The concluding chapters of of Jake Meador's book illustrate his positive agenda in two parts, the microcosm of the household and the macrocosm of contemporary political life in America. Chapter 9 (The World in Cracked Icons: Wonder, Death, and the End of All Things) begins with the moving account of the stroke of Meador's father and its effects on his family as they struggle to provide care. This story hits close to home as I was about five when my grandfather suffered a debilitating stroke and my parents sold their newly-built home and purchased my grandfather's so they could care for him. (My care extended to sitting with him to watch his beloved Westerns.) So also our children, who enjoyed the blessing of living with their dementia-afflicted grandmother for several years.
Meador doesn't draw the expected lesson from the effects of his father's stroke and his family's response. It's not about the value of family in a time of crisis but about his father, whose "chief vocation now is to bear witness to the sufficiency of Christ in his limited state." As good as they are, strong families can't reverse the effects of the Fall, sin, and the inevitable decay and death that is our lot in this age. Instead, the point of his father's continuing struggle is that
there's goodness in bodily living, even when the body is broken. There is something true about binding our life to the life of the world, even if that requires giving up our love affair with the fiction of endless cheap energy. There is beauty in marital fidelity, even when it comes at a cost. ... Ordinary Christian people like my parents are a sort of icon of both Christian community and Christ's own love. ... These people aren't a final bulwark against decay or the savior of a Christian nation. They are images of light that can ... direct our attention upward, toward the source of the light they reflect.
Chapter 10, Politics Beyond Accomplishment: Toward a Politics of Care, marks a return to James Davison Hunter's theme of faithful presence first mentioned in Chapter 6. Meador characterizes contemporary social life as one in which worth is measured by accomplishment. Termination of 88% of the unborn experiencing Down syndrome is his prime example. Measuring worth by (potential) accomplishment, however, is not limited to the preborn. "Because a certain level of agency and accomplishment is treated as the sine qua non of the good life, people who lack a list of accomplishments ... are relegated to a kind of second-class status." Indeed. The problem inherent in grounding human rights in human capabilities was the subject of my article, Looking for Bedrock: Accounting for Human Rights in Classical Liberalism, Modern Secularism, and the Christian Tradition (here or here).
Meador argues that Christians should seek to reconfigure their social lives with insights drawn from the Bruderhof communities. Rather than accomplishment, the Bruderhof order their lives toward care.
No one from the Bruderhof has ever been left to die because of a disability or shunted away to live out their final days out of sight and out of mind. They do not push their poor into designated parts of the community so that their wealthy needn't see them--indeed, they do not have poor or wealthy for the simple reason that they do not have private property.
Of course, like in a Bruderhof community is not for everyone, and some might criticize the Bruderhof for their relative lack of engagement outside their communities. (Such a criticism strikes me as hollow given the lack of community engagement that characterizes the social lives of most Americans.) Instead of retreat into a community of common property, Meador exclaims that "what is needed today is for Christians to be committed to their cities, neighborhoods, and home places ... while tying those commitments together with the devout piety and generosity of the Bruderhof." In short, Christians should exist as living rebukes to a society of expressive individualism, whether that expression takes the form of ever-more consumption or rejection of the limits of embodied life.
This chapter has much more of value to say about time, relationships, hospitality, and physical rootedness of community but let me conclude this penultimate post with some of Meador's concluding words:
We have lived in a time of uprooting, and now it is for us to begin the work of becoming rooted again. Because the Christian church is being tutored in the school of Christian discipleship, trained by divine revelation to behold reality as it is and to love the world as God has made it to be, we are uniquely positioned to begin this work and to commend it to others.
No comments:
Post a Comment