Don Henley's Cass County: A Review

I am not the biggest fan The Eagles ever had. There were a couple songs I wouldn't turn off, but mostly I could never forgive the horrible joke that ends "Take it to the Limit." As they're running through the final chorus, Randy Meisner bawls out "take iiiiiiit to the limit, one more time," and then the chorus repeats. And then it repeats again. And again. Until one more time turns into ten more times. That's the kind of joke that merits a lifetime of punishment and trip across the Styx!

But every once in a while, the Eagles would astound me, with a melody phrase or a guitar line that seemed like it was two hundred years old. And now that Don Henley's first solo album since I was a teenager has come out, I know why.

This 16-track
album (on the Deluxe edition) hearkens back to the time before being country before country was cool was cool. While Nashville's moneyed darlings are trying as hard as they can to turn country music into everything else, Henley has released an album complete with guitar waltzes like "Bramble Rose" and "Too Far Gone," whining pedal steel, and Mearl Haggard's woeful caterwaul. The piano solo on "Too Much Pride" is worth the price of admission all on its own!

The subject matter is right on the money for this kind of music. A high school friend decides you're the one who got away and tries to screw up both of your lives ("That Old Flame"). A woman trembles at the reality of a shrinking future as the "fine for now" job turns into her life story ("Waiting Tables"). Notable everywhere is the stoic resignation to disappointment that marked a whole musical era and which now exists in brilliant relics like Lindi Ortega and Robert Ellis, and practically nowhere else.

But Henley is not Ortega or Ellis. Cass County may be an album about his East Texas homeland, but it is still a Don Henley album. A small army of country's yesteryear elites can be heard on this album – Dolly Parton, Martina McBride, and Haggard – along with newcomer Miranda Lambert. But his guests haunt the shadows and set the scene, like stray moments where the radio signal in East Texas actually comes in. The voice of this album is Henley's, and it is the same smooth and raspy instrument that immortalized "Boys of Summer" and "End of the Innocence" in the Top 40 canon. And "Take a Picture of This," which will surely be the album's first single, would fit just as easily among those as it does on this album.

Henley tiptoes through these songs with the respect and caution of a grown child in the house of his sleeping parents, that strange mixture of familiar and guest.

It is the recognition that leaving home has costs, even when you had to do it, that makes this album not a 70's country album but a creation of 21st century mobility.

That's a suitcase. Yeah, that's a ticket from a plane. There's no one here to talk to; no reason to remain. 

         ("Take a Picture of This")

My mother's three children live in three different states. And going home will always be a time of reckoning with choices I am glad to have made even as I remain more aware than anyone of what it has cost me.

Henley achieves his highest synthesis of now and then with "Praying for Rain," which from its first note – a pedal steel descending arpeggio – recalls a venerable tradition of rural people talking about the weather, the kind of life or death matter that is the proper subject matter of pleasantries. But the old tradition is struggling to make sense of new realities:

Something's different, something's changed, and I don't know why.Even the old folks can't recall when it's ever been this hot and dry.Dust devils whirling on the first day of July. It's a hundred degrees at 10 am: not a cloud up in the sky.

The second verse begins with a line found in a hundred songs that sound just like this one, but by the second chorus, it is clear that Henley is doing something I am certain I've never heard before:

I ain't no wise man. But I ain't no fool.And I believe that Mother Nature is taking us to school.Maybe we just took too much and put too little back.It isn't knowledge, it's humility we lack.                

Is this the first song in music history with both a steel guitar and a meditation on climate change? Probably it is. Even if not, it is surely the first that did it without being a trite political shill. Henley holds in view the mystery that the world is and suggests that our ignorance might not be so dangerous if we remembered how little we know. On this planet, we are a strange mix of familiar and guest, and we could stand, perhpas, to tiptoe a little more.

There is a deep awareness on Cass County that sometimes home crushes us, and sometimes it heals us; and sometimes we have to leave it, and sometimes leaving it causes a regret we never get free of. The distorted-electric defiance of the album's last track notwithstanding ("I like where I am now,"), this album settles into pain and owns it. The genius of old country music is the ability to live in and suffer with paradoxes like this.

Cass County stamps a welcome update on that deep tradition with a clever and soft hand.

Hospitality and the Benedict Option

Perceived breakdowns in the relationship of Christian conviction to the civic spirit of the age have compelled a number of Christians to reconsider a more sectarian prerogative. In an edgy 2009 piece entitled "Becoming Barbarians," Rod Dreher invited Christian conservatives to consider a "Benedict Option":

"that is, pioneering forms of dropping out of a barbaric mainstream culture that has grown hostile to our fundamental values." 

In the wake of the Obergefell v. Hodges, Dreher's commendation has become a hot topic of discussion. There is simply a sense among many Christian conservatives that a world becoming increasingly inhospitable to their values might be best served by their withdrawal from the institutions that dole out political capital and the habitation of a truly countercultural way of life, one that will provide a joyful witness in the face of society's grim and growing anhedonia. 

But the recent fallout from terrorist attacks in Paris compels me to reflect on the possibility that barbaric proposals are no respectors of persons, politically speaking. Both sides of the proverbial aisle can dehumanize.

On this note, I call attention to St. Benedict's Rule:

Let all guests who arrive be received like Christ, for he is going to say, "I came as a guest, and you received me." And to all let honor be shown, especially to the domestics of the faith and pilgrims (Ch. 53). 

All guests who visit the Abbey are to be received "with all charitable service." Benedict continues:

Let the Abbot give the guests water for their hands; and let both Abbot and community wash the feet of all guests. After the washing of the feet let them say this verse: "We have received Your mercy, O God, in the midst of Your temple."

Benedict commands the Abbot – not the monks but their leader who stands in the place of Christ – to focus especially on the guest. He is to make sure guests have water. He is even to go forego his fast, under most circumstances, in order not only to provide a feast for guests but to make sure they are not made to feel awkward by eating alone.

It must be admitted that Benedict clearly has in mind that most guests will be Christians, as is clear based on his command that the Abbot pray with them and adore Christ along with them. But his explicit intensification of the command to receive all guests like Christ ("especially to the domestics," as above) makes clear that others are in consideration and to be treated like Christ whoever they are.

Syrian Madonna and Child

In Benedict's world as in ours, it was not inconceivable that strange guests would pose real danger to the brothers. Any knock on the door could portend a threat. And yet it is just for that reason that Benedict commands this ethic of hospitality as a radical imitatio Christi. No threat releases a Monk from the obligation to answer the door.

According to Benedict, this is the face of Christ, this the distressed face of his Blessed Mother. What calculation of risk, based--it must be admitted--on a calculation of fear alone, would justify not answering the knock on our door.

Give us grace, oh Lord: that we would see your servant Benedict's words as more than an option!

Chasing: A Poem

Chasing
     *for Mom and Wally

Clipped from under the feet it did not merit,
the earth ceded its grip on all that was

Chino.  His was the tail whose wag would dare it
to become part of this motion's cause.  Because

a dog's a dog, one cannot be sure of earth
as more than another fetched thing, one more

spinning disc of which only he knew its worth.
And come to think of it, let him keep score!

    I dig it, Chino.  I feel the difference
    made when you counted for joy the spinning

    that threatens to fling us free of itself.  Once
    I flung over you earth, shoveled and spinning,

    no tail upturning its settle.  I dig it,
    Chino, but now it, not you, grips tight at my feet.

Liberal Arts as Admission of Need

Presaging the extended foray into the rationale of a Liberal Arts education for Christians, in Book II of Augustine's De Doctrina Christiana, the Bishop of Hippo prefaces his project with a defense against those who would reject the making of rules for the interpretation of Scripture. Augustine imagines basically three types of objections, the first two of which do not really trouble him. He answers both of them in a single paragraph while spending the rest of the prologue on the third objection, namely that his regulae are unnecessary since the Spirit can give us all we need to read Scripture well. Augustine contends that not only does sociality go to the heart of human being; the desire to evade it has its roots in a lack of charity, which (he will later say) is the precondition of interpreting Scripture well.

Those who raise this objection have received knowledge of the Scriptures from some kind of charismatic inspiration rather than a careful and orderly inquiry into the text. These objectors "will declare that these regulations are necessary to no one, but that everything which may laudably be revealed about the obscurities of those books can be revealed with divine assistance."  Augustine fears that those who boast in divine inspiration may also be tempting "Him in whom we have believed," expecting "to be 'caught up to the third heaven,' as the Apostle says, 'whether in the body or out of the body,' and there to hear 'secret words that man may not repeat'" (cf. 2 Cor. 12:2,4). They would rather, perhaps, hear the gospel only from Jesus "rather than from men."

Augustine responds in a two-fold way to this objection. First, he reminds such people that there is frankly no escaping dependence anyway. For one thing, "they have learned at least the alphabet from men." Additionally, "any one of us has learned his own language by hearing it spoken habitually from childhood, and any other language such as Greek or Hebrew or the like either by hearing it or by human instruction." That is, there is no escaping human dependence even if we wish to. The Spirit who inspires the St. Antony's of the world is the same Spirit who presided over creation and vivified human beings who were created male and female, i.e., as social creatures.

His second response to his (apparent) detractors takes the form of detailed reflection upon Paul's Corinthian correspondence and the book of Acts, each of which explore the relationship of charismata to catechism, of power to parish, of the Spirit to the body of Christ. Reflection upon these texts allows Augustine to concede the possibility of such a blessing while casting real doubt on its efficacy, given that the objectors show an ignorance of Paul's doctrine of charity and Luke's ecclesiology. Sure, Paul was drawn up into the third heaven, but this is the same Paul who insisted that the gathered community ("ya'll") is the Temple of the Spirit (cf. 1 Cor. 3:17). Paul may have heard the gospel directly from Jesus, but he "was nevertheless sent to a man that he might receive the sacraments and be joined to the church" (cf. Acts 9:3-18). Likewise, Cornelius experienced the advent of the Spirit upon the Gentiles, but still he received sacraments from Peter and was taught by the Apostle what should be believed, hoped, and loved (Acts 10, cf. 1 Cor. 13:13). "Charity itself, which holds men together in a knot of unity," is the most important virtue a Christian can have. And the development of that virtue necessitates that the ordinary way of Christian catechism take place between people.

De Doctrina will proceed, in Book II, to make an extended defense of the liberal arts, of the value of learning biblical languages, history, and philosophy, on the grounds that the human arts enable us to learn the Scriptures. The willingness to undergo serious study, for the sake of knowing and loving God, can itself be an act of charity, by which we learn to love and hallow our neighbor. Augustine does not stake out a hard and fast position here; those who receive inspiration to know the Scriptures "do not rejoice in a mediocre gift." Equally, knowledge can puff up (cf. 1 Cor. 8:1), but charity can build up. Study can be an occasion for pride, but those who are enlightened by the Spirit may also fall victim to that great temptation. Charity alone edifies, and without it no one will see the Lord, either in Scripture or in the eschatological kingdom. In the prologue to De Doctrina, then, we see that not only is charity the rule for reading Scripture (Book II) but the one measure by which we may know whether apparent spiritual gladiators are inspired by God's Spirit or another. It is hard to imagine a more satisfying interpretation of the great 13th chapter of Paul's first letter to Corinth.

New Voices, Old Songs

The opening of Book IX of the Confessions finds Augustine engaged in a delicate exposition of Psalm 4, by which he exclaims upon the sweetness of his rediscovery of Scripture. At earlier points in his life, he had been famously contemptuous of the Scriptures, thinking them profane, immoral, and rhetorically unpolished. Book IX retains some of this legacy, for Augustine's meditation upon the newfound sweetness of Scripture comes directly on the heels of his retirement from the professorship of rhetoric. Indeed, the meditation on Scripture seems positioned precisely as the antidote to Augustine's defilement of language in his former life. Once a latrator amarus et caecus adversus litteras (IX.4), he now finds them honey-covered, an herb and medicine that heals him of the vain sophistry of the rhetoricians. With his own language purged and healed by God's own grammar, he cries out to God, who brings forth in Augustine a new voice from old songs.
"You delivered my tongue," Augustine confesses to the Lord, as he reflects upon the day he retired from his professorship, employing the verb used by Isaiah to speak of the Lord's saving his soul (Is. 38:17) and employed to describe God's deliverance of Israel from Egypt (Exod. 18:10). His reflection upon his life as a rhetor mirrors a common critique of sophists in ancient Rome: namely, that they peddled wordplay to the highest bidder without regard for the truth of what was said. Augustine's derisive formulation, nundinae loquacitatis, expresses his newfound disavowal of dishonest vanities (insanias mendaces). Originality and novelty were values, but beneath the florid cover of their belles lettres, both teachers and students suffered from incurable avarice and vice. The education industry found itself deeply corrupted. The "cedars of the schools," impressive as they might appear, are no remedy "against serpents."
Retiring from rhetoric, Augustine undergoes a profound internal transformation. Once a player in the marketplace, he submits to a "domestication" (perdomueris) that will prepare him to be a servant of the house of the Lord. Concurrent with that domestication is a revision of language, its uses and its beauty.
The first thing that changes is the value of originality. Instead of selling his own verbal prowess, Augustine finds himself wishing that the Manicheans could hear him recite the Psalms. That is, Augustine is learning to make his own the words of the Psalmist: "accendebar eos recitare." And yet, those words are sung in the whole world! They are not his; he can lay no claim of his own to them. Another change is the relation of his words to truth. His rehearsal of the Scripture begins to fill the words with the content of God's saving work in his own life. The Spirit, who had spoken in the Psalms, ait nobis. And when the psalmist questions humankind about their heaviness of heart and their love of vanity, Augustine senses himself in the dock. At the proclamation that God had raised his Holy One, audivi et contremui, quoniam talibus dicitur, qualem me fuisse reminiscebar. When the text summons humanity to be angry and sin not, Augustine is moved to anger, and as a result his own sinfulness becomes distasteful to him.

The rehearsal of the Scriptures serves to reorient Augustine's tastes, as God grows sweet (dulcescere) to him. This is a profound reversal; the recitation of the words of others, words which are sung in the entire world (here we see the incipient catholic impulse that will animate Augustine's critique of Donatism), has allowed those words to become true of him. He thus subverts the aims of the sophists on both counts: he speaks the words others wrote, and they become true as God changes Augustine into a man whose life is best described in those terms. Once the great professor, "neque enim dico recti aliquid hominibus, quod non a me tu prius audieris, aut etiam tu aliquid tale audis a me, quod non mihi tu prius dixeris."

Strangers as Means of Grace: Rublev and Genesis 18

About Rublev's icon of the Trinity, Florensky famously exclaimed “Rublev’s icon of the Trinity exists, therefore God exists.” But an intriguing characteristic of the icon is its insight as an interpretation of Genesis 18.

Probably in response to Genesis 18 (and its resumption later in Hebrews), the rule of Benedict states "let all guests be received like Christ." In a Benedictine Abbey, special kitchens are to be kept open for guests who arrive at irregular hours.  This commandment to hospitality finds an ancestor in the story of Abraham, who ran to meet three unexpected visitors from his tent door and to welcome (compel?) them into his house.  It is from him that the traditions of all his descendants “include injunctions to offer hospitality to the stranger.”   Abraham insists the three men allow him to wash their feet, and to serve them water and bread.  These practices echo all over the ancient world, recognizable as both honor for guests and expectation of good hosts.  Although practices may vary, the Abrahamic traditions all agree that Abraham’s example commits all those who claim his patrimony to the expression of hospitality to strangers.  And it is this hospitality that is dramatized in Rublev’s 14th century piece.

Let us venture a provisional definition of hospitality, because its popularity as a buzz word in a pluralistic context has allowed many kinds of slippage.  By the fact of the neighbor’s presence, we are sharers of space in which various goods are common to all:  “let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under a tree, while I fetch a morsel of bread.”  What those goods are may change over time and place.  But whatever the goods in common might be, the stranger lays claim to them for her own reasons.  Those reasons need not orient on any axis of values held by the host.  A great deal of listening will likely be necessary in order to identify what those goods in common are, but they are bound to be there.  When they are discovered, a good host will ensure that inasmuch as she is able, she procures the interests of the guest without determining for the guest the proper reasons for such goods.  To do all the good one can for one’s neighbor as that neighbor understands goodness:  this is the understanding of hospitality I will suggest.  Abraham recognizes the needs but implores the men and awaits the consent of their stopping at his house.  He then offers his guests the best from what he has, a choice, tender calf.  Abraham’s service to them is extravagant, what the New Testament would call latreia.  If we have any doubt about what the text means when it has Abraham call the men "lord" (Adonai), we are relieved of it by the slaying of a choice (Heb. twb) calf, exactly as would be prescribed by Torah’s own commands.  Rublev’s icon shows the three men at a table, with one of the men blessing a chalice in which is the head of a lamb.  While this is definitely Eucharistic imagery, hearkening to sacrifice of Christ enacted in the Lord’s Supper, the genius of Rublev’s account is that he shows that sacrifice via Abraham’s finest wealth, placed at the disposal of his guests, doing all the good he can.   And, importantly, there is no clear evidence in the text that Abraham knows the identity of the men to whom he offers his hospitality, at least until much later, when the men set out to perform judgment on Sodom and Abraham names them “Judge of all the earth.”  True, the Torah’s most common rationale for hospitality is that the Israelites were themselves aliens once (Ex. 22:21, Lev. 19:34, Deut. 10:19, et. al).  But Abraham serves whoever comes to him “as unto the Lord.”

By so doing, some have entertained angels unawares (Heb. 13:2):  Rublev captures the unawareness precisely in that he does not render what is inexpressible to word or image.  This is not exactly the Trinity.  It is, the text and his rendering show us, three men.  But it is also, the text tells us, somehow, an appearance of YHWH.  This indirectness is not typical of icons.  Indeed, this image is liable, insofar as it is called an icon of the Trinity, to tremendous theological misrepresentation.  The contents of this icon, read literally as a representation of God, would lead one not to Trinitarian faith but to tritheism.  Rublev forces the reader to remember, and never to stop remembering, that she is reading a visual representation of an Old Testament text!  And yet it is precisely so that the reader discovers the Triune God revealed there, for insofar as the story is one of Abraham’s wandering and Sarah’s barrenness (cf. Is. 40), of exiles surprised by God in the desert (Hosea 2), of tables set in the wilderness (Ps 23, Ps 78:19), the icon narrates the story of Israel.  And it positions, literally front and center, the sacrifice of the Passover Lamb, shared in the one chalice, as the focus to that entire history.  Again, this is not how icons of Christ typically work.  In the case of the Transfiguration, the crucifixion, or even the Pantokrator, all that the icon claims is seen in the face of the Son of God.  But here, we search in vain even for Christ.  Rather, we are given the history of God leading his people through the desert, providing for them in unexpected ways as they wander, both feeding them and feeding the world through them.  Within this story of Israel, a secret begins to make itself known, as the various symbols and motifs of Israel’s history coalesce around the table Rublev knows, from his privileged position on the receiving end of Israel’s history, to be set for God.  Which of these three does Abraham address by the singular “lord?”  It is dangerous to speculate, and Abraham’s actions do not differentiate.  Similarly, it is fruitless to differentiate practically
the “God” we serve from among the neighbors with whom Christians live, and when Christians work for the common good of those neighbors, they are making choice offerings to the Lord.

Following his source text, Rublev insists that nobody involved needs to recognize their work as an offering for that to be in fact what it is.  There are dangerous consequences to this, since failure to serve the neighbor would by Rubev’s logic be a sin against God.  Indeed, it is exactly the straw of bad hospitality that breaks the camel’s back in Genesis 19, occasioning the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.  Thus, hospitality precedes fruitful engagement with others not merely for pragmatic reasons, but because there is simply no way to know whom we are receiving, or whom we deny.  This is not to say, however, that there are no benefits to be realized.  Indeed, working to procure for our neighbors the goods common to us both will likely win a measure of trust that allows conversations to begin and continue (this will be explored below).  Rather, it is to insist that whether or not such benefits materialize, Abraham’s children are committed to be hospitable for higher reasons.  The stranger is a means of grace for us in that she places a vital check on our desire to gather for ourselves alone, and in so doing, she compels us to live lives of offering to the God in whom, as Augustine reminds us, we love our neighbor.  Rublev shows us nothing if not that.

In its respect for these boundaries, then, hospitality represents one (all too rare) way of dealing with the logic of election, to which all of Abraham’s children are in some way or other committed.  Scripture and history alike testify to the danger that election represents among sinful people.  So often, and so easily, election justifies us/them dynamics that allow unspeakable acts of violence and destruction.  For many in the 21st century, language of election is inherently to be avoided.  They see election as the religious enshrinement of the native fear and mistrust of strangers.  And it must be conceded that such fears are justified, for example, when one considers Sarah’s hostility and abuse of Hagar.  The world can be a fearful place, and often it seems as if religious beliefs merely ossify those fears and baptize fight and flight responses.  But the stranger in the midst of Abraham’s community turns out, unexpectedly, to be the bearer of the promise of Abraham’s favor in the eyes of God.  God’s actions for the elect, we learn, are precisely to deliver them from fear.  Terrorism and “wars of religion” are not inherent to the logic of election but opposed to it, in that they stem from the fear for the security of one’s election.  It is the person secure in her status before God who can be hospitable (cf. Gen. 13, where Abraham gives Lot first choice).  It is exactly our fears about the truth of our election that the other in our midst mercifully forces upon us, and invites us to commit to God for healing.

Rublev keeps the story’s principal characters (at least in the telling of Genesis) off the screen.  Abraham stands by a tree, and Sarah, Genesis tells us, is in the tent laboring over preparations for these guests.  But their presence with her forces the question on which the whole election is poised:  “after I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?” (Gen. 18:12).  The claim to revelation in the mouth of the stranger, in unexpected and unpredictable ways, forces insecurity to arise and shakes Sarah's faith.  The neighbor’s presence unsettles our confidence, and we are compelled to make an account of the other in our midst.  In this light, Sarah’s laugh cannot be passed over, for it is exactly here that she is making this account of the men, processing the complex logic of election and struggling with the difficulty revelation forces upon her, demanding faith and absolute loyalty to what seems ridiculous.  The laugh is a nervous dismissal of the other's claim to her trust, which explains why she is later ashamed of it.  The sheer difference of the stranger strains credibility and threatens her worldview. Yes, it is Israel that carries the election, but that can only be because Sarah herself carries it.  The questions the strangers force are not questions about election generically but about Sarah’s own barren womb and the blessing soon to come from it.  There is no doubt that this announcement, good news though it may be, in fact merely added pressure where pain was already felt.  How much resentment at the hebel hebelim of her life was expressed in that laugh!

Rublev keeps these elements of the story both present and held carefully in the background.  The tree and the house, Abraham and Sarah, remain in back of the cold, unearthly gazes shared by his three figures.  They stare inexplicably in a circle, at one another, unflinchingly held within an embrace they alone share.  Our ways are not their ways, and their thoughts are not our thoughts.  To receive them, to wash their feet and serve them food, is to acknowledge oneself as an outsider.  It is to respect a boundary one cannot cross.  Abraham and Sarah disappear from view like table waiters:  the first family of Israel reduced to such a position.  These three men are unabashedly the center of the story Rublev is telling.  To sit with them is to sit away from them, and to recognize the reality of one’s own otherness.  It is to allow the searching gazes to call us radically into question.  On what basis dare we call ourselves children of Abraham? It is uncomfortable, and if one takes Rublev seriously that this is a window into God, fear is not at all out of the question!

Again, Rublev’s icon, it must be remembered, is an icon of three men, that is, three human beings.  They are communicating God to us, but not in some other way than as the strangers that visited Abraham.  Insofar as we look at them, we cannot help but see God, but we cannot at all identify them as God.  As Rowan Williams observes, “We have granted that this is not a 'picture' of the Trinity in any ordinary way, and that the three figures are not straightforwardly portraits of the three divine persons; rather we are looking into and following the path of the divine process of dealing with us to reveal and save.”   That path and process, as has already been said, is the story of Israel’s election, finding its fulfillment in the crucified Lamb whose blood seals the New Covenant.  These strangers, unsettling as they are, do indeed bring us good news of God’s welcome issued to us and to all.  And if we are willing to seek in the contours of their strangeness the message of God, if we are willing to sit at this table and brave our inevitable anxieties as they come upon us, then we are permitted, unthinkably, to remain at this table.  “She has chosen the good portion, and she shall not be deprived of it” (Lk 10:42).  As has been noted by many of Rublev’s readers, the fourth seat at this table belongs to the one who views it.  We become the other in the midst of the other, enabled to “go with them on their way” (v. 16), and to be the presence that (potentially) brings the other to a crisis.  “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?”  We become the representative to the people we have hosted, now the guest among them, calling them into question:  “shall not the judge of all the earth do right? (Gen. 18:25).  And this mutual act of calling of one another into question, ensconced in a mutual welcome and the assurance that we will do all the good for one another we can, even at high cost to ourselves, simply is what agape will look like in a pluralistic context.  Not only this:  it is what it means for Christians to give faithful witness to the world in a way that does not blind them to what surprise God might be speaking to them through the outsiders among whom they live.  To the degree that this does not occur, it is because of flinching responses to the realities that press in upon us, through the uneasy presence of the other.  That is, Christian witness is hampered by a failure to recognize (heremeneuō) the stranger as a means of grace, as Christ present to us in disguise, drawing us into fuller recognition of the miracle of a people chosen for God.

All of this means that Rublev’s icon is hermeneutically significant.  It is a way of helping Christians discern the voice of God speaking in the complexities of the Old Testament and, thus, of the world.  Natalie Van Kirk observes how Christian images in the early and medieval church were meant to train the eye to see God.  The evacuation of images from much worship, she argues, has had detrimental effects probably unintended by those who removed them, for “even those of us who do not think we are using images are indeed surrounded by them, and when the images with which we surround ourselves contradict the words that we speak or read, we are in great danger of creating such cognitive dissonance that the entire message becomes incomprehensible.”   This claim has resonance with an earlier one that failing to show hospitality to the stranger in our midst is dangerous, because of just whom we might be failing to serve.  Similarly, if we do not allow our image of the other to be disciplined by God, our fear will not hesitate to produce a caricature.  And God forbid we should see the finger of God and name it as the work of darkness (Mt. 12:26-32)!  Jesus’ words on this score are utterly unsettling:  “They will also answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty…?’  He will reply, “truly I tell you, ‘whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me’” (Mt. 25:44-45).

Rublev’s icon insists that under no circumstances can love of God be divorced from love of neighbor.  Instructed by it, the observer allows the form of Abraham’s guests to discipline her vision, such that she finds every other stranger she meets to be the image of these three.  And this of course is the point, Biblically speaking.  A Trinitarian theology of hospitality sees the other in light of the fact that God is our guest and we are His.  For all Abraham’s many faults, he is tenacious and desperate to know the Lord, so much so that he offers his best animal at the faintest chance that the stranger will turn out to be the veiled face of God.  The Benedictines expect God in the guise of a guest, because, like Rublev, they know whose table they serve.  They know that servers at this table drink from the Passover Chalice whose wine quenches all thirst.  Rublev’s three men, for all their Trinitarian echoes, are only echoes.  But the thing to which they witness, the slain Lamb in the center of the table, focuses the icon and interprets it.  In the end, the only icon can be the crucified body of Jesus the Stranger, raised up for the world’s deliverance.  Icons train us to discern that blessed body and to love what we see.  For to love Christ is to love God and neighbor at one time.  Rublev’s icon, then, like all good Trinitarian theology, contains an entire Weltanschauung.  He understands everything that is to depend for its existence on God in Christ, through whose body and blood we are drawn in to the witnessing community and empowered by the Holy Spirit.  In that community, God heals the alienation that makes us strangers to each other and ourselves.  His power removes our corruption, makes us images of God for one another, and through us orients all creation towards a table where He is Giver, Guest, and Gift.  At that table, no man will teach his neighbor, saying “know the Lord,” for they shall all know Him, from the least to the greatest.  Small wonder then that this mere sketch of the Lord’s Table, prepared in the wilderness, had the great Florensky lost in Alleluias.

Of Walls and Wailing: Psalm 80

"All who pass by (עָבַר) do pluck," wails the Psalmist, because "you have broken down our wall." In Psalm 80, God's action is the apparent problem. He has "fed them with bread of tears," "given them bowls of tears to drink," "made us derision."

The problem about all of this, for the Psalmist, is its incongruence with the salvation God had already achieved.

גֶּ֭פֶן מִמִּצְרַ֣יִם תַּסִּ֑יעַ תְּגָרֵ֥שׁ גּ֝וֹיִ֗ם וַתִּטָּעֶֽהָ׃

   פִּנִּ֥יתָ לְפָנֶ֑יהָ וַתַּשְׁרֵ֥שׁ שָׁ֝רָשֶׁ֗יהָ וַתְּמַלֵּא־אָֽרֶץ׃

כָּסּ֣וּ הָרִ֣ים צִלָּ֑הּ וַ֝עֲנָפֶ֗יהָ אַֽרְזֵי־אֵֽל׃

   תְּשַׁלַּ֣ח קְצִירֶ֣הָ עַד־יָ֑ם וְאֶל־נָ֝הָ֗ר יֽוֹנְקוֹתֶֽיהָ׃

God is the farmer who has tilled and prepared ground, who has removed rocks and weeds, who has planted Israel. God is the one who made it fill the land, who allowed the mountainous wasteland to be "covered" (כסה) by its shadow. And it is God who has stretched out Israel's shoots from the River to the Sea. What farmer would do that only to uproot and destroy? What farmer would invest in a crop only to see the harvest stolen by thieves?

For all these reasons, however, the transition to v. 12 is arresting. While the entire Psalm has focused on the agency of God in both planting and uprooting Israel, the wall of v. 12 (גָּדֵר) does not have God as its builder. God's intent was to stretch out Israel from river to shore, to grow them up into a nation in whom the nations could find shelter. It was God's plan that in Israel the nations would find the "cover" the original pair found for their nakedness in the garden and that the blessed find for their sins (Ps. 32:1).

The plan was always that Israel's grapes would be harvested by the foreigner (וְ֝אָר֗וּהָ כָּל־עֹ֥בְרֵי—cp. Lev. 19:10), that the nations would find shelter in a bountiful and generous Israel.

Such plans cannot help but be hindered by the construction of a wall.

But the wisdom of Israel's God consists in this: that the hard hand of divine discipline is merely the gracious pull further up and further in to Israel's deliverance.