Practice Losing Everything

Returning home from a philosophy conference one night, I fell into a deep sleep on the plane and dreamed. I don’t remember the city where the conference was held or the paper I’d presented there, but I do remember the dream: A disembodied voice solemnly intoned, Practice losing everything. I woke and rubbed my eyes, exhausted. The hour was late, and we were circling the Dayton, Ohio, airport when the voice spoke these words again, like the oracle at Delphi—clear, unmistakable, inscrutable: Practice losing everything.

A week later I was summoned to the office of the academic vice president of the conservative religious college where I was a tenured professor. He informed me that I was being fired for publishing a feminist book that included the work of gay and lesbian writers. It was actually an anthology I had edited with a colleague, for use in women’s studies and cultural studies classes, and it was titled Free Spirits.

This was February 1995. House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his Republican cohorts had taken over the US House of Representatives, and a politics of resentment was busy being born. Repercussions were being felt far from Washington, DC, even here in an evangelical college fastened to a cornfield near Springfield, Ohio. The college’s board of trustees had recently turned over, and my life was about to do the same.

I taught Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud in my Introduction to Philosophy class. Students sometimes expressed surprise at studying the work of three notorious atheists at a Christian college. “Ah, but they are not evidential atheists,” I’d explain. “They are atheists of suspicion.” Evidential atheists like Bertrand Russell and Richard Dawkins argue that there is not enough empirical data to claim that God exists, while Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud expose the ways religious language is used to mask and promote self-interest at every turn. Freud argues that religion functions primarily as wish fulfillment, infantile weakness seeking consolation; for Marx, religion seeks to legitimize power while masking economic inequalities; and for Nietzsche, the alleged virtues of Christianity are actually glittering vices—the weak seeking revenge on the strong.

I challenged my students to interrogate their own religious inheritance, and I spoke frequently of the “ethics of faith.” I asked whether they’d arrived at faith through honest inquiry or by suppressing their doubts. Had their beliefs become fixed through authority—biblical, parental, ecclesiastical—and, if so, was authority alone sufficient to establish certainty? In class we discussed how the liberational practices of a charismatic spiritual leader like Jesus could congeal into systems that legitimize violence, racism, patriarchy, greed, and environmental exploitation. Students gleefully pointed to the medieval Crusades, enslavement, colonialism, lynching, and the long history of religious wars in Europe as examples—as well as the ridiculous rules outlined in the college handbook: no public displays of affection, skirts or dresses mandatory for women, and, bizarrely, if two female students are in their room and seated on a bed, they must keep their feet squarely on the floor.

I tried to give my students the tools of critical inquiry, which are central to the quest for philosophical truth. I was a graduate of the college myself and therefore considered a safe hire by the administration, but “there is no such thing as a safe education,” I told my students. “Anything that is arbitrarily asserted may be rationally questioned or denied. Philosophy can never make your life easier; it can only complicate it.” I had taught these ideas each semester for twelve years. Still, it turned out I hadn’t been suspicious enough of my own religious inheritance, or the ethics of my own faith.

On the day I was summoned to the office of the academic vice president, he told me that by publishing the book, I had violated my contract. The book contained essays that espoused positions contrary to the college’s understanding of “biblical Christianity”—that is, it contained articles written by gays and lesbians. He explained that no one in the administration had actually read my book; they’d just skimmed the contents: “We don’t need to lift the lid off the sewer to know that it stinks down there.” He continued in this general vein, but I’d stopped listening.

French theorist René Girard identified the scapegoat mechanism as the way threatened communities deal with internal strife: They select a vulnerable victim to “other” and then project what is dark, shameful, and denied about themselves onto that scapegoat. This “shadow side,” as psychologist Carl Jung called it, represents hidden or wounded aspects of ourselves: “the thing a person has no wish to be.” My own scapegoating pales in comparison to the way immigrants are being scapegoated in this country, but it does show how the mechanism can work politically, and how the Christian faith can be hijacked and subverted into this nefarious activity.

As I left the VP’s office, the bell in the belfry of the administration building tolled twelve times. I had a class to teach at noon. Hurrying across the quad, I interrogated myself:

Q: What did he just say?

A: The college will be firing you.

Q: For what?

A: For publishing a book.

Q: Aren’t academics supposed to publish books?

A: Yes, but not books like this one, not here. Get serious.

Q: But I have tenure!

A: Ha-ha. Good one, Gary. Tenure doesn’t matter. They’ll argue that you violated the employment contract, which you signed voluntarily.

Q: The First Amendment doesn’t apply?

A: Nope. As I said, you signed a contract stating that you wouldn’t do things like this.

Q: Things like publishing a book?

A: No, you moron, publishing a book that includes writers who support gay rights.

Q: You mean scholars like Cornel West, bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Catharine MacKinnon—all widely anthologized and respected in the field?

A: Stop. The point is that these writers support gay rights, and you just got fired because the college thinks this is a terrible thing. Didn’t you always know this was coming someday?

Q: OK, yeah, I guess I suspected this gig might end badly. Maybe I should have bailed earlier or even refused to accept the tenure-track teaching position in the first place. But have you forgotten who I was when I was first hired here? I hadn’t yet poked myself to think more critically about the faith I’d inherited from my parents. I did believe most of this stuff when I got this job. And I needed the job. When I left grad school, there were like eight tenure-track philosophy positions in my specialization in the entire English-speaking world.

A: Stop. Please. You’re rationalizing.

Q: OK. So what do I do now?

A: You do still care about your students, right? The ones who tell you they’re here only because of you, who stop by your office seeking solace, who ask how you can go on teaching in this place? OK then. Stop whining. Go teach your class. Think about someone other than yourself.

Q: I am thinking of someone other than myself. My family is screwed because of my recklessness. What will we do for money? We’ll lose the house, the barns, the horses, the pool. Jae’s starting college in the fall, and—

A: Practice. Losing. Everything.

I arrived at my classroom ten minutes late and stood outside the door looking in. The room was full. The students had waited for me. Of course they had. A terrible thought came to me: I might never teach again. I was a forty-year-old philosophy professor. What could I do besides teach?

After class I drove home. Mercifully, no one was there. I lay in bed for hours, watching the ceiling fan slowly turn and counting the beams in the ceiling and the redwood planks between them. When I had counted them all, I began again. The fan continued to turn. Outside, water flowed from the fountain in our Japanese-style garden. All my life I’d loved books. They’d given me some of my greatest moments of pleasure. Sixteen years would pass before I would publish another.

A week later my wife would lose her position as a music teacher in the Springfield City Schools due to budget cuts. Our combined income slashed to zero, we would be forced to sell our beloved home. The kids would be devastated. The marriage wouldn’t survive.

There’s an old joke: “I used to believe I had a happy childhood. Then I became a writer.”

I began keeping a journal as a bewildered middle school student, and by eleventh grade I’d come to accept this truth about myself: I don’t know what I think until I try to write about it. Thinking is muddled; writing clarifies

I’m doing it again here, reexamining this pivotal moment in my life and trying to tease out the origins of my faith. What part of it is mine, what part is an inheritance from my mother and father and my ancestors, and what part is pure mystery, both gift and debt?

When I was a small boy, I’d get up very early on Saturday mornings and sit in front of the TV, watching a show about gardening. Week after week I sat there, which puzzled my parents. I was not ordinarily an early riser, and they couldn’t fathom why their young son would watch such a program.

Coffee brewed in the kitchen. My parents peeked around the corner into the living room to see if I was still watching the show. I was.

One day I overheard my father say, “I wonder if Gary’s interested in taking up gardening.”

“Or farming?” my mother said.

But there were no farms and few gardens where we lived in south Yonkers, a few blocks from the Bronx. One Saturday morning my father walked into the living room and watched me watching TV.

Some things you should know about my father: He enlisted in the US Army after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. He landed in Normandy, France, on D-Day, June 6, 1944. He helped liberate Paris and was stunned by the gratitude of the French people, who were near starvation. He survived the Battle of the Bulge. He saw the death camps at Buchenwald. He was the recipient of many medals, including the French Order of Liberation and the Bronze Star. He declined the Purple Heart, believing his flesh wounds were insignificant compared to the grievous suffering of others. He never thought of himself as a hero or a member of a “greatest generation.” Greatness wasn’t part of his vocabulary. He was just a guy who’d enlisted because his country had called, and he’d felt it was his duty to answer. He was needed to fight fascism in Europe, a place he had never visited. Like everyone else in that war, he’d just wanted to survive and get home.

After he returned from Europe, he married my mother in the Italian Methodist Episcopal Church of Our Savior, on the corner of Park Hill and Waverly in Yonkers. I was their second son. The eldest, Tommy, walked down the aisle at Madison Square Garden to accept Jesus into his heart at the age of nine, during evangelist Billy Graham’s 1957 New York City Crusade. My parents were thrilled. They believed Graham’s assurances that, because Tommy had accepted Jesus by faith, he would bring joy to our household, be at peace with God, and experience everlasting life.

Six months later Tommy was asphyxiated in our father’s car while it was stuck in a snowbank, motor running, the exhaust blocked by ice. My father, who was shoveling the car out of the snow, believed Tommy to be asleep and carried him up to the kitchen, where he discovered his son was dead. We all got to see this. How’s that for joy and peace?

The morning my father watched me watching the gardening show came a few years later. I can imagine what was going through his head. He had already lost his eldest. There were things he needed to know.

“Son, why are you watching this program? You think you may have a green thumb?”

I didn’t know what a green thumb was, but I was pretty sure I didn’t have one. I shook my head.

He tried again: “Do you like this gardening show?”

I shrugged. I had no idea what the program was about and didn’t care. I was waiting for The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle to come on the air at 7 am. It was my favorite cartoon. The only reason I sat through the stupid gardening show was so that I wouldn’t miss a single minute of Rocky and Bullwinkle, Boris and Natasha, Dudley Do-Right, Fearless Leader, the dog scientist named Mr. Peabody, and the comical “Fractured Fairy Tales.”

I never told my father this. Not because I didn’t love and respect my father. I did. But maybe I believed there were things parents shouldn’t know about their kids. Maybe I was defending my privacy. Maybe I didn’t tell him because telling him would have involved speaking, which I wasn’t big on since my brother’s death. Was I silent because I was traumatized, or did I already feel the weight of becoming the eldest son? Did my parents really believe I was some sort of urban Johnny Appleseed? Did I think that the truth might have disappointed them?

I didn’t tell my mother either. In fact, until now, I’ve never told anyone the story of how I, a boy who adored Rocky and Bullwinkle, was mistaken for a budding farmer. Which is itself a kind of parable about faith: Sometimes we may never find out the reason for something. As French philosopher Blaise Pascal said, “The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of.”

My father, who died in 1994, was something of a mystery to me. He never wrote me a letter. He did not keep a journal, to my knowledge, much less write a poem or an essay or a story. He was judicious with words. There were times when I needed his words, but they never came. He never talked to me about sex. Or about his faith. Or about that day when my brother died on a narrow street in Yonkers.

What he could not communicate to me when he was alive is in me still. He writes through me. This, too, is my inheritance.

In Mark 4, Jesus gets in a boat on a lake to address a crowd that has gathered on the shore. Among the things he tells them is the story of a man who scatters seed on the ground and then sleeps and wakes the next day to find the seed has sprouted and grown, but the sower doesn’t know how. The sower in this parable may refer to Jesus himself, who certainly scattered a great many words as if they were seeds.

What seeds of faith did my parents plant in me unawares? My mother, who’d buried her firstborn, impressed on me the sense that God might have slipped a note under my door, a summons. My mother’s love was conditional. She had high expectations of me and frequently expressed them. “Remember who you are,” she’d say as I walked out the door to play stickball with my friends in the streets.

My father, on the other hand, was a stoic sentry standing at his post. He watched me carefully. In later years, when I visited my parents with my two kids, he’d dab those weary eyes, crying the tears of a soldier at my comings and goings. His love was boundless, unconditional. He understood that there are things too deep for words, that we always know more than we can say.

There is another story, also in the fourth chapter of Mark. It is not one of Jesus’s parables. It is a story about Jesus:

After Jesus has finished speaking, the shadows begin to lengthen on the shore. It is growing dark. Jesus comes to his disciples with a strange invitation: “Let’s cross over to the other side of the lake.” Meaning: Let’s cross over to the land of the Other—the one who is not like us. For Jews like Jesus and his disciples, the “Other” meant the Gentiles.

Jesus’s disciples begin their crossing in the half-light of dusk, when the edges of things begin to blur and clear distinctions are hard to make; a time when light and darkness are not so neatly separated. A wind blows across the water. Waves beat against the boat, swamping it. Meanwhile Jesus lies asleep on a pillow.

Who is this man, the disciples ask themselves, who sleeps through a storm at sea, who takes his closest friends and puts them in mortal danger, who is fast asleep when we are battling the waves? What kind of teacher treats his students this way? They cry out to Jesus: “Don’t you care that we are dying?” (Experienced sailors who know they’re about to die are granted the right to be rude.) Jesus wakes and speaks a word that silences the wind and water. Then he asks why they were afraid. Have they no faith? Only then do the disciples understand what true fear is. Tremulous with awe, they ask themselves again: Who is this person?

That day in the academic VP’s office I was beginning to learn that, when you stand in solidarity with those who are catching hell, you can expect to catch the hell that was aimed at them. What had made me think I was exempt from suffering? Had my parents been spared? Was my father foolish enough to believe he’d escaped Buchenwald’s long shadow in the American suburbs? If God is love, does this mean God is not in those places where there is no goodness or love? What pitiably small conception of justice made me believe I should not experience what my friends and neighbors were experiencing—in their case not even for something they had done, but merely for who they were and whom they loved?

It would take me years to comprehend how far upward I was destined to fall. My firing would propel me—unhappily at first—from the university to the ministry. In the peculiar calculus of faith, every loss can become a gain.

I believe that Jesus cares a great deal about us, but not always in the ways we expect or want him to care. It’s possible to believe, as Billy Graham promised, that Jesus is the solution to all our problems. But in time, as our faith is tested and matures, we may discover a Jesus who doesn’t want to solve our problems; a Jesus who instead invites us to cross over to the land of the Other and to create space and extend extravagant hospitality to the people we find there; a Jesus who leads us into danger and creates for us problems we never would’ve had had we not signed up to follow him in the first place.

Maybe Christian faith is the determination to stick with Jesus even when he has the audacity to say to you, Practice losing everything. Maybe all we’re really losing is a faith that isn’t worth a tinker’s damn in a storm. Maybe a shallow faith is a faith well lost. Maybe the German churches in the 1930s were almost completely co-opted by the Nazis precisely because those churches practiced a shallow piety, a sentimental Christianity that affirmed those who looked and believed a certain way while scapegoating the most vulnerable: Jews, Roma, LGBTQ+ folks—people who were easily othered and then eliminated.

As a young philosophy professor teaching Plato’s Apology to first-year students, I would re-create the trial of Socrates and then call for a vote. Every semester Socrates was found guilty of corrupting the youth of Athens. At first this annoyed me. Then I realized that by teaching his students to think for themselves and to reject the view that the majority determines truth, Socrates was corrupting the youth. And so was I. That was my job as a professor.

What about preachers? Preaching the gospel is dangerous too, because following Jesus can get us into trouble. “Good trouble,” as congressman and civil-rights leader John Lewis called it.

Maybe my parents weren’t so far off the mark in thinking that I’d one day become a gardener. Here in Hawaii, where I preach from the pulpit of the Keawala‘i Congregational Church on Maui, I picture my parents, reunited at last beyond the rainbow, looking down on their enigmatic second son scattering seeds Sunday after Sunday, big smiles on their faces. A pastor! Can you believe it!

What’d I tell ya, my father says. The kid has a green thumb.

My mother smiles demurely but keeps her thoughts close, pondering. When Dad goes off to fetch the coffee, she whispers a prayer: Thank you, Jesus. How you did it is an utter mystery.