siren was wailing. I thought maybe I’d hang around until the fire department arrived, just in case anyone did stumble out of the darkness.
Then someone did. She came strolling up the street as though she were taking an afternoon walk. Standing next to the fire in the middle of the night, I could see very little else, so she gave me a start when she materialized.
She was another of our church members, a strange woman, daughter of one of the men who did odd jobs in town, who still lived with him. I’d heard some rumors of her past but you hear lots of things as a small-town pastor, not always told with the best of motives or much concern with accuracy. She showed up at church services and events, and she struck me as just one more town character, maybe a little harsher than most.
She walked up to me, looking from side to side, not meeting my eyes, nodded in my direction, then stood next to me, her arms folded.
I was about to ask her if she knew if anyone had been in the trailer when she said: “I hope they burn to a crisp.”
Then she nodded at the fire, turned back the way she had come, and disappeared in the dark.
It was like being next to another, greater, more overwhelming fire, but a fire of another order than physical. I’ve thought of something like napalm, that sticks to your spirit and you can’t get it off. I truly can’t remember anything else that happened that night: the fire trucks arriving, talking to the volunteers, walking home, telling my wife what happened. The encounter with the woman has darkened everything else for me.
I found out the next day that no one had been inside the trailer during the fire. Whoever had been living there had moved on to another run-down dwelling in another town.
It’s that handful of words spoken by my strange night companion that stays with me. I’ve tried over the years to describe to myself what it was like, at that moment, to hear something like that: an image that comes to me is something like a trapdoor thudding open right at my feet, showing some dark well of human horror.
But all the comparisons seem weak. Nothing I say now that I felt or thought can capture what confronted me. I finally decided that’s because I really didn’t think or feel anything. When I probe that memory, it’s like I’ve gone numb, the way your body can go numb immediately at the point of an injury.
It’s the image of her, her words, the ugly passion, that stays before me. I can see her right now more vividly than I can see most of my life and service: the quick, affirming nod at the fire, turning away from me, walking out of the light, leaving me staring after her, alone.
What’s a Nice Philosopher like You Doing in a Profession like This?
When I first studied philosophy, my teacher was a Methodist minister with a passionate commitment to phenomenology and existentialism. Like so many twentieth-century thinkers (not only the existentialists), he gave the impression philosophy only began getting answers in modern times. The negative side of this teaching, of course, was that I had a lot of catching up to do, as well as prejudices to overcome, when I began seriously studying philosophy’s history. (I found it very profitable to read, when I was a serving pastor, Spinoza’s Ethics, which I would have scorned to open as an undergraduate.)
But the positive side of beginning philosophy with a Christian existentialist was that it cast the whole endeavor of philosophy as a way of living, not merely of learning (or, worse yet, unraveling logical puzzles). Not being able to teach philosophy, as I had hoped to do, didn’t mean I lost the point of studying it. You could say the point was sharpened.
In any case, this probably eased my way into working for the church and helped give my life a continuity it might not have had.
My way was eased, from the other side, by my admiration for Christians like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Thomas Merton, and Daniel Berrigan. At the time, I probably couldn’t have worked for the church if I didn’t think people like that were at the heart of the church. I thought they were leading lives I would have called philosophical (much more so than the academics who called themselves philosophers). These were lives that loved wisdom, sought wisdom, lives that tried to think, act, and feel wisely, lives that paid a price, as Socrates did, for their choices, their activities.
As Socrates did, as Jesus did. Towards the end of my service, I used to say, partly to be provocative but mostly to be honest, that I wasn’t a Christian because I believed God created the world (or that humans had souls or that there was a heaven waiting for good little boys and girls): I was a Christian because I couldn’t get away from Jesus, from the stories he told to snare us in his world, from the stories told of his time in our world.
I don’t think Jesus and Socrates would have had a hard time recognizing each other, or Jesus and Diogenes the Cynic, for that matter. (In fact, John the Baptist, Jesus, and Paul don’t make a bad philosophical trio.) The simple life pictured in the gospels, the scorn of the world’s pomp and glitter, the self-possessed courage before earthly power, the sense that grew among the Christians that they were citizens not of a tribe but of the world, are elements in a life that most of the children of Socrates would find congenial. Paul’s boast in Philippians could have been spoken by many of them:
I have learned to be content with whatever I have. I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need. (Phil 4: 11–12)
Given this convergence, I came to think, as I grew older, that the path of wise living wasn’t really that hard to find. It was, as always, living it, wanting it in the first place, that was the problem.
Holy Things
There was a little café on the south side of town in our first parish. It was just across the river from the parsonage yard, an easy walk down the highway. We’d eat there sometimes if we were hosting a pastors’ meeting and, at first, we thought it would be a handy place to grab a quick lunch or to treat ourselves to dinner. This turned out to be harder than I thought, especially if we wanted to eat our food quickly, or taste it while it was still warm.
Everyone in town who was on the church’s books but who would never enter the church except for weddings and funerals would stroll over to our table, greet us not as distant acquaintances but as bosom companions, and stand there hovering until whatever we ordered had begun to decompose. They’d tell stories, share philosophical reflections, and generally make me perspire with impatience and discomfort. Then they would sigh in satisfaction and depart, proclaiming some variation of: “Well, I’d better let you eat your dinner.” They would sometimes add: “ . . . so you can get back to work.”
In a way, it was another version of church membership: they really did want us to know them and to know they considered themselves members. (They wanted everybody to know it. That’s why they hovered so long.) And, to be honest, they weren’t the worst members the church had. They just made eating in town impossible. If we were going to dine out, we had to leave town and, eventually, as more people knew us, leave the county. (Or order something that could be eaten cold.)
One of the people I met this way was a tall, thin, rugged-looking old fellow, with a stately walk and a quiet manner, named Arlan. I knew a lot of his kids and grandkids since the family really was strongly connected to the church; his wife was a mainstay of the women’s group, especially if cooking was needed.
Arlan not only looked like he’d stepped out of the nineteenth-century frontier, he tried to live
