and friends, sitting on hard wooden pews in small, rural Baptist churches, we sang hymns of redemption and bowed our heads during altar calls. Because of, or maybe despite, excitable preachers who shouted, stomped their feet, jumped on pews, and thumped their Bibles on the pulpit, we asked Jesus into our lives and sought His guidance as we looked to the future.

Kneeling at the altar changed our lives in major and understated ways.

Our day-to-day living remained much the same, but our assurance in what might happen to us in the afterlife was grounded in unwavering faith. We knew where we were and are headed. This faith, then and now, would sustain and ground us throughout life.

After considering many other occupations, from anthropology to police work, we chose to become teachers. Looking back, even though we attended college at a time when society favored nursing and teaching for young ladies, we believe, with all our hearts, that our Lord and Savior directed our paths, calling us into the teaching profession—an elementary teacher, an elementary principal, and then a college professor for Kathy and a secondary English teacher and then a college professor for Melissa. Our careers, though perhaps traditional choices for the time period in which we entered the workforce, have challenged us, thrilled us, and occasionally disappointed us. Regardless, we have never questioned our paths. We have lived our faith…albeit quietly…until now.

While our families were strong supporters of our education, we had few or no college graduates to serve as role models. The one role model I (Melissa) had was my mother, JoAnn. She dropped out of school at age sixteen to marry my dad, a decision she never regretted even though she put her dream of being a nurse on hold in favor of becoming a wife and mother. When I was a sophomore, she earned her GED and enrolled in school, earning the distinction of a licensed practical nurse (LPN). The realization of the delayed dream was bittersweet. She faced many obstacles throughout the process, particularly the loss of her mother to cancer and financial instability, but her faith never wavered.

Her accomplishment served to reinforce what I had been told from the earliest memories: education was something no one could ever take away, and that I should never stop learning and never give up on my quest for knowledge. My husband’s mindset was much like that of my mother’s; in our first year of marriage, he insisted I keep thirsting for knowledge which resulted in the title of Dr. in front of my name.

My (Kathy’s) path to a terminal degree was a little different. While in eighth grade, I learned that one could earn the title of “doctor” for knowing a lot

4

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

about a particular subject. While I had not yet determined the subject, because school was the place I loved best, I knew that one day I would earn that title. In hindsight, it seems comical in first grade that I’d “borrowed” flashcards at recess to teach the students in the “blackbird” reading group their new vocabulary words while declaring in second grade that I’d never be a teacher. In my heart, I probably have known, at least since my early elementary years, I would be a teacher—a professor—someday.

Case in point: it was my seventh birthday when mother handed me a card from my paternal grandmother and I said, “Well, my goodness, her handwriting is bad.” Misreading mother’s look of horror, I thought she agreed. After all, my mother was always making me practice writing the letters of the alphabet after school when I so wanted to climb the oak trees or play with the neighborhood dogs. We then had what she called a discussion and what I later learned to call “a come-to-Jesus meeting.” In no uncertain terms, she told me that my grandmother, the oldest of thirteen children, had no roomful of books like I did and only a second-grade education. She went on to say that my grandmother was one of the smartest people that she knew—that my grandmother could plow with a mule, plant, and harvest crops while canning and freezing vegetables that would keep her family from starving. She reminded me of the blouses and dresses that she had sewn for me, the feather-tick pillow that I slept on, and the wedding ring quilt that I slept under. Although I did not know it then, I was learning to appreciate my Appalachian culture, both its bounty and its dearth.

Appalachia Appalachian region. According to the Appalachian Region Commission (ARC), thirteen states make up the Appalachian geography, with only one state, West Virginia, being completely engulfed by the region. While people hailing from the Appalachian area are well accustomed to the term “hillbillies” (Hargis and Griffin 368) when others describe them, the truth is that their ancestors come from a variety of places, including Scotland, Ireland, Germany, and England (Hayes 172; Jones 14). Naturally, their language also finds hold in a variety of languages, particularly a strong link to the Scottish language (Hayes 171-175). This connection, too, is found in the Appalachian culture of oral storytelling, as well as in their music (Jones 115).

Appalachian people. In the words of Brashears, Appalachia is “a home to diverse...people, and religions; a region where inhabitants are not all white, poor, barefoot, and living in the mountains” (34). Further counteracting the stereotype of a non-diverse people, Pollard and Jacobsen point out that, although whites make up the large majority of the population in the Appalachian region, over four million people belong to minorities, some of whom are Black, Hispanic or Latino, American Indian, and Asian (21).

While not all may claim Appalachian heritage, Loyal Jones says that Appalachians have characteristics that other cultures may share, such as staunch

Kathy Brashears & Melissa Comer

5

family values (79). He also discusses their strong patriotism, sense of place, and dry sense of humor (107, 123). As Jones explains, Appalachians are additionally recognized for their independent nature, resiliency, willingness to help others, and the importance that they place on religion (39, 68, 69).

Religion in Appalachia. Religion plays a significant role in Appalachia. Howard Dorgan goes as far as to say that religion “...has been one of the most powerful and definitive forces in the region’s culture” (1281). In fact, the culture of religion in Appalachia includes a wide array of churches, boasting some forty different types of Baptists as well as a variety of Pentecostal, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Holiness factions (1285). Episcopalians, Quakers, and Catholics are among other faiths that also have a foothold in Appalachia.

Practices within these churches and faiths are also quite diversified.

While most of these faith-based practices are considered conservative or traditional, Appalachia offers a myriad of differences in how and why they are performed or not. Although not an exclusive list, these actions include foot washings, observance of the Lord’s supper, sermons, reading of the Bible, baptisms, the singing of hymns, the use of music, sanctification, the sending of missionaries abroad and at home, speaking in tongues, and the selection of pastors and elders or deacons. In light of these observations and until there is evidence to suggest otherwise, Dorgan asserts that diversity in Appalachia is “...the most distinctive characteristic of the region’s religion” (1289).

Awareness of Diversity Hailing from the Appalachian region, we grew up with a limited awareness of the culture of other people, mainly about those with dark, ebony skin and mostly through stories of missionaries serving in various African countries. Often my (Kathy’s) maternal grandparents hosted them, and, although I was sad to learn that people the missionaries described didn’t know about Jesus and the children didn’t have opportunities to attend school, I loved to hear their stories of faraway places where people spoke in different ways and lived where tigers, lions, and venomous snakes were commonplace.

My progressive-thinking, third-grade teacher, however, was the one who introduced me to the idea that I might not have to go so far away to encounter people different from myself.

She asked that we find the differences between the new basal readers and the old ones. We flipped through our textbooks, eager to spot a difference, only to find the same characters in the exact same stories. Disappointed, we accused her of teasing us, but she smiled and instructed us to turn to a specific page. Initially I thought that it was only a picture of children reading—just like in the old book—until someone exclaimed, “They’re not all like us!” Indeed, we were looking at an

6

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal illustration featuring not only white children, but children of color. Our teacher then uttered words that to this day I’ve never forgotten: “We’re making history.”

Even from a young age, our view of people from other cultures, unfortunately, was rooted in that of a single story, much like Adichie’s experience (3:31). She thought of her mother’s houseboy and his family, all from Nigeria, as uneducated people to be pitied until she learned differently. He and his family were skilled craftsmen, with the main source of their living coming from the sales of their beautiful and useful baskets.

We were also guilty of seeing culture through a very similar lens, one that wasn’t very diverse or even seen as lacking in its seemingly solitary picture. This, however, would soon change. Attending college allowed us to encounter people from a vast array of other cultures, and again, like Adichie, we were a bit taken aback. Gray’s Dick and Jane books of our childhood had done little to prepare us for the various people groups we would encounter.

We found people of other cultures not unlike ourselves—people who did well in school believed education was of great importance to success, struggled to find money for course fees and books, told funny stories about their families, and dreamed of being “somebody” someday. We befriended them and enjoyed having them in our life; they added a richness to living that, in full disclosure, we weren’t even aware was missing. We tasted foods different from our traditional fare; we listened to music without a country twang to it; and we soaked up stories that taught us that different backgrounds, different belief systems, did not mean there was no common ground. Still, in complete honesty, we worried about them if they did not profess Jesus as their Lord and Savior, and we prayed for their souls—something we continue to do today.

Bias toward Appalachians As much as college was an eye-opening experience for us in the realm of multiculturalism, we are still amazed that people from around the globe find their way to where we call home, East Tennessee. Just recently I (Kathy) talked with a fellow from the Middle East, a practicing Muslim, and he shared that he had never planned nor dreamed of coming to East Tennessee or even America for that matter.

In my blissful and biased opinion, I cannot imagine anyone not wanting to come to America, and I remember stating as much during our conversation. He laughed and explained that the stories he had heard about America were far from idyllic, full of self-centered, materialistic, and godless people. Horrified, I said, “Come again?!” He explained about the news reports, the propaganda flaunted, and his family’s negative and fearful beliefs about the United States. His mother, particularly, begged him not to leave his country, his culture—but he did at the request of a friend.

Kathy Brashears & Melissa Comer

7

Through a complicated story of connections to friends’ friends, he and his buddy wound up in rural East Tennessee in a borrowed car that broke down one rainy night. Nervous, thinking of tales they’d heard of good ole’ boys who would sooner shoot strangers than not, they gripped their seats with nowhere to go as a noisy, old truck rumbled up behind them. To their horror, three men tumbled out of the truck yelling. As the men began pounding, or rather knocking on the car windows, they recognized words like, “Can we help you’all? Out of gas? We’ve got a little extra!” In no time at all, with memories of firm handshakes and shouts of “God Bless you!” everyone was once more on their way.

Still today, when we present in academic settings across the nation and in various parts of the world, we have been greeted by people who view our way of talking and belief in God as being symptomatic of a lack of intelligence and/or narrowmindedness. Case in point: a few years ago, I (Melissa) buckled myself into my seat on a flight headed for Chicago and engaged in small talk with a friend traveling with me to present at the National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE) annual conference. Excited to be given a national platform to share ideas and network with like-minded individuals, I, unwittingly, slipped into my native language patterns, those of the Appalachian dialect.

At first, I thought I was imagining the close scrutiny, but when the gentleman sitting nearby leaned forward, elbows on his knees, chin resting in his folded hands, it became obvious that I was being scrutinized. After a pointed look (trust me on this, I have perfected the teacher stare to such a degree that it makes others wilt), he leaned closer, glanced down to my feet, moved to look at my stomach, and finally back to my face. Warring thoughts ran rampant. Do I be professional, polite, and simply ask if I can help him? Do I let my anger show?

Do I tell him that he is being rude? Do I ask him what his problem is? The first question, perhaps, would have been the best course of action to take. But it was not the choice I made. I elected to go with the latter one. His response was that he was just checking to see if I had shoes on and if I was pregnant.

Apparently, the single story the gentleman on the flight to Chicago associated with Appalachia was that of a female being barefoot and pregnant. He made assumptions about me (Melissa) based purely on the lapse into my native dialect. Of interest, I met this man, officially, at a dinner party later that same day. He worked with the publishing company that had invited me to the party in recognition of a favorable book review I had written. He apologized and shared that he had made erroneous assumptions based on my speech. I accepted his apology but not without first telling him that geographic prejudice is just as wrong as any other kind of prejudice.

While people of any culture may have biased single stories, bias toward Appalachians is more than a single incident or two. In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s thrust to “declare war on poverty” cast Appalachians as a needy people (Cahn and Cahn). While not necessarily untrue, if Appalachians were seen by society before as being inferior, they were certainly seen so then. As Shaffer puts it, “Appalachians know the ‘H’ word well. Often referred to as ‘hillbillies’ by most of the world, Appalachians have been fighting prejudice and negative stereotypes since the early 1900s.”

8

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

With experiences and stories like these in mind, it is our desire to help others see that our home, the Appalachian region, has more than a single story.

Beyond this, we want children and our students, as Comer shares, to see their lives, especially those rooted in Appalachia, represented and validated (141).

With society’s heightened sense of respect and acceptance for diverse people groups, it seems that now would be the time for us, as God-fearing Appalachians, to share our backgrounds and be met with respect, if not acceptance, of our culture.

Society’s Intolerance of Christians The news is replete with reports of society’s intolerance of Christians.

Making headlines in 2014, a marine was court-martialed for not removing a Bible verse from her office when instructed to do so. Three years later, the U.S. Supreme Court elected to support this decision (Sterling). As recently as 2019, the Supreme Court declined to hear a case involving a high school student who believed that a particular assignment was in direct opposition to Christian faith (Quinn).

Not long ago, I (Kathy) also had an eye-opening and personal experience with intolerance, and one that left me feeling uncomfortable to say the least. A gentleman, whom I did not know well, approached me one day in a group of people and said, “Would you believe that some people have the nerve to say that I’m going to hell?” Ranting, he said that not believing in Jesus was no reason to believe such a fallacy. Although I knew he was aware that I hailed from the area in which we were standing and suspected that he knew I was a Christian, mainly because I freely mentioned being an active member of a Southern Baptist church, he kept asking how people could believe such diatribe about eternal damnation.

Fearing that by sharing my Christian beliefs I would escalate an already tense situation, I quickly and quietly slipped out of the group.

Reflecting on that incidence, I have often asked myself…did I do the right thing? How can I state my belief—without being seen as intolerant of others— that Jesus Christ alone offers salvation? Just recently even the mere sharing of our stories in a storytelling session to foster an appreciation for other cultures, including our own culture, has caused us to come under attack. With stomachs churning and heads aching, we are left to ponder why society is not perceived as intolerant toward Appalachian, particularly Appalachian Christians. Kristoff echoes our pondering in stating that “stereotyping and discrimination are wrong, whether against gays or Muslims, or against conservatives or evangelicals. We shouldn’t define one as bigotry and the other as enlightenment.”

Promotion of Tolerance With this in mind, it is no small wonder why we are fervent in our desire to model for our students a tolerance for all cultures. As a result, we both make

Kathy Brashears & Melissa Comer

9

the conscious choice to acknowledge our Appalachian Christian cultural influences for our students on day one of each semester. Choosing previously selected artifacts held in a small box or basket, we introduce ourselves each semester as Appalachians, explaining each item as it relates to our culture and/or interests.

In my (Kathy’s) basket, for example, I have a small figurine of a girl attending school, representing the importance of education in my life; a blue ornament from the Netherlands, representing my love of travel; and vintage, crocheted beads that my grandmother made just for me. Among the remaining items is a little angel figurine with a book. As I hold it aloft for my students to see, I always state, in a matter-of-fact way, that it represents my love of reading and the importance of my faith in Jesus Christ.

In my (Melissa’s) box, I have a picture of my husband and two children, signifying the importance of family; a small figurine of a school representing the key to learning; and, among other things, a devotional book highlighting my relationship with God and the appeal reading holds for me. We have come to believe that the sharing of our various objects serves as a gateway for students to open up about their own cultures, some of it similar to ours involving a belief in God, and some of it not.

Appalachian Christians in Academia Caravantes asserts, “Religion is a powerful form of cultural expression” (66), and, according to Norman, the Gallup Poll assessed that southern states are more religious than other parts of the United States. In fact, Dorgan refers to religion as “...one of the most powerful and definitive forces in the region’s culture” (1281). In Tennessee, specifically, the Pew Research Center reports that 81% of adults in the state claim to be Christians. Highlighting the prevalence of and importance of religion in our home areas and paraphrasing Jones’ words, one cannot separate Appalachians from religion because it is the basis of who we are (39-50).

While we acknowledge that individuals outside our cultural backgrounds may have difficulty understanding our stance as Appalachian Christians in the world of academia, we might expect that, living in the Bible Belt, we would encounter little resistance (Brunn, Webster, and Archer 514). I (Kathy) heard a professor, however, from a nearby institution of higher learning in Appalachia recently say, “As soon as they know you’re a Christian in the academic world, your IQ goes down by at least ten points.” Unfortunately, we do not think he is wrong.

Yancey asserts that he has faced more discrimination as a Christian than as a black man in academia. In academia, he shares, there is an attempt to understand his plight as an African-American; but this attempt, however, does not transcend into similar support regarding his faith. While we cannot identify with his race, we do know about the discrimination he has encountered because of his Christian beliefs. While some may argue that it is impossible to declare with

10 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal certainty that someone is discriminated against because of faith, the preponderance of evidence is overwhelming.

In fact, intolerance of Christianity has been and is happening worldwide.

In 2016, the Pew Research Center reported that Christians were being persecuted in 144 countries, a significant increase since 2007. The title of Mary Eberstadt’s article in Time magazine succinctly captures America’s intolerance toward Christianity: “Regular Christians Are No Longer Welcome in American Culture.”

Even closer to home—in our own classrooms, we have students, raised in the Appalachian area, who express fear in reading books to elementary students that mention the word—wait for it—“God.” They insist that this is out of concern for the separation of church and state, explaining that in order to keep their jobs they must remove all mention of who they are as Appalachian Christians from their vocabulary. Is their fear of retribution concerning their job unfounded? Schwartz suggests that our students are not alone in their concerns: Many Christians who are teachers or who want to be teachers in public schools have been confused by and concerned about the tension between living their faith and living within the constraints that exist within this public school arena.

These students, however, are the same ones who are open to providing a quiet place for students of Islamic faith to pray and for allowing people of varying faiths to wear articles of clothing denoting their religion. In other words, they are inclusive of other cultures, willingly embracing diversity—its people and their traditions—except when it comes to their own Christian faith. These are the same students who say that it would be disrespectful to wear a large cross around their neck when teaching, but that it would probably be okay to wear a small one as long as it was mostly out of sight. They think it would be acceptable for a student to share the Koran with his classmates during show-and-tell, but it would be inappropriate to share the Caldecott-honor picture book Noah and the Ark (Pickney).

When I (Melissa) assigned graduate students, all practicing teachers, to write their autobiography, I discovered that the majority of them share my Christian background. Surprisingly, or perhaps not so much, a large percentage of them apologized to me—the reader and grader of their stories—for mentioning their faith. They were afraid that I would find the mere reference of their beliefs in God, in Jesus, offensive. I do not think they would have apologized for their ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identification, or religious backgrounds if they had been, for example, Islamic or atheist. To echo, have we become such an “enlightened” nation that we find the mere mention of faith, of God, of Jesus and salvation, unacceptable? Have we, at least in academia, accepted the idea that tolerance is to be extended to all groups except Christians, specifically Appalachian Christians? If the answer is no, why then do our students, do we as educators, feel the need to apologize for referencing our faith or simply remain quiet of our beliefs? Answers to these questions continue to haunt us as we

Kathy Brashears & Melissa Comer 11 attempt to take a bolder stance, questioning and often blurring the stance of separation of church and state.

Conclusion Throughout our careers, we have worked diligently to model tolerance of others, embrace diversity, and ensure equity among all peoples in our classes, presentations, and writings.

In our college classrooms, we persist in demonstrating respect for others by sharing children’s literature featuring people of different faiths. We are proud of what we have accomplished while humbled that we have been allowed, so far, to thrive in the world of academia in spite of, or perhaps because of, our faith in Jesus Christ. However, our reflection is not without questions. With our lofty goals, have we somehow helped in sending the message that intolerance of Christianity, especially our own Appalachian Christian views, is acceptable? The answer in the affirmative is not an easy one, nor is it one we like. We find ourselves asking, how did we reach this point...but, more importantly, how do we move beyond it?

Let’s all hope, for Heaven’s sake, that Christians—Appalachian or not— will find both acceptance and their voice in society, and, perhaps especially, in academia.

Works Cited Adichie, Chimamanda. “The Danger of a Single Story.” TedGlobal, 2009. https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_ story/transcript?language=en. Accessed June 22, 2019.

Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC). The Appalachian Region, vol. 1, N.D. https://www.arc.gov/appalachian_region/theappalachianregion.asp.

Accessed June 22, 2019.

Brashears, Kathy. “Appalachian Picturebook, Read-Alouds, and Teacher-led Discussion: Combating Stereotypes Associated with the Appalachian Region.” Childhood Education Journal, vol. 88, no. 1, 2012, pp. 33-35.

Brunn, Stanley D., Gerald R. Webster, and J. C. Archer. “The Bible Belt in a Changing South: Shrinking, Relocating, and Multiple Buckles.”

Southeastern Geographer, vol. 51, no. 4, 2011, pp. 513-549.

Cahn, Edgar S., and Jean C. Cahn. “The War on Poverty: A Civilian Perspective.” Yale Law Journal, vol.73, 1963, p. 1317.

Caravantes, Ernesto. From Melting Pot to Witch’s Cauldron: How Multiculturalism Failed America. Lanham, Md: Hamilton Books, 2010.

Comer, Melissa. “Rob, Mary Call, and Me: The Search for Self in Appalachian Literature.” The New Advocate, vol. 12, no. 2, 1999, pp. 141-153.

Dorgan, Howard, section editor. 2006. “Religion.” In Encyclopedia of Appalachia, ed. R. Abramson and J. Haskell, 1281-1359 (with

12 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal introductory essay, 1281-1289). Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Eberstadt, Mary. “Regular Christians are No Longer Welcome in American Culture. Time, 29 June 2016. https://time.com/4385755/faith-in-america/ Accessed January 20, 2020.

Gray, William. Elson Gray Readers. Scott-Foresman, 1965.

Hirsch Jr., Eric Donald, et al., eds. The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

Hargis, Peggy Griffith, and Larry J. Griffin. The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Social Class. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, vol. 20, 2012.

Hayes, Amanda. “Op’nin’ the Door for Appalachia in the Writing Classroom.”

Teaching English in the Two Year College, vol. 39, no. 2, 2011, pp. 168183.

Jones, Loyal. Appalachian Values. Ashland, KY: Jesse Stuart Foundation, 1994.

Kristof, Nicholas. “The Liberal Blind Spot.” The New York Times, 28 May 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/opinion/sunday/the-liberal-blindspot.html. Accessed June 24, 2019.

Norman, Jim. “The Religious Regions of the United States.” The Gallup Poll, 2018. https://news.gallup.com/poll/232223/religious-regions.aspx.

Accessed June 22, 2019.

PEW Research Center. “Religion and Public Life: Religion Composition of Adults in Tennessee.” Pew Research Report. Washington D.C., 2014. https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/state/tennessee/.

Accessed June 22, 2019.

PEW Research Center. “Restrictions on Religion.” 21 June 2018. Pew Research Report. https://www.pewforum.org/2018/06/21/harassment-of-religiousgroups-hits-highest-point-since-2007/. Accessed January 20, 2020.

Pickney, Jerry. “Noah and the Ark.” Chronicle Books, 2002.

Pollard, Kelvin and Linda A. Jacobsen. “The Appalachian Region: A Data Overview 2013-2017 American Community Survey.” The Appalachian Regional Commission, May 2019.

Quinn, Melissa. “Supreme Court Reject Challenge to Public School Coursework on Islam.” Washington Examiner. 12 Oct. 2019. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/courts/supreme-courtrejects-challenge-to-public-school-coursework-on-islam. Accessed January 20, 2020.

Schwartz, James E. “Christians Teaching in the Public Schools: What Are Some Options?” Christian Scholar’s Review, 1997.

Shaffer, Aishina. “The “H” Word: Fighting Negative Language Stereotypes in Appalachia.” 12 June 2017. West Virginia University. https://eberly.wvu.edu/news-events/eberly-news/2017/06/12/the-h-wordfighting-negative-language-stereotypes-in-appalachia. Accessed January 20, 2020.

Kathy Brashears & Melissa Comer 13 Sterling, Monifa. “Marine Fired for ‘Bad Conduct’ after Refusing to Remove a Bible Verse over Her Desk.” LifeSite, 9 May 2017. https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/marine-fired-for-posting-a-bibleverse-over-her-desk. Accessed January 20, 2020.

Yancey, George. “In Academia I Face More Discrimination as a Christian than as an African American.” The Stream, 29 May 2016. https://stream.org/what-its-like-for-me-as-a-minority-and-christian-inacademia/. Accessed June 22, 2019.

14 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring 2020): 14-36

Powerlessness: Redeeming the Memory of Trauma in Patience Jane Beal

Five poems are often attributed to the same poet: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and St. Erkenwald. The first four forms appeared together in Cotton Nero A.x, and the fifth, in Harley 2250.1 Early scholarly investigations of these poems debated the “authorship” question: whether the poems were written by different poets or whether the same poet wrote all four or five poems.2 Since the publication of A.C. Spearing’s The GawainPoet: A Critical Study in 1970, most literary scholars have felt comfortable attributing all four of the poems in “The Pearl Manuscript” to one poet and some have added St. Erkenwald to the poet’s oeuvre as well.3 The poet remains anonymous, though there have been many speculations about his identity,4 and his anonymity has not prevented scholars from composing books about him.5 Studies examining all four (or five) poems together have discovered many connections between them. Significant academic books have focused on the unifying elements between the poems,6 comparative analysis of the poems’ genres,7 and key themes, including courtesy, vision, number symbolism, epistemology, and theology, or more specifically, the poet’s representation of God.8 The poet has a recognized penchant for developing key symbols—the pearl, the pentangle—and, notably, the word “perle” occurs in all five poems. Yet even with all of these considered, additional connections remain to be examined.

The experience of trauma and the need for healing from it, for example, is an under-explored theme that runs through all five poems.9 “Trauma” is an English word with Greek origins; in Greek, τραύμα means “wound.” In English, the word has come to mean not only a physical injury, but a deeply distressing or disturbing personal experience and the emotional shock that accompanies the experience. Within each poem of the five poems attributed to our anonymous poet is a memory of trauma: in Pearl, the dreamer’s traumatic memory is of the loss of someone beloved to him; in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the traumatic thought haunting Gawain is the imminent threat of beheading. In Cleanness, a series of biblical disasters becomes a chain of traumatic memories; in St. Erkenwald, the righteous pagan judge is traumatized by being buried, unbaptized, and excluded from heaven until his intact body is exhumed and baptized with a bishop’s teardrop. In Patience, which re-tells the biblical story of Jonah as a negative exemplum in a sermon on the Beatitudes, that trauma is two-fold—poverty and prophetic calling—which results in a sense of powerlessness in the narrator and Jonah respectively.10 That sense of powerlessness leads to intense fear. Coping strategies include the speaker’s emotional resistance, verbalized as complaint, and the prophet Jonah’s spiritual

Jane Beal 15 resistance, actualized in physical flight. But these do not bring healing. Something else is needed for healing to occur: truth and redemption.

This essay on Patience explores the parallel between the sense of powerlessness experienced by the speaker as a result of poverty and the powerlessness experienced by Jonah as a result of his prophetic calling. The speaker’s redemptive healing can be understood in terms of a narrative identification with Jonah and a progression through the Christian contemplative stages of humility, purgation, illumination, maturation, and unification. As the conclusion of the poem shows, this process strengthens the virtue of longsuffering in the speaker, not in isolation, but in community with the readers of the poem.

Powerlessness and Trauma The structure of Patience, like that of Pearl, can be compared to a triptych.11 Whereas Pearl begins and ends in an earthly garden, and features an elaborate dream-vision in-between, Patience begins and ends with the speaker’s monologue to the readers and features a re-telling of the biblical story of Jonah inbetween. In other words, the story of Jonah in Patience is related within a carefully crafted frame narrative. The frame narrative contains and comments upon the central picture of the triptych. Elements from that picture are visualized by the illustrator of the Pearl Manuscript, British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x, in two scenes, the first of Jonah being thrown overboard into a stormy sea toward the maw of the waiting whale and the second of Jonah preaching to the citizens of Ninevah.12 In comparison to Pearl, Patience is the shorter poem—531 lines (vs. 1212 lines)—but it is similarly divided into sections, as indicated by the large capital letters that begin them. Whereas Pearl has twenty of these, Patience has four major sections, including a prologue and an epilogue. These parts of the poem are composed of unrhymed, alliterative lines, which are not divided into stanzas (though the quatrain has been used in some editions to create breaks between smaller units of text).13 The closing line of the poem echoes the opening one almost exactly. The dialect of the poem originates in the North-West Midlands of England in the last quarter of the fourteenth-century.14 The formal structure provides the immediate context for the presentation of three key characters—the speaker, Jonah, and God—who, like the Dreamer, the Maiden, and God in Pearl, have a troubling trauma to work through among them. As in the dream vision, so in this homiletic poem, God seems to be the source of the wound. In Pearl, God took the Maiden, and the Dreamer lost her. In Patience, the speaker’s Lord has left him in a state of involuntary poverty, which results in a sense of powerlessness. The trauma of the speaker is paralleled by Jonah’s trauma: the central panel of the triptych of Patience depicts Jonah as traumatized by God’s command to go to Ninevah to fulfill his prophetic calling, resulting in his sense of powerlessness and fear. The poet deliberately establishes

16 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal this vivid parallel between the speaker and the prophet, who are both wounded – both traumatized.

The English word “trauma” comes to us from the Greek word, τραύμα, meaning “wound.” However, “trauma” did not enter the English language until the mid-seventeenth century. It was first used in adjectival form (“traumatic”) in the 1650s and later in nominal form (“trauma”) in 1685-95. Then, as now, “trauma” was related to physical pathology and meant “a body wound or shock produced by sudden physical injury, as from violence or accident” as well as “the condition produced by this: traumatism.”15 Today, we also think of trauma in psychological terms, which developed from the understanding of “shell-shock” in World War I: “an experience that produces psychological injury or pain” and “the psychological injury so caused.”16 Shell-shock came to be known as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD is well-defined in a key textbook relied upon by modern psychologists, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV and, now, DSM-V.17 The term is commonly used in culture “to describe an emotional shock that causes serious psychological damage.”18 Although the terms “trauma” and “post-traumatic stress disorder” as we use them today were unknown to our poet’s late-medieval time period, the concepts of “trauma” and “post-traumatic stress disorder” were certainly experienced by human beings and explored in the literature of the Middle Ages.

Not only were death and battle wounds traumatic, but love itself was a wound.

The figure of Sir Orfeo, wandering in mad grief in the woods after his beloved Queen Herodis is taken by the fair folk, is a poignant example.19 Key symptoms that we find in the DSM-IV are found also in medieval poetry: exposure to traumatizing events, the resulting fear and terror (in Middle English, called “drede” [dread]), unexpected cues and triggers, recurring nightmares and flashbacks, and vivid fight-or-flight responses as well as the sufferers’ shaking and being easily startled.20 The trauma in Patience emerges gradually, in a way readers might not expect, given that the poem begins with the speaker recollecting how he heard a sermon on the Beatitudes preached from the Gospel of Matthew. He recalls these virtues and imagines them as eight ladies, as allegorical personifications, that he calls Lady Poverty, Lady Pity, Lady Penance, Lady Meakness, Lady Mercy, Lady Cleanness, Lady Peace, and Patience—the last of whom he includes in the list but does not actually call a “Lady”—perhaps a sign of frustration with this particular virtue. Indeed, in the very first line of the poem, he has already said: “Pacience is a poynt, þaȝ hit displease ofte” (“Patience is a point [of doctrine], though it displeases often”).21 The personification of this allegorical virtue as “Patience” (also sometimes known as the Queen of Patience) occurs in other well-known, Middle English poems of the Ricardian era: John Gower’s Confessio amantis (3.1098), William Langland’s Piers Plowman B-Text (13.35), and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls (l. 242). In the anonymous Orchard of Syon (ca. 1425), the poet writes, “Þis Pacience is a qweene, sett in þe tour of strenkþe” (l. 212/15), and John Lydgate apostrophizes her: “Vertu of vertues, o noble Pacience, / With laureer crowned for vertuous constaunce” (The Fall of Princes, 9.2371, ca. 1439).22

Jane Beal 17 Certainly our poet is working within an established tradition that personifies Patience as Lady, even a Queen, and considers her one of the greatest of all virtues.

The understanding of the allegorical personification depends first of all on the meaning of the word, which the author of Patience is certainly exploring as a spiritual practice in response to trauma. “Pacience” enters the English language between 1175-1225, via the Old French, from Latin patientia, the nominal form derived from the verb patior, meaning, “to suffer.” In Middle English, “pacience” primarily means “calm endurance of misfortune, suffering, etc.; a willingness to bear adversities, wrongs, etc.; steadfastness against temptation.”23 Proverbially, Middle English poets write of “the patience of Job” or “the patience of Griselda.”24 Jonah, of course, does not exemplify patience, but rather its opposite: impatience or, perhaps, acedia (sloth).25 In the Prologue, the speaker pairs Patience with Poverty, the two ladies of the eight who most concern him, and he says he will “pleye” with both because they are discussed together in the scriptural passage on the Beatitudes.26 Then he makes it clear that he himself is impoverished and that he is suffering as a result: “Sythen I am sette with hem [Poverty and Patience] samen, suffer me behoues” (“Since I am beset with them, it behooves me to suffer”).27 This is a significant revelation.28 If poverty is causing the speaker to suffer against his will, then in a sense, his poverty is traumatic. This trauma results in his sense of powerlessness. As he says in subsequent lines, if his liege-lord asks him to run an errand to Rome, he cannot gain anything by grumbling except greater grief. He knows he must be “patient,” that is, that he must calmly endure the suffering this order causes. At the end of the prologue, he mentions Jonah, whose attitude is different from the speaker’s. Of Jonah, he says, “To set hym to sewrté, vnsounde he hym feches.” (“To set himself in surety (or security), he brings himself trouble [or unsoundness].”)29 Jonah, in the very act of trying to keep himself safe and sound, actually becomes “unsound”; in the poet’s view, he brings his trouble on himself.

Thus, the speaker sets up a parallel between himself and Jonah: they both face a form of traumatic powerlessness, albeit from different causes, but each of them responds differently. The speaker invites the reader to tarry awhile (“Wyl ye tary a lyttel”) and pay attention (“tent me a whyle”), so that the reader may learn (“wysse”) something from scripture.30 From this statement, we know the speaker will use a negative exemplum to teach “us,” his readers, about the virtue of longsuffering. This poem is explicitly and intentionally didactic. As the matter concerns a spiritual virtue, readers should expect that the poet is attempting to foster their spiritual progress.

Anger and Fear, Healing and Spiritual Progress As Jonah’s journey unfolds, dramatically related by the speaker of Patience, readers are meant to understand that the speaker has already learned from the story that which he is trying to share with his readers. He has already

18 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal learned patience from Jonah, and by rehearsing Jonah’s story in his own unique way, the speaker reinforces his learning and remembers what can be recognized by the reader as his healing. The speaker has experienced the trauma of involuntary poverty, and the powerlessness that goes along with it, but Jonah’s negative example teaches him that it is better not to seek his own security.31 In this bitter pill is a miraculous cure.

The story of Jonah was familiar to the poet’s intended audience of latemedieval, English Christians. So what is really interesting is the significant ways in which the speaker of this poem embellishes (“makes beautiful”) the biblical account. The additions and changes, which do not distort the original narrative, show what the speaker has gotten out of the story and applied to his own situation.

Through the dynamic speaker, the poet gives Jonah a motivation for disobeying God’s command to him to go to Ninevah: anger (“wrathed in his wyt”).32 In the biblical account, no motive is clearly stated; readers can only infer what motivated Jonah’s flight, perhaps from the prophet’s remarks near the end of the book: et oravit ad Dominum et dixit obsecro Domine numquid non hoc est verbum meum cum adhuc essem in terra mea propter hoc praeoccupavi ut fugerem in Tharsis scio enim quia tu Deus clemens et misericors es patiens et multae miserationis et ignoscens super malitia (And he prayed to the Lord, and said: I beseech thee, O Lord, is not this what I said, when I was yet in my own country? therefore I went before to flee into Tharsis: for I know that thou art a gracious and merciful God, patient, and of much compassion, and easy to forgive evil.)33 At least at this point in the story, near the end, Jonah is claiming he did not want to go to Ninevah because he knew God’s character, clemens et mesericors et patiens (gracious, merciful, patient), would cause God to hold back the destruction he was threatening. Jonah knew that even if God sent him to declare the imminent destruction of the city of Ninevah, God would forgive the Ninevites when they repented—making all Jonah’s efforts, in the prophet’s view, irrelevant.

For God may have wanted the Ninevites to repent, but Jonah did not, because the Ninevites were enemies of Israel: uncircumcised goyyim (gentiles), outside of the covenant, and worshippers of many gods (including Innana / Ishtar), not the one true God of Israel.34 In fact, the Ninevites were the violent citizens of the capital of the ancient Assyrian Empire whose kings were intent on taking over the world, including what was left of the divided kingdom of Israel, that is, northern Israel and southern Judah.35 Responding in part to Jonah 4:2, early Jewish biblical commentators attribute one primary motive to Jonah: fear (Josephus), fear of looking like a false prophet (Lives of the Prophets, 1 CE), fear the Ninevites would repent and God would forgive, fear that God would compare the Assyrians to the unrepentant

Jane Beal 19 Israelites and be angry at them, and fear that he would be seen as a lying prophet (Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer, 9th c.).36 Christian biblical commentators emphasize fear for these and additional reasons: St. Gregory (6th-7th c.) thought Jonah would be ashamed to be a false prophet and afraid of his own person being destroyed; even more specifically, St. John Chrysostom (4th c.) believed Jonah was afraid of being ridiculed, mocked, and crucified.37 Theodoret, in his commentary that proved influential through its inclusion in Glossa ordinaria, believed Jonah thought it unseemly that his prophecy might prove false or himself a liar.38 Haimo of Auxerre (9th c.) writes of Jonah: He did not flee because he envied the salvation of the Ninevites, but because he refused to destroy his own people, the Jews. For he knew that the penitence of the Gentiles would be the ruin of the Jews. Furthermore, he had seen other prophets sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, in order that they might rouse the people to penitence, and for that reason, he grieved his own selection, for he had been sent to the Assyrians, enemies of Israel.39 In so saying, Haimo of Auxerre is drawing on the commentary of Jerome on Jonah. Jerome believed Jonah fled, not out of hatred toward God, but because he was jealous for the salvation of his own people: Moreover, when Jonah saw his fellow prophets being sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel in order to stir the people to repentance ... Jonah was sorry that he alone had been chosen to be sent to the Assyrians, Israel’s enemies, and to the greatest city of the enemy, where there was idolatry where there was ignorance of God; and what is more than this, he was afraid lest through the occasion of his preaching they would be converted to repentance so Israel would be utterly abandoned.

For by the same Spirit by which he had been entrusted to be a public proclaimer to the Gentiles, he knew that when the nations would believe, then the house of Israel would perish, and he was anxious that whenever that would be, it should not take place in its own time.40 Jerome’s “supercessionist” theology, in which the Christian Church replaced the Jewish Synagogue as the sponsa / bride of the Divine Bridegroom, is evident in this passage even as he compares Jonah to Moses in the longer context, and even as his invention of Jonah’s motive—fear that Israel would not be saved—shows some sympathy to the prophet’s problem.41 In Patience, however, the poet emphasizes Jonah’s anger, not his fear, though his fear is certainly implied by what is making him angry. What makes Jonah angry and afraid in this poem is found nowhere in exactly this formulation in the Bible or the biblical commentary tradition. After the speaker of this poem

20 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal identifies Jonah’s motivation as anger—“wrathed in his wyt”42—the speaker then makes a list of all the things Jonah was angry might happen if he did what the Lord was telling him to do and went to Ninevah. Specifically, Jonah imagines 1) being put in prison; 2) being put in stocks, 3) being put in fetters, and 4) having his eyes gouged out—all by the Ninevites: And I be nummen in Nuniue, my nyes begynes: He tells me þose traytoures arn typped schrewes; I com with þose tyþynges, þay ta me bylyue, Pynez me a prysoun, put me in stokes, Wryþe me in a warlock, wrast out myn eȝen.

(And if I am trapped in Nineveh, my injuries begin: He tells me those traitors are extreme shrews!

I come with those tidings, they take me immediately, torture me in prison, put me in stocks, clap me in fetters, wrest out my eyes. )43 Jonah then imagines that God might actually want all of this to happen to him for “sum sake,”44—that is, for some reason—that is deserved. This horrifying thought is directly followed by Jonah’s articulation of his determination to flee to Tarshish.

The Jonah of this poem, Patience, clearly adds that if God values his life so little, he will refuse to suffer, and be “naked dispoyled / On rode rwly torent with rybaudes mony” (“despoiled, naked, / on a cross torn pitifully by many villains”).45 For any medieval Christian reader, Jonah’s fear of being naked and torn on a cross would have immediately called Jesus to mind: the Jesus who, in the garden of Gethsemane said to God the Father, “Not my will, but yours.”46 This attitude is clearly much different from Jonah’s.47 As psychology clearly informs us, anger is a secondary emotion. Under Jonah’s anger is profound fear—fear of imprisonment, torment, and death. Fear, of course, has to do with trauma (that is, being wounded), and in this case, Jonah feels powerlessness before the Divine will. This moves him to resist. But his resistance is met with a storm on the sea that inhibits the progress of the ship he chose to take him Tarshish—a city, by the way, in the opposite direction of Ninevah! This storm is God’s storm; God is the one who bids the winds to blow.

As the poet puts it: For þe Welder of wyt þat wot alle þynges, Þat ay wakes and waytes, at wylle hatz He slyȝtes.

He calde on þat ilke crafte He carf with His hondes. Þay wakened wel þe wroþeloker for wroþely He cleped: “Ewrus and Aquiloun þat on est sites Blowez boþe at My bode vpon blo watteres!”

(For the Wielder of wit that knows all things,

Jane Beal 21 that always wakes and waits, at will has He stratagems.

He called on the same craftworks that He had fashioned with His hands; they awakened so much more wrothly for wrothly he called: “Eurus and Aquilon, east-dwelling winds, Blow both at my command upon the dark waters!”)48 Jonah has been angry, but now God is, and God “the Wielder of Knowledge who knows all things,” calls two winds, the east (or south-east) wind Eurus and the north (or north-east) wind Aquilon, to do his bidding.49 Unlike Jonah, Nature’s elements immediately do what God instructs, a pattern seen again later in the obedience of the enormous fish in the sea that swallows Jonah and the woodbine outside of the city of Ninevah that first grows and then withers at God’s word.50 In response to the storm, the sailors cast all their treasures overboard in order to stay afloat—they become poor: “For though we like our lot but little, life is ever sweet.”51 The same sailors begin to pray to their gods—whom the speaker identifies as Diana and Neptune, Mohammed and Magog, the Moon and the Sun.52 Then one sailor proposes to draw lots and throw the one who gets the short end of the stick into the water. So the sailors gather everyone, but Jonah, they find, is sleeping—just as in the biblical source—but in this poem, Jonah has flown in fear from the fury [noise] of the storm (“he watz flowen for ferde of the flode lotes”)53 into the ship’s hold, where the speaker tells us, he is not only slumbering but slobbering in his sleep.54 Jonah is rudely awakened and dragged up to the ship’s deck.

The sailors with whom Jonah journeys do draw lots, and the identifying one falls to Jonah, who admits who he is and how he is running from God. He says he must be thrown overboard to appease God or the sailors will get no grace.

In fear, the sailors try to fight the storm by rowing harder, but their efforts are unsuccessful.55 In the end, they do what they believe that justice demands, and toss Jonah overboard. This moment of shocking trauma is vividly depicted in the first of two illustrations of Patience contained in the Cotton Nero A.x manuscript (below).56 It is notable that Jonah enters the mouth of the fish with his eyes closed and his hands brought before his chest, as if he is in a posture of prayer and surrender. It appears that the illustrator is making a connection between Jonah’s near-death experience here and his soon-to-be-depicted repentance and confession: anticipating Jonah’s major attitude adjustment. Of the two sailors depicted, one seems reluctant to abandon Jonah to his death and is shown holding onto the prophet’s white under-garment. Ironically, the poet has already said that they have “noȝt in her honde þat hem help myȝt” (“they have nought in their hand that might help them”).57 At the same time, the sailor who is holding on is also casting overboard, and the forefinger of his left hand points along the sweeping curve of Jonah’s body toward the mouth of the fish. The other sailor holds a red oar, the end of which looks more like a pitchfork than a paddle, and he appears to be using it to pry open the sea-monster’s sharp-toothed mouth and to push Jonah deeper into it. The sailors sit, with impassive facial expressions, in a simple

22 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal wooden boat riding high on a dark, blue wave. The illustrator, like the poet, focuses our attention on this moment of Jonah’s traumatic powerlessness.

In the sea, Jonah meets the means of his salvation from death in the most unlikely place: the belly of a great fish. In terms of the medieval contemplative journey into God, in what looks like the worst of all possible moments, Jonah is

Jane Beal 23 actually making spiritual progress. Compelled to humility by God’s great storm, Jonah confesses his true identity, his wrong-doing and guilt, and his need for a very specific penance—all in the community of pagan sailors. After they do as he asks, the sailors pray to Jonah’s God, not their idols, apparently converting to the one true God of Israel. Meanwhile, by willingly surrendering to the waves and paying a terrible penance, Jonah begins the process of purgation that will lead to his subsequent illumination in the belly of the great fish.

In the belly of the fish, which, in this poem, is likened to hell, Jonah thinks about God’s “mygt and his merci”58 for three days and nights.59 Like the protagonist in St. Patrick’s Purgatory, Jonah experiences a period of purgation, but in the hellish depths of the fish. ... stod vp in his stomak þat stank as þe deuel. Þer in saym and in sorȝe þat sauored as helle, Þer watz bylded his bour þat wyl no bale suffer.

And þenne he lurkkes and laytes where watz le best, In vche a nok of his nauel, bot nowhere he fyndez No rest ne recouerer, bot ramel ande myre ... (... stood up in his stomach that stank like the devil.

There in grease and in filth that tasted like hell, There was built his bower that will no harm endure.

And then he lays low and seeks where was best shelter, In each nook of his navel, but nowhere does he find Any rest or recovery, but only muck and mire ... )60 Then he prays a prayer like a psalm calling on the Lord (line 281-82), admitting he has fallen (line 285), and asking the Lord, for pity’s sake, to hear him, his prophet.61 God does hear and orders the fish to vomit up Jonah on the shore.

After another conversation with God, Jonah then wisely heads to Ninevah.62 There Jonah preaches, “unloosing the lore locked within him,”63 as God told him to do. He warns the people that God is going to destroy them in forty days. Despite the fact that the prophet preaches only destruction, not the need for repentance, the Ninevites get the gist. They do repent in sackcloth and ashes with fasting. Most importantly, they turn from their wicked ways. In response, God does not destroy them.

Jonah’s preaching to the Ninevites is the second of two illustrations of the poem included in Cotton Nero A.x (below). The figure of the prophet towers over three citizens, two men and a woman, and he is depicted specifically as a Jew with a telltale, pointed cap. The fingers of Jonah’s hands point at the people—just as the sailor’s hand in the earlier illustration pointed at the wide-open mouth of the great fish as Jonah entered it. As Quintilian observes in his writing on rhetoric: ... the hands may almost be said to speak. Do we not use them to demand, promise, summon, dismiss, threaten, supplicate,

24 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal express aversion or fear, question or deny? Do we not use them to indicate joy, sorrow, hesitation, confession, penitence, measure, quantity, number, and time? Have they not the power to excite and prohibit, to express approval, wonder, and shame?

Do they not take the place of adverbs and pronouns when we point at places and things? In fact, though the peoples and nations of the earth speak a multitude of tongues, they share in common the universal language of the hands.64 The pointing fingers, in both the first illustration and the second, certainly suggest a threat, first to Jonah and now to the Ninevites, especially given the contexts in which those pointing fingers appear.

Interestingly, one of the three citizens to whom Jonah preaches, the man with the red gown, blue hood, blond beard, and walking stick, bears a remarkable resemblance to the figure of the Dreamer in the four illustrations of Pearl earlier in the manuscript.65 It seems the illustrator may have been sensitive enough to imagine the speaker of Patience as the same speaker of Pearl and depict that man as listening to Jonah’s sermon—implying, of course, the speaker’s status as a repentant Gentile.66 The four crosses in the city walls all around Jonah and the three Ninevites imply a connection to Christ is being made (though we may remember Jonah’s fear of crucifixion as well). That two of the citizens are facing Jonah in physical postures appropriate to praying and/or receiving the Eucharist from a priest is also notable. To the illustrator’s mind, these Ninevite converts are not simply Judaized, but Christianized.

Ironically, as we know, the prophet who has been shown mercy resents when God shows mercy to Ninevah. In fact, Jonah becomes angry again. Jonah asks God, both in the biblical story and this poem, why he had to travel so far to declare a prophecy of doom if God was just going to spare the wicked Ninevites.

Now, the moment when God spares the Ninevites, and holds back his wrath, is actually a moment when Jonah might be expected to show spiritual maturation.67 He has, after all, been humbled by the storm, then purged by his penance in the belly of the great fish, and finally illuminated by his personal experience of God’s mercy, after which he hears God’s voice and obeys it. But instead, Jonah’s spiritual progress is arrested; he actually slides backward on the path of spiritual growth. When he could have had the experience of being unified with God, and God’s loving will, he instead is at odds with his Maker: he fiercely resents the same Divine Mercy that saved him from drowning to death. In the biblical book of Jonah, God tries to teach his prophet an important lesson, allowing a vine to grow and shade Jonah from the heat of the sun and then allowing the vine to die. Jonah is infuriated by the discomfort this causes. But God’s point is that the people, and even the cattle of Ninevah, have greater value than the vine. He asks Jonah if he shouldn’t be concerned about those people, who don’t know their right hand from their left, and about their cattle, too.68 That is how the biblical book of Jonah ends: with a provocative question about whether Jonah shouldn’t understand and empathize with God’s desire to show mercy. The author of the biblical book of Jonah is clearly trying to awaken the

Jane Beal 25 moral conscience of his anticipated audience using the rabbinic technique of question-asking.

The poem â&#x20AC;&#x153;Patience,â&#x20AC;? however, ends differently.

26 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Long-suffering and Reader Response After depicting the incident with the woodbine, and the conversation between God and Jonah, the epilogue to “Patience” returns to the theme with which the poem began: Be nogt so gryndel, godman, but go forth thy ways Be preue and be pacient in payne and in joye For he that is to rakel to renden his clothez Mot efte sitte with more vnsounde to sewe hem togeder Forthy when pouerté me enprecez and paynez innoge Ful softly with suffraunce sagttel me bihoues Forthy penaunce and payne to preue hit is sigt That pacience is a nobel poynt, thag hit displease ofte.

(Don’t be so angry, good man, but go forth on your way, Be proved [discrete] and be patient in pain and in joy, For he that is too hasty to tear his clothes Must sit again with more trouble to sew them together.

Therefore when poverty presses in on me and pains me enough, Very gently with endurance it behooves me to settle.

Therefore penance and pain proves it to sight That patience is a noble virtue, though is often displeases.)69 This epilogue does not end with a question, like the biblical book; instead, it draws a conclusion, one which the speaker applies to his own life. In contrast to Jonah’s negative exemplum, the speaker presents his own attitude to the reader as a positive exemplum, which can be morally imitated. The speaker directly advises the reader, whom he calls a “good man,” to be “patient in pain and joy.” The speaker has experienced a degree of healing, and spiritual progress, even in the midst of his poverty: he offers his own learning experience to his readers.

The speaker then develops a down-to-earth metaphor, saying that if someone rends his clothes, he will have to sew them back together, but with more trouble. This is an interesting idea, for metaphorically, it aligns Jonah’s impatience with self-destructive tendencies, with a kind of vandalism of one’s proper clothing, which would of course render a person naked, or at least partially so, and vulnerable. Patience, on the other hand, keeps a good man well-dressed.

Long-suffering, even when one is oppressed by the same kind of involuntary poverty the speaker is experiencing, is a noble virtue, even if it is often displeasing. The choice to respond to poverty, and the trauma of powerlessness, with patience actually ennobles a person. It makes a “good man” more like a noble man.

As with Jonah on the ship, so with the speaker in the epilogue: both are in community. Jonah’s community was one of the pagan sailors—who later convert.

The speaker’s community, however, is felt, more than it is depicted, when the

Jane Beal 27 speaker addresses his reader directly and personally in the conclusion of the poem.

Just as the sailors turned toward God after Jonah was thrown overboard, and prayed to God, so too does the speaker invite the reader to convert—not to faith, which is assumed, but to patience. Calm endurance through suffering with a right heart toward God can be a healing balm in the face of poverty and powerlessness. The last word of the poem in the manuscript, “Amen,” suggests the epilogue (and perhaps even the poem as a whole) has been a kind of prayer.

The speaker is praying for the reader, and when the reader reads the word “Amen,” the reader joins the speaker in that prayer. Impatient Jonah may not have gotten it right, but, as the patient speaker suggests, the readers still can.

Thus the temporary wound of powerlessness is redeemed: the memory of trauma, experienced by both the speaker (in poverty) and Jonah (in his prophetic calling), teaches the audience the truth about God’s mercy and salvation so that they, too, can make spiritual progress. Our powerlessness in the face of our circumstances, or in the presence of God’s power, becomes a pathway to moral character. The journey through humility, purgation, and illumination leads to unification with God and his purposes. When we crown Patience as our Queen, and God as Lord of all, we, too, are saved by grace, and his strength is made perfect in our weakness.70

Notes

1

Both manuscripts are held by the British Library in London, England.

2

For an overview of these debates, see the bibliographic reviews: René Wellek, “The Pearl: An Interpretation of the Middle English Poem,” Studies in English by Members of the English Seminar of the Charles University, Prague (Praze, CZ: Riváce, 1933), 1-33; Lawrence Eldredge, “The State of Pearl Studies since 1933,” Viator (1975): 171-94; Malcolm Andrew, The Gawain-Poet: An Annotated Bibliography, 1839-1977 (New York: Garland, 1979); Michael Foley, “The Gawain-Poet: An Annotated Bibliography, 1978-85,” Chaucer Review 23.3 (1989), 250-82; Robert J. Blanch, “Supplement to the Gawain-Poet: An Annotated Bibliography, 1978-85,” Chaucer Review 25.4 (1991), 363-86; Robert J. Blanch, “The Current State of Pearl Criticism.” Chaucer Yearbook 3 (1996), 21-33; and Jane Beal, “Materials,” in Approaches to Teaching the Middle English Pearl, ed. Jane Beal and Mark Bradshaw Busbee (New York, N.Y.: MLA, 2017). An early attributor of St. Erkenwald to the poet was Henry Savage, The Gawain-Poet: Studies in his Personality and Background (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1956).

3

A.C. Spearing, The Gawain-Poet: A Critical Study (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970). Spearing’s book endorsed the common authorship theory, at least for the four poems of the Cotton Nero A.x manuscript, and his view proved influential. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron refer to the

28 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal current form of the manuscript containing the four poems as “The Pearl Manuscript” as do many others now. See their standard edition, The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 5th ed. (Exeter: Liverpool University Press, 2007). The edition was originally printed with the University of California Press in 1978.

On the anonymous authorship of the poem, see Malcolm Andrew, “Theories of Authorship,” in A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, ed. Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1999), 1-22; N.S. Thompson, “The Gawain Poet,” in British Writers: Supplement VII, ed. Jay Parini (New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons / Gale, 2002); 83-101, and A.S.G. Edwards, “The Authorship of Pearl,” in Approaches to Teaching the Middle English Pearl, 60-65. As Edwards remarks: “these names have included Huchoun of Awle Ryale, Ralphe Strode, John Donne, John Prat, John of Erghome, Hugh or John or William Massey, David Rate, and Richard Newton, as well as, less precisely, the author of the alliterative Wars of Alexander. None of these candidates have survived more than cursory scrutiny. Indeed, in some instances it is highly unlikely they ever existed. And in others their tenuous biographies cannot be shown to provide any basis for linking them to the Cotton poems” (61).

4

Notable among these “biographies” and introductions to the poet is John Bowers, An Introduction to the Gawain-Poet (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2012), who considers the poet a Ricardian one, examining connections between his native Cheshire and the royal court in London.

5

6

Robert Blanch and Julian Wasserman, From Pearl to Gawain: Forme to Fynisment (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1995). In their book, Blanch and Wasserman argue that, taken together, the poems of the Pearl Manuscript “extend from Creation to the Apocalypse and then transcendence to the heavenly Jerusalem. Comprising the entire scope of ‘History,’ the poems share a Creator whose active intervention in human affairs speaks of providential history that is the product of divine will. Beginning with this premise, the authors discuss a series of interrelated themes (language, covenants, miracles, iconography of the hand, and the role of the intrusive narrator) that successively arise from their initial observation. Every discussion treats all four poems, using each individual work to gloss the others” (abstract). Other books have focused on the unity of the poet’s artistry: Edward Wilson, The Gawain-Poet (Leiden: Brill, 1976): William Davenport, The Art of the Gawain-Poet (Atlantic Highlands: Athlone, 1978); Lynn Staley Johnson, The Voice of the Gawain-Poet (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); J.J. Anderson, Language and Imagination in the Gawain-Poems (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2005). See also Jennifer Lee, “The Illuminating Critic: The Illustrator of Cotton Nero A.x,” Studies in Iconography 3 (1977): 17-46. Her discussion shows how the twelve illustrations unify the manuscript and thus, at a visual level, the poems as well.

Jane Beal 29 7

On genres and their relevance to interpreting the poems, see Sandra Pierson Prior, Fayre Forms of the Pearl-Poet (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1996) and Cecelia Hatt, God and the Gawain-Poet: Theology and Genre in Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2015). See also Jane Beal, The Signifying Power of Pearl: Medieval Literary and Cultural Contexts for the Transformation of Genre (New York, NY: Routledge, 2017), in which she argues that Pearl is literally, an elegy; spiritually, an allegory; morally, a consolation; and anagogically, a revelation; and, at the same time, a poem that incorporates motifs from parables, fables, and fairy-tales.

8

Jonathon Nicholls, The Matter of Courtesy (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1984); Sarah Stanbury, Seeing the Gawain-Poet (Philadelphia, Penn: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991); Edward Condren, The Numerical Universe of the Gawain-Poet: Beyond Pi (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2002); Piotyr Spyra, The Epistemological Perspective of the Pearl-Poet (London: Ashgate, 2014), Cecelia Hatt, God and the Gawain-Poet (2015). See also Nicholas Watson, “The Gawain-Poet as Vernacular Theologian,” in A Companion to the Gawain-Poet (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1999), 293-313.

9

Jane Beal considers Pearl in the light of trauma theory in The Signifying Power of Pearl in her conclusion, “Remembering,” 138-54.

The genre of Patience has been variously identified: sermon (cf. “mashal”), negative exemplum, and parable—even consolatio. On the poem as sermon, or on its homiletic qualities, see Charles Moorman, “The Role of the Narrator in Patience,” Modern Philology 61 (1963): 90-95; Ordelle G. Hill, “The Audience of Patience,” Modern Philology 66 (1968): 103-09; William Vantuono, “The Structure and Sources of Patience,” Medieaval Studies 34 (1972): 401-21; and Sylvia Tommasch, “Patience and the Sermon Tradition,” Centerpoint 4 (1981): 83-93, who makes the case for it being a negative exemplum in the sermon tradition. Morton W. Bloomfield saw it as a “mashal” (a narrative with a small amount of moralizing): “Patience and the Mashal,” in Medieval Studies in Honor of Lillian Herlands Hornstein, ed. Jess B. Bessinger and Robert R. Raymo (New York, N.Y.: New York University Press, 1976), 41-49. On the poem as parable, see John T. Irwin and T.D. Kelly, “The Way and the End are One: Patience as Parable of the Contemplative Life,” American Benedictine Review 25 (1974): 3355. On the poem as consolatio, see David Williams, “The Point of Patience,” Modern Philology 68 (1970): 128 and R.J. Spendal, “The Narrative Structure of Patience,” Michigan Academician 5 (1972): 107-14.

10

11

On Pearl as a triptych, see Beal, Signifying, xv. The poem Patience has been compared to other structures as well. Following Charles Moorman, William Vantuono makes the case that the poem is modeled on the five-fold division of a sermon taught to preachers in medieval artes praedicandi: theme, ante-theme, dilation, exemplum, peroration, and closing formula. See Charles Moorman, “The

30 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Role of the Narrator in Patience,” Modern Philology 61 (1963): 90-95 and Vantuono, “The Structure and Sources of Patience,” Medieval Studies 34 (1972): 401-21.

12

Cotton Nero A.x, folio 82/86 recto and verso. These are available to view in the Cotton Nero A.x Project hosted by the University of Calgary. See http://contentdm.ucalgary.ca/digital/collection/gawain/id/272/rec/91 and http://contentdm.ucalgary.ca/digital/collection/gawain/id/273/rec/92. Accessed 30 July 2018.

See William Vantuono, “The Question of Quatrains in Patience,” Manuscripta 16 (1972): 24-30.

13

For further discussion, see H.N. Duggan, “Meter, Stanza, Vocabulary, Dialect,” in A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, 221-42.

14

“Trauma,” Dictionary.com. Available at https://www.dictionary.com/browse/trauma?s=t. Accessed 30 July 2018.

15

16

Ibid.

See “DSM IV PTSD Definition,” European Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. Available at https://www.estss.org/learn-about-trauma/dsm-iv-definition/.

Accessed 30 July 2015. On the recent changes to the definition in DSM V, see Anushka Pai, et al., “PSTD in the DSM V: Controversy, Change, and Conceptual Considerations,” in Behavioral Sciences 7 (2017): 7. Available at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5371751/. Accessed 30 July 2018. See also Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1996).

17

18

“Trauma,” Dictionary.com.

For discussion, see Jamie McKinstry, “Perpetual Bodily Trauma: Wounding and Memory in the Middle English Romances,” Medical Humanities 39:1 (2012).

Available online at https://mh.bmj.com/content/early/2012/11/04/medhum-2012010199. Accessed 30 July 2018.

19

20

“DSM IV PTSD Definition.”

Patience, line 1. “Poynt” is also often translated “virtue” in this line and the concluding line of the poem. All quotations in this essay are cited from Andrew and Waldron. Translations are my own.

21

Cited under the third definition, “Patience personified,” in the entry, “Pacience,” Middle English Dictionary (MED), Western Michigan University.

Available at 22

Jane Beal 31 https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/medidx?type=byte&byte=136014280&egdisplay=compact&egs=136037769.

Accessed 30 July 2018.

23

Cited as the first definition of “Pacience,” MED.

24

One strand of scholarship on Patience has debated why the poet used Jonah (rather than Job) to exemplify the virtue of calm endurance in the face of adversity – especially given that, in Diekstra’s view, the poet’s approach to Jonah is at odds with medieval commentators on the biblical book of Jonah. See F.N.M. Diekstra, “Jonah and Patience: The Psychology of a Prophet,” English Studies 55 (1974): 205-17. However, one scholar has observed that using Jonah to exemplify patience has patristic precedent: Paul Szarmach, “Two Notes on Patience,” Notes & Queries 216 (1971): 125-27. It seems to me that the poet chose Jonah over Job because the biblical story of Job ends happily with Job’s health and wealth restored. This is not the case with Jonah, whose story ends without resolution, in the wilderness outside of Ninevah with God asking his reluctant prophet a question that goes unanswered. Perhaps the poet thought this realistic picture of Jonah’s frustration would resonate meaningfully for those members of his audience who were still in the midst of their trials and still suffering from their wounds. Certainly the speaker is presented as still being impoverished at the end of the poem, and more patience is required to keep on living.

On impatience, see C. David Benson, “The Impatient Reader of Patience,” in Text and Matter: New Critical Perspectives of the Pearl-Poet, ed. Robert Blanch, Mirriam Youngerman Miller, and Julian Wasserman (Troy, NY: The Whitston Publishing Company, 1991), 147-62; on personified figures of acedia (sloth) as literary models for Jonah, see Lorraine Stock, “The ‘Poynt’ of Patience,” in Text and Matter, 163-75.

25

26

Patience, lines 36-39.

27

Patience, line 45.

Scholars have debated whether the speaker’s poverty is material or metaphoric.

On his literal poverty, see J.J. Anderson, “The Prologue of Patience,” Modern Philology 63 (1966): 283-87; on his spiritual poverty, see Irwin and Kelly, “Patience as a Parable of the Contemplative Life,” 33-55. In my own view, the poverty is material, and traumatic, and occasions a spiritual crisis.

28

29

Patience, line 58.

30

Patience, line 60.

On the significance of the speaker’s involuntary poverty, see Ethan Campbell, The Gawain-Poet and the Fourteenth-Century English Anticlerical Tradition 31

32 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications / Western Michigan University, 2018), chap. 4 “The Reluctant Priest of Patience,” 149-92.

32

Patience, line 74.

33

Jonah 4:2 (Vulgate; Douay-Rheims translation).

34

In the 8th c. BC, there was a major temple dedicated to Inanna / Ishtar in Ninevah, the capital of Assyria. See Julian Reade, “The Ishtar Temple at Ninevah,” Iraq 67:1 (Spring 2005): 347-90.

35

The book of Jonah may have been written anywhere between the 8th and the 2nd century BC, but the events in it are set in the 8th century during the reign of King Jeroboam II of Israel (ca. 786-746 BC) prior to the fall of the Northern Kingdom of Israel to the Assyrians. In ca. 733 BC, Tiglath-Pilesar of Assyria invaded Northern Israel and captured Galilee; in ca. 724 BC, King Shalmaneser V of Assyria besieged Samaria, and the northern kingdom of Israel was destroyed in 722 BC by the Assyrians. The hatred Jonah is depicted as feeling in the biblical book toward the Ninevites is a direct reaction to the Assyrian threat to Israel as a nation, a threat which was eventually realized in a devastating war. However, Ninevah itself fell to the armies of the Medes and Babylonians in 612 BC, an event addressed in the book of Nahum. Meanwhile, the southern kingdom of Judah would last until the Babylonian invasion, which was carried out by the armies of King Nebuchadnezzar II in 597 BC. See James Limburg, Jonah: A Commentary, The Old Testament Library (Louisville, KY: Westminster / John Knox Press, 1993), esp. “Date, Composition, and Text,” 27-33, 40. Excavations at the site in present-day Iraq demonstrate the historical existence of the city of Ninevah; many of the material and cultural objects discovered by Reginal Campbell Thompson (between 1927-32) are currently housed in the British Museum in London as well as in the Birmingham City Museum, Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, and the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge (Reade, 347) and elsewhere.

36

Summarized and/or quoted in Limburg, Jonah: A Commentary, 41-42.

37

For quotations of medieval Christian biblical commentators on Jonah in English translation, see John Sanidopoulous, “The Prophet Jonah in the Writings of the Church Fathers,” Mystagogy Resource Center https://www.johnsanidopoulos.com/2009/09/prophet-jonah-in-writings-ofchurch.html/.

Accessed 30 July 2018. For the Latin, see the relevant volumes of Migne’s PL, searchable online at http://patristica.net/latina//.

See Theodoret’s marginal gloss on Jonah 1 in the Glossa ordinaria, available in English translation here: 38

Jane Beal 33 https://sites.google.com/site/aquinasstudybible/home/jonah/glossa-ordinaria-onjonah/prefaces/chapter-1. Accessed 30 July 2018.

39

Haimo of Auxerre, Commentary on the Book of Jonah, trans. Deborah Everhart, TEAMS Commentary Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications / Western Michigan University, 1993), 8.

Jerome, Jerome’s Commentary on Jonah: Translation with Introduction and Critical Notes, trans. Timothy Michael Hegedus (Wilfrid Laurier University, M.A. thesis, 1991), 7. Available online at http://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1114&context=etd.

Accessed 30 July 2018.

40

41

Whether the poet knew the commentary tradition from reading Latin texts directly is virtually impossible to establish. It is evident that the biblical book of Jonah is his primary source, and he also used the Matthean Beatitudes and the Psalms, but what other sources he used has been the subject of much scholarly debate. Francis Cairns finds it doubtful that the poet relied on the five Latin texts scholars before him had suggested as sources: Tertullian’s De Patientia (SC 310, 60-114) and the Carmen de Iona (once attributed to Tertullian); two poems, Hymnus Ieiunantium of Prudentius and Naufragium Ionae Prophetae of Marbod of Rennes (c. 1035-1123) (PL 171, 1675ff); and Jerome’s commentary In Ionam Prophetam (CCSL 76, 386). He instead makes a case for the Summa de arte praedicatoria of Alanus de Insulis, esp. chapter 15, which provides instruction on how to give a sermon on patience and includes reference to the Beatitudes and to Jonah as a type of Christ. He suggests the poet knew Latin, and probably knew Alanus’ Summa indirectly: “Somewhere in the written or oral heritage of Alanus the three themes of the beatitudes, patience / impatience, and Jonah may have come together. Alternatively, the Patience poet himself first combined all three.

If he did, he had assistance ...” (14). For the full discussion, see Cairns, “Latin Sources and Analogues of the Middle English Patience,” Studia Neophilologica 59:1 (1987): 7-18.

42

Patience, line 74.

43

Patience, lines 76-8o.

44

Patience, line 84.

45

Patience, lines 95-96. This idea is also found in the commentary on Jonah by St. Chrysostom.

46

Luke 22:42.

This is also the passage in Patience that most clearly shows the poet’s awareness of the allegorical reading of Jonah’s story, which Jesus initiated, when 47

34 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal he said: sicut enim fuit Ionas in ventre ceti tribus diebus et tribus noctibus sic erit Filius hominis in corde terrae tribus diebus et tribus noctibus (“For as Jonas was in the whale's belly three days and three nights: so shall the Son of man be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights”) (Matt. 12:40; cf. Luke 11:2932). For discussion of the poet’s knowledge of allegorical interpretations of Jonah, see Malcolm Andrew, “Jonah and Christ in Patience,” Modern Philology 70 (1973): 230-33 and John Block Friedman, “Figural Typology in the Middle English Patience,” in The Alliterative Tradition in the Fourteenth Century, ed.

Bernard S. Levy and Paul S. Szarmach (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1981), 99-129.

48

Patience, 129-34.

49

See Virgil, Aeneid I.52ff. As in Pearl, when the poet refers to Aristotle and Pygmalion, these references to the Roman names of the winds clearly suggests the poet’s Latinate education and his familiarity with the classical as well as biblical stories.

50

For an analysis of the woodbine shelter in Patience as similar in design to domestic architecture recommended to combat plague, see Coley, Death and the Pearl-Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England (Ohio State University, 2019), chap. 3, “Flight and Enclosure in Patience,” esp. 112. Coley sees the late-medieval recurrences of plague in England as the “trauma” that is reflected throughout all four of the poems in the Pearl Manuscript. In Patience, as Coley observes, “the woodbine is perhaps most notable for those qualities that connect it to domestic architecture—a broad floor plan and a lofted ceiling; a north-facing window to allow in cool, light drafts; walls so tightly woven that even a dust mote will not pass through” (112). Coley demonstrates that plague treatises advised living in homes designed like this, and “fumigating rooms with strong-smelling flowers” (112), as protection against the plague. Readers who have wondered about the poet’s precise but previously inexplicable details in the description of the woodbine shelter now have a plausible way to interpret them in connection to the themes of Patience. Knowing that Jonah (not Job) was frequently alluded to in plague treatises may also help to explain why the poet chose to focus on Jonah as an exemplum of impatience rather than the proverbially “patient Job,” given the poet’s engagement with plague imagery in his poems.

51

Patience, line 156, trans. Borroff. See Marie Borroff, The Gawain-Poet: The Complete Works (New York, N.Y.: W.W. Norton Company, 2011). Borroff’s poetic translation, while not entirely accurate word-for-word, nevertheless has key turns of phrase that can highlight the meaning of the poem and contribute to the broader understanding of readers.

52

For a convincing explanation of this odd list of divinities, see Kathryn P. Goldstein, “‘As Holy Wryt Telles’: Translation and Conversion in the Pearl-

Jane Beal 35 poet’s Patience,” a paper given at the 52nd International Congress on Medieval Studies in May 2017 at Western Michigan University.

53

Line 183 (my emphasis).

The “slobbering” has been characterized as comedic but also as anti-Jewish.

For discussion of anti-Semitism in the poem, see Edward Vasta, “Denial in Patience,” The Chaucer Review 33:1 (1998): 1-30.

54

Patience, line 220: “their power was as nothing; it would not prevail” (trans.

Borroff). Here, then, powerlessness is experienced not only by Jonah, by the sailors in the storm as well.

55

56

For discussion of all twelve illustrations in the manuscript, see Jennifer Lee, “The Illuminating Critic: The Illustrator of Cotton Nero A.x,” Studies in Iconography 3 (1977): 17-46 and Paul F. Reichardt, “‘Several Illuminations, Coarsely Executed’: The Illustrations of the Pearl Manuscript,” Studies in Iconography 18 (1997): 119-42. Also see Robert J. Blanch and Julian N. Wasserman, From Pearl to Gawain: Forme to Fynisment (Gainesville, Flor.: University Press of Florida, 1995), 65-110 and Sarah M. Horrall, “Notes on British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x.,” Manuscripta 30 (1986): 195-96.

57

Patience, line 222.

58

Patience, line 295.

On the description of hell in the poem, see Malcolm Andrew, “Patience: The Munster Dor,” English Language Notes 14 (1977): 164-67.

59

60

Patience, 274-79.

Jonah’s words in the poem, as in the biblical book, do echo the Psalms. See Lynn Staley Johnson, “Patience and the Poet’s Use of Psalm 93,” Modern Philology 74 (1976): 67-71, who discusses the paraphrase of Psalm 93:8-9 in lines 119-24 of Patience.

61

62

Thomas D. Hill has made the point that the way the poet describes God talking with Jonah in this moment, and elsewhere, is gentle, private, and intimate—even humorous in an ironic but not unkind way. This manner of speaking suggests the merciful character of God in interacting with his prophet. See Hill, “God’s ‘Inquits’ and Exegetical Speech Theory in the Middle English Patience,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 116:2 (2017): 182-94. Of course, God’s manner of speaking to Jonah contrasts with Jonah’s manner of speaking to the Ninevites later on.

63

Patience, line 350 (paraphrase).

36 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

64

Institutio Oratoria, II.85-87. Quoted in Blanch and Wasserman From Pearl to Gawain, 67-68. See chap. 4 “Tools of the Trade: The Hand of God, the Hand of Man” for further discussion of the pointing hands in Cotton Nero A.x.

65

The connection between the Dreamer and this Ninevite citizen has also been made by W.W. Greg, “Review of Gollancz’s Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain,” Modern Language Review 19 (1924): 226, and discussed in Paul F. Reichardt, “‘Several Illuminations, Coarsely Executed’: The Illustrations of the “Pearl” Manuscript,” Studies in Iconography 18 (1997), 119-42, esp. 132-34.

66

Relying partly on Greg, Reichardt has suggested that the blue hood on this third figure is a fool’s cap that represents “moral culpability” comparable to Chaucer’s Miller, who is described in The Canterbury Tales as wearing a blue hood (134).

Blanch and Wasserman suggest his hands, which are turned away and not toward Jonah (in contrast to those of his two fellow Ninevites), visually represent his lack of repentance and “a clear attitude of rejection” (From Pearl to Gawain, 101).

However, the fact that the man holds a cane in his two hands may suggest infirmity, advancing age, or even his status as some sort of pilgrim. So rather than a lack of repentance, the position of his hands on his walking stick implies a willingness to come to hear Jonah’s message despite obstacles.

67

To place this moment in the context of the contemplative life, see Irwin and Kelly, “Patience as a Parable of the Contemplative Life,” 33-55.

68

See Jonah 4.

69

Patience, lines 524-31.

70

Cf. 2 Corinthians 12:9.

Book Reviews 37 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring 2020): 37-49

Book Reviews Bowler, Kate. The Preacher’s Wife: The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2019. 368 pages, $29.95.

Reviewed by Julie Ooms Bowler’s first words in The Preacher’s Wife, in an introductory note to readers, bring one piece of her project’s purpose into immediate view: “In my experience, evangelical girls learn the limits of their own spiritual authority as an accounting of small details, little moments of encouragement or discouragement that nudge them toward a sense of being acceptable” (ix). The second piece of that purpose concerns the relationship between religion and the marketplace, particularly the celebrity culture that drives many North American, conservative, male-dominated megachurch empires. Overall, Bowler’s task—and one the book very much succeeds in fulfilling—is to examine how the “sense of being acceptable” toward which evangelical girls are nudged is not so much a doctrine or even a role, but an image that can be marketed and sold. Crafting these images successfully is, Bowler argues, a (or perhaps the) way for women in these conservative circles to gain power and influence: “The visible and invisible rules that govern the lives of evangelical women can be mastered and occasionally subverted by those willing to play a difficult long game with handsome rewards and harsh penalties” (xvi). Bowler’s study of these “visible and invisible rules” is a thorough, engaging, and incisive look not just at so-called “Christian womanhood” but at the packaging and market forces that fuel and promote it.

Bowler organizes her book according to these images, focusing on one of them in each of five chapters: “The Preacher,” “The Homemaker,” “The Talent,” “The Counselor,” and “The Beauty.” Her first chapter, “The Preacher,” is, perhaps the chapter whose content would be most hotly discussed and debated in the conservative circles Bowler studies; it concerns the history of women’s ordination (or not) and the preaching roles that have been available to women—or that women themselves have carefully crafted in order to make them seem acceptable to (male) spiritual authorities—throughout Western and then American church culture. Bowler discusses women’s influence and institutional power from the very beginnings of the Church in the New Testament up to the present day, where she observes rather pointedly that the overlap between the two is often nonexistent: “We might say that [by the twentieth century] conservative women gained considerable influence without institutional power, while liberal women gained institutional power [through women’s ordination] without considerable influence” (27). But her chapter begins with a familiar (at least to many

38 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal American conservative evangelicals) Bible teacher (but not pastor, she would emphasize): Beth Moore, who immediately illustrates Bowler’s ultimate conclusion in this chapter. The lack of opportunity, whether because of theological stance on gender roles (in conservative churches) or de facto hiring practices (in mainline churches), for women to teach Scripture with authority routed women with teaching gifts not (only) to the sidelines but to the “spiritual marketplace.” There, “these women would have to manage the simultaneous performance of motherhood, showmanship, vulnerability, and sexuality” not just of Christian celebrity but of Christian female celebrity (64).

It is these performances that Bowler’s later chapters examine. In “The Homemaker,” Bowler charts the “professionalization of…wifehood,” particularly for the wives of megachurch pastors and ministry leaders, women whose home lives were almost necessarily part of their public lives (109). That Bowler can successfully connect the “professional wifehood” of Tammy Faye Bakker or Ruth Graham to the celebrity “mommy blogger” of the early 2000s effectively shows the strength of the image of homemaker as a marketing tool. In “The Talent,” Bowler explores the ways in which female performers—usually musicians—were and weren’t encouraged to use their talents on stage in order to minister. She concludes in this chapter that successful women walked a tightrope, able to give clearly powerful—and very much marketable—performances without claiming actual power: “Singing women appealed to the emotions, leaving the men with exclusive real estate over doctrine and the mind” (152). Bowler’s fifth chapter, “The Beauty,” dissects an image with far less substance beneath it than either homemaker (who, after all, must do the work of homemaking even outside the spotlight reflected off her husband) or the talent (who, after all, performs with clear skill): women who, through their emphasis on slimness and a particular Christian brand of husband-pleasing sexuality, “learned to live as if their bodies possessed the keys to their character,” becoming “embodied arguments for God’s perfect plans for…holy femininity” (236).

Chapter four, “The Counselor,” concerns a type of female Christian celebrity that, at least in my experience, has the most firm hold over conservative evangelicalism and megachurch ministries in the United States in the present moment: the female celebrities who bill themselves as “veterans of life itself,” “famous not for what they had accomplished but for what they had endured,” building platforms of influence not on actual credentials in counseling or therapy but on personal experience with hardship, which Bowler ironically describes as “the ultimate foundation of psychological insight” (155). I must point out, somewhat ironically, that Bowler knows of what she speaks on two fronts here: her research into the phenomenon is one, but the other is the celebrity she herself garnered not because of her first (academic) book about the prosperity gospel but because of her second book, written about her personal experience receiving a cancer diagnosis. I saw Bowler speak at Calvin University’s Festival of Faith and Writing a few years ago; when I brought both books to her to sign, she remarked that she almost never signs copies of her first book, as her celebrity is built on the second. Suffering granted Bowler influence in a way that actual expertise did not.

And this influence is dangerous, Bowler notes, because confessions of suffering

Book Reviews 39 and even of sin are not the same as exhortations for the renunciation of sins: “The thinness of these women’s public confessions threatened to lead others into theological error by allowing them the appearance of confession without the substance of repentance” (183). Bowler’s diagnosis here is quite damning: women operating as “the counselor” encourage extraordinary vulnerability and acknowledgement of sin and struggle (they model it themselves), but because they operate under a model based on celebrity rather than institutional authority, they must keep their audiences somehow, and most people won’t pay if they’re challenged too much. The result is an audience of under-spiritually-nourished followers and a counselor-celebrity who, at best, has been rubbed raw in order to maintain financial stability.

Bowler’s book, as I noted above, is well-researched and fascinating, particularly as a study of the boundaries laid for (American) Christian femaleness that explores territory I am not used to seeing in other books about so-called “Christian womanhood.” Even complementarian readers poised to disagree with many of Bowler’s diagnoses should note the dangers she unveils in each of her chapters of too close a marriage between Church and celebrity: a Church, and any Church leader, who sells its soul to the marketplace wades into dangerous waters that may dilute challenging doctrine in order to make it easier to sell. The book is not without flaws and oversights—I wish, for example, that she had focused more than a few pages of one chapter on the place of single women in the landscape of conservative Christian female celebrity. But Bowler’s book is an important, even necessary read, particularly in an era when even expert Christian writers are asked for the number of Twitter and Instagram followers they have so their celebrity, along with or rather than their expertise, can be gauged.

40 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Smith, James K. A. On the Road with Saint Augustine: A RealWorld Spirituality for Restless Hearts. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2019. 256 pages, $24.99.

Reviewed by Julie Ooms I began reading James K. A. Smith’s On the Road with Saint Augustine while self-isolating during the novel coronavirus pandemic, a strange, strained time not only for me but for most of the world. The book itself is strange, as well.

It seems to have no clear thesis (and I believe that this is part of Smith’s intent), and Smith describes his purpose in the first lines of the introduction partly by identifying what the book is not: “This is not a biography. This is not a book about Augustine. In a way, it’s a book Augustine has written about you. It’s a journey with Augustine as a journey into oneself. It’s a travelogue of the heart.

It’s a road trip with a prodigal who’s already been where you think you need to go” (xi). Smith views Augustine, particularly in his (narrative) Confessions as opposed to his (argumentative) sermons and dogmatic writings, as both precursor and responder to the unsettled, unsettling questions raised by existentialist philosophers in the early twentieth century—philosophers whose thinking most people in the secularized West, including professing Christians, wrestle with even if they aren’t explicitly aware of it.

The book begins with a section, helpfully entitled “Orientation,” that maps this restless philosophical landscape. Readers of Smith’s other books will be familiar with the mix of philosophy and pop-cultural allusions that commonly season them; On the Road with Saint Augustine does the same immediately, using, among others, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and the George Clooney film Up in the Air to describe the landscape of the postmodern, secular West. (Smith also employs many landscape and mapmaking metaphors; I, for better or worse, follow suit here.) We are, Smith argues, “always on the move, restless, vaguely chasing something rather than oriented to a destination” (5); this situation is not freedom but a prison. Happiness, for Augustine and for us, is rest (10); “There is delight in the sojourn when we know where home is” (13). We are, Smith says, aware of our own restlessness, and Augustine helps us to define and describe our felt need for home.

Once he has described this cultural landscape, Smith describes the philosophical topography that he argues Augustine will help us map. Describing how Augustine’s thinking is interwoven with the thinking of philosophers like Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, Arendt, Derrida, and Lyotard, Smith argues that “we don’t need to ‘make’ Augustine postmodern: the postmodern is already Augustinian” (34). He also proposes the method of reading Augustine that will frame the rest of the book, building on Hannah Arendt’s methodology, in which she focused “not on why Augustine said x but on whether and how x proved illuminating for our experience,” in order to read Augustine as “a philosopher of experience…who…had something to show us about ourselves” (31).

Book Reviews 41 Having described a cultural landscape characterized by restless wandering, and having not only named Augustine as a particularly helpful guide through this landscape but also shown his connection to the ways of thinking that helped give us this landscape in the first place, Smith next tells us who we are as we set out with Augustine as our guide: “We are not just pilgrims on a sacred march to a religious site; we are migrants, strangers, resident aliens en route to a patria, a homeland we’ve never been to” (51). This framing is, I think, one of the most helpful and novel parts of a book that could be accused of venerating, or at least over-focusing on, particularly Western strains of Christian and philosophical thought. Smith critiques the “celebration of never arriving” in the secular West as something that smacks of “bourgeois cosmopolitanism”; a better, and even more Augustinian, way of understanding the human condition is as a “cosmic émigré”: “vulnerable, exposed, unsettled, desperate, looking for a home I’ve never been to before” (42). Such a framing takes Augustinian (and other historical Christian— and, yes, particularly Western) wisdom and experience into account while recognizing that the wealthy majority culture that wisdom and experience spawned, in part, is the cause of the problem. As Jesus modeled and outright named in the Gospels, truer wisdom and closeness with God lies often in the experiences not of the privileged but of the downtrodden, the ignored, the neglected and the frequently legislated against. Those who are privileged to enjoy the comforts of this world are far more prone to fooling themselves that the pleasures of this world are ends in and of themselves; without a refugee spirituality to properly order our love for creation, creation itself “becomes a foreign country, that ‘distant land’ of the prodigal’s wandering: arid, barren, a region of nothingness even if it’s filled with earthly delights” (49).

Smith follows this setup—the first quarter of the book—with a series of chapters he describes as “way stations of the hungry soul.” In about fifteen pages, each chapter poses a question about a particular idea—freedom, ambition, friendship, enlightenment, and others—and uses Augustine as a “philosopher of experience” to help readers answer these questions. In the chapter on enlightenment, for example, Smith poses the question “What do I want when I want to be rational?” and with Augustine, readers consider the difference between curiositas (learning as a means to control the world and serve one’s own interests) and true wisdom (144). In the chapter on ambition, Smith asks “What do I want when I want to be noticed?” and again with Augustine’s own ambition as a guide, readers consider how “the telos of [our] ambition…distinguishes good from bad, separating faithful aspiration from self-serving aggrandizement” (78). It was the chapter on friendship, which asks “What do I want when I want to belong?” that I found most poignant personally. Its lessons were familiar to me, but the words “the disastrous effects of social isolation put the lie to the modern spin on the self as autonomous and self-sufficient” had a particular resonance for me as I selfisolated—which, as a single person living alone, involves an extra emphasis on both “self” and “isolation”—during the pandemic. I was, as I perhaps haven’t really been before in my life, able to ask myself Smith’s questions, “What if authenticity is the source of our loneliness? What if it’s precisely this unquestioned, unrecognized construal of others as threats to my freedom and

42 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal autonomy that has sequestered us? Is authenticity worth it?” and feel acutely Augustine’s and my own longing for the balm of embodied friendship, of struggle shared.

The strengths of On the Road with Saint Augustine are many; I say that not in spite but because of the fact that it resonated so deeply with me, just as Augustine’s ideas endure not in spite but because of his own lived experiences.

The book is fine to read through from cover to cover, but it also lends itself to a more piecemeal reading. A reader, beginning with that first fifty pages of setup, can choose chapters based on their resonance during a particular season or struggle. Those reading for themselves might not want to do this, though a college instructor looking to use this book as a classroom text would value being able to focus on particular chapters to fit with a course theme and (or) because of limited time in the class schedule.

The book’s weaknesses are few but worth remarking upon. I am inclined, as the reader likely understood far earlier in this review, to recommend this book quite strongly. It was still quite galling to watch Smith relegate all discussion of Augustine’s misogyny to an endnote without engaging the subject at all. And, as with many of Smith’s other books, the ideal reader of On the Road with Saint Augustine lives in that strange space between very well-read layperson and Humanities scholar. I would recommend this book heartily for use in a senior seminar or capstone course, but its successful use depends on the depths to which the students’ Philosophy 101 classes dove. Readers whose graduations from liberal arts colleges are a decade or more off might find Smith’s crash course on existentialist philosophy too brief, but church book studies whose leaders have some background in these ideas might find the book worth tackling. All readers will likely find that the book provides the impetus they needed to pick up and read Augustine’s Confessions for the first time.

Though the book is in a not-quite-layperson’s philosophical register, the questions it raises and the ills it diagnoses are timely and significant. Its answers, and Smith’s choice to use narrative to communicate them, are indeed likely to address the restlessness particular to our often prosperous, but just as often seemingly purposeless, age.

Book Reviews 43

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment: A New Translation.

Trans. Michael R. Katz. New York: Liveright, 2019. 624 pages, $19.95.

Reviewed by John J. Han

A perennial world masterpiece from nineteenth-century Russia, Crime and Punishment (1866) has appeared in many English translations, including the ones

by Constance Garnett (Heinemann, 1914), Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Vintage, 1993), and Oliver Ready (Penguin, 2014). The newest rendition by Michael Katz—the C. V. Starr Professor Emeritus of Russian and East European Studies at Middlebury College—testifies to the enduring appeal of Dostoyevsky’s novel, which offers both moral insight and reading pleasure. Each translation has its own merits and demerits, but for lay readers, the variations among different translations seem inconsequential and do not hinder the fundamental understanding of the original text. In the introduction to his translation, Katz notes that he attempted to “express the richness of registers or tones—and thus the extra poignancy—of [the] decisive moments” of the novel (xi). Indeed, Katz’s translation vividly captures the gripping nature of Crime and Punishment, a work of murder mystery and psychological realism.

The novel consists of seven parts and an epilogue. As the novel’s title indicates, Dostoyevsky’s story concerns a crime (Russian: Преступление) and the penalty (Russian: наказание) for the crime. Part 1 describes the protagonist’s murder of two innocent women, and the epilogue summarily describes the trial and sentencing and the main character’s spiritual regeneration. The parts in between deal with the mental anguish, remorse, and eventual self-incrimination of the main character. In addition, this middle section involves several subplots, a critique of Russian society in the mid-nineteenth century, and musings on suffering and Christian faith, making Crime and Punishment a multifaceted epic.

At one level, the novel is a character study of a bright twenty-three-yearold man, Raskolnikov, who commits a double murder in St. Petersburg, Russia.

A former law student, he has withdrawn from the university due to financial difficulties. He lives in a shabby apartment in St. Petersburg, avoiding his proprietor who reminds him of unpaid rent. Striking is his similarity to the main character of Dostoyevsky’s novella Notes from Underground Man (1864): intelligent, contemplative, absent-minded, socially awkward, and contemptuous yet craving respect. Unlike the underground man, however, Raskolnikov has some redeeming features: he is compassionate toward the poor and downtrodden, feels indignant against social injustice, and helps others in need. Notwithstanding a murder, it is hard not to feel sympathetic toward Raskolnikov.

Early in the novel, a letter from his mother, Pulkheriya Aleksandrovna, in the countryside reveals much about the current family situation. Pulkheriya Aleksandrovna and Dunya, his beloved sister, are living in penury. Dunya has decided to marry a shady man in his forties to support her mother and Raskolnikov. The news enrages Raskolnikov, who believes his sister deserves

44 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal better. His mother’s letter ends with a recollection of his childhood faith: “Remember, my dear, how in your childhood, when your father was still alive, you mumbled your prayers on my lap and how happy we all were then!” (42).

The fond memory only reinforces the stark contrast between former happiness and present misery.

After reading the letter, Raskolnikov goes to a moneylender to pawn an item that has sentimental value to him. Upon arrival, he is insulted by the owner—an old, cold-hearted woman, Alyona, known for enslaving and mistreating her intellectually challenged younger half-sister, Lizaveta. As he walks out of the shop, he contemplates the idea of robbing Alyona. With the small amount of lent money, he goes to a tavern, where he overhears a conversation between a government officer and a loquacious university student.

The student calls Alyona “a stupid, mindless, worthless, spiteful, sick old hag, needed by no one—on the contrary, causing harm to everyone,” contending that she does not deserve to live: “Murder her and take her money and then use it to dedicate yourself to the service of all humanity and to the common good” (71, 72). The student cannot bring himself to kill her, however. While leaving the tavern, Raskolnikov is astonished at the timing of the student’s remarks: like the student, he was thinking that the old woman deserved to die and that her wealth could be used to benefit the public good. Indeed, as a student, Raskolnikov published an article which maintained that an Overman (German: Übermensch)— an extraordinary person—has the right to overrule societal morals, thereby rationalizing crimes in the name of the common good. This kind of utilitarian thinking leads Raskolnikov to commit premeditated murder.

As a realistic novel, Crime and Punishment does not present Raskolnikov as someone who suddenly repents of his capital crime. In Parts 2-6, which span approximately 500 pages, he does not regret his murder of Alyona, although he feels guilty about killing Lizaveta. Until the very end of Part 6, he does not confess his guilt. Meanwhile, he suffers from intense psychological torture, which results in deliriums, hysterics, and nightmares. Three characters are instrumental in leading Raskolnikov to finally go to the police department and confess. First, the police detain a house painter, Mikolka, as a suspect, and he confesses to the murders he did not commit. It pricks Raskolnikov’s conscience.

Second, Porfiry Petrovich, the magistrate investigating the case, nudges Raskolnikov to confess without resorting to harsh interrogation tactics. Finally, Sonya, a teenage girl forced into prostitution by her family’s abject poverty, plays a crucial role in Raskolnikov’s confession. A woman of Christian faith, she urges him to face a penalty not only on legal grounds but also on moral and spiritual grounds: “Go to the crossroads, bow down before the people, kiss the earth because you’ve sinned before it, and say aloud to the whole world, ‘I’m a murderer!’” (577). The advice recalls the parable of the prodigal son, who, in destitution, tells himself, “I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you” (Luke 15:18 NIV). Part 6 ends with Raskolnikov’s confession at the police station: “It was I who killed the old civil servant’s widow and her sister Lizaveta with an axe and robbed them” (584; italics in the original).

Book Reviews 45 In the Epilogue, Raskolnikov is sentenced to eight years’ penal servitude.

Following arrival at a Siberian prison far from St. Petersburg, he serves his time without either enthusiasm or indolence. During the day, he works hard so that he can be exhausted enough to have a good night’s sleep; he feels moody and still rationalizes his murder of Alyona. Meanwhile, Sonya follows him and takes up residence in a town next to the prison. Thereafter, she visits him daily and cares for him. Raskolnikov is annoyed by her presence but gradually opens his heart to her. One day, the couple sit in a forest, holding each other’s hand and having tears in their eyes. Once Raskolnikov’s term is over, they will have a happy life together: “They were both pale and thin; but in their sickly, pale faces already glimmered the dawn of a renewed future, of perfect resurrection to a new life.

Love had resurrected them; the heart of one contained infinite sources of life for the heart of the other” (603). By the end of the novel, Raskolnikov begins his Christian journey: he asks Sonya to read to him the New Testament passage on the resurrection of Lazarus, the same passage Sonya read to him in Part 4.

Similar to François Mauriac’s The Knot of Vipers, Crime and Punishment is one of the “novels of redemption,” which Patrick Sherry defines as those which “attempt to convey how God’s redemptive purposes may work through human lives.” Thematically, those types of novels focus on “evil (i.e. that from which people are redeemed) and grace” (Literature & Theology, vol. 14, no. 3, Sept.

2000, p. 249). Indeed, redemption of a sinner is the most prominent theme of Dostoyevsky’s novel. Further, Crime and Punishment is contrasted with many devotionally oriented works of fiction, such as John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Guy Howard’s Give Me Thy Vineyard, and Harold Bell Wright’s That Printer of Udell’s. Dostoyevsky’s novel conveys more than biblical truths of sin and redemption; the novel raises some intriguing questions for theological discussions as well. For instance, in Part 2, the priest and Sonya’s stepmother dispute over the mercy of God after Sonya’s alcoholic father undergoes last rites in a family room of “poverty, ragged clothes, death, and desperation” (203). When the priest exhorts her to trust in God’s mercifulness, she retorts, “Eh! Merciful, but not to us!” (203). The brief spat embodies the age-old question of where God is amid human tragedy—the kind of question the Old Testament book of Job raises.

Another interesting theological discussion takes place in Part 4 during Raskolnikov’s visit to Sonya’s house. When he sounds concerned about her consumptive stepmother’s impending death and the hard times that will befall Sonya’s younger half-siblings, she exclaims, “Oh, no! God won’t allow that!”

(352). When she keeps insisting that the good God will always protect her family, he sarcastically responds, “Perhaps there’s no such thing as God” (353), expressing a nihilistic view of God. By the end of the novel, Raskolnikov is a changed man who regains his childhood faith, but an intelligent, rationalistic man’s journey toward salvation, which the author dramatically illustrates, is worth contemplating.

A story of sin, guilt, and redemption, Crime and Punishment endures as a profound moral story. During his four-year hard labor in Siberia, Dostoyevsky himself renounced his radical political ideology, instead embracing Christianity.

The novel reflects the author’s lifelong preoccupation with good and evil, a theme

46 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal that pervades all of his stories. Crime and Punishment also exhibits his ability to capture human misery, the power of love and faith, and salvation that comes with suffering. It is no wonder that Karen Swallow Prior, professor of English at Liberty University, lists the novel as one of the eight works of fiction every Christian should read (the Gospel Coalition website, 20 Nov. 2018). Finally, Crime and Punishment can be a rewarding read for those interested in Dostoyevsky’s insight into the human psyche. The fact that more than twentyfive film adaptations of the novel exist reflects the cinematic qualities of Dostoyevsky’s novel.

Book Reviews 47

Hesse, Hermann. Narcissus and Goldmund.

Trans. Leila Vennewitz. London: Penguin Books in association with Peter Owen Publishers, 2017. 311 pages, UK £9.99.

Reviewed by John J. Han Peter Owen Publishers originally published Leila Vennewitz’s translation of Narcissus and Goldmund (German: Narziß und Goldmund, 1930) in 1993, and Penguin published a reprint of the same edition in 2017. The republication of the text attests to the continuing appeal of this philosophical novel set in medieval Germany. The title characters meet as pupils at a Catholic monastery school and maintain a lifelong friendship with each other. Narcissus is a man of faith, reason, intellect, and self-control who dedicates his life to religious devotion, eventually rising to the rank of abbot. In contrast, Goldmund is a gifted artist who deserts the monastery, becoming a lifelong vagabond in pursuit of “idle talk, tenderness, playfulness, love, [and] contentment unmarred by thought” (293).

The two men seek the meaning of life in contrasting ways—Narcissus through asceticism and Goldmund through self-indulgence. At first sight, the two figures come across as incompatible, but they never lose respect and admiration for each other, perhaps because they see something missing within themselves in the other person. Indeed, many critics have noted Narcissus and Goldmund as what Nietzsche calls Apollonian and Dionysian characters, respectively.

During their brief life together in the novitiate, Goldmund feels intellectually inferior to Narcissus. However, Narcissus corrects him, saying that they are simply “different” from each other and that their goal should be “to learn to see and honour in the other what he himself is—the other’s counterpart and complement” (40, 41). The plot of the story supports what Narcissus says. By the end of the novel, Narcissus even admits that his way of life is easier to maintain than that of his friend’s; his life looks orderly because he lives within the safety of the cloister, not in a world of flesh and blood. In the second to last chapter, Narcissus cannot help but admire something noble in his wayward friend: However that might be, Goldmund had shown him that a person destined for higher things can plunge deeply into the blood and drunken chaos of life and cover himself with much dust and blood without becoming petty and mean, without killing the divine spark within him; that he can go astray among the dark depths without the divine light and the creative force in the sanctuary of his soul being extinguished. (297) Narcissus realizes that, whereas his life has been acceptable to God, he lacked charity. In the final chapter, he tells Goldmund who has returned from yet another trip to the world,

48 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal My life has had little love in it—I lacked the best part.[…] I am not unjust towards my fellowmen. I endeavour to be just and patient with them, but I have never loved them. Of two scholars in the monastery I would rather be with the more learned one. I have never felt love for a weak scholar despite his weakness. If, nevertheless, I know what love is, it is because of you. (306) Indeed, despite his many sinful acts, Goldmund never leaves God and strives to remain connected to Him through his art. In this regard, Goldmund accomplishes what Narcissus—a man of the mind—cannot. On his part, Narcissus inspires Goldmund as a model of Christian piety. The two men’s final reunion and mutual understanding represent the convergence of two paths to spiritual awakening—the path of the mind and the path of art.

In a way, Narcissus and Goldmund is the story of Goldmund, a picaro whose life journey a third-person narrator follows along with readers. Similar to Don Quixote, Don Juan, and Huckleberry Finn, Goldmund roams the world, encounters numerous life situations, and reflects on them. In the middle of the book, he has a life-changing experience when he attends a mass and sees a beautiful Madonna created by Master Niklaus. Thereafter, Goldmund becomes a creator of Christian artifacts while continuing his life as an epicurean vagabond.

On his part, Narcissus remains in the background except at the beginning and end of the novel. Although largely a flat character, Narcissus serves as a witness to his friend’s wanderings and comes to a new understanding of Goldmund’s Christian spirituality, which he feels as valid as his own.

Motherhood is a theme that runs through Narcissus and Goldmund.

Goldmund's wanderings are a way to search for his mother who has been missing since early childhood, and his artistic pursuit of the Virgin Mary parallels this search for motherhood. Indeed, his prayer to the Virgin Mary draws him closer to his missing mother: “By repeating long prayers to the holy Mother of God he gave vent to the torrents of emotion drawing him to his own mother” (57). Even his constant interest in women reflects the absence of his mother in his life.

Goldmund’s father, who dropped him off at the monastery school, had taught him not to think of his mother—supposedly a sinful woman. It is no wonder that Goldmund’s image of motherhood is devoid of perfection, which also impacts his conceptualization of the Virgin Mary. Master Niklaus’s wooden Madonna mesmerizes Goldmund, but its impeccable beauty lacks reality for him. Master Niklaus crafts holy images to sell them to churches; Goldmund creates them out of his image of an earthly mother—Eve-mother—as a spiritual practice.

In Narcissus and Goldmund, Hesse also reflects on the meaning of art in life. In chapter 11, Goldmund ponders—and Hesse would agree—that art is “a uniting of the paternal and maternal world, of mind and blood; it could begin at the most sensual level and lead to the most abstract realism, or it might have its origin in a pure world of ideas and end in the bloodiest of flesh” (168). For Goldmund (and Hesse), art is neither an imitation of reality (as Socrates and Plato argue) nor a pleaser of our senses. Rather, art can transform what is mundane into

Book Reviews 49 what is sublime, both aesthetically and spiritually, and vice versa. In “The Study of Poetry,” Matthew Arnold (1822-88)—a Victorian poet and literary critic— predicted that poetry would replace religion and philosophy in modern times. It has not happened. However, it is also true that art can lead one to deeper spirituality. As Thomas Merton famously wrote in a letter to Boris Pasternak in 1958, “even things that are not patently spiritual if they come from the heart of a spiritual person are spiritual.”1 Further, poetry is a prominent literary type in Scriptures. Poems are interspersed in books in narrative prose, as in Exodus 15:119 and Numbers 21:17-20. Six wisdom books of the Old Testament—Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, and Lamentations—consist, either entirely or almost entirely, of poetry.

Overall, Narcissus and Goldmund is a modern novel that not only tells an intriguing story but also contains Hesse’s aesthetic and philosophical ideas. In addition to the Jungian concept of archetypes, the work shows the influence of the Romantic Movement, whose ideals include freedom, spontaneity, and primitive living. Although he does not dismiss Narcissus’s sacred intentions, Hesse seems to find Goldmund’s lifestyle much more interesting. Hesse once acknowledged that his parents’ Christianity, “not preached but practiced, has been the strongest among the powers which have educated me and formed me.”2 Narcissus and Goldmund shows that, as a creative writer, Hesse retained his Christian faith but still fell under the influence of the zeitgeist of modernity.

Notes 1

The Courage for Truth: The Letters of Thomas Merton to Writers, ed. Christine M. Bochen, Farrar, 1993, p. 90.

2

Quoted in Ernst Rose, Faith from the Abyss, Peter Owen, 1966, p. 7.

\ Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal 50 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring 2020): 50-65

Thoughts and Reflections Young Refugees Kyung-ok and In-kyung Sung Editor’s Note: Below is an excerpt from Kyung-ok and In-kyung Sung’s A Love Song for Young Truth-Seekers: A Story of the Korean L’Abri (Seoul, Korea: Jeyoung Communications, 2017), translated from the Korean by John J. Han. L’Abri Fellowship International began in 1955, when Francis and Edith Schaeffer opened their home in Switzerland as “a place where people might find satisfying answers to their questions and practical demonstration of Christian care.”

The organization currently has residential branches in Australia, Canada, England, Holland, South Korea, the United States (Massachusetts and Minnesota), and Switzerland. It also operates resource centers in Brazil and South Africa. For more information on L’Abri Fellowship, visit www.labri.org/.

1. The Young American Man Who Came via a Buddhist Temple One afternoon, when the maples looked beautiful, my wife Kyung-ok and I had a wonderful time together. We were having dinner at Osaek, Yangyang, Gangwon Province.

Yangyang is beautiful year-round, but autumn is spectacularly beautiful. Yangyang’s autumnal beauty mainly lies in the Seoraksan maples at Osaek’s Jujeon Valley and Micheon Valley’s maples, which made the residents “even unaware of the Korean War.” We stopped eating when our youngest son called us in an urgent voice. I spoke with him.

Son: Dad, a young man from the United States is asking for a room. What should I do?

Dad: I have no problem giving him a room, but did you ask him what he came for?

Son: Not yet. Is there a student who has registered?

Dad: I have not heard of any foreign students coming this week. Anyway, give him a bath towel so he can take a shower and get some rest. I’ll be right down there.

Son: By the way, Dad, he looks like a full-time beggar—bags are dirty, hair is messy, and clothes are rubbish. I wonder why someone like him has come to L’Abri.

Dad: Maybe the young American ran out of money traveling.

Kyung-ok & In-kyung Sung 51 Son: Okay.

When Kyung-ok and I got home, we found a tall, handsome young man drinking coffee. Awkwardly, our youngest son added, “After taking a shower, he looks like a different person.” After gobbling up the sandwich Kyung-ok had made for him, the American man introduced himself and explained in detail why he had come to L’Abri. Then, he unpacked his bag to stay for a week.

It turned out that he was a student at Saint Louis University in the central U.S. state of Missouri. About a month before, he came in haste to a Buddhist temple in Seoul for spiritual training. After hearing a Buddhist priest at SLU tell him, “If you want to know the truth, come to Seoul,” he came to study Buddhist scriptures. Although he listened attentively to lectures at the temple for more than a month, he did not find the truth he had expected.

One day, he was thinking, “I should go home.” Then, suddenly, he remembered what one of his friends had told him: “When you go to Korea, make sure to stop by L’Abri.”

At that time, several teachers who were native speakers of English were already staying at L’Abri. Also staying there were the Reverend Je-ho Han, a professor of New Testament at Anyang University, and his son who had returned from his studies abroad. Accordingly, the young man from St. Louis was able to talk extensively with those who could speak English. For a week, he discussed the topics “What is the truth?” and “Does God exist?” with a full-time staffer.

When Sunday arrived, he joined us on the way to a nearby Korean church.

A young man among us interpreted the sermon for him. While listening to the sermon, the man from St. Louis sent a small note to the staffer, who responded to it.

A: I think I have found what I was looking for: the truth in Jesus.

B: Congratulations! Let’s talk about what kind of truth you have found when we go back to L’Abri this afternoon.

That day, the preacher was Eun-cheol, another staffer. Eun-cheol had ministered to young people at Shanghai Korean Church and Shanghai KOSTA (Korean Students All Nations) before he returned to Korea. Based on Romans 1, he preached a sermon whose thesis was, “The gospel is that anyone who believes in Jesus can be saved, and this is a truth that is not lost either empirically or intellectually.”

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”

(Romans 1:16-17 NIV)

52 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Upon returning to L’Abri, we had a conversation with the young man from St. Louis. Clearly, he had realized that Christianity was a religion that was true by virtue of both experience and reason. It was also clear that he had realized that Jesus was both a person and the eternal God; he acknowledged that no one other than Jesus could solve the problem of his sin.

A single Sunday sermon did not make him come to a sudden awakening.

Rather, the knot that had bound him was untied after weeklong conversations with multiple Christians, his Bible study during the week, and finally Eun-cheol’s sermon. Initially, the knot seemed seriously tangled, but once he accepted that the genuine truth is both mysterious and rational, the seemingly complex knot began to unravel like a disentangled skein.

That night, we threw a small party. At L’Abri, we host many parties— parties for those who have their birthdays, who have found truths, who have decided to begin a relationship, or who announce their weddings. Our “parties” are simple: we cut a cake, have something to drink, and hear stories. We had a wonderful time as the young man from America was explaining how he had come to Korea and how he had accepted Jesus. As the party was about to end, he asked the following question with a voice full of excitement: When I called home this afternoon, my father told me that he would come here to take me home. Would it be all right for him to come here?

We teased him by asking questions such as “Does your father live in Seoul?”

“Are you too young to go back home without holding your father’s hand?” and “Do you not have a plane ticket?” Looking very embarrassed at the jokes from us, he went to bed.

Then, after fewer than twenty-four hours, his father barged into L’Abri. It was around 11:00 p.m., when all of us had washed ourselves to go to bed. A big, tall man wearing a large cowboy hat, the kind of hat John Wayne wears in his western movies, took long strides to the floor as if to demand his son right away.

He did not even take off his shoes.1

2. The Father Who Came from America to Take His Son The young man’s father did not live in Seoul; he flew from the Midwestern U.S. state of Missouri to Yangyang in one breath. Approximately two months earlier, his son had left home announcing, “I am going to Korea.”

However, he stopped contacting home, causing great anxiety. One day, he called home and said, “Father, I have come to believe in Jesus at L’Abri.” As soon as he hung up the phone, the father came all the way.

He came from St. Louis, Missouri, to Seattle, to Seoul, and to Yangyang—in one big stride. Most fathers whose sons wander away from home 1

In East Asia, it is customary to take off shoes before stepping on the floor of a residential house or a temple. Not doing so is deemed boorish. —Trans.

Kyung-ok & In-kyung Sung 53 would probably chastise them when they receive their phone calls. They may yell, “Come home right away!” The father from St. Louis may have felt like yelling, “Did you go all the way to Korea to believe in Jesus?”

Investing much money and time, however, this father ran all the way from the American Midwest to Yangyang to find his son. Standing next to a pillar in Hongseok Hall on the lower floor, father and son spent probably more than ten minutes hugging each other and crying together. Abruptly, the father spoke to his son with a voice booming enough to blow the whole hall away: Father: Son, let’s go home now. (Turning to those who were witnessing their reunion) Thank you, everyone, for having kept my son safe.

Staffer: Father, the night is deep. Why don’t you sleep here and leave tomorrow morning?

Father: No thanks. Now that I have found my son, we should leave right away. His mom is waiting for him, too.

Staffer: I understand; you should take your son home promptly. However, would you not like to meet other American kids before you depart? As you can see, several young people from America are sitting here.

Father: Are there other kids who came from America, too? I see them now. (Turning to one of them) What brought you to Korea? How much did you make by teaching English? Stop wasting your money using drugs or seducing Korean girls and go back home quickly.

A Young Man: Please stop worrying about us. Worry about your own son. Do you know why he left home?

Father: He said he was leaving to clear his head. He used to say he was struggling with the meaning of life and the source of truth, but I assumed that he was simply fed up with studies.

Son: Father, you probably do not know why I came to Korea.

As soon as I entered college, I learned about Buddhism through a priest and began to attend the meetings of a sutra study group. Then I requested a leave of absence and came to Korea so that I could train my mind full time. However, I gained nothing through my stay at a temple. Fortunately, I have found the meaning of life and the source of truth at L’Abri, so you do not have to know why I came to Korea.

A Young Man: Your son is not a baby. He has a plane ticket, so you could have told him to come home. Why did you come all the way here? Do you have any particular reason?

Father: No. I came here because I wanted to see him as soon as possible. He did not contact us for almost two months after leaving home. Then he told my wife and me that he had come to believe in Jesus. I was so happy that I came to see him. We prayed for a long time for the day when our son would accept

54 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Jesus, but we never dreamed of him accepting Jesus in Korea.

(Turning to the whole group) I sincerely thank all of you for having helped my son.

Staffer: You do not talk much with your son. Right?

Father: Indeed, no. I was unhappy with his lifestyle for the last few years, so we did not have any conversation. By the way, why are you asking that question?

Staffer: Your son would not be in Korea if you and your son were in accord. You could have helped him much better than we, whose English skills are lacking. All of the questions he posed to us were the ones you could have answered easily.

Father: What questions did he have?

Staffer: Why don’t you hear them from him on the plane?

Ultimately, the father decided to stay overnight at L’Abri. After a long separation from his son, he slept next to him. Judging by his haggard and tiredlooking face at the table the next morning, he must have tossed and turned all night long. However, he was still very happy, emitting guffaws loud enough to shake the whole house. Once breakfast was over, we took father and son to the Yangyang Bus Terminal. Handing us a bill of US$100, he said, “Thank you very much for saving my son.” Soon, the two got on the bus bound for Seoul.

3. The Youngsters Who Go Wild about the Zeitgeist Older generations do not understand the anxieties of young people.

Understanding young people as persons should precede understanding their anxieties. Sadly, that is not the case. It is because older generations are unfamiliar with the vocabulary they use, the profanities they spew, or their passions. To understand young men and women, one should observe the kind of movies they watch, their outfits, the kinds of smartphones they carry, and their atypical behaviors. Young people today tend to communicate via nonlinguistic— not linguistic—means.

One of the characteristics of young people today is the love of money.

Older generations are enslaved to money enough to be called Homo economicus,2 but young people are deeply addicted to money and love, too. We hear people say, “The teens are more sensitive to money than to their neighbors,” “Do not be deceived by the startup advertisement that goes, ‘We give you passion pay,’” 3 or “It is better to starve to death than to begin a career at the bottom like a dog.”

It may sound natural for young people, who are sensitive to current trends, to be passionate about the zeitgeist. At the same time, they sadly remind us of the prodigal son, who prematurely tasted the sweetness of money and told his father, “Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me” (Luke 15:12 2

Literally, economic man. It is a word play on Homo sapiens (“wise man”). —Trans.

“Passion pay” refers to the contemporary business practice in Korea of exploiting young people by paying little but praising them for working passionately. —Trans.

3

Kyung-ok & In-kyung Sung 55 NRSV). Money is important, but addiction to money and love sickens both youth and the church. Below is an analysis by a young teacher: Modern society is a capitalist society. The highest value in capitalism is definitely money. Money determines good and evil. Money has become a class of its own. Humans are equally precious; instead, humans receive different treatment based on the money they possess. The problem is that a capitalist way of thinking has infiltrated into the church.

Watch the church closely, and you will find different classes within it. Those who are rich or have a high social status are popular among church members. In contrast, those who are poor or of lower class are completely alienated. Instead of looking after orphans and widows, the church focuses on those who give a lot of money and have a large amount of power.

Identical to the world, the value of humanity is found in material wealth within the church.4 Even more frightening than addiction to money are young people’s relational malaise, weariness, inferiority complexes, and frustration. Research by the reporters Dong-uk Kim and Su-yeon Kim reveals, “Young people compete with each other by expanding their human relationships on social network service (SNS). Offline, however, they undergo relational malaise, complaining about their weariness in human relationships.” Those who are called “the rich in human connections […] may have hundreds of friends on SNS but have fewer than five friends with whom they have meaningful conversations.” Indeed, five is a big number. The report continues, “Stricken by relational malaise, a Mr. Lee, who is a twenty-eight-year-old part-time worker, is ‘submerged’ socially, yet it only increased his depression.”5 The most serious of all issues is that the majority of young people suffer from an inferiority complex and a sense of frustration. Of course, those symptoms are not unique to the young men and women of our day; rather, they have always troubled young people throughout history: But when he [the prodigal son] came to himself, he said, “How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! […] I will arise and go to my father, and will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you, and I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants.’” (Like 15:17-19 NKJV)

4

Yun-seok Jang. “The Zeitgeist and the Christian Worldview.” A paper presented at the L’Abri Christian Worldview Forum, 3 August 2017.

5 Dong-uk Kim and Su-yeon Kim. “Young People Who Have Fallen into Relational Malaise and Weariness.” Dong-Ilbo, 4 April 2017.

56 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Do you not hear the groan of a son whose identity has been shattered? In Cynical Society, the reporter Min-ha Kim offers an excellent analysis of young people’s inferiority complex and sense of frustration: Some people look more attractive than I, some look thinner than I, and some make more money than I do. We constantly compare ourselves with others, trying to find something better in ourselves. If we cannot find anything in ourselves that is better than other people, we dismiss them as “pains in the neck.” On a daily basis, we find fault with everything about other people and repeatedly discuss how bad it is in its nature.

The term that refers to this kind of behavior is “the explosion of inferiority complex.”6 Taking a step further, some young Koreans throw a fit over “Hell Joseon.”7 The economic inequality, the impassible gap between a “golden spoon” and a “dirt spoon,” 8 the problem of youth unemployment, neoliberal hypercompetitive society, the grim realities of poverty that are hard to escape no matter how hard one tries—all of them make young people condemn their country as unlivable. In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem,9 Hannah Arendt superbly portrays the “banality of evil” that exists in the dreadfully animalistic and evil minds of people. As the readers of the book often feel, these Korean youngsters feel sarcastic enough to lie on their backs and spit into the air.10 Some people criticize the expression “Hell Joseon” as unpatriotic and defeatist, but an overreaction seems unneeded. When angered by frustration, young people even curse God, so there is no reason not to curse their country.

When frustration deepens, you can pour out curses. Instead of condemning curses wholesale, we should consider them young people’s call for SOS or a warning against the pathological phenomena of our society. In Gang-myeong Jang’s novel Because I Dislike Korea, a man in his twenties decides to emigrate. As if throwing up blood, he says, Because there is little vision in Korea.11 In this regard, backpacking travel is an outlet for young people’s anger.

The biggest cities in the world attract young people from Korea, who also roam the remotest parts of the world. As someone said, “Moving to another country is 6

Min-ha Kim. Cynical Society (Seoul: Hyeonamsa, 2016), p. 23.

The term is a combination of “hell” (a terrible place) and “Joseon” (a contemptuous word for South Korea). —Trans.

8 “Gold spoon” is the Korean equivalent to “silver spoon.” A person born with a “dirt spoon” in the mouth comes from a working-class, underprivileged family. —Trans.

9 Originally published by Viking Press in 1963. —Trans.

10 The Korean proverb “Do not lie on your back and spit into the air” is equivalent to the Western maxim “Do not cut off your nose to spite your face.” —Trans.

11 Gang-myeong Jang. Because I Dislike Korea (Seoul, Mineumsa, 2015), p. 44.

7

Kyung-ok & In-kyung Sung 57 not an easy option because my native land is holding me by the collar.

Continuing to stay in Korea is a stifling thought, too. The only viable option is to carry a backpack and travel abroad.” The young man from St. Louis who came to Korea with a single backpack may also have been frustrated by the irregularities of American society or may have witnessed enough of “Hell America” where evil has become commonplace.

The fact is that young people today are passionate about the idea of Amor fati. 12 This term was made famous by Professor Nan-do at Seoul National University, who used it on In-na You’s radio program Turn Up the Volume. Amor fati is the Latin phrase that means, “Love your fate.” The term appears in Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche's (1844-1900) Thus Spoke Zarathustra.13 Below is an excerpt: Sometimes you do not get as much as you worked for.

You can attain Amor fati when you hold onto the center of your existence and endow it with meaning.

That is the only way to endure your life and live it in this age of nihilism, in this age of God’s death.

Love your fate.

Amor fati.

Similar to the young Germans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, young men and women in Korea today go wild about Amor fati. Why? It is probably not because these Koreans have understood Nietzsche’s idea: one should affirm one’s circumstances and inevitable destiny, enduring them as well as loving them as a way to become an overman.14 Perhaps they get a small comfort from the fact that they are not the only ones whose lives shake like a dog’s tail or that their lives have been shaken, but not as many as a thousand times.

Another possible reason for young people to go wild about Amor fati is that it is easy to blame societal structure for the hopeless reality that does not reward hard work, and to justify oneself when they do not benefit from their efforts. Yet another reason might be that, by going wild about Amor fati, they want to look similar to Nietzsche, who was a lonely and melancholy genius, a “superman” courageous enough to accept all of his life as his destiny. These days, college students chant Amor fati when they create their club names or drink a toast. Worse yet, even the female singer Yeon-ja Kin is publicizing the slogan.

Do they want to praise the inevitability of their lives? First, they should 12

Literally, “a love of fate.” —Trans.

This philosophical book (1883) has been translated into Korean by many different scholars. — Trans.

14 In German, Übermensch, whose English equivalents include the superior man, overman, superman, and beyond-man. —Trans.

13

58 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal consider that affirming one’s fate and loving one’s own existence are different, that admitting the inevitability of one’s own life and refusing to compromise the absurdities of reality are different. It is worth reading an excerpt from Larawin’s online essay “The Three Reasons Why Fatalism Destroys Love.” The author, who identifies herself as a “thirty-year-old philosopher,” writes, Those who embrace fatalism have incredibly high standards.

With such high standards, it is hard to find someone who is satisfying. They reject everyone who is not at the level of prince or princess. They try to fit reality to fate. Accordingly, they initially think, “That person fits me,” but later they think, “Well, that person turns out not to fit my life.” Fatalism does not allow people to live intensely and hard, instead making them wait lazily for what their lives have in store for them.

Some people think they are destined to live alone, to meet a bad man, or to meet a good woman. By dreaming of making a magical movie out of your own script, you will destroy your romantic relationship.15 The young people who had gone wild about Amor fati for a while are now fanatical about AlphaGo. Made by Google, it defeated Se-dol Lee, Korea’s world-famous Go player of 9-dan rank, 4-1, and swept Ke Jie, the best Chinese Go player, marking its sixtieth consecutive victory. Witnessing AlphaGo’s intelligence, the same young men and women began to heap praise and adoration on the altar of the computer program as if it were God. While AlphaGO was competing with internationally renowned Go players, there was a minimum set of moral apparatus—an algorithm called Minimax and a value network—to prevent a heavy loss even in the worst-case scenario. Now, the computer program has transcended the limit. Below is what Gi-Jin Sung says: Some of the opinion leaders in Silicon Valley who espouse transhumanism16 argue that in the future artificial intelligence will be able to design better artificial intelligence and that, consequently, with “technological singularity,” an explosive amount of growth unimaginable during the days when humans designed artificial intelligence will take place.

For transhumanists, technological singularity is an event as important as the return of the Messiah; some of them even believe that it could happen within a few years. When it does happen, humans should lay down their weak judgment and let the superior judgment of artificial intelligence run the world or improve their power of judgment by integrating artificial 15

Larawin, “Thoughts on Romance and the Romantic Life.” https://kokr.facebook.com/larawin30s. Larawin, Damn Romantic Life (RHK, 2012).

16 Encyclopedia Britannica defines the term as the “social and philosophical movement devoted to promoting the research and development of robust human-enhancement technologies.” —Trans.

Kyung-ok & In-kyung Sung 59 intelligence into their brains. In that transhumanism deifies artificial intelligence, transhumanism is like a religion. Its idea of salvation lies in the belief that, when technological singularity arrives like the Messiah, the mighty power of artificial intelligence will solve almost all of the problems in human society. Some transhumanists sincerely believe that people will be able to upload their consciousness to a computer or transfer it to a healthy body so that they can live for eternity.17 The person who has further fueled the enthusiasm for AlphaGo is Yuval Noah Harari.18 In his book Homo Deus (“man-turned-God”), he analyzes how “artificial intelligence” or “data religion”—not a Nietzschean superman—has replaced the God whom Nietzsche killed. Whereas his earlier book, Sapiens, covers peripheral issues such as starvation, disease, marriage, and war during the past ten billion years, Homo Deus explains how contemporary science has come to challenge the areas traditionally considered the “realms of God,” such as immortality, happiness, sacredness, and eternal life.

In the end, what makes humans gods is artificial intelligence, which comes from data algorithms. Harari diagnoses that, in the sense that “data” determine humans and their future, “Homo Deus can be deemed the same as Datism or the Data Religion.” Big Brother, whom George Orwell predicted in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, 19 has returned as Big Data. Eui-jin Sung offers the following observation: Harari's argument gives us the following implications. First, considering that worldviews lead the flow of history, it offered an insightful perspective that understands history as an essence, not as a phenomenon. Second, it exposed the weaknesses of humanism and other fictional beliefs, offering a fresh perspective that all thoughts are religious ideologies. Three, by introducing Datism, it warned against the danger of reckless technological development. On the other hand, Homo Deus has the following limitations. First, by defining all conceptions as fiction, Harari committed the logical contradiction of rendering his own argument fictional. Second, he failed to provide a proper basis for criticizing the Bible and humanism.

Third, despite his warning against Datism, he ignored the 17

Gi-Jin Sung. “Christian Ethics in an Age of Artificial Intelligence.” School for Practicing Christian Ethics 6 Oct. 2016. See also his essay “The Problem of Worldview as Revealed in the Discussion of Artificial Intelligence” (Reformed Faith 23, March-April 2017).

18 Currently a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was born in Israel in 1976 and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Oxford in 2002. He has authored books such as Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011) and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2015). —Trans.

19 Orwell’s dystopian novel and science fiction published in 1949. —Trans.

60 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal central issue of the fall of humanity. Fourth, his alternative was limited and irresponsible.20 These days, college students swallow all kinds of worldviews as they swallow fusion foods. They do these things without verifying the contents of them. Datism, also called transhumanism, is one of such worldviews. Young people drink them and eat them indiscriminately without knowing that those worldviews could lead to the death of their souls. This is what happened to St. Augustine: For what can be more wretched than the wretch who has no pity upon himself, who sheds tears over Dido, dead for the love of Aeneas, but who sheds no tears for his own death in not loving thee […] ?21 4. What Youngsters Need Now: “A Shelter for Body and Mind” St. Augustine is not the only example. Many college students pursue all kinds of studies to receive a degree certificate without realizing that they are dying a spiritual death. The majority of young people are obsessed with the zeitgeist, devoting not only their bodies and minds but also their souls to it. The young men and women we have encountered did not know how weary they were and how their souls were dying, but they knew how to talk about their needs. “I am hungry. Please give me something to eat,” said they. There was one more: I would like to rest a little bit. I guess I need healing, too.

Among young people, “I need healing” means “I would like to quit my studies or work, relaxing my body and mind.” They know very well that healing does not mean just doing nothing or fooling around unthinkingly. They also know that the best healing comes from finding the meaning of life, obtaining the wisdom to live in this world, and knowing the truth. Similarly, the young man from the United States knew that healing meant having a short break from studies in search of meaning in life.

Healing is particularly essential for the young people who have had nightmares due to personal reasons or to national crises. It is essential for those who taste the bitterness and experience a “menbung”22 several times a day while 20

Eui-jin Sung. “Reading Yuval Harari’s Homo Deus the Right Way” (L’Abri Resource Room, 2017).

21 The passage appears in Chapter 13 of the Confessions, a spiritual autobiography. The English translation is by Albert C. Outler (1908-89), a former professor of theology at Southern Methodist University. For more information, see Outler’s entire translation of the book, which appeared in 1955 and is currently in public domain: https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/hum100/augustinconf.pdf. —Trans.

22 An abbreviation of the Korean phrase mental bunggwae (mental collapse). —Trans.

Kyung-ok & In-kyung Sung 61 working in a poorly run organization. For those who deeply suffer from an inferiority complex and a sense of frustration, healing is an absolute need.

Professor Bong-ho Son once said, “The kind of rest we need is the rest from money, power, and fame, which force us to compete fiercely with other people.” This is a highly insightful comment on the most pressing type of rest for young people in Korea. What young men and women in Korea need to do is to escape from all of the worries, anxieties, and competitions and to take a rest.

Importantly, this rest is not something one can manufacture, wait until it happens, earn by running away, or earn through a fight. Rest is a gift. Indeed, we cannot buy any of the most precious things in this world; we get them free. Our lives, our family, salvation, peace, rest, birthday gifts—all of these come to us free. In this regard, there is a clear source or provider for a gift.

True peace and rest are always given through the restoration of relations.

For example, spiritual and religious peace comes from a restored relationship with God, and international peace comes from the recovery of the relationship between nations. True peace and rest—the gift of gifts—are given to those who come to Jesus, who says, Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. (Matthew 11:28-30 NRSV) Peace and rest always come through a messenger, who introduces and delivers them. Peace of King Solomon came via Moses and David, and Elijah’s rest came through the bills of crows and the shade of a broom tree. Because God does not have a hand, he usually borrows human hands. “Loving the strangers,” “entertaining strangers,” “a warm welcome,” “kindness,” “cordial reception,” “hospice,” “hospitality”—all of these different terms refer to God’s left hand.

Christine Paul explains, Hwandae or sondaejeop means philoxenia in Greek and hospitality in English. Etymologically, phileo means love, and xenos means “wanderer,” “stranger,” or “guest.” Combined, the two words mean “to love strangers.”23 Abraham, who is called “the father of Christian faith” and “the father of faith,” and his wife, Sarah, entertained three strangers who had visited them unannounced. Thereafter, hospitality became a duty to all of those who try to emulate Abraham’s faith. While under house arrest before the Roman Emperor’s final trial, the apostle Paul also “welcomed” people who came to his rented residence, thereby serving as the left hand of God:

23

Christine D. Pohl. “Entertaining Strangers.” A Blessed Person 2002, p. 49.

62 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal He lived there two whole years at his own expense and welcomed all who came to him, proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance. (Acts 28:30-31 NRSV) Here the word welcomed comes from the Greek word apodechomai, which means “welcome,” “receive with happiness,” “acknowledge,” “accept what is offered from without,” and “entertain with all might.” What young people today truly need is a warm hand reached out to them. That is the best way to heal the cynicism, escapism, anger, sense of failure, inferiority complex, and resignation, all of which singe their hearts. We have not found a more timely interpretation of hospitality than the one by the attorney Jong-cheol Kim. He had worked with us at L’Abri before he founded the “Center for Public Interest Law,” which helps those who are in the blind spots of human rights at home and abroad: Hospitality means giving others part of our space so that they can stay and thrive there.24 What L’Abri provided to the young man from the United States was hospitality, not some special training program. We simply invited him to the ordinary space of our daily living. When he woke up in the morning, he cleaned the rooms or did yard work with us. When he came, it was autumn, so he harvested persimmons and helped remove the summer platform bench. Other than that, we left him alone so that he could have a time of reflection.

Although we had a young man who did not know Korean, we did not give up on the weekly Bible reading session or our movie time. We also did not sacrifice one-on-one study sessions with a staffer, naptime, or quiet reading time.

We simply tried to help the young man fully enjoy the community’s daily life of manual labor, discussion, study, rest, and worship in a calm and peaceful environment.

If he were grumpy about a mosquito bite, we would not have glanced at him. However, when he said he had been stung by a hornet, we applied Tiger Balm on him. If he said, “I am thirsty,” while he was working, we could have said, “Go and drink water.” However, when he said that he had a sore throat, we poured Dragon Horn Powder into his mouth.

If he said he would like to go home because his bed or bathroom was uncomfortable, or because he did not like the taste of our food, we would have told him to go home right away. However, when he opened his heart and asked honest questions, we stayed up all night, answering them. We might have needed more time if he—bound by the frame of old-fashioned atheism or age-old agnosticism—strongly asserted himself. However, he had already come to Korea feeling the need to find a new framework, so it did not take much time to accept the truth.

Thankfully, he was not a “social media troll” who sits alone in his small 24

See Jong-cheol Kim’s Christian worldview school lecture on uncomfortable strangers (www.labri.kr) and the introduction to the Public Interest Law APIL (www.apil.or.kr).

Kyung-ok & In-kyung Sung 63 room roaring at the world. Fortunately, he was not a “little dork” who sneaks into a campus bathroom stall and eats his lunch alone. He was a brave young man who had barged out of his small room and his university campus, launching a pilgrimage in search of the meaning of life and truth. Like young Korean people, he was an open-minded young man who could go anywhere with a backpack, a smartphone, and a credit card.

At the same time, he was not a reckless, overemotional, or hedonistic man—not the type of man who would say, “Let’s go to Mojito to have a drink of Maldives,” which is the famous last line of the movie Inside Men.25 Nor was he crazy enough to seek an ascetic, pessimistic lifestyle in Nepal, Delhi, Dunhuang, or Angkor Wat. Importantly, unlike some mindless young people, he did not wander around the world wasting his money, time, and youth.

Many places in this world welcome honest young pilgrims. The Camino de Santiago in Spain helps young pilgrims meet God by providing a 900kilometer hiking route. Also worth visiting are Wittenberg, the city of Luther that celebrated the 500th anniversary of the Reformation in 2017, and the Lutherhaus, where Katharina von Bora—nicknamed “the morning star of Wittenberg”—raised hogs and brewed beer.

Young Korean Christians who wish to meet their counterparts in another country should consider the Bruderhof in the United Kingdom, where manual labor and praise are commingled, or the The Taizé Community in France. Those who prefer a quiet place may visit a medieval monastery or an Amish village in the United States or Canada, where the residents ride horse-drawn buggies, instead of cars, and use a lamp, not electricity.

Visitors are welcome at the L’Abri community where we live. L’Abri began in 1955 when Francis and Edith Schaefer opened their own house in Switzerland, sharing part of their space with young college students from all over the world. The current book contains stories of the young men and women who came to the only L’Abri community in Asia. Our invitation for you is to follow the path those young pilgrims took just a step ahead of you.

25

A Korean movie released in 2015.

64 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

The Korean L’Abri on a snowy day (1)

Kyung-ok & In-kyung Sung 65

The Korean Lâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Abri on a snowy day (2)

66 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring 2020): 66-74

Photo Essay The Chinese Baptist Church and Mission School in Cleveland, Mississippi John Zheng

Recruited by planters to replace freed African American laborers after the Civil War, the first Chinese immigrants, who might have been laborious workers for the transcontinental railroad, set foot on the Mississippi Delta. They came with the purpose to make money so that they could live a better life when they returned to China. Once they realized they couldn’t make money from laboring in the cotton fields, the Chinese resorted to opening grocery stores to achieve business success.

An early Chinese immigrant who arrived in the Delta was Wong On. Born near Canton, China, in 1844, Wong arrived in California in 1860 to help build the transcontinental railroad. After moving to the Mississippi Delta to pick cotton, Wong married a black woman and opened a store in Stoneville (Wilson).

Soon more Chinese arrived, particularly in the early decades of the twentieth century. Most of them were the immigrants’ relatives or sons from China. Their grocery stores were successfully established in the communities through a family system that passed business from father to son. When more Chinese immigrants settled down in the Delta and established families, education became an urgent need for their children. But, during the hard times of segregation, Chinese children were excluded from white public schools even though Delta Chinese wished to be assimilated.

When Chinese children were excluded from local all-white schools by the 1927 US Supreme Court decision, Gong Lum v. Rice, Chinese parents, the First Baptist Church, and community leaders worked together to found a boarding mission school in Cleveland in 1937 to provide an educational haven for dozens of Chinese students in the central Delta. It offered classes in English, Chinese, math, spelling, reading, and history from 8:30 in the morning and ended at 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon. Some students boarded at school while others went home after school. The mission school, supported by the Baptist Church, desired also to introduce the Chinese students to Christianity. Unfortunately, the school was closed in 1951 when Chinese children had a chance to attend public schools in the Delta.

In the difficult years when Chinese immigrants worked hard to maintain business and raise children in the Delta, the Baptist Church played a central role for generations, particularly the Chinese Baptist Church in Cleveland (Figures 1

John Zheng 67 and 2), which “served as a center for wedding banquets, community service projects, fundraising activities, funerals, and other occasions that brought the extended Chinese community together” (Wilson). This church stopped providing service when most of the younger generations of Delta Chinese began to move out of the region. Later it was remodeled into the Haven Hospice and Palliative Care building. Now the church cornerstone (Figure 3) is preserved outside the Capps Archives & Museum building at Delta State University, and the church tablet (Figure 4) is displayed in the Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum housed on the third floor of the Capps building. The Chinese Mission School in Cleveland (Figure 5), which used to stand close to the Chinese Baptist Church, no longer exists either. On its site, a historic marker indicates the bygone building (Figure 6).

I photographed the Chinese Baptist Church and the Mission School in 1997, a year after I relocated to the Delta. One Saturday as I approached the town, the church and the mission school immediately caught my attention, particularly the school. Its peeled yellow paint and boarded-up windows were eerily impressive with stains of old days. Some years later when I drove back with a desire to photograph the Mission School, especially its marble tablet with inscriptions on the wall, it was no longer extant. It might have been an “eyesore” to the landscape, so it was demolished in 2003, but its history has been preserved through films, books, articles, and recordings. It was lucky that I had grabbed a shot of both buildings before they disappeared from sight.

One noticeable thing is that research on Delta Chinese seems to have flourished in the twenty-first century. Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton: Lives of Mississippi Delta Chinese Grocers by John Jung was published in 2008; Journey Stories from the Chinese Mission School, edited and compiled by Paul Wong and Doris Ling Lee, was published in 2011; The Mississippi Chinese Veterans of World War II: A Delta Tribute, edited by Gwendolyn Gong, John Henry Powers, and Devereux Gong Powers, was published by Delta State University Archives & Museum in 2015; Honor and Duty: The Mississippi Delta Chinese, a film in three parts covering the history of Delta Chinese from 1870 to the present, was released as a heritage series in 2016; and Water Tossing Boulders: How a Family of Chinese Immigrants Led the First Fight to Desegregate Schools in the Jim Crow South by Adrienne Berard was published in 2017.

In October 2012, through the initiative of Raymond Wong, Frieda Quon, and a group of others, Delta State University opened the Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum to promote “the local heritage preservation by actively collecting oral histories, memorabilia, photographs and textile materials related to the history and story of the Mississippi Delta Chinese immigration and settlement.” Its goal is to preserve cultural resources which will disappear through the changes of Delta migration and economy in order to “encourage an environment of understanding and appreciation of our ethnic and cultural diversity” (“Museum Information”). The opening of the Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum is a capstone to future projects on the history of Delta Chinese. Personally, I wish a book on the Chinese Baptist Church would come

68 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal out soon to serve as an addition to the study of Delta Chinese and to be a window for the reader to catch a glimpse of their spiritual world.

Works Cited “Museum Information.” The Mississippi Delta Chinese Museum. http://www.deltastate.edu/library/departments/archives-museum/guidesto-the-collection/ms-delta-chinese-heritage-museum/.

Wilson, Charles Reagan. “Chinese in Mississippi: An Ethnic People in a Biracial Society.” Mississippi History Now. http://mshistorynow.mdah.state.ms.us/articles/86/mississippi-chinese-anethnic-people-in-a-biracial-society.

John Zheng 69

Figure 1. The Chinese Baptist Church by Highway 8, Cleveland, MS. Photograph by John Zheng, 1997.

70 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Figure 2. Penney Gong’s note on the Chinese Baptist Church.

Photograph by John Zheng, 2017.

John Zheng 71

Figure 3. The Chinese Baptist Church cornerstone, Cleveland, MS. Photograph by John Zheng, 2017.

72 IntĂŠgritĂŠ: A Faith and Learning Journal

Figure 4. The Chinese Baptist Church tablet, Cleveland, MS. Photograph by John Zheng, 2017.

John Zheng 73

Figure 5. Chinese Mission School, Cleveland, MS. Photograph by John Zheng, 1997.

74 IntĂŠgritĂŠ: A Faith and Learning Journal

Figure 6. The Chinese Mission School Marker, Cleveland, MS. Photograph by John Zheng, 2015.

Poems 75 IntĂŠgritĂŠ: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring 2020): 75-87

Poems Two Poems Philip C. Kolin

My Fair Lady

Hello, my fair ladybug in polka dots red and orange and sunrise yellow and also shiny ebony on either side of your wired wimple.

You are April's godmother ushering in countless offspring to carry on your heritage of preserving gardens and trees.

Voracious harvesters, you all dine on aphids, mites, mealybugs, a feast of salvation for springtime greenery.

You can hold a family reunion equal to the population of a city inside a gallon lemonade jug.

Though alluring with your dots and Seurat-like symmetry, the birds of the air still pass you by; your perfume is not to their liking and your flourish of color shames the drab coats of fantails and sand doves.

It's a miracle that within your small frame you carry a prophet's promise of fertility and season's renewal.

76 IntĂŠgritĂŠ: A Faith and Learning Journal In the Hill Country Luke 1:39-56

The three months Mary spent in the Judean hills with her cousin Elizabeth, miracled in old age with a child, fulfilled a prophecy for both women.

They spoke of the Messiah as a family member, a descendant of Aaron and David, and how long they had waited for him to come.

Mary recounted Raphael's courtly words and his splendored wings that filled her small room with eternity as he overshadowed her with promises.

And Elizabeth, her soul ablaze, shared with Mary God's gift of a herald who dwelt within her and who would proclaim the Christ at the right hour.

As they listened to the child in each other's womb, those cloistered spaces expanded into a symphony, the infants' hearts beating in unison.

Poems 77

“A Psalm of Ed” and Other Poems James Fowler

A Psalm of Ed

Praise the Lord upon the circular saw; praise Him upon the door spring.

Make the strings sound upon the hambone; make them twang upon the aerosol can.

Sing to the Lord a new song; pluck Him a hymn from the hollow.

Plead not poverty, a pocketful of lint; there are tools at hand: grasp them.

For the Lord abhors waste, and scorns those who discard the good as of no worth.

His will is salvage, the saving of scraps from the heap, the jarring made tunable.

Have faith in God! He will not detest the work of honest hands, however rough.

Let the sycamore and tin pot accord; let the feral hog dance with the barn owl.

The wilderness will give up its harmony, and the rocky places their freshets.

So be glad with the gladness of morning; be still, for He whispers by night.

Poet’s Note: This poem first appeared in Cave Region Review 9 (2017).

78 IntĂŠgritĂŠ: A Faith and Learning Journal Goat

Two rows of wooden chairs back to back extend the length of the fellowship hall.

A loop of people like a bicycle chain goes down each side.

The child understands when the music stops he must quickly sit because there are not enough chairs for all.

Being quite young, and probably between chairs at the moment for action, he finds himself the last one standing, hence the first one out.

No room at the inn for him. Devastated, he dissolves in tears.

There is consolation, a page to color with Jesus feeding the five thousand.

But he doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want that, he wants a chair, to be still in the game, not the one regarded with relief and pity by the survivors.

That they will follow in defeat hardly touches his exclusive grief.

Incapable of metaphor, of seeing past the present catastrophe, he chokes on the pain, as on something too large to swallow, impossible to stomach.

Poems 79 Inquest

What with microbes burning through millions, viral hatred with its ovens and trenches from a fairy tale gone bad, you get to wondering. Could be the price of freedom, every horrendous thing allowed including efforts to set them right.

Providence gets sticky, though: oh-so deep down, AWOL, figment?

Sometimes you fantasize about going to the source, getting the scoop.

Maybe start with the palms, then check the back of each for exit wounds.

Not that they’ll cinch the case.

No, you’ll need to probe more intently, slipping fingers into the side, exploring up to the wrist, the elbow, testing the blood and water account, easing out the sacred heart, looking for signs of necrosis, excusing the gross invasion by invoking crimes against humanity.

Then it’s just a matter of raising the scarred muscle, tubes dangling, to your mouth, fitting a chamber or so and feeling it palpitate as its unoffended host leans in and kisses your fevered forehead.

80 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Double Helix

I

I L

O

O V

E

E Y

O

O U

A

A F

T

T E

R

R M

Y

Y O

W

W N

W

W A

Y

Y

Poems 81

释经者的祷告 — The Prayer of an Exegete 简思德 – Scott N. Callaham

亲爱的天父，当我打开你宝贵原文 话语的时候，我要寻求你。 我要寻求你，因为我是一个罪人。 我的罪使我听不清楚你的话，拦阻 我看清楚你的旨意。我呼求你赦免 我的罪，改变我的本性。愿我生活 的每个方面都得你的喜悦，因为我 要荣耀你的名。 我寻求你，因为我希望你古时的话 语在今天会说出你福音的信息。求 圣灵打开我的心，让我亲近你。我 知道你爱我，你要我劝别人跟我一 起进入你的同在。愿圣灵透过我的 口所说的和我的手所写的都宣扬你 圣洁的话语，把你圣洁的光传给世 界上每一个民族。

我寻求你，因为我很软弱，我的能 力都很有限。请让我记得我所学习 的神学教育，帮助我明白你的真理 。请让我使用我所学会的词汇、语 法和句法来看得懂你的启示，以便 别人听得懂你的启示。

根据你完美的旨意，请使用我的释 经来服侍你。遵从你和你的话语是 我的一切，所以我要将自己完全献 上给你。奉我的救赎主耶稣基督的 名求，啊们。

Dear Heavenly Father, as I open your precious word in its original languages, I seek you.

I seek you, because I am a sinner. My sin prevents me from clearly hearing your word and from clearly seeing your will. I cry out to you, that you would forgive my sins and change my inner being. May every aspect of my life bring you joy, because I want to glorify your name.

I seek you, because I want your ancient word to speak forth your gospel message today. Please use your Holy Spirit to open my heart and draw me near to you.

I know that you love me and want me to call others to join me in coming into your presence. Through all the words my mouth speaks and my hand writes, may the Spirit proclaim your holy word and spread your holy light to the peoples of the world.

I seek you, because I am weak and my abilities are very limited. Please cause me to remember each aspect of my theological education in order to help me understand your truth. Please let me use the vocabulary, grammar, and syntax that I have learned to read your revelation with understanding, such that others may hear it with understanding.

According to your perfect will, please use my exegesis to serve you. Obeying you and your word is everything to me, so now I give all that I am to you. In the name of my redeemer Jesus Christ I pray. Amen.

82 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

“A Parable” and Other Poems Todd Sukany A Parable

In spite of the rainbow and slight mist a lone cricket out of ten thousands seeks refuge from jumping into the wall but ends up crushed under a sneaker

Part of the Pattern “There are no creatures you cannot love.” —Tom Hennen

Tom Hennen knows that frogs talk to God. He’s sure they listen too.

A sign on the highway labels this prairie as a preservation project for protection of the climate; their sure language calls to the deep reclamation within each of us.

Shining insects and cottonwood leaves share secrets long past our ears, past the stars even. Hennen joins in, pens gems to help us be.

They Have Their Reward

Beginning before dawn and pressing into the darkness, the field follows a script. Weeds and flowers, separated, to the left and to the right. On the day after the weeds gathered themselves into tall stalks to honor the other stalks, a sea of lilies, like a garden of blood drops, bow low before an oven filled with unleavened bread.

Poems 83 Tree Hugger

I spoke with a bonsai sunning itself before the cafe window (yes, we have that type relationship) and she, Amy, was feeling quite “beautiful.”

I asked how she arrived at this state and she snapped, “I am not like Piercy says ‘small and cozy, domestic and weak.’

I have a just and correct amount of soil, water, and care. My branches and new growth?

Snipped by shears held in his hands.”

I suspected nothing actually hurts a plant, so I made such an observation.

Amy released Romans 9 and I hid once more behind coffee and today’s news.

Closing the Distance

So many poets push the best words together into tiny pieces of art that sit on desks or on a dust-free shelf in the frontal lobe.

They, too, expect the word to drift down into the heart, just like the One Who's waited much longer and paid a much greater price.

84 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Still Waters

Of course, sweet reader, you thought this poem should take you deep into Psalm Twenty-Three, where the good shepherd would be, guiding you with a rod to your noggin and a staff to the aft, where you’d be comforted by oil dripping off your chin and onto your new sandals, (though wearing open loafers in a pasture is sticky), where the cup in your hands is now crimson with Merlot, where goodness and mercy chase you down like a kitten does a feather, but this poem will offer none of that.

The Profit

Fallen into this calling, I scour the desert floor for locust, interrupt prayer for a honey hive.

Milk and honey. Who ever considered locust milk?

Energized once again, I shout a message as unfiltered as my food. Repentance.

As popular now as pillows of rock, rivers of blood, the smell of wet camel hair. A daily discipline worth losing one’s head over.

Poems 85

A Spring Liturgy Rebecca Duke

Lament Ice coughs, snow sobs, A muddy melancholy.

The earth groans, it would seem, A little more, as if Remembering She was once Paradise.

Assurance Hymns hang from the walls Like a tapestry, Feathered in light dusts of â&#x20AC;&#x153;Even so, swiftly come.â&#x20AC;?

In services, we sing, Remembering We will see Paradise.

86 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

The Novel Coronavirus: Haiku John J. Han “Because of all these things, and many others that were similar or even worse, diverse fears and imaginings were born in those left alive, and all of them took recourse to the most cruel precaution….”

—Giovanni Boccaccio’s introduction to The Decameron (1353); trans. Richard Hooker.

1 Milan’s main square toured by pigeons only virus scare 2 only one passenger on the Grand Canal water bus coronavirus 3 virus scare soldiers exhausted after spraying disinfectant 4 epidemic death of a young woman who said she wanted to live 5 coronavirus shaking hands with what if 6 endless news on epidemic rising death tolls and falling stocks 7 cherry blossoms burgeoning of outbreaks of the coronavirus

Poems 87 8 spread of a virus rereading Boccaccio’s Decameron 9 virus scare recalling scholars who kept skulls on their desks 10 big cities hit by the virus tempted to emulate Desert Fathers 11 virus scare today more attentive to church bells 12 life like a mist turning to the book of James amid epidemic 13 Be still… trusting in His goodness amid confusion Poet’s Note: The sequence above was completed before March 11, 2020, when WHO characterized COVID-19 as a pandemic. Poem #7 previously appeared in the 2020 issue of Cantos, and poem #11 in the May 1, 2020 issue of Geppo.

88 IntĂŠgritĂŠ: A Faith and Learning Journal

Notes on Contributors Jane Beal, Ph.D. <janebeal@gmail.com> is full professor and chair of English at the University of La Verne in Southern California. She has written the academic monograph, John Trevisa and the English Polychronicon (ACMRS/Brepols, 2012), and co-edited the festschrift, Translating the Past: Essays on Medieval Literature in Honor of Marijane Osborn (ACMRS, 2012). She also has written The Signifying Power of Pearl: Medieval Literary and Cultural Contexts for the Transformation of Genre (Routledge, 2017), co-authored and co-edited Approaches to Teaching the Middle English Pearl (MLA, 2018), edited and translated Pearl: A Middle English Edition and Modern English Translation (Broadview, 2020). She is the editor of two volumes of academic essays on the reception of major religious figures in the Middle Ages: Illuminating Moses: A History of Reception from Exodus to the Renaissance (Brill, 2014) and Illuminating Jesus in the Middle Ages (Brill, 2019). She writes poetry, magical realist fiction, and creative non-fiction as well; her poetry collections include Sanctuary (Finishing Line Press, 2008), Rising (Wipf and Stock, 2014), and Song of the Selkie (Aubade, 2020). To learn more about her and her work, please visit https://janebeal.wordpress.com.

Kathy Brashears <kbrashears@tntech.edu>, a former principal and classroom teacher, currently serves as a professor at Tennessee Technological University and has served in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction since 2004. Dr. Brashears teaches literacy courses and an English-as-a-Second-Language class for undergraduate students in an elementary teaching program and graduate students in a reading specialist program. Her research interests include cultural influences on teaching and learning, particularly in the Appalachian region, as well as reading and writing practices in the elementary school. She has contributed manuscripts to edited books and peer-reviewed journals, as well as presented at the local, state, national and international levels. Dr. Brashears has also served as president of the TN Reading Association and the International Reading Association Storytelling Special Interest Group.

Scott N. Callaham <s.callaham@bts.org.sg> is Lecturer in Biblical Hebrew and Old Testament at Baptist Theological Seminary, Singapore, where he teaches in both Chinese and English. Dr. Callaham is author of Modality and the Biblical Hebrew Infinitive Absolute (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010), lead editor of World Mission: Theology, Strategy, and Current Issues (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2019), and has written book chapters and journal articles spanning Biblical Hebrew grammar and syntax, Old Testament theology, biblical theology, language learning, preaching, pastoral ministry, worship, and songwriting. He has served as a conference speaker and Bible translator, and he is also a composer of Chinese worship music for congregational singing. Dr. Callaham earned his Ph.D. from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2006.

Notes on Contributors 89 Melissa Comer, Ed.D. <mcomer@tntech.edu> has served on the faculty in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at Tennessee Technological University since 2004. She teaches literacy related courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Professional scholarly experience includes numerous presentations at the local, state, regional, national, and international venues as well as the publication of conference proceedings and scholarly articles in various reputable journals. Additionally, Professor Comer served as the webmaster and president of the Tennessee Council for Teachers of English (TCTE) as well as the co-editor for Visions & Revisions, TCTEâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s newsletter. Beyond this, she currently serves on the editorial review board for The ALAN Review. Current research interests include Appalachian culture, storytelling pedagogy/methodology, technology integration, and Christianity in higher education.

Rebecca Duke <Rebecca.Duke@mobap.edu> is Special Lecturer in English at Missouri Baptist University in St. Louis, MO. Rebecca enjoys engaging students in both the academic and creative writing processes inside the classroom. In addition to writing lesson plans that encourage students to develop their voice and to record meaningful detail within their essays, Rebecca has studied creative writing within her undergraduate and graduate career in English studies and has written and produced a short play at Bob Jones University. Rebecca personally keeps a poetry journal by her side during travels, Bible study, and when recording simple observations about daily life. Poetry challenges and retreats with friends and colleagues as well as quiet Saturday mornings with her husband and dog inspire her to fill her poetry journals.

James Fowler <jamesf@uca.edu> teaches literature at the University of Central Arkansas. His literary essays have appeared in ANQ, Childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Literature, and The Classical Outlook; his personal essays in Southern Cultures, Cadillac Cicatrix, Quirk, and Under the Sun; his short stories in such journals as The Labletter, Anterior Review, Little Patuxent Review, Best Indie Lit New England, Line Zero, The Chariton Review, the Southern Review, Riding Light Review, and Elder Mountain; and his poems in such journals as Futures Trading Magazine, Aji Magazine, Cantos, Dash, Valley Voices, Sheila-Na-Gig, Common Ground Review, Angry Old Man Magazine, and Cave Region Review.

John J. Han <John.Han@mobap.edu> is Professor of English and Creative Writing and Chair of the Humanities Division at Missouri Baptist University.

Han is the author, editor, co-editor, or translator of twenty-three books, including Worlds Gone Awry: Essays on Dystopian Fiction (with Clark Triplett and Ashley Anthony; McFarland, 2018), Autumn Butterfly: Haiku, Senryu, and Other Poems (Cyberwit, 2019), and On the Road Again: Photo Essays on Famous Literary Sites in Japan (Cyberwit, 2020). He has published hundreds of poems, as well as numerous critical essays, worldwide. His recent poems have appeared in The Bamboo Hut, Cave Region Review, drifting-sands-haibun, Elder Mountain, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, Tanka Origins, Valley Voices, Wales Haiku Journal,

90 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal World Haiku Review, and other periodicals. Han earned his Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Philip C. Kolin <Philip.Kolin@usm.edu> is Distinguished Professor of English (Emeritus) and Editor Emeritus of the Southern Quarterly, has published more than 40 books, including critical studies and reference works on Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, David Rabe, Edward Albee, and a host of contemporary African American women playwrights, especially Adrienne Kennedy. Also a poet, Kolin has published nine collections of his verse, most recently Emmett Till in Different States (Third World Press, 2015), Benedict’s Daughter: Poems (Wipf and Stock, 2017), and Reaching Forever: Poems (Poiema Series of Cascade Books, 2019). His poems have appeared in America, Spiritus, Christianity and Literature, The Cresset, St. Austin Review, Emmanuel, US Catholic, Anglican Theological Review, Sojourners, Michigan Quarterly Review, South Carolina Review, and Louisiana Literature. He has coedited three eco-poetry collections, including Hurricane Blues (Southeastern UP, 2006), with Susan Swartwout, Down to the Dark River (Louisiana Literature Press, 2017), and Night’s Magician: Poems about the Moon (Negative Capability Press, 2018) with Sue Walker. Kolin has also published the 11th edition of his business writing textbook Successful Writing at Work (Cengage). Kolin was the featured poet in the most recent issue of Delta Poetry Review.

Julie Ooms <Julie.Ooms@mobap.edu> is Associate Professor of English at Missouri Baptist University. She received her Ph.D. in English from Baylor University in 2014. Her current research projects focus on Christian practices for teaching reading and the crossroads of religion and secularism in twentiethcentury American fiction. She has published articles on the writing of Tim O’Brien, J.D. Salinger, and Sylvia Plath in Renascence, Journal of the Short Story in English, Christian Scholar’s Review, and Plath Profiles.

Todd Sukany <tsukany@sbuniv.edu>, a Pushcart nominee, lives in Pleasant Hope, Missouri, with his wife of over 37 years. He holds degrees from Southwest Baptist University and Southeast Missouri State University. Sukany currently serves as an instructor of English at Southwest Baptist University. His work has appeared in Ancient Paths, Cantos: A Literary and Arts Journal, Cave Region Review, The Christian Century, Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal, and The Ekphrastic Review. Sukany co-authored a book of poetry, The First Book of Mirrors, with Raymond Kirk. A native of Michigan, Sukany stays busy running, playing music, loving three children, their spouses, five grandchildren, and caring for four rescue dogs, a kitten, and one ancient cat.

Kyung-ok and In-kyung Sung are leaders of the Korean L’Abri. As a married couple, they raised three children and have been helping many young truthseekers for the last thirty years since they attended the first L’Abri conference in 1988. The author of A Mother to Mothers (1992), Kyung-ok, graduated from Ewha Girls’ High School and Yonsei University in Seoul. In-kyung graduated

Notes on Contributors 91 from Chongshin University and Chongshin Theological Seminary in Seoul. His many books include The Answer Is There (1996), Turning My Worldview Upside Down (1998), Bible & Culture (1998), The Truth Is Still Alive (2001), Cocktails of Pluralism (2007), and The Paradigm of Lowlands Vision (2010). All of the books by the authors are in Korean.

John Zheng <zheng@mvsu.edu> is author of Enforced Rustication in the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Texas Review Press, 2019) and editor of five books, including the forthcoming Conversations with Dana Gioia (UP of Mississippi, 2021). He has published more than ten photoessays, including “Avalon and Valley: Mississippi John Hurt’s Blues Base” in Mississippi Folklife (Spring 2020). He teaches at Mississippi Valley State University, where he serves as editor for Journal of Ethnic American Literature.

92 Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Call for Papers and Book Reviews

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Published Semiannually by the Faith & Learning Committee and the Humanities Division of Missouri Baptist University St. Louis, Missouri 63141-8698 Intégrité (pronounced IN tay gri tay) is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal on the integration of Christian faith and higher learning. Founded in the fall of 2002 with the Institutional Renewal Grant from the Rhodes Consultation on the Future of the Church-Related College, it is published both online and in print copy. Interested Christian scholars are encouraged to submit academic articles and book reviews for consideration. Manuscripts should be sent as e-mail attachments (Microsoft Word format) to the editor, John J. Han, at john.han@mobap.edu.

Articles must be 15-25 pages, and book reviews must be 4-8 pages, both double-spaced. Articles should examine historical, theological, philosophical, cultural, and/or pedagogical issues related to faith-learning integration. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:         

the current state and/or future of the church-related college history of Christian liberal arts education Christianity and contemporary culture a Christian perspective on multiculturalism and diversity service learning academic freedom in a Christian context implementation of Christian truths in academic disciplines Christian education in the non-Western world global Christianity.

Articles must engage in faith-learning issues or controversies in a scholarly, critical manner. We generally do not consider manuscripts that are merely factual, devotional, or sermonic. Due dates are March 1 for inclusion in the spring issue and September 1 for the fall issue.

Articles are expected to be research-based but must focus on the author’s original thought. We typically do not consider articles that use more than twentyfive secondary sources; merely present other scholars’ opinions without

Calls for Papers & Book Reviews 93 developing extended, thoughtful analysis; and/or use excessive endnotes. Direct quotations, especially lengthy ones, should be used sparingly.

Considering that most IntĂŠgritĂŠ readers are Christian scholars and educators not necessarily having expertise on multiple disciplines, articles and book reviews must be written in concise, precise, and easy-to-understand style.

Writers are recommended to follow what William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White suggest in The Elements of Style: use definite, specific, concrete language; omit needless words; avoid a succession of loose sentences; write in a way that comes naturally; and avoid fancy words.

For citation style, refer to the current edition of MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. Articles should include in-text citations in parentheses, a list of endnotes (if applicable), and an alphabetical listing of works cited at the end of the article. Book reviews need only page numbers in parentheses after direct quotations.