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24 October 2007
Hello everyone,
As part of a class project in my Research Methods graduate course this semester, we were charged with the duty of cataloging the various manuscripts, unpublished poems, background materials, and other miscellaneous items left behind after James Tillotson Whitehead, author, poet, and professor from the University of Arkansas, died in 2003. On Tuesday of this week (23 October 2007), his widow, son-in-law, and neighbor came to answer our questions about Whitehead and his work. We had read his novel Joiner as a class, the only prose work published in his lifetime, and found it an unusual read. It chronicles the life of Sonny Joiner, an NFL star who is also an intellectual struggling to come to terms with his life. Its style is discursive—one is not surprised to learn it was penned by a poet—and is more than liberally peppered with vulgarity and profanity in addition to high-flown prose. Parts of it would be deemed pornographic and there is also a fair amount of violence and racial tension as well. As an undercurrent in the book, there is a definite nod to Christianity, both the more fundamentalist forms as well as its incarnations that more closely resemble secular humanism than orthodoxy.
In the other manuscripts that Whitehead left behind—there were many—were multiple drafts of two novels that were supposed to form a trilogy along with Joiner, as well as screen plays and poems, many of which took on the same characters and themes, though of course appropriated to the different genres of writing. In the other novel drafts, the theme of religious faith is much more pronounced, and, not surprisingly, became a subject of inquiry as we spoke with Gen. Further, in the later unpublished poetry there is an interesting motif that emerges which has been dubbed “The Panther Project.” These poems are based on a theory that has surfaced in recent years that a first-century Roman soldier named Tiberius Julius Abderus Pantera fell in love with a young Jewish girl named Mary and their son was the Jesus of the gospels. (Jesus in the Rabbinical Traditions offers more information on this theory—see under heading “I. Jesus’ Birth” near the end, just before the heading “II. Jesus’ Crucifixion.”)
My part of the project was writing the background information on Whitehead, cataloging the outside source information, and compiling the inventories of my fellow colleagues into a publishable finding aid. I was interested to learn that when Whitehead left for Vanderbilt University on a football scholarship, he had every intention of becoming a cleric in the Presbyterian tradition. However, whether it was his bachelors in philosophy or his masters in English, both, or neither, he lost his faith in college. In particular, he could no longer accept special revelation and Christology. That is, he apparently had a difficult time with the idea that God could (or did) reveal himself in sacred writings or that Jesus could literally be both man and God. Whitehead lost his faith and his high school sweetheart, but it would not be long before he met his future wife Gen, a Roman Catholic girl who was also to lose her faith. The couple raised seven children, a number that includes triplets. Somewhere throughout the years, Whitehead developed an affinity for alcohol, a thing that likely contributed to his death in 2003 at the age of 67.
As I mentioned, his since-remarried widow Gen came to speak to us this Tuesday. She had a warm and vibrant personality and the picture that emerged of Whitehead through her eyes as well as through the eyes of both her neighbor and son-in-law (himself an academic and a believer grounded in the Greek Orthodox tradition) was an interesting one. Whitehead was an extrovert, interested in anything and everything, and yet knew how and when to listen when that was needed. He was the kind of professor who had students over to his home at all times, watching sports with him, drinking beer, and talking about a variety of topics from highly intellectual to everyday and commonplace. Whitehead loved teaching, he loved his students, and they loved him.
A former colleague of Whitehead teaches at Missouri State, and like Whitehead, he too has battled problems with alcohol. The question came up as to why Whitehead drank as he did: what compelled him. Gen did not have a ready answer, though she candidly admitted that he caused a lot of his own problems by his drinking. She thought it perhaps had something to do with his mother, with whom he never had a close relationship. Both his parents were devout Presbyterians, did not drink, smoke, or curse, and were supremely happy that their son was planning on going into ministry. Whitehead’s father was a quiet, stable influence and Gen and the family had a tremendous amount of respect for him. Whitehead’s mother, by contrast, apparently complained a lot, had a whiny voice, and was not a very likable person. Too, Gen suggested that Whitehead’s mother did not really understand her son: he is supposed to be going to school to become a minister, and then he loses his faith, writes weird books and weird poems, and cannot seem to pen a single sentence without employing some of the most offensive terms found in the English language, for if there was one thing we learned as a class, it was that Whitehead had no qualms about writing pornography, and, as pornography goes, writing it well.
Perhaps then, Gen suggested, Whitehead drank because of the bottled-up anger he felt toward his mother. At this point, Whitehead’s former colleague from Arkansas—a wonderful, wonderful professor who cares deeply for his students—interjected. He said that he felt he could shed some true insight into why Whitehead drank as he did, for not only did he know Whitehead very well, he also has taken several sabbaticals since I have been attending Missouri State to seek treatment for his own alcoholism. As he spoke, one sensed that he had real insight into the underlying motivation. Like Whitehead, he too had been raised on Christianity and like Whitehead eventually rejected it. Like Whitehead, he had aspirations for ministry. What this past left behind, was, in his own words, “a gaping hole.” Or, again to use his words, he had “an existential angst” that he could not ever escape and drinking became a means of trying to cope with this loss of meaning and purpose.
At the time, I was too absorbed in the sobering nature of the conversation going on around me to be thinking of my own life story, but as I reflect now, I have very often told people that my real problem in my early twenties was not drug addiction: that was merely the symptoms on the surface of something much deeper. The real problem was my philosophy of life, for I too had concluded that Christianity—indeed, all religion period—was at best a human fabrication. I am too close to myself to see how that looks and hear how that sounds, but I see now in this context it fits. And I remember a conversation I had some time ago with an MK (missionary’s kid) and how we agreed that having been raised in an environment in which religion is everything, one does not escape unscathed. Even if one rejects the faith and turns away from it, one is never free from it and often has an almost morbid obsession with it, studying it, wrestling with it in the night, consumed with questions without answers.
The MK of whom I speak was in my class, and we had read an essay by Anthony Brandt, a skeptic who feels a deep ambivalence toward faith, entitled “Do Kids Need Religion?” At least implicitly, Brandt’s essay further bears out the effect on children raised in strongly religious homes who now struggle with the beliefs of their parents when he writes of other parents he knows. Speaking of the husband of one such couple, he writes, “The father, Pete, was raised in a fundamentalist family and rebelled against it; religion holds a kind of perverse fascination for him, but he is not what you would call a believer” (qtd. in The Presence of Others 217). Pete is a very common incarnation, in fact: someone who no longer feels he can believe but who cannot let go either: there are many Petes who have “a kind of perverse fascination” with theological subjects because religion was a part of the very air they breathed as a child.
While we are on the subject, the essays for this latest assignment in my classes have been interesting. Students were to write a “definition essay,” so-called because the essay attempts to take an abstract concept or value and offer a subjective though well-organized definition. Two students wrote about love in the first class, both speaking of various loves in their lives, and both ending with their love of God in one case and love of Christ in the other (though ultimately saying the same thing). I have an aspiring cleric in that class as well who included Christ in his definition of hope. Perhaps the most interesting essay, however, came from a creative writing major and religious studies minor who wrote her paper on not knowing. Raised in a strong religious home, she since has become agnostic. Her account includes a conversation with her father as they are driving one day that cuts her to the quick.
“I worry so much,” Dad said softly, “that you’re going to go to Hell.”
The words were a dagger, piercing and jerking its way into my gut until I had to remind myself to breathe. It wasn’t the first time someone told me I was on my way to Hell, but hearing my father voice the same sentiment was crippling in ways I’d never before imagined.
I would have been happier if he was angry rather than concerned. If he started screaming hellfire and damnation rather than genuine concern over my eternal fate. I know how to respond to hellfire and damnation. This was a horse of a different color, and I had no idea how to proceed.
I don’t know how long I was silent. The road ahead blurred and the hum of the car provided some small form of calm. Finally, I swallowed hard. I couldn’t keep quiet forever. I’m not ashamed of my beliefs, and while I don’t expect everyone to understand them—especially when agnosticism is a stone’s throw from atheism in the eyes of many—I don’t want my father to walk away with the impression that I never consider these issues. I consider them all the time. Other than it being a part of my studies, theological issues, especially concerning my own beliefs, are always at the forefront of my mind. This might not be how all agnostics operate; I don’t know. I can’t speak for others. I only know that complete apathy toward religion is regarded as atheism; I’m not apathetic. I never have been. Even when I tried to run from religion, it tailed me, loomed over my shoulder, waiting for me to turn around and acknowledge it as a force from which I couldn’t hide. Not thinking about religion isn’t an option for me.
A bit later she continues:
I’m reminded of a woman I saw praying in a Catholic church when I visited New York last summer. I’d just walked the perimeter of the sanctuary, observing the Stations of the Cross, when I caught sight of a middle-aged Hispanic woman in the front pew. Her head was bowed, a rosary draped gracefully across her open hand. It wasn’t until I drew nearer that I saw she was praying, her lips moving fast, sending silent words into the void. Her body trembled as though the ground beneath her had cracked. And in a blink, I was flooded by the most potent wave of awe and humility I’d ever known. It shook me, sank into my skin, wringing my insides and commanding recognition beyond my understanding. I stood and watched her as long as I could without being obvious, not wanting to be rude but similarly unable to move aside. By the time I convinced my feet to walk, my eyes had blurred with tears.
The woman in the church, and others like her, are the sort of people who keep me agnostic without driving me completely toward atheism. I see so much bad done in the name of God—to catch a glimpse of the good, or to see faith in action rather than faith being forced upon others—provides hope. I don’t know what Beth or my father would have done if they’d seen the woman. Would they have reacted as I did? Would they have understood—if only in that minute—how thoroughly remarkable she was?
Likewise, the responses in the second class were equally varied, many of them examining religious faith or its absence, and most of them (as with the first class) insightful and well written. One essay in particular chooses “religion” as its topic, seeking to redefine the word. This student’s story is well summarized in a single paragraph; whereas the previous student came from Protestant traditions, her own experience was from the Catholic side of the faith:
In my lifetime, I can’t say I’ve seen much acceptance and tolerance. When my parents were going to be married, my father was working out of state. The Catholic church both refused to recognize the marriage, because my father wasn’t Catholic, and they also refused to work with him when he said he would convert. Later on, when my parents had agreed to baptize me Catholic, the church called me a bastard child because they still wouldn’t recognize the marriage between my mother and father. This was a preacher who baptized my own mother, and just like that she went from pious to whore, and only because of a difference in religious views of two churches. My own definition of religion could best be stated as man putting words into the mouth of god and calling them god-given—we ourselves interpret the words of our faith, and oftentimes in ways that directly benefit one group or another at the expense of yet another group.
Her redefinition, then, is “Religion: perceptions, experiences, and tolerances of an individual that guides a person through life, that may or may not be of divine influence, but serve as a beacon for learning and acceptance of the world for how it is, and as motivation to better the world a person lives in.” She concludes her essay by stating, “That’s a definition I could live by.”
Being around the academy is interesting. In a conversation with another friend recently whose views are unabashedly conservative, he believes that American universities are not only infiltrated by liberals, but that professors routinely brainwash their charges. He also suggested that the university “wasn’t a real place.” What he meant by that statement, I believe, was that in “the real world” one could not express the range of opinions and views that one can in the university without consequence. In any case, while I understand both of his points, I do not fully agree with either, particularly not the first one.
At least based on my own experience, the university is very much a real place where the views that will become tomorrow’s culture are today being negotiated and hashed out, and where (it is true), most of the faculty do tend to be leftward leaning as a rule. As I pointed out to my friend, this may not be so much a case that more liberal-minded people have battered down the doors of academia as that a more progressive view ideally lends itself to ideology and interest in new ideas much more readily than a conservative one: it might also be the case that teaching adult students as a profession tends to draw a certain personality type that tends toward idealism (for most progressives are nothing if not idealistic, even when these utopian views are tempered with facts and figures). While there are bound to be some exceptions, it has certainly not been my experience that professors routinely censure or shame their charges whether explicitly or implicitly; rather, it has been my experience that most professors are of the sort whose voices have been resounding in this newsletter: people who often know a great deal about faith, who have mothers and fathers, who are mothers and fathers, and who feel an ambivalence toward all things false in our culture including the religious sphere, taking exception to a lot of the organized aspects of the faith but longing for something that is pure and undefiled. There is a tremendous difference between being an enemy of false masquerades offered up in the name of piety and being an enemy of God.
In my experience, there are many professors like Whitehead and his colleague who have “gaping holes” left from being raised around (in most cases) Christianity and who long to return to a faith that they can truly believe without leaving behind their learning in the process. Professors of Whitehead’s sort often find those of simple faith to be inspirations: I speak specifically of those who do have “simple faith” and not necessarily those persons who tend to come across merely as annoying or dangerously naive in their attempts to proselytize the entire world to their particular brand of faith. A university education may not be everything, but one cannot merely sweep under the rug what one has learned, nor does it help when people write off academic learning as so much rubbish when they clearly have no idea what they are talking about, offering sweeping generalizations that exist only in their own imaginations.
Whatever my experience, to categorically place all professors in one catch-all category strikes me as overly simplistic and thus flawed from the outset. Everybody is unique and one finds in academia a motley cast of characters just as in any other venue of life. Some may be notorious atheists, some pious believers, and a great many more somewhere in between making their way through life as best as they can. The fact that many tend to be more liberal than conservative does not in itself say anything about their faith or lack thereof, a fact that my friend would freely admit, as he does a truly commendable job of being vigilant lest his political beliefs become confused with the timelessness of Jesus’s message. In his own words, he speaks of keeping the essential the essential and the non non, his disdain for progressive ideology merely his political opinion.
We began by speaking about Whitehead, giving a sort of overview of his life. He was not a perfect man, and the words he leaves behind freely admit that fact. Further, his interest in the Pantera myth is but a reflection of his seeking to restore some sense of the faith of his youth: if he cannot accept that Jesus is the son of God, then perhaps he can add some beauty to the account by a romantic story of a Roman soldier and a Jewish girl in love and separated by the call to duty, their son going on to inspire multitudes. It is not an orthodox view, but where does someone like Whitehead fit in? The orthodox, for the most part, will not have him: he does not share their creed. He does not really fit in with the unbeliever either, for his longing to believe gives him no peace, likely explaining the self-destructive habits he has formed, perhaps as an only partly conscious attempt to punish himself. And what do we do with the people who are very much like Whitehead who perhaps do not share his education or his vocabulary, who cannot communicate themselves so articulately? What of the forty-something mother in my second class who for a while attended an Episcopal Church simply for the positive social atmosphere it provided for her and her children in spite of the fact that she is a secular humanist? Her own mother longs for her to come back to the Christianity of her youth, but she finds that she cannot believe what she is asked to believe: faith in virgin births and human gods is asking a little more of her than she feels she can sensibly grant. What of our own children who were raised in the faith but for one reason or another have walked away, perhaps on similar grounds?
When one hears “personal testimonies,” as they are so often called, one rarely hears these sorts of voices. Yet the reality that they tell is no less true for all of that. We may believe they have their particulars off when it comes to things above, but when it comes to their existence on the earth below, their perceptions are no less urgent or impacting. As I scribbled in the margins of the student’s paper in the first class who wrote of her love for God, love itself is one of the strongest arguments for the existence of God, yet many do not know the love of God because such a knowledge has to be spiritually discerned and personally experienced. And while longing exists in every heart, there can be many things that interfere with depth of spiritual vision. We should not expect that those who have not our eyes will be able to see as we believe that we can see. And if we are to be light and salt, we must learn to listen to our heart in dealing with those around us, for it is in our willingness to love others that we will find the “how” to these questions. Nothing should be ruled out and nothing should be ruled in save that we know who we are, we are learning who God is, and we strive to love those who, for one reason or another, cannot see the connection we see between these facts. Any other approach risks failure because any other approach lacks the vision of the heart which alone can see through the darkness.
God bless,
Eric
The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill
together. Our virtues would be proud if our faults whipt them
not; and our crimes would despair if they were not cherish’d by
our virtues.
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