"It's about God, stupid." I can still hear Dean Richard
Hays addressing Duke Divinity School at its convocation two years ago,
reminding a room full of ambitious, intelligent, and talented theologians to
keep their priorities in line. "You will all be writing papers,
reading books, studying for exams. Some of you will be worrying about
getting published and applying for Ph. D programs. But just stop.
Just remember: It's about God, stupid."
Meanwhile, I sat there in awe at this powerful message, but also amused
at how he just called three hundred graduate students at Duke
"stupid."
Yet Dean Hays was right on target. We needed to hear it. Five
hundred years before, Thomas à Kempis, the
15th century Catholic monk, gave a similar reminder to women and men of
learning: "What good does it do to
speak learnedly about the Trinity if, lacking humility, you displease the
Trinity? ...I would rather feel contrition than know how to define it. For what
would it profit us to know the whole Bible by heart and the principles of all
the philosophers if we live without grace and the love of God?"
Yet those who have made a profession out of talking
about, writing about, thinking about God seem determined to make our profession
an idol. And, no, it isn't just the professional theologians here who are
guilty. What about the incessant Facebook posters, Tweeters,
bloggers, and so on who just have to be heard and heard and heard… (I'm condemning
myself here!)? Verily, verily, I say unto thee, it is far easier to tweet
about the poor than to live among the poor. It is far easier to read
about Jesus than to follow Jesus. Academics prefer to build for ourselves
a mighty religion-industrial complex rather than walk in the way of the
mendicant master Jesus. And all professions have their own
variation on this theme.
Thomas à Kempis lived roughly two centuries after
another Thomas: the most brilliant theologian in the history of Western
Christianity, Thomas Aquinas (who, oddly enough, was slow of speech and
was called a "dumb ox" by his fellow students; that was before he
started writing his tomes that would change theology forever).
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| St. Thomas Aquinas in Stained Glass |
Funny thing about Aquinas. It is said
that after years and years of writing his life's work, the Summa
Theologiae, and pontificating on humankind's most profound questions,
Aquinas' almost comically industrious pen simply stopped writing. Just
like that. In his last days before death he looked back upon his
theological work and said, "Everything I've written seems to me like so
much straw compared to what I have seen." What had he seen?
Some glimpse of God? Some mystical taste of the Trinity? We
don't know for sure. But we do know that he wrote something very unlike
anything else he'd written before --
Thomas Aquinas, Doctor Angelicus, wrote
a song.
The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins translated it
from the Latin:
Godhead here in hiding, whom I adore
Masked by these bare shadows, shape and nothing
more,
See, Lord, at thy service low lies here a heart
Lost, all lost in wonder at the God thou art.
Seeing, touching, tasting are in
thee deceived;
How says trusty hearing? that shall be believed;
What God's Son has told me, take for truth I
do;
Truth himself speaks truly or there's nothing true.
On the cross thy godhead made no sign to men;
Here thy very manhood steals from human ken:
Both are my confession, both are my belief,
And I pray the prayer of the dying thief...
