Interrupted by God. Tracey Lind

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      Introduction

      the Question

      Thirty-five years ago I sat in a classroom with fifty other adolescents watching the movie Let My People Go. It was the first documentary of the Holocaust, and I’ll always be haunted by the memory of emaciated corpses being pushed down a slide in the Warsaw Ghetto. At the end of the film, a young rabbi tried to elicit responses from a stunned and silent class of usually loud and obnoxious ninth graders. I’ll never forget the moment when he looked at me, the only kid with a non-Jewish parent, and said: “Tracey, you don’t look Jewish. You could have passed. What would you have done? Would you have died for your faith or denied it?” I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t know what it meant to pass. I didn’t know what it meant to die for one’s faith. I didn’t really know what my faith was. I only knew that I was angry, embarrassed, confused, and alone. So I just stared back at him and finally said, “I don’t know.”

      That accusatory statement, “You could have passed,” followed by the probing question, “What would you have done?” has haunted me all the days of my life. It has permeated my dreams; it has kept me awake; it has stood with me in the pulpit; and it has influenced every major life decision I have made. And just when I think I have put the accusation to rest and answered the question, it reemerges as a beast from the deep recesses of the ocean called my unconscious. This question, “will I pass or will I claim who I am and what I believe regardless of its cost, even to death?” is the angel with whom I wrestle, causing me to walk with a limp. It is the burning bush in front of which I stand barefooted, the slow burning flame that keeps alive my passion but does not consume my spirit. Whenever I travel into the wilderness of my soul, I am tempted to avoid this question’s pain and confusion. It remains the blinding flash of light that forces me to my knees when I try to run away.

      The question of passing or claiming one’s faith, even to the point of death, is for me The Question. It is what Buddhism calls my koan. Phyllis Trible, one of my favorite seminary professors, used to say that we all need a myth to guide our lives; and that if we don’t claim a myth, one will claim us. I think everyone needs both a myth and a question. In fact, I believe that everyone has a myth and a question; we just don’t always choose to acknowledge and explore these truths in our conscious self.

      To pass has many implications. Passing can be as simple and as seemingly innocent as allowing a racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, or homophobic remark to go unnoticed. It can mean worshipping a homeless man on Sunday and walking by without seeing dozens of homeless men, women, and children during the rest of the week. Passing can cause one to hide in all kinds of closets for all kinds of reasons. Passing can simply mean taking the easy way out, even at the cost of one’s soul.

      To live and die for one’s faith—now that is another matter. That’s true discipleship. That’s the stuff that Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Oscar Romero, Mother Teresa, Dorothy Day, and the other great prophets and disciples of the ages are made of. Dying for one’s faith is having the courage to really live a life worth living.

      For two years, I slept in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s old room at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. I used to lie awake at night wondering what Bonhoeffer would have been thinking about when he couldn’t sleep—whether to return to his native land and confront the evil of Nazi Germany or stay and teach in the safety of the academy. Bonhoeffer chose the former, and it cost him his life. I still don’t know if I have that kind of courage; nor do I know if that sort of action is my calling. What I do know is that Bonhoeffer’s witness has deeply influenced my vocation, and has on more than one occasion called me to account for my decisions and actions in this world.

      There is a famous rabbinical saying: “Consider three things and you will not fall into the grip of sin. Know where you come from, to where you are going, and before whom you are destined to be judged and called to account.”¹ Knowing one’s history, one’s story, and one’s God is incredibly important. Without this knowledge, we are lost—both individually and collectively. Our ancestors in faith knew their God and their story; the Bible is their recorded history.

      Each of us has a sacred story, much of which is inherited through ancestry and birthright. It is a byproduct of our race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and class. It is planted and cultivated in the landscape and geography of our birth and upbringing. It is engraved in our soul and frequently lost in our memory. Sometimes, to my family’s chagrin and my church’s discomfort, I have set about the task of searching out, retrieving, claiming, speaking, and discerning the life-giving truth of my story.

      Much of life-giving or gospel truth is about transforming contradiction into paradox—like water into wine, brokenness into wholeness, scarcity into abundance, the last into the first, and death into life. Paradox makes sense of things that don’t make sense and holds divergent things in tension. Turning contradiction into paradox is choosing both/and rather than either/or, seeing shades of gray instead of black and white. My life is one big contradiction seeking to become a paradox. In many ways, I think the American story itself—all sorts and conditions of people coming to this land on many ships but being in the same boat now—is a contradiction trying to become a paradox. It is both our blessing and our curse. And I know it well, since I personify the American story.

      My mother’s family came from England. To the best of our knowledge, her ancestors arrived in Jamestown during the seventeenth century, settled in the upcountry of Virginia, and eventually moved west to southern Ohio in the late eighteenth century. My mother was born in a place called Greasy Ridge, Ohio—a hamlet located twenty miles north of the Ohio River. She was the youngest of seven children born to Noah and Minnie Heffner, two of the hardest working coal miners and farmers you’d ever want to meet. My mother was raised in the Methodist tradition; her grandfather and great-grandfather served as lay leaders of a little backwoods church called Locust Grove. My mother hated those mountains; she hated the poverty, ignorance, superstition, and old-time religion of rural Appalachia. At the age of fifteen, having graduated from a one-room school, determined to make a better life, my mother left the mountains for good and moved north to the city.

      My father’s ancestors were Austrian-German Jews who came to this country with the great wave of nineteenth-century immigration. One of my great grandfathers was a cigar roller and reputed Torah scholar who lived out his years in America on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. When I toured Ellis Island, I could see his face in the photos of Jacob Riis. My other great grandfather peddled his way to Zanesville, Ohio, where he settled and raised up six sons to become successful merchants in a booming town through which the Old National Road passed, only decades later to be bypassed by the interstate.

      Wealth and poverty became a paradoxical symbol in my family. At the dinner table, my father used to recall how his mother had to let go some of the household help during the Great Depression. My mother would sit silent and never speak of the real poverty she knew during those painful years when her father couldn’t find work in the mines. To this day, when I view the Farm Service Administration photos of that era, I can’t help but look for the faces of my mountain ancestors.

      My parents met shortly after World War II. He was a young businessman, and she was a nurse. They fell in love on their first date and married six weeks later. Unfortunately, since he was Jewish and she was Christian, no clergy would perform the wedding. So they eloped and were married by a judge, and for their honeymoon, my mother accompanied her new husband on a business trip to Cleveland. Upon hearing of the marriage, my mother’s family, who had never known any Jews, was upset and unable to welcome my father. My father’s family received СКАЧАТЬ