—William F. May
Introduction: “Some Real Surprises”1
Sermons of Arthur C. McGill
For there is no distress like that of believing in something
which you secretly know may be false. (Sermon 6, pp. 58–59)
Arthur Chute McGill, Christian theologian, teacher, and preacher, reigned in the classroom. He was a paced master of dialectical surprise. He possessed a passionate honesty. He knew the risk of faith. McGill was intellectually tough: he would not believe something he secretly knew to be false. With no proof that the Christian faith is true, he was clear that there is no proof that it is false. But wait: “may be false”? To believe in something which you know is false: yes, grave distress. But to believe in something which you “know may be false” but which also may be true: surely such honesty belongs to the risk of Christian confession. Is the “may be false” in the quotation above probability—not possibility? Even so, probability does not rescue one from risk when the probability is of—improbability. Why, then, risk improbability? McGill’s sermons and surprises offer response to this question.
Meet McGill:
• But if you cease to hope, to live on the edge of hope, like a child alert for the coming of Christmas, then you die. (Sermon 15, p. 129)
• Because the mind is the greatest narcotic, it is extremely difficult for any of us to know our suffering, especially the deep suffering that belongs to our daily life. (Sermon 2, p. 30)
• Jesus died—he died all the way . . . (Sermon 3, p. 34)
• Any person who is not willing to be emptied, to let go of his own piety and his own faith and his own loving and his own virtue, he is full of extortion and rapacity, full of spiritual pride and greed. (Sermon 3, p. 37)
• Love is the name for the frame of mind, for the attitude which does not mind being poor. (Sermon 3, p. 38)
• You measure the meaning of letting go by the power of Christ and not by the power of death. (Sermon 14, p. 121)
• The proper speech is the deed. (Sermon 10, p. 95)
• The price of ecstasy is poverty. (Sermon 6, p. 61)
• It is always strange, this message of Jesus, to everyone everywhere . . .
(Sermon 12, pp. 106–7)
• If you love, you will be used up. (Sermon 9, p. 84)
• We do not first love our neighbor, first our neighbor loves us. (Sermon 17, p. 146)
In what might be read as a commentary on the above quotations, McGill proposes:
“Faith” is not the possession of a settled world-view [“viewpoint Christianity”], which people can interpose between themselves and the shock of experience, and by which therefore they can keep the world at an arm’s length away from them, can solve all their problems, and can arrange themselves with the “right” attitudes for every situation. On the contrary, “faith” has the effect of opening a man to the world, to his neighbors, and to himself. It deprives him of all self-conscious postures. It propels him into a living engagement with concrete experience.2
The Stuck Imagination
“American life is in the midst of some deep and obscure torment” (Sermon 6, p. 53). So preaches Arthur McGill about 1974—and about today. McGill’s words leap into our present—any present, surely—but so patently and painfully into our own. Here is McGill’s declaration in context:
Nothing makes clearer why this is a moment of deep disquiet and anxiety. For all the conflicts and frustrations which beset our life in the United States today make it difficult to face the future with assured enthusiasm. American life is in the midst of some deep and obscure torment. (Sermon 6, p. 53)
McGill speaks of “American life today” from the 1960s and 1970s, of the Vietnam War and “mimeographed reports” (Sermon 10, p. 87). “Friends, as the daily news reports to us the pains and agonies of the whole world, let us keep each other awake. Let us hope not in the future, but in the God who will [bless?] every [possible?] with the fullness of his glory and his love” (Sermon 15, p. 129). McGill suggests that “the problem of policy” in the context of Vietnam is not bound to that context:
It has to do with the general conviction in American life today that when real power is unleashed, we are beyond the realm of speech. For that reason, I would expect that if we were to become embroiled in Czechoslovakia or in the Middle East in a war of savage destruction [if we were to become embroiled . . .], we would find ourselves burdened by the same anguish. (Sermon 10, p. 90)
The “anguish” referred to is the anguish in the gap between words about and devastation in Vietnam.
William F. Lynch imagines, “In eternity there will be . . . less stuckness in the imagination,”3 indicating his own unstuck imagination. In the company of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Lynch dramatizes imagination as “trapped,” “stuck,” stuck with “no way out,” “puzzled,” “caught.”4 Lynch and the “stuck” imagination: if our imaginations were “stuck” when Lynch wrote (1970), they are downright reified today. Have our imaginations ever been more trapped?5 McGill would resonate with the idea of our stuck imaginations. His sermons may be read as attempts to unstick our imaginations, to unglue them, to open them up, to turn them loose, to set them and us—with and because of them—free.
McGill looks around in his today and in his past and ours to the poor and oppressed, the poor of Brazil, pygmies of Africa, the ancient Chinese, to the Indian, to Vietnam, Czechoslovakia, the Middle East, India, to the South, Selma, to Harlem, Chicago, Watts. What the topical references exemplify is still exemplified; what they deplore is still deplorable.
“Truth Is Meant to Save You First,
and the Comfort Comes Afterwards”
In Georges Bernanos’ magnificent novel, The Diary of a Country Priest, an old, seasoned, earthy priest, M. le Curé de Torcy, strives to help initiate a young, naive country priest of the village of Ambricourt:
Teaching is no joke, sonny! I’m not talking of those who get out of it with a lot of eyewash: you’ll knock up against plenty of them in the course of your life, and get to know ’em. Comforting truths, they call it! Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterwards. . . . The Word of God is a red-hot iron. And you who preach it ’ud go picking it up with a pair of tongs, for fear of burning yourself, you daren’t get hold of it with both hands. . . . when the Lord has drawn from me some word for the good of souls, I know, because of the pain of it.6
These words become powerfully ironic when, later in the novel, the country priest thrusts his arm into a fire. He is “no tongs.” So is Arthur McGill, whose dialectic is heavy on what he risks as the truth and light on the “comfort”—as if, in light of the truth, the comfort can take care of itself: “Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterwards.” The truth can be painful, which is why we are so tempted to do an end run around the truth and to go straight for the comfort. A student once gave me a poster—it was on my office door for years—which showed a rag doll with bright yellow yarn hair going through the ringers of an old-style washing machine. Her tongue was hanging out. The poster read: “The truth will make you free, but first it will hurt like hell.” “The Word of God is a red-hot iron.”
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