encounter in McGill the ability to present a bold, brash engendering of perspectives and to set perspectives in opposition. Frequently the perspective developed becomes a foil for a perspective enjoined, which is often not “developed” but alluded to, hinted at, pointed toward.20 We find the relentless redoing of a distinct perspective, often a perspective that is a surprise to us, that takes us by surprise, disorienting and disarming us. At the same time, McGill is able to evoke a familiar, all-too-familiar perspective and then to gesture toward a counter-perspective powerfully, vividly, shatteringly. He can plop a puzzling scriptural text down in that context and allow us suddenly to see the logic of it. He places it deftly where it can come alive. He need not interpret it. The perspective he has drawn does that.21 All he has to do is to watch us “get it”:
Blessed are the poor, the sorrowful, the hungry and the persecuted. These statements attributed to Jesus seem confused, if not nonsensical . . .
What Jesus’s beatitudes do is to make clear the indispensable condition for receiving. We cannot receive unless we lack, unless we are in need. . . .
In other words, if you are not willing to be one with your neediness, you cannot be blessed. (Sermon 2, pp. 27–28)
After setting the stage for scripture, McGill concludes a sermon (“On Worship”): “Let me read again the lesson from Paul’s letter to the Colossians” (Sermon 12, p. 109).
The Wind in the Tree
McGill affirms, “A technical language certainly has its place in the Christian community.”22 This warning follows:
whenever such technical language becomes an end in itself and is taken as the only true language in the church, whenever sermons and prayers are content to repeat theologically precise abstractions, then Christians are saying that their true life with God separates them from the present concrete world, and from the everyday speech that belongs to that world.23
In his sermon “Loneliness,” McGill rehearses a story (one he thinks we might know, so this is not a story originating with him) of a child who hears the wind in a backyard tree. The tree becomes a mystery, alive—and special. The tree is later blown over in a storm. The child’s parents do not understand: there are other trees. The child is alone—without the wind in the tree.
Specificity matters. In Federico Fellini’s La Strada, a nighttime metaphysical24 exchange occurs. Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina) hears Matto,“The Fool,” (Richard Basehart) call her name. The conversation which follows is a mesmerizing moment in film:
The Fool: “Gelsomina.” . . . What a funny face you have! Sure you’re a woman? Not an artichoke? . . .
Gelsomina: . . . I’m no good to anybody . . . and I’m tired of
living . . .
The Fool: You like to make love? What do you like? Gosh, but you’re homely. . . .
Gelsomina: What am I here for on this earth? . . .
The Fool: A book I once read said everything in this world serves a purpose . . . Take that stone, for instance . . .
Gelsomina: Which one?
The Fool: Anyone . . . even this one serves for something . . . or this one . . .
Gelsomina: For what?
The Fool: How should I know? . . . Know who I’d have to be? God! He knows everything! When you’re born . . . when you die . . . Who else can know it? I don’t know what this stone’s good for, but it must serve something. Because if it’s useless, everything’s useless! Even the stars and even you! Even you serve some purpose with that homely artichoke head of yours.25
The Fool gives Gelsomina the particular stone he has picked up in illustrating his reflection. Gelsomina accepts the stone, attends to it carefully, caringly, nods, and beams with a new-found promise of purpose. The magic line: “Which one?” Which one? The tree blown over, the tree with wind no more.
Specificity matters:26 “Love of all mankind, love for the human race. That’s silly. Love is specific” (Sermon 7, p. 71). McGill is thinking of the words of Ivan Karamazov to his younger brother, Alyosha, in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, which he knew well: 27
I could never understand how one can love one’s neighbours. It’s just one’s neighbours, to my mind, that one can’t love, though one might love those at a distance. . . . For any one to love a man, he must be hidden, for as soon as he shows his face, love is gone.28
Again the words which seem so right for McGill’s dialectic: “Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterwards.” But there is an “afterwards”; and, in the sense that this “afterwards” is grace, in the sense that—in a different but related orchestration of McGill’s dialectic—receiving precedes giving, this “afterwards” is “before”:
But there is something in God for my loneliness greater even than His knowledge or His justice. For in God I know not only that I am truly known, and by this knowledge truly judged, but that I am understood. . . . For the person of the Son Himself became flesh like us, suffering in Himself every agony the human soul can encounter. Therefore He who knows every hypocrisy and evil in our thoughts, knows these from our point of view. And He also knows the secret beauty of the nature He gave us. He knows the deep recesses of goodness in us of which we ourselves have not the slightest knowledge.
Also God’s knowledge of us is a loving knowledge . . . which creates in us the goodness we do not have alone. . . . God’s knowledge saves and redeems us, so that if once you know that you are truly known to God, you not only experience justice, but you also experience mercy and redemption. (Sermon 1, p. 26)
McGill exacerbates (or so we might wish to believe) the negative. One must look and listen carefully for a bleep, a pinch of the positive. But it is there—or implied. This is a note not often sounded, and yet McGill is empty without it. It is a grace note.29 I recall hearing McGill conclude a lecture on agape in Seipp Alcove, Firestone Library, Princeton University, by quoting a little verse of Abner Dean titled “Grace Note”:
Remember the word—?
The one from the manger—?
It means only this . . .
You can dance
with a stranger.30
“Grace Note”: as in music, as in faith.
How near McGill’s dialectical words are to those of Barth, words he may not have known directly but words which he might have accounted for in the words of Barth reported by William Stringfellow, “We read the same Bible . . . .”31
