A Helper

Truth and History

This morning’s reading with Merna was from the Gospel of John: chapter 14:12–21.

A concatenation of events triggered a number of things in me, in a very good way. First, it’s the first day of a New Year.¹ Our minds naturally turn to things past and to things we are afraid of or hope for in the future. Second, the recent death of a longtime friend and onetime colleague reminded me of some events of the past.

John chapter 14 is packed with words that matter. When I read 14:16, “Then I will ask the father, and he will give you another helper, to be with you forever,” and then Tom Wright’s thoughts on this verse, they stopped me and I began weeping. Wright’s words on the nature of the helper that Jesus promises:

One word sometimes used is ‘comforter’. Comfort is a strange and wonderful thing. Have you noticed how, after a bereavement or a tragedy, when someone is deeply distressed, the fact of having other people with them, hugging them and being alongside them, gives them strength for the next moment, . . . Outwardly, nothing has changed. The tragedy is still a tragedy.

And then, riffing on the multiple senses (in English) of the Greek word John used, paraclete, Wright says:

An equally good translation for the word is ‘advocate’. An advocate stands up in a court of law and explains to the judge or jury how things are from his or her client’s point of view. The advocate pleads the case. Jesus assumes that his followers will often find themselves, as he found himself, on the wrong side of official persecution. He saw the situation, as centuries of Jewish tradition had done before him, in terms of the heavenly law-court with God as the judge. In that court, his people can rest assured that their case will be heard . . . because the spirit will plead on their behalf.²

Earlier this morning, I had read this from Karen Swallow Prior’s substack, The Priory:

The important thing to remember about the necessities of mending is that it signifies a state of brokenness. Those among you who have not felt so broken that there seems no hope of repair, just you wait. It will happen to you, if you are lucky. Then you will know what it is to be on another shore, though not before the difficult years. [Prior is quoting from Alexandra Barylski, a poet]

Yes. Truth. All of this is true. (This is the third thing that contributed to my tears this morning.)

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Some explanation.

I subtitled this post “Truth and History” because, well, there’s a story that involves both.

In the winter of 1982, I was in my 8th semester/4th year of teaching in a local seminary, the same seminary from which I’d earned 2 degrees, before going on to Ann Arbor for graduate work. I believed that I had been called to do what I was doing. I was teaching Biblical Hebrew, Old Testament introduction, exegesis courses, and much more (teaching loads were heavy). I was a damn good teacher, and I loved what I was doing; and I believed that what I was doing was important. And yes, there’s at least some egocentricity in that, though it’s hard to know what percentage (it’s above my pay-grade to evaluate fully, even if I wrestled then and wrestle now with it). My reviews both by administrators and students were positive; so positive on the part of students that they tended to take some of my courses rather than the courses of others, and this slowly migrated into some resentment on the part of other faculty.

Graduate courses—teaching Th.D. students—was also part of my job. One day, I was summoned to a meeting with the administrators of the institution. We were to meet in the dean’s office. When I entered the room (it was a Friday afternoon), I knew instantly from the body language that the jig was up: four chairs, with four administrators, were on one side of the room; there was an empty chair, for me, on the other side of the room. This was not going to be a session where a younger colleague was simply to be given modest advice.

The details of the discussion are more or less irrelevant, because this sort of history is only too common in institutions of all kinds. The dynamics, the use of power, and the lack of practice of community are at the forefront. After a weekend of anguish, questioning, hard discussions with Merna, and wanting to do what was best for the institution (was that naive? or was it genuine concern? or both?), by Monday I had agreed to resign. In my resignation letter, I told the administration that if they deemed my teaching to be damaging to students, I was willing to have the situation described to students in a way that would be helpful to them: I could be an example of what they deemed to be serious error. (I view, in retrospect, as my naiveté.)

The end of the semester was 3 months in the future. The admin agreed that I could complete the semester, and this would be less disruptive than dismissing me on the spot. So I did so. It was not easy, to say the least. To be rejected by the Christians, some of whom had taught me and whom I had respected, resulted in a crisis of faith. If they didn’t think I was OK, healthy, “safe,” etc., who then was I? Where did I belong? At the same time, I was teaching a Sunday School class at the church we had been attending, made up mostly of “young marrieds.” In the class was one of the administrators and a member of the board of trustees of the institution, both of whom obviously by then knew that I had been fired (yes, I resigned, but this is the way that institutions handle problem employees).

During those months . . . I don’t know how I survived. What struck me this morning is that the Spirit, my comforter, my advocate, was where the strength to go forward came from. None of my colleagues, as they learned of the situation, stood up for me, save one person. That person was the former colleague whose death occurred recently and whose willingness to “stick his neck out” on my behalf I have always treasured; his death reminded me of his gift of friendship in this trying time. Curiously, when I had occasion to have a long conversation with a dear Roman Catholic friend from graduate school about what had happened, he understood completely what I was going through.

Barylski’s comment quoted above: “Those among you who have not felt so broken that there seems no hope of repair, just you wait. It will happen to you, if you are lucky.” No one ever is grateful in the moment for events that break us, that threaten to destroy the person we think we are or that we have constructed for ourselves. But, we may be lucky, dare I even say blessed. (That’s a word I hesitate to use: it’s so damaged by trivial Christian usage.)

My testimony, my truth, is that God rescued me from a career that would have, in the end, deeply and strangely confined me, that would have been the death of parts of me had I remained in it. God did it through the unkind, unjust, even (sometimes I say, though this too may well be above my pay-grade) wicked acts of others. That something very good came out of those acts in no way diminishes their negative effect. It took many years for me to see any of this in a different light.

In retrospect, I am grateful. I had a wonderful, difficult, but very rewarding long career in publishing, one in which I was able to grow in many ways. To use Prior’s terminology, my calling turned out to be different from what I’d at one time anticipated; and the change came through a tragedy. I am grateful, not for the tragedy itself (like Prior, I still miss the classoom),³ but for what came afterward.

The photo at the top of this post Merna and I have taken as emblematic of our lives. It was certainly true, in ways we didn’t know, in 1982. It was true in 2009, at our 40th anniversary, when it was taken.⁴ And it is true as we look ahead into 2026.

1. Western cultures in general have located the turnover of the year on 1 January of each year. But many other cultures don’t use the Western calendar, or at least didn’t do so at this date (see, especially the Jewish New Year, the Chinese New Year, etc.). But all cultures seem to recognize something significant, even numinous, about the annual cycle.

2. Quotations are from N. T. Wright, John for Everyone, Part 2: chapters 11–21 (Louisville: WJKP, 2002, 2023).

3. You can read Dr. Prior’s triggering (for me!) post here:

An Academic in Exile

4. Photo courtesy of Cliff Staton.