Study war no more

"I'm gonna lay down my burden," we sang, "(Way down) down by the riverside."

But the fact of the matter was we weren't laying burdens down so much as taking them up. In the same Sunday schools and Bible classes in which we sang that song we were also being taught that we must shoulder the "heavy burdens hard to bear" that Jesus once mocked the Sunday school teachers of his day for burdening others with without lifting a finger to help.

"And I ain't gonna study war no more."

But again, war was just exactly what we were studying — spiritual war, culture war, the pseudo-intellectual triumphalism of war-by-apologetics. Those wars were exactly what we studied, and the obligation to fight them was a heavy burden hard to bear, far heavier and more burdensome than anything we'd been allowed to lay down (way down) down by the riverside.

What struck me in the passage I quoted in the previous post was recognition. Oh dear, that. I recognize that. I know what that is like and it's really quite awful.

Randall Balmer isn't mocking, ridiculing or dismissing the folks he describes — that's why he's able to describe them so accurately, to capture and convey their personality and their humanity. Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory belongs to a growing genre — the travelogue of evangelical America. That's my home and native land. These travelogues cover the same territory once covered by H.L. Mencken, but where Mencken was a devilishly talented and devastating caricaturist, Balmer and others (Daniel Radosh, Nicholas Guyatt, Frank Schaeffer) seek a more realistic and, yes, empathetic portrait. They identify their subjects as fully human in all that entails and identify with them as fully human.

And when one sees another human staggering under a burden that threatens to overwhelm them, the human response is to be moved.

Pity gets a bad rap. It's considered acceptable to feel pity for those who are fully aware that their plight is pitiable — victims, say, of earthquakes or tsunamis. But to feel or show pity for those not fully aware of their plight — particularly of those who would vehemently deny that they are, like the rest of us, deserving of pity — is somehow regarded as unforgivably arrogant and condescending.

"Undo the thongs of the yoke to let the oppressed go free." How patronizing! Who are you to tell someone else they're oppressed. "Let the one who has two tunics share with the one who has none." How condescending! Keep your tunic to yourself, you stuck-up, less-shivering-than-thou jerk.

If we are to love one another as we love ourselves, then pity is unavoidable. To reject pity as arrogant and condescending can only lead to somewhere cruel, callous and monstrous. Somewhere, obviously, pitiless.

No, thank you.

So I don't buy the criticism of Balmer that his palpable pity for his subjects means we shouldn't listen to him.

My favorite expression of this same pity comes from Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk. I see it's been six years since I last quoted this, so let me do so again. Dillard rings a doorbell to ask the homeowners for their permission to walk
along Tinker Creek where it passes through their property and a woman answers the door:

The woman was very nervous. She was dark, pretty, hard, with the
same trembling lashes as the boy. She wore a black dress and one brush
roller in the front of her hair. She did not ask me in.

My explanation of myself confused her, but she gave permission.
Yes, I could walk their property. … She did not let me go; she was
worried about something else. She worked her hands. I waited on the
other side of the screen door until she came out with it:

"Do you know the Lord as your personal savior?"

My heart went out to her. No wonder she had been so nervous. She
must have to ask this of everyone, absolutely everyone, she meets. That
is Christian witness. It makes sense, given its premises. I wanted to
make her as happy as possible, reward her courage, and run.

She was stunned that I knew the Lord, and clearly uncertain
whether we were referring to the same third party. But she had done her
bit, bumped over the hump, and now she could relax.

Now, we can try to distort this, to project all sorts of hostile meanings into it, but that won't be easy. We could suggest, for example, that by not embracing this poor woman's burdensome notion of witnessing, Dillard must be saying that "the eternal fate of people is not really a big deal." We could go even further, introducing other baseless accusations, such as that Dillard really isn't "referring to the same third party" because what she means by "knowing the Lord" is really just "Social Democracy with a Little Bit of Jesus Thrown in for Flavor." Or, because Dillard believes that her environmentalism is congruent with her Christian faith, we might accuse her of arguing here that "really the message of Christ is more social welfare benefits from the state," or some such nonsense.

But such a hostile misreading would be so wholly unfounded and unfair that I'm not sure how we could honestly sustain it. Nor can I think of any reason why we would want to.

Dillard's pity for this burdened woman mirrors Balmer's pity for the driven, rather than called, Multnomah students burdened by their study of war. There's nothing condescending or arrogant about such pity. It is, rather, an egalitarian, elevating response to one's fellow humans, the alternative to which is the sneering,
pitiless dismissal of Menckenesque condescension.

Part of the bad rap for pity is the same confusion that infects our thinking about every other form of love. We can slip into thinking of it as a sentiment, rather than as a deed. And then we slip further into thinking that the sentiment outweighs the deed, when really the deed is all that matters. ("I hated everyone but I acted generously and no one found me out." — Leonard Cohen.) If I have a bit of tomato sauce on my chin, it doesn't really matter whether or not you feel an affectionate sorrow warming your chest cavity, only that you tell me to wipe it off.

The pity that recognition or empathy or a common humanity requires from the sight of others staggering under these burdens manifests itself in a deed, in an invitation. And here is that invitation:

Come and lay down your burden (way down) down by the riverside
Down by the riverside, down by the riverside
Come and lay down your burden (way down) down by the riverside
You don't have to study war no more.