Falling in love with theology

I didn’t think rereading John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus would prompt a dream. I thought it was an intellectual exercise, the beginning of an exploration of where I stand today in relation to Jesus, Christianity, and Mennonites.

I have not thought much about theology since college. My heart turns, instead, to spirituality—direct experience and insight, the presence of the Holy Spirit. But I recently read the theologian Stanley Hauerwas’s wonderful memoir, Hannah’s Child. My sister-in-law Louise recommended it and she was right. Hauerwas, whom Time named the most important theologian in America in 2001, is an interesting man whose life intersects with my experience in a number of ways. Same generation, shared neighborhood (he was at Notre Dame for 14 years), and I like his style.

What stirred my curiosity was Hauerwas’s lifelong love affair with theology—not, at first, the church or even Christianity. On top of that, Hauerwas came under the influence of the Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder at Notre Dame and became a pacifist.

I also came under Yoder’s influence, but in the way of most young Mennonite intellectuals from the 60’s on. We more or less sucked it out of our thumbs. Pacifism, “radical” Christianity, Kingdom living. These were the background of our understanding and experience of Christianity, the church, what it meant to be a Mennonite.

As I read Hauerwas I began to wonder whether I was still that kind of Christian. What did I believe these days? What was John Howard’s contribution to that and was it still relevant?

I looked all over the house for our copy of his most popular book and couldn’t find it. I paid for an e-version of The Politics of Jesus, started reading it last night, and found it surprisingly hard to put down.

And then I had a buoyant dream set in church:

Fellowship time in a brightly lit hall. I am talking with someone I’ve admired, an unrequited love. The attraction becomes mutual. We are falling in love. We hold each other’s hands and rise to the ceiling. I just think about rising and then I levitate. We are laughing, encouraging others to do the same. “You have the lightness inside you,” I say. “Just connect to it.” I tell my partner that this is like one of those flying dream except that it is real.

There is an interlude about cycling, also set in church. Then Vic appears with a large, unusual flower, tall as a person and with a flat, stylized blossom. I decide we should use the flower on the altar even though it is way out of proportion to other things placed there. I will look for a carboy--a large glass bottle bigger than a water dispenser bottle--to use as a vase. I find many such bottles in a room behind the altar but they are all full of drinking water. I see another tall vase that will do.

I love my occasional church dreams—they are full of symbols and joy. Dreams like this are part of what keeps me connected to church. This is where love is, where we connect to the light and lightness within us—the church is the home for my experiential spirituality. It is where we come into possession of outsized gifts, like that flower, like John Howard Yoder, which we don’t quite know what to do with except place it on the altar, and the container for the offering is also given to us, like the snagged lamb was revealed to Abraham. The water of life is stored abundantly here.

Are theology and I falling in love? A conversation is beginning, anyhow.