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Anna Karenina: Aristocratic Life is All a Stage


Imaginative Gifts for the Entire Family

Les Misérables: A Rousing Tale for Slumbering Souls

Confronting an Evil Empire

Conservative Credo

The Divine Conspiracy of Dallas Willard

Damsels in Distress: a Cultural Anti-Depressant

Celestial Courtroom: America at the Judgment of the Nations


Germans Seize Homeschoolers in Outrageous Raid

Want Affordable Health Care? Try These Tantalizing Options

D-Day and a Decadent French Wedding

What is Happiness? Pharrell Williams vs Aristotle

Why Did the Berlin Wall Fall?

Conservative Credo

Hip-Hop Hamilton

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HamiltonThe musical Hamilton is star-spangled patriotic and worthy of attention, even though hip-hop may not be the favorite musical genre of most Imaginative Conservatives. Why? Intelligence finds the answer to a question, but genius answers a question no one else has thought to ask. The genius of Lin-Manuel Miranda leapt across three centuries to answer the question of how to make the history of America’s Founding come alive in a musical. Mr. Miranda’s genius brings the American Revolution to life with a cast of multi-racial revolutionaries, mirroring the face of America today, who sing and dance in today’s revolutionary genres of rap and hip-hop. Mr. Miranda created and played the role of the “$10 Founding Father without a father” himself.[1]

Terry Teachout of The Wall Street Journal called Hamilton “the best and most important Broadway musical of the past decade.”[2] New York Times columnist David Brooks described it as “one of the most exhilarating experiences I’ve had in a theater… bold, rousing, sexy, tear-jerking and historically respectful — the sort of production that strips things down and asks you to think afresh about your country and your life.”[3]

The musical Hamilton opened off-Broadway in New York in February 2015 and was so popular that it moved to Broadway in August 2015 and has been packing in audiences to sold-out performances eight times a week ever since. An avalanche of awards and prizes has followed. Hamilton received a record-breaking sixteen Tony nominations and took home eleven. The musical won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and received the Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by History. The cast album received a Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album, and was named the number two Album of the Year 2015 by Billboard. Among many honors since, Lin-Manuel Miranda received the George Washington Prize Special Achievement Award and a “Genius Award” from the MacArthur Foundation.

Why does the musical Hamilton evoke such a seismic response? First and foremost, it is a powerful story, brilliantly told. Secondly, through Hamilton’s story, we experience the dramatic story of the birth of our nation all the way from the American Revolution through the ratification of the Constitution and the presidency of John Adams. Third, Hamilton’s biography runs parallel to that of the musical’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda in striking ways. Both are immigrants and outsiders whose sheer genius has left a mark on history. And finally, this rendition of Hamilton’s personal story embodies many of the classical elements of tragedy Aristotle describes in his Poetics, making this biography a piece of high literary art.

A moment of truth about this author: Like most people in America, I have not yet been able to see the Broadway production of Hamilton. But I have been listening to the cast album almost non-stop since discovering it a year ago, watching excerpts online, and sharing the music with friends, family, and the university students I teach, much to their surprise. (The buzz on campus: “Professor Elliott was playing rap in her class yesterday!”) Some of my most fanatically devoted students have memorized the entire score.

“This is the story of America then told by America now,” says Hamilton creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, who seasoned the melting pot of music with a little pop and a dash of R&B, throwing in a ballad or two. The contemporary musical flavor keeps the history fresh, while the musical’s costumes are eighteenth century. As improbable as this mixture may seem, it sizzles. The characters of George Washington, Aaron Burr, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Marquis de Lafayette join Hamilton, his son Philip, his wife Eliza, and her sister Angelica, as they debate, dance, and duel through the birth of our republic. The high energy, rapid-fire, hip-hop lyrics pack more syllables per minute than any other form of music (more than 20,000 words in just under three hours), which allowed Mr. Miranda to pour rich layers of meticulously researched historical content into impeccable rhyming couplets. The music is captivating while the lyrics sparkle with passion and intelligence.

There isn’t a whiff of historical stuffiness. Ambition is pitted against ambition, as the characters circle around each other in political intrigue as recognizable as that of contemporary Washington. The razzle-dazzle number “The Room Where it Happens” features Aaron Burr (played by Leslie Odom Jr.), who is maneuvering for power: “No one really knows how / The game is played, / The art of the trade, / How the sausage gets made.”[4] But the story doesn’t descend to cynicism. In fact, it has a kind of wide-eyed enthusiasm that inspires, much to the consternation of educators who have denigrated the Founding era as evil propagated by dead white males who favored the upper classes. Mr. Miranda’s interpretation obliterates that vision. The history of the American Revolution comes alive in the nonstop, overlapping layers of language and music, evoking fear in danger, respect for courage, and patriotic fervor. It is impossible not to be moved.

The opening words from Aaron Burr’s lips sketch the arc of Alexander Hamilton’s extraordinary life:

How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a

Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten

spot in the Caribbean by providence,

impoverished, in squalor,

grow up to be a hero and a scholar?[5]

The rest of the musical provides a nuanced answer to this complex question. Against all odds, Alexander Hamilton survived the abandonment of his father, an illness that killed his mother and nearly took his own life, the death of a cousin who became his guardian, and a fierce hurricane that devastated the Caribbean island of St. Croix, where he lived. A passionate, literate letter that young Hamilton wrote about the hurricane’s destruction was published, moving local island merchants to take up a collection to send this promising teenaged orphan to New York City. He landed there untutored but full of ambition. He knew he would have one chance to leave his mark on history, and he was not going to throw that opportunity away.

… I’m just like my country,

I’m young, scrappy and hungry,

and I’m not throwing away my shot!

I’m ‘a get a scholarship to King’s College.

I prob’ly shouldn’t brag, but dag, I amaze and astonish.

The problem is I got a lot of brains but no polish…[6]

This “diamond in the rough” is a quick learner in every way, utilizing his intellectual gifts and newly acquired social skills to “rise up.”[7] Hamilton joins the American Revolution to distinguish himself in battle and becomes the indispensable right-hand man of General George Washington. Handsome and charming, though penniless, Hamilton wins the hand of Elizabeth Schuyler, a daughter of one of the richest men in the colonies, and rises to the top of the military, social, and political milieu by sheer merit of his genius. He writes fifty-one of the Federalist papers, advocating ratification of the Constitution, and serves as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. Under President Washington, Hamilton becomes the youngest cabinet member, the first Secretary of the Treasury, and the architect of the financial system of the new nation.

As we follow the meteoric ascent of Hamilton, we meet other characters who figure prominently in the American Founding, including Thomas Jefferson, with whom Hamilton clashes in Cabinet meetings, and the Frenchman Marquis de Lafayette, who leads troops to aid the colonists in their war for independence from Britain. Rapper Daveed Diggs plays both Jefferson and Lafayette. Renée Elise Goldsberry delivers a Tony-winning portrayal of Angelica Schuyler, who introduces Hamilton to her sister and future wife, Elizabeth, played by Phillipa Soo, who also garnered a Tony nomination. Leslie Odom Jr. won a Tony for his portrayal of Aaron Burr, the friend and rival who ultimately kills Hamilton in a duel. (True to character, Mr. Miranda was up against Mr. Odom for this award.) George Washington is played with gravitas by Christopher Jackson. Jasmine Cephas-Jones doubles as Peggy Schuyler and Maria Reynolds; Jonathan Groff, who also garnered a Tony nomination, originated the role of King George III, who has some of the funniest lines in the musical. He sings in the style of a British pop breakup song:

You’ll be back, soon you’ll see

You’ll remember you belong to me…

And when push comes to shove

I will send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love!

Da da da dat da da da da da daya da…[8]

There are distinct similarities between Alexander Hamilton and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Both began life as outsiders: Hamilton immigrating from a Caribbean island, and Mr. Miranda as the son of parents from Puerto Rico. Mr. Miranda underscores the contributions of Hamilton and Marquis de Lafayette, who say in unison: “Immigrants – we get the job done!” followed by a fist bump. Hamilton’s extraordinary intelligence made him a voracious reader as a youngster and he poured out a torrent of written words throughout his adult life. Mr. Miranda’s parents recognized early on that their son was a prodigy and placed him in a New York school for the gifted and talented. It is obvious that he read widely. “Everybody there was smarter than I was, and half of them were funnier,” recalls Mr. Miranda. “So I had to figure out my thing and run really fast in that narrow lane.”[9] His thing proved to be writing musicals, and he hit the ground running. While still in high school Mr. Miranda started writing his first musical, In the Heights, an autobiographical look at growing up in New York with Puerto Rican roots, which eventually made it to Broadway.

After winning a Tony Award for In the Heights, Mr. Miranda headed off for a vacation and picked up Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography of Alexander Hamilton. As Mr. Miranda was lounging in a hammock, Hamilton’s story set his mind ablaze. Mr. Miranda saw parallels between the lives of Hamilton and rap artists Tupac and Biggie: They came from broken homes, grew up ambitious and verbally adept, and died in displays of male bravado.[10] It was clear to Mr. Miranda that rap was the genre to tell the story of Alexander Hamilton. Mr. Miranda immersed himself in history and literature of the Founding era, trying to get inside the heads of the historical figures he wanted to portray, while getting the history right. He spent six years researching and writing the score, which takes very little license with the facts for purposes of storytelling. To foster the creative process, Mr. Miranda went to the places Alexander Hamilton had been, sitting in the same rooms he had lived in, looking at the things Hamilton would have seen. Then he let it all simmer, creating a rich stew from which lyrics would emerge, sometimes unexpectedly.

When Mr. Miranda went to historian Ron Chernow to share the opening song from Hamilton, the author of the biography was dumbfounded. “You just did the first forty pages of my book in one song,” he exclaimed. “I know. Isn’t it great!” crowed Mr. Miranda. Once as he was on his way to a friend’s birthday party, Mr. Miranda listened to the rhythm of the train on tracks and suddenly the words to one of Aaron Burr’s songs came to him:

Death doesn’t discriminate

Between the sinners

And the saints

It takes and it takes and it takes

And we keep living anyway

We rise and we fall

And we break

And we make our mistakes

And if there’s a reason I’m still alive

When everyone who loves me has died

I’m willing to wait for it

I’m willing to wait for it.[11]

The astonished songwriter recalls, “That came in one giant lump on the train to Brooklyn.” So Mr. Miranda got off the train, went in to his friend and said “Happy Birthday! Now I have to go home and finish writing this song!”[12]

One aspect of Hamilton’s success is the fact that it tells a great story, a meteoric rise from rags to riches on the way up from obscurity to power, combined with all the elements of a Greek tragedy on the way down, as described by Aristotle in his Poetics.[13] Aristotle wrote that the plot for a good tragedy “should have for its subject a single action, whole and complete, with a beginning, a middle, and an end,” with a “single hero or a single period.”[14] Hamilton’s portrayal of the American Founding era clearly fills the bill on this score. Aristotle continues, saying hero of such a tragedy should be “above the common level,”[15] renowned and prosperous, whose misfortune is brought about by some error or frailty. Actions should originate between friends or enemies, or be committed in ignorance.[16] Aristotle concludes that the actions should be true to life and consistent with the protagonist’s character.[17]

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s depiction of Alexander Hamilton fulfills these requirements almost perfectly in telling the story of this extraordinary Founding Father. Hamilton was exceedingly intelligent, gifted in leadership, and successful in all he undertook. But his excessive libido proved to be his fatal flaw. (Martha Washington named her feral tom cat after Hamilton.) When Maria Reynolds came to his door begging for assistance, Hamilton took pity on her, then succumbed to her offer of sexual favors and became ensnared by her husband in blackmail. This sexual indiscretion sets a series of events into motion (spoiler alert!) that will eclipse Hamilton’s political life, damage his marriage, claim the life of his son, and ultimately snuff out his own. When Hamilton later dueled with his friend and sometimes enemy, Aaron Burr, Alexander shot in the air, just as he had advised his son Philip to do. This tragic miscalculation of the honorable intentions of their opponents proved fatal for father and son, completing the form of a Greek tragedy.

Mr. Miranda wanted to make history come alive, especially for students, through the musical Hamilton. This is becoming a reality through a $1.47 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, through which 20,000 New York City public school students from the least advantaged neighborhoods are being given access to $10 tickets for Wednesday matinees, after which they can interact with the performers. The Lehrman Institute is also working to integrate the musical into teaching materials for the classroom to foster appreciation of America’s history.

July 9, 2016 marked the end of an era. That night was the last Broadway performance of the original Hamilton cast members Lin-Manuel Miranda, Leslie Odom Jr., and Phillipa Soo, who have played Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton since the show opened. Plans are underway to open with a cast in Chicago later this year, with other cities queuing up for performances by a traveling cast next year, including London and Houston. You can see lots of snatches of the musical online, like the performance for the Tony Awards. The cast was interviewed for “Sixty Minutes,” which also filmed the making of the cast album.[18] Mr. Miranda gave homage to Founding Fathers on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and appeared on “The Late Late Show with James Corden,” riding along with the host for his “Broadway Carpool Karaoke” singing songs from Hamilton (which is hilarious). But just listening to the cast album is a rich experience, particularly a version that shows the lyrics.

My husband and I have wanted tickets for the past year, but have reluctantly concluded that the cost of scalper tickets, airfare, and hotel would wreck the family budget. But Charlotte sports writer Joe Posnanski, whose 14-year-old daughter Elizabeth was obsessed with Hamilton, raised money by taking speaking engagements to pay the unspeakable sum to take her to New York to see the Broadway show. She was ecstatic. Elizabeth already knew all the words to every song. Overcome with excitement, she clutched her father’s arm throughout the surreal experience of actually being there. I’ll let him tell the rest of the story after the last curtain call:

As we walked out into New York, the echo of the show still ringing, she held on to me tight, and she stumbled because she was still inside the dream. She leaned up and kissed me on the cheek.

“Are you going to start crying again?” I asked her.

“No,” she said, but she did, just a little, and she clung to me tighter, and I leaned down and sang in her ear:

‘They’ll tell the story of tonight.”

She smiled and wiped away her tear. “They’ll tell the story of tonight,” she sang back.[19]

The next morning, she burst into tears again when she saw the Tweet responding to her father’s message to Lin-Manuel Miranda, the author and star of Hamilton.

Sobbing reading this in my dressing room after a long week.

Thanks Joe. Thanks Elizabeth.

Books on the topic in this essay may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore

[1] Act I, Hamilton

[2] Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 6, 2015

[3] David Brooks, New York Times, Feb. 24, 2015

[4] Act II, Hamilton

[5] Act I, Hamilton

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] “Sixty Minutes Overtime,” interview of Lin-Manuel Miranda by Charlie Rose.

[10] “The Hamilton Experience,” David Brooks, The New York Times, Feb. 24, 2015.

[11] Act II, Hamilton

[12] “Sixty Minutes Overtime,” interview of Lin-Manuel Miranda by Charlie Rose. For more about the background of Hamilton’s lyrics, see Mr. Miranda’s posts on Genius.com.

[13] Aristotle, Poetics, Translated by S. H. Butcher, Provided by The Internet Classics Archive.

[14] Ibid, XXIII.

[15] Ibid, XV.

[16] Ibid, XIV.

[17] Ibid, XV.

[18] Making the Cast Album: “60 Minutes Overtime

[19] ‘”Hamilton’ works its magic on a Charlotte dad-daughter night that will live forever,” Charlotte Observer

 

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When Mother Teresa Came to Washington

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mother teresa and reaganIt was utterly ludicrous, stepping out of a chauffeured White House limousine to go hear Mother Teresa. Even then I recognized that, as a twenty-something working at the locus of political power. Her simple sari and sandals were incongruous among the tailored suits and silk ties of the people who styled themselves as Masters of the Universe. The crowd was large, and the photographers and reporters jostled each other aggressively to get near the woman popularly believed to be a living saint. She seemed uncomfortable, not as much from the noise and shoving as from the praise she received. She fixed her glance to the floor as Senator James Buckley introduced her. Mother Teresa spoke quietly to several hundred perfectly still listeners. Every small gesture she made provoked a swarm of photographic clicks like a cloud of gnats around her. But the sound of the milling photographers soon dissipated in a consciousness riveted on her joyous face. Now we know that we were gazing on the face of a saint who would be canonized in September 2016.

She told us of newborn babies that were left in dustbins in Calcutta near the home of the Missionaries of Charity, with the mother’s unspoken hope that they would be found and saved. She and her Sisters found eight aborted fetuses outside an abortion clinic that were still alive. They brought them home, nurtured them; one survived to grow up into a healthy child for whom they found an adoptive home. Mother Teresa and her sisters collected thousands of people from the streets: abandoned children, lepers, the sick, and the dying. Every day in Calcutta, the Missionaries of Charity fed 8,000 people and somehow they never had to turn one away because there was nothing to give.

She told us of a man who lay dying in a gutter, half-eaten by worms, rotting. Mother Teresa herself carried him to her home for the sick and dying. She laid him in a bed, washed his entire body using a basin and cloth, picked the maggots out of his open wounds and dressed them with ointment, laid him in fresh sheets and gave him a drink of cold water. He was given what he had not known until then: a clean place to lie, unconditional love, and dignity. “I have lived like an animal all my life,” the man told her, “but I will die like an angel.”

With flashbulbs popping, Members of Congress came to stand by her side, one by one. I waited in line to shake Mother Teresa’s hand, to ask her to sign my copy of Malcolm Muggeridge’s biography of her, Something Beautiful for God. The tiny nun, who barely came up to my shoulder, took my hand and pressed it into her rough and calloused one, saying “Love God, Barbara,” which came out sounding more like “Luff Gott, Bahbada.”

As I stood there among the purveyors of political power in the most powerful nation in the world, self-satisfied, puffed up with what we thought was our own importance (and I include myself among them), her presence inserted a slender needle of doubt, deflating my own exalted notions of political prowess. It occurred to me, as I looked around that room in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, that one day in Mother Teresa’s life brought more good to the face of the earth than all our efforts combined for a lifetime. The thought shook me to my core. And I can see now retrospectively that she lit a long fuse in me that would ignite the fire of faith in my soul six years later.

The next day, Mother Teresa came to the White House for lunch with President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy. A crowd of reporters and many of my colleagues from the White House staff joined them for her farewell. “What did you talk about, Mr. President?” shouted one of the reporters. “We listened,” he replied.

Mother Teresa came to Washington again to speak at the National Prayer Breakfast in 1994. More than 3,000 people assembled from virtually all the nations of the world: Prime Ministers, Presidents, Ambassadors, Members of Congress, Supreme Court Justices, and dignitaries from 150 countries. I had traveled there with leaders from nations newly liberated from Soviet domination. President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary were seated on the stage. As I looked around the huge ballroom in the Washington Hilton at the staggering assembly of the world’s political power, the tiny nun entered. The electrifying response made it clear who had the real power. She spoke with a moral and spiritual authority that eclipsed that of the governing officials.

Despite the fact that Mother Teresa had to step up on a footstool to be seen over the podium, her presence filled the ballroom to the rafters. She said boldly, “St. John says that you are a liar if you say you love God and you don’t love your neighbor. How can you love God whom you do not see, if you do not love your neighbor whom you see, whom you touch, with whom you live? Jesus makes himself the hungry one, the naked one, the homeless one, the unwanted one.”[1]

Mother Teresa then threw down the gauntlet on behalf of the unwanted ones, with Bill and Hillary Clinton seated a few feet away. Mother Teresa said in a firm voice, “The greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion. And if we can accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? We are fighting abortion by adoption–by care of the mother and adoption for her baby. We have saved thousands of lives.… Please don’t kill the child. I want the child. Please give me the child. I am willing to accept any child who would be aborted, and to give that child to a married couple who will love the child.”[2] Give me the child. Her plaintive plea seared the hearts of everyone who heard her. As all of us in the entire crowd rose to our feet in thunderous applause that billowed through the hall. Only two people remained seated: Bill and Hillary Clinton.

The Call Within the Call

On my first trip to Europe right after graduating from college, armed with a passport and a Eurail pass but no particular itinerary, I boarded a train in Luxembourg to travel to Greece, hoping it would be warmer than the northern clime where I had landed. As it turned out, this train went through Yugoslavia, stopping at Skopje, where hospitable locals offered me the opportunity to stay overnight and then continue on. I didn’t know that I was making a pilgrimage to the birthplace of a saint who would change the direction of my life. As it turns out, that was the town where Mother Teresa was born of Albanian parents in 1910 as Agnes Bojaxhiu. She entered the Irish order of the Sisters of Loreto at the age of eighteen and bid her family a tearful farewell as she left for Ireland to learn English. She feared that she would never see them again, and that proved to be the case. She had chosen her new name after Theresa of Lisieux, the Little Flower. She was sent to Calcutta in 1929, where she taught geography and catechism at St. Mary’s High School, and later became the principal. There she learned Hindi and Bengali, as she taught in the school that served orphans and poor children as well as more affluent boarding students. On her daily trips to the Loreto school she observed the bone-crushing poverty and squalor of the city. Dead bodies were collected from the streets where the weakest had fallen victim to disease or starvation. It seared the heart of the nun who lived cloistered away in the safety and relative comfort of the convent.

Mother Teresa was on a train Sept. 10, 1946, when she received what she called “the call within the call.” It became quite clear that she was to follow Jesus into the poorest slums of the city, live among the poor, and do his work there. We know that she did that heroically. But what has come to light only recently in the investigation for her canonization is that she had a much more difficult time acting on this call than was known. She struggled first with her own uncertainty, and then with the Church, from which she had to receive permission for this unconventional ministry. The Postulator of the cause, Father Brian Kolodiejchuk of the Missionaries of Charity, has documented her story, based on interviews and correspondence with her spiritual advisor Father Van Exem and Archbishop Perier.

Mother Teresa had made a secret vow in 1942 that she wanted to give as a gift to Jesus, “something very beautiful… something without reserve.” She promised “to give God anything that He may ask–not to refuse Him anything.”[3] She carried this private vow within her four years, not knowing in what way she could give this gift. When she received the “call within a call” to go and live among the poorest of the poor in Calcutta, this was what God was asking her to give. He spoke to her in an interior voice she sensed rather than heard. The words that resonated through her were these: You have become my spouse for My love. Will you refuse to do this for me? Refuse me not.[4] She kept a journal of these inner locutions, and wrote,

One day at Holy Communion I heard the same voice very distinctly: I want Indian nuns, victims of my love, who would be Mary and Martha, who would be so very united to me as to radiate my love on souls. I want free nuns covered with my poverty of the Cross. I want obedient nuns covered with my obedience of the cross. I want full of love nuns covered with the charity of the Cross. Wilt thou refuse to do this for me?[5]

In the hope that she could obtain permission to embark on this work among the poor, she wrote to Archbishop Perier in 1947, citing these things God had put in her heart. “These words, or rather, this voice frightened me. The thought of eating, sleeping, living like the Indians filled me with fear. I prayed long–I prayed so much… The more I prayed, the clearer grew the voice in my heart and so I prayed that He would do with me whatever He wanted. He asked again and again.”

Mother Teresa continued to pray, and she kept a journal of what God was impressing on her agitated soul. On another day she recorded:

You have become my spouse for my Love. You have come to India for Me. The thirst you had for souls brought you so far. Are you afraid to take one more step for your Spouse, for me, for souls? Is your generosity grown cold?… You have been always saying, ‘Do with me whatever you wish.’ Now I want to act…. Do not fear. I shall be with you always. You will suffer and you suffer now, but if you are my own little Spouse of the Crucified Jesus, you will have to bear these torments on your heart. Let me act. Refuse me not. Trust me lovingly, trust me blindly.[6]

The Lord punctured any potential pride by telling her You are, I know, the most incapable person, weak and sinful, but just because you are that, I want to use you for My glory.[7]

When Mother Teresa initially asked to be released from the convent to go onto the streets, she was denied permission and was told to say nothing and go back and pray, which she did obediently. As she waited to act on this fire that was increasingly consuming her, the outlines of what she was to do became more clear. She was to go with other Indian nuns to reach the unwashed children on the streets, bathe them, teach them to read, and feed them. She was to go to the sick and dying, wash and bind their wounds, and give them a place to die with dignity. She was to go to the forgotten ones, the lepers, and be a presence of love and light. She knew that she would need nuns equipped to move about in the city, and even began to make plans for them to learn to drive vehicles, which was outrageously unusual for any women, let alone nuns, in Calcutta in the 1940s. The contours of the ministry became clearer as she prayed, and thought, and planned. When she implored again, her superiors in the church doubted the authenticity of her call. Once again, she went back in obedience to pray further. But still, the permission was not granted from the Church.

In a vision, she saw a crowd with their hands lifted to her in the midst, as they cried out “Come, come, save us. Bring us to Jesus.” She wrote in her prayer journal, “I could see great sorrow and suffering in their faces. I was kneeling near Our Lady who was facing them. I did not see her face but I heard her say, ‘Take care of them. They are mine. Bring them to Jesus. Carry Jesus to them. Fear not….'” Then she could see the crowd in darkness with Christ on the cross before them, as she stood as a little child with Our Lady, facing the cross. Our Lord said, I have asked you. They have asked you and she, my mother, has asked you. Will you refuse to do this for me, to take care of them, to bring them to me? She answered, “You know Jesus, I am ready to go at a moment’s notice.”[8]

Mother Teresa’s perseverance and prayer finally sufficed to persuade Fr. Van Exem of the authenticity of her call. And when Archbishop Perier received Mother Teresa’s letter with the excerpts from her prayer journal cited above, he no longer doubted that it was the will of God, either. She then asked permission to move out of the convent to live among the poor. It was highly unusual to have a nun remain under vows but live in the outside world. But when the permission finally came from Rome to live on the streets among the poor, she was permitted to remain in her order. But her struggles for acceptance were not over. She encountered serious resistance from her fellow believers in Calcutta. “One convent where she stopped by to eat her lunch ordered her to eat under the back stairs like a common beggar. A Yugoslav Jesuit, of the very nationality and order that had first inspired her love for India, commented brusquely, ‘We thought she was cracked.’”[9]

Mother Teresa embarked on the ministry that the world now knows: the outreach to the unloved, the lost, the unwanted, the lepers, the untouchables. She picked up the dying and brought them to the home she founded to give them love and dignity in death. She picked up babies and infants that had been abandoned in the garbage heaps, like human refuse, and nursed them back to life. David Aikman wrote, “Many, perhaps the majority of the babies, had been abandoned almost as soon as they were born, and almost all were suffering from acute malnutrition or tuberculosis. Their eyes were weary and sunken into their skeletal little faces, their limbs often mere sticks, incapable of independent movement. Several were beyond saving even when immediately provided with the proper medicines and nutrition. And, of course, all of them were starving for love.”[10]

The Fruit of a Contemplative Life of Prayer

MT1Mother Teresa always insisted that the work she and the sisters did was not social work, but the fruit of their contemplative life of prayer. There were many people eager to push a label of social activism on her, or engage her in political issues centered on the poor. But she would have none of it. She said, “We are contemplatives in the world.” The work she did was rooted in prayer, and was an outpouring of the love she received in the mystical union with Christ. She saw Him in the destitute people she touched. As she explained it, she served “Christ in the distressing disguise of the poorest of the poor.” In touching their filthy and diseased bodies, she was touching his body. By serving them, she was participating in his love.

There are two words written on a sign that hangs on the walls of the Missionaries of Charity homes all over the world: “I thirst.” These words Christ uttered on the cross are a reminder to the sisters that he thirsts for souls. This thirst motivated Mother Teresa, and became a motivating force for the order she founded. The constitution of the Missionaries of Charities says: “Our aim is to quench the infinite thirst of Jesus Christ on the Cross for love of souls. We serve Jesus in the poor, we nurse Him, feed Him, clothe Him, visit Him.” It was this profound love, deepened in contemplative prayer, and nourished daily by the Eucharist, that sustained Mother Teresa through what would have been a crushing burden of misery for lesser souls. The ultimate source of this power is Christ Himself.

She warned that it is not possible to do this kind of work “without being a soul of prayer.” Time for silence and contemplative prayer was crucial for her work. “We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of the silence,” she said. “We need silence to be able to touch souls…. We must be aware of oneness with Christ, as He was aware of oneness with his Father.” We must “permit Him to work in us and through us, with his power, with His desire, with his love. We must become holy, not because we want to feel holy, but because Christ must be able to live His life fully in us. We are to be all love, all faith, all purity, for the sake of the poor we serve.”[11]

Mother Teresa set ripples of goodness into motion by her presence. “Our work is to encourage Christians and non-Christians to do works of love,” she sad. “And every work of love, done with a full heart, always brings people closer to God.”[12] When she brought rice to a destitute woman in Calcutta, she found that a Hindu woman gave half of what she received to a Muslim woman who lived nearby, because she too was in need. Rather than giving the first woman more, Mother Teresa let her make the sacrifice, because it had a value to the heart that had been moved to generosity.

Even the very poorest beggars gave Mother Teresa donations for others. She cherished the gift of a beggar who scraped together a few coins by not smoking for several days, and gave her what he had saved. The amount was miniscule, but the sacrifice was great. She loved a young couple that decided not to have a lavish wedding, but instead by wearing simple clothes and having a modest dinner with a few friends, they were able to give a gift to the poor of the money they had saved. These gestures of sacrificial giving touched her heart, because they were evidence of the participation of others in what God was doing. “Give until it hurts,” she often said. She knew the joy that would result. “We must grow in love and to do this we must go on loving and loving and giving and giving until it hurts–the way Jesus did. Do ordinary things with extraordinary love: little things like caring for the sick and the homeless, the lonely and the unwanted, washing and cleaning for them. You must give what will cost you something.”[13] She also often said, “There are no great deeds. Only small deeds done with great love.”

She points us toward the way of what she calls A Simple Path.

The fruit of silence is
prayer.
The fruit of prayer is
faith.
The fruit of faith is
love.
The fruit of love is
service.
The fruit of service is
Peace.[14]

Mother Teresa called herself a pencil in God’s hand. In her faithful yielding to God, she wrote with her life what He intended to demonstrate to a world grown cold. She was able to live and give His transforming love. She also had a winsome but arresting way of enlisting the aid of people to assist her efforts. She would simply ask them: “Would you like to do something beautiful for God?”

Although she had labored in relative obscurity for much of her life, she made the cover of Time magazine in December 1975 with an essay that declared her a living saint. She won the Nobel Peace Prize and the Templeton Prize for Religion. Her story penetrated the conscience of a jaded generation. The respect for her saintliness spread throughout the world, and her order now spans the globe in 139 countries. What began with twelve sisters has grown to 5,600 people, including two orders of brothers and one of priests, who run hospices, homeless shelters, and homes for the mentally ill. It has become one of the largest women’s orders in the Catholic Church worldwide. Although the Missionaries of Charity live in the acute poverty of those they serve, there is no shortage of young women, and now also men, who have joined this order. Their ministry has spread to other countries, including some in the West that did not think of themselves as home to the “poorest of the poor.” But the spread of AIDS, drugs, and the squalor of urban slums in first world countries has spawned pockets of Third-World conditions.

The conditions of poverty in the First World are expressed in two very different ways. Beyond the pockets of material poverty in otherwise affluent cities, there is a quiet, crippling poverty of the soul that is not as visible but every bit as devastating. Spiritual and relational impoverishment are often found in countries that are materially wealthy. Mother Teresa found in First-World countries people who hungered for sustenance at two levels: “the hungry and lonely, not only for food but for the word of God; the thirsty and the ignorant, not only for water but also for knowledge, peace, truth, justice, and love; the naked and unloved, not only for clothes but also for human dignity; the homeless and abandoned, [who yearn] not only for a shelter made of bricks, but for a heart that understands, that covers, that loves.” She expanded the definition of the “least of our brethren” to include “the unwanted, the unborn child, the racially discriminated against.” She reached out to alcoholics and drug addicts, captives “not only in body but also in mind and spirit.” Her heart went out to “all those who have lost all hope and faith in life.”[15]

The Mystery of Spiritual Darkness

One of the greatest mysteries in Mother Teresa’s life is a phenomenon that was almost entirely unknown to others during her lifetime. Only her spiritual directors knew. She suffered from a spiritual darkness that lasted more than forty years, until, as far as we know, her death. This woman whose radiant smile lit up the world around her was in fact walking by faith, and not by sight. Her communication with her spiritual directors in the 1960s, 70s and 80s describe a “darkness and nothingness” that eclipsed her spirit. In her “dark night of the soul” that lasted for nearly four decades, she had an overwhelming thirst for God that caused her great anguish. She likened her suffering to that of souls in Hell, parched for God. She questioned whether He had rejected her. And yet she remained surrendered to Him, and persevered despite all.[16] It was only later that this intense longing for Him became a part of her union with Him. The postulator for her canonization, Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, says, “She understood that the darkness she experienced was a mystical participation in Jesus’ sufferings.” She described in her prayer journal the sense of aloneness that Jesus experienced, the pain and darkness that he endured. In being allowed to share in his pain, it gave her a paradoxical joy. She wrote, “Today really I felt a deep joy that Jesus can’t go anymore through the agony, but that He wants to go through it in me. More than ever I surrender myself to Him. Yes, more than ever I will be at His disposal.” The interior pain she experienced was acute, and in a moment of unfiltered candor she voiced her cry to God: “When You asked to imprint Your Passion on my heart, is this the answer? If this brings You glory, if You get a drop of joy from this, if souls are brought to You, if my suffering satiates Your Thirst–here I am, Lord. With joy I accept all to the end of life and I will smile at Your Hidden Face–always.”[17] In the very deepest sense, she offered up the profound pain of separation from Christ to him as a gift. Fr. Kolodiejchuk concluded, “Seen in this light, the long and painful interior darkness takes on not only new meaning, but also gives the reason for total, even joyful surrender to it.”[18]

Mother Teresa told Malcolm Muggeridge, “Without our suffering, our work would just be social work, very good and helpful, but it would not be the work of Jesus Christ, not part of the Redemption. Jesus wanted to help by sharing our life, our loneliness, our agony, our death. Only by being one with us has he redeemed us. We are allowed to do the same; all the desolation of the poor people, not only their material poverty, but their spiritual destitution, must be redeemed, and we must share it, for only by being one with them can we redeem them, that is, by bringing God into their lives and bringing them to God.”[19]

Mother Teresa made it a goal of the Missionaries to Charity to “quench the infinite thirst of Jesus on the cross for love and for souls” by doing joy-filled work among the poorest of the poor. One personal hallmark was the undiluted joy that she radiated with a dazzling smile from her whole being. Joy was the one characteristic she insisted on for all those who joined her order. She only wanted women to join her who would radiate joy in their faces and their demeanor, regardless of how trying their circumstances. We know now that the joy she consistently showed was not an easy effervescence. It required an extraordinary resolution of will and a commitment of her whole person to withstand the hardest of trials in extreme poverty, and even a darkness of the spirit, and not to let it show. It is one of the hardest aspects of her life to fathom. And yet she radiated pure joy and the fragrance of Christ wherever she went.

She encourages us to go and do likewise. The Missionaries of Charity often sent a prayer to people by way of thanking them for contributions, however modest. Those that I received in the 1980s came with a hand-typed letter from one of the sisters, obviously written on a manual typewriter. The prayer was this:

Dear Jesus, help us to spread Your fragrance everywhere we go.
Flood our souls with your spirit and life.
Penetrate and possess our whole being, so utterly,
That our lives may only be a radiance of Yours.
Shine through us, and be so in us,
That every soul we come in contact with may feel Your presence in our soul.
Let them look up and see no longer us, but only Jesus!
Stay with us, and then we shall begin to shine as You shine;
So to shine as to be a light to others.
The light O Jesus will be all from You, none of it will be ours;
It will be you, shining on others through us.
Let us thus praise You in the way You love best by shining on those around us.
Let us preach You without preaching, not by words but by our example.
By the catching force, the sympathetic influence of what we do.
The evident fullness of the love our hearts bear to you.

Portions of this essay appeared first in Street Saints: Renewing America’s Cities by Barbara J. Elliott and is republished here with the gracious permission of the author. Books by Barbara J. Elliott and by Mother Teresa may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore

Notes:

[1] Address of Mother Teresa to National Prayer Breakfast, Washington, D.C. February 4, 1994.

[2] Mother Teresa, Ibid.

[3] Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C., “The Soul of Mother Teresa: Hidden Aspects of Her Interior Life,” Rome, Nov. 28, 2002, part 1A. ZE02112820

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C., “the Soul of Mother Teresa: Hidden Aspects of Her Interior Life,” Rome, Nov. 29, 2002, part 1, ZE02112920

[8] Ibid.

[9] Eileen Egan, Such a Vision of the Street: Mother Teresa–The Spirit and the Work (Garden City, NY: Doubleday& Co. 1985), 38.

[10] David Aikman, Great Souls: Six Who Changed a Century (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson 1998), 226.

[11] Malcolm Muggeridge, Something Beautiful for God, (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 47.

[12] Eileen Egan, Such a Vision of the Street, 357.

[13] Mother Teresa, A Simple Path, (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995) 99.

[14] Ibid 1.

[15] Ibid xxx-xxxi.

[16] Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C., “The Soul of Mother Teresa: Hidden Aspects of Her Interior Life,” Rome, Dec. 19, 2002, part 2. ZE02121922.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C., “The Soul of Mother Teresa: Hidden Aspects of Her Interior Life,” Rome, Dec. 20, 2002, part 2 concluded ZE02122020.

[19] Muggeridge, Something Beautiful for God, 49.

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John with Jesus: From Passover to the Garden of Gethsemane

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I went with Peter to make the arrangements for the Passover supper. When we arrived in Jerusalem, Jesus had told us to look for a man carrying a pitcher of water. We were to follow him into the house he entered, ask to speak to the owner, and say: “The master asks you where is the room for him to eat the Passover with his disciples?” Jesus was always giving us assignments like this, which always worked out, much to our amazement. This was no exception. The owner took us upstairs and showed us a nice, large room furnished with couches, opening to a beautiful view of the city. We thanked him and purchased the food and wine for the evening: unleavened bread, lamb, and bitter herbs, just like those Moses and the Israelites had eaten on the night the angel of death passed over them on their Exodus from slavery in Egypt.

When the twelve disciples gathered around Jesus that night, as he gave us bread, he said something we didn’t understand. “I have longed to eat this Pasch with you before I suffer, because I shall not eat it until it is fulfilled in the Kingdom of God.” What could that mean? He took the cup, and said, “This is my blood. Take this—share it—because I shall never drink wine again until the Kingdom of God comes.” Although there had been a festive mood among us since the hosannas on Sunday, as Jesus entered Jerusalem on a donkey to the waving of palms, Jesus was now sober and reflective as he uttered these words. He took the bread and broke it, handing it to each of us, saying “This is my body,” and he asked us to partake of his body in the new covenant. The image of his body broken for us stopped me completely with the realization that this was no mere metaphor. The body of Jesus would be broken. He explained many things to us, then He prayed for us, long and fervently, that we would be one, as he and the Father are one. He prayed for those who would believe through us in the days to come, and that they too would be one in the Father, united as Jesus is one with the Father and the Holy Spirit.

Peter, James, and I had heard the voice of the Father and had gotten a glimpse of the dove of the Holy Spirit on the mountaintop during the Transfiguration, as Jesus hovered above us in dazzling white, conversing with Elijah and Moses. It was overwhelming to the senses and the mind, and just as Peter, James, and I thought we could take in no more, suddenly it was just Jesus with us, as if the other realm had never intersected with ours. But we had seen it! Had he shared this glimpse to prepare us for what was to come? If so, what did it all mean, this intersection of the heavenly and earthly realms?

We walked with Jesus to the Mount of Olives, where we had gone with him other evenings whenever we were in Jerusalem. Jesus seemed to feel at home there, perhaps closer to his father somehow, as he looked out across the city to the valley, and beyond into the desert. Cicadas hummed in the dark blue velvet night. A dog yapped in the distance, answered by the howl of another. Several of the disciples had been singing psalms as we walked over from dinner in the upper room, psalms we always sang for Passover, recalling the mighty deeds of God the night that the blood of the lamb above the doors of the Israelites marked the homes that would be spared by the angel of death. I hummed along as we settled into chosen spots in the garden, watching Jesus intently. I could sense that he was deeply focused within his thoughts, which were impenetrable, even though I knew him so well.

Jesus asked Peter, James, and me to come with him as he walked a few steps away from the others. We settled into the soft grass, which was already wet with evening dew. It was as if the garden wept. Jesus knelt down and began to pray to his Father, as we had seen him do so many times before. But this time it was different, somehow. He opened his palms and turned his face up to the brilliant starry heaven in the clear night sky, imploring his Father with words we could barely hear. I moved a little closer to listen, my spirit drawn to his. I sensed an urgency I had never seen in Jesus. The same man who had commanded the waves of the storm to be calm, who had healed the sick and made a blind man see, who brought our friend Lazarus out of his tomb, four days dead, trailing his grave clothes behind him—this same man was imploring God the Father in words I moved in to hear. I was drawn irresistibly by the depth of anguish in the voice of Jesus as he spoke: “Father, if you are willing, take this cup away from me.” He stopped, and the silence was deafening. I held my breath, and so did he. Seconds passed. Finally, Jesus spoke again, plaintively: “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass me by.” As we waited for an answer, a snake slithered through the blue-green grass. Still, no sound came from heaven or from the lips of Jesus.

The other disciples had drifted off to sleep, but I struggled to keep my eyes open. Jesus walked back to the others, disappointed that they did not keep vigil with him. “Did you not find the strength to stay awake one hour with me?” he chastised them. Jesus returned to pray again, with increasing fervor. “Father, if it is within your will, I beg you, take this cup from me.” He prayed so intensely that he sweated, then his sweat turned to blood. As he prayed even longer, his body began to sway. He was shaking. From the thin blue night air, two angels suddenly materialized next to him. One held Jesus, propping up his swaying body against his own, while the other angel soothed his furrowed, sweating brow with a cooling gel, perfumed with wildflowers and frankincense. I watched in wonder, my eyes growing heavier in the scent, which was intoxicating, sweet, and pungent. I would have succumbed completely to sleep had I not heard the sharp, urgent tone of Jesus, as he prayed to his Father again.

Once more, Jesus spread open his arms, palms up, outstretched to heaven. In anguish, he cried, “Father, if you are willing, please take this cup away from me.” He paused. Surely a loving father would not want his son to suffer, I thought. Surely he has the power to stop the Sanhedrin with one mighty blow and annihilate the enemies of Jesus. He could send lightning bolts to incinerate the Roman occupying forces. Surely God the Father could unleash a mighty show of power in defense of his perfect and beloved son, demonstrating his victorious right hand! But no sign came. The silence was perfect, deafening in its oppressiveness. On this pause would hinge all of salvation history, I later thought, remembering this scene.

Finally, Jesus spoke, slowly and deliberately: “Nevertheless, let your will be done, not mine.” He continued to pray, still producing profuse sweat mingled with blood. He wrestled in agony with the burden of his mission, his love for the men and women whose lives he had touched. He had formed apprentices, apostles, to be sent to the far reaches of the world. Three long years he had done intensive training with us, and yet it was clear that we comprehended so little. Another wave of bloody sweat cascaded from the brow of Jesus. And as he wrestled with the future of his precarious mission to the world, he walked back to his sleeping disciples and chastised them for abandoning him. Despite my best efforts, it was then that I succumbed to sleep along with them.

Jesus spoke: “Look at them now, every one of them is asleep, even my beloved John, as I am about to enter into the struggle of my life, even with death itself, the fulfillment of all the prophecies, the realization of the plan of salvation history. Everything we planned since the beginning of time—the Father and the Holy Spirit and I together—hinges on what happens now. And my men, my hand-picked ambassadors to the world, are all out. Unconscious. Unable to muster enough commitment to stay with me while I pray. The desolation of their abandonment is a desert to my soul. How is it that the people I have come to save cannot muster a modicum of commitment to stay with me? Have I not taught you well enough? My anguish only intensifies in the silence. Yet this battle is far from over. The worst is yet to come. And I feel utterly alone.”

The serpent hissed at Jesus, then spoke, mocking him: “Where are your followers now? How can you save a world where not even these straggling human beings care enough to stay awake with you? It is futile. You should give up now. It is over.”

In one swift move, the foot of Jesus came down on the head of the serpent, crushing it, in an echo of the confrontation in the Garden of Eden. Eve’s fateful bite of the apple and her “no” to God had been reversed by Mary, who said “yes” to God. And Jesus, as the new Adam, would reverse the curse of original sin: “I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and hers; He will bruise your head and you will strike his heel.”

But the suffering Jesus would endure—to pay the overwhelming price of all man’s sin—had just begun, and it was about to become much worse, as he entered into the terrible Friday we call Good.

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The Divine Conspiracy of Dallas Willard

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Authentic discipleship transforms all aspects of life, every day, at work, at home, in all relationships. My discipleship to Jesus is, within clearly definable limits, not a matter of what I do, but of how I do it. Brother Lawrence, who was a kitchen worker and cook, remarks, “Our sanctification does not depend upon changing our works, but in doing that for God’s sake which we commonly do for our own”…

Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Barbara Elliott as she invites us to consider the legacy of philosopher Dallas Willard. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher

One of the great oaks among us is fallen. Dallas Willard, who died May 8 (2013), was a professor of philosophy, a teacher par excellence, and a great soul, capable of inspiring deep faith. As a young Southern Baptist pastor in the 1960s, he left the ministry to study philosophy because he was convinced he was “abysmally ignorant” of God and the soul, and had concluded that Jesus and the philosophers were addressing the same questions.[1] Willard pushed deep into the intellectual roots of philosophy and Christian theology, while nourishing the spiritual disciplines of silence and prayer. The result was a quietly luminous relationship with Christ himself, which shone forth through Willard’s books on discipleship. The Divine Conspiracy won awards when it was published in 1998, setting off a series of explosions in the church world by causing people who called themselves Christians to evaluate their actual relationship with Christ, if they had one at all.

Christ’s Great Commission was to “go and make disciples” and the church is failing to do that, says Willard, and failing rather miserably. A disciple of Jesus is one who is with Jesus, learning to be like him, but as Willard points out, “one can be a professing Christian and a church member in good standing without being a disciple. There is, apparently, no real connection between being a Christian and being a disciple of Jesus.”[2]

If we are not truly disciples, we are missing the opportunity to step into “the divine conspiracy,” the collaboration with God here and now, where he is at work renewing his creation. He invites us into partnership with him. As Willard explains in The Divine Conspiracy, “God’s own ‘kingdom,’ or ‘rule,’ is the range of his effective will, where what he wants done is done. The person of God himself and the action of his will are the organizing principles of his kingdom, but everything that obeys those principles, whether by nature or by choice, is within his kingdom.”[3] This kingdom is among us, and is accessible now.

“Think of visiting in a home where you have not been before,” said Willard in his mellifluous baritone voice. “It is a fairly large house, and you sit for a while with your host in a living room or on the veranda. Dinner is announced, and he ushers you down a hall, saying at a certain point, ‘Turn, for the dining room is at hand,’ or more likely, ‘Here’s the dining room.’”[4] Jesus invites us to step into his kingdom with the same clear directions. There is no suggestion in scripture that the kingdom hasn’t happened yet or is about to happen or about to be here. “Where God’s will is being accomplished, the kingdom of God is right beside us. It is indeed The Kingdom Among Us.”[5] Christ invites us to take part in it now, as partners with God in the “divine conspiracy.”

Co-Conspirators with God

This exhilarating role as co-conspirators with God, agents mixed into the ordinary workings of the world, is the task for which we were born, asserted Willard. But simply showing up to do church-related things is not discipleship, he warned, not by a long shot. We were created to participate in the “kingdom among us” as well as the kingdom of heaven after we die, and that participation should be evidence of God’s life within us.

“The human job description…found in chapter 1 of Genesis indicates that God assigned to us collectively the rule over all living things on earth, animal and plant. We are responsible before God for life on the earth. However unlikely it may seem from our current viewpoint, God equipped us for this task by framing our nature to function in a conscious, personal relationship of interactive responsibility with him. We are meant to exercise our ‘rule’ only in union with God, as he acts with us. He intended to be our constant companion or co-worker in the creative enterprise of life on earth. That is what his love for us means in practical terms.”[6]

“God’s desire for us is that we should live in him. He sends among us the Way to himself. That shows what, in his heart of hearts, God is really like – indeed, what reality is really like. In its deepest nature and meaning our universe is a community of boundless and totally competent love.”[7]

Dallas Willard devoured books as a child during the Great Depression, while he was schooled in a one-room Missouri schoolhouse. “Plato was his companion when he worked as an agricultural laborer after high school.

Willard recalls giving his Baptist Sunday school teachers a ‘very bad time’ as a young teenager. He didn’t think it made sense that you ‘got saved’ and were ‘stuck with it.’”[8] His questions led him to some conclusions that pushed the boundaries of his Southern Baptist upbringing.

After Willard left pastoring to study philosophy, he encountered Richard Foster, a Quaker pastor, forging a friendship and collaboration that would extend across the coming decades into the ecumenical work of Renovarè, a ministry that transcends denominational lines to foster discipleship in Christ. In addition to teaching philosophy to university students and speaking in conferences across the country, Dallas Willard was the author of The Spirit of the Disciplines; Hearing God; Renovation of the Heart; The Great Omission; as well as The Divine Conspiracy; and a book on German philosopher Edmund Husserl, Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge.

Willard’s philosophical study of reality in phenomenology led him to probe the results of people’s beliefs. He was troubled by the gap between people professing faith and living it. As he explained in The Divine Conspiracy, “According to Gallup surveys, 94 percent of Americans believe in God and 74 percent claim to have made a commitment to Jesus Christ. About 34 percent confess to a ‘new birth’ experience. These figures are shocking when thoughtfully compared to statistics on the same groups for unethical behavior, crime, mental distress and disorder, family failures, addictions, financial misdealings, and the like.”[9]

Where is the Transformation of Character?

“The understanding of a commitment to Jesus Christ has not penetrated our character deeply enough to influence our behavior,” laments Willard, “transformation of life and character are not a part of the redemptive message offered by the church today.”[10] My experience in working with both protestant and Catholic congregations across the country leads me to conclude that he is correct in his assessment. Far too few people who say they believe in Christ show evidence of becoming more like him.

“The current gospels, left and right, exhibit the very same type of conceptual disconnection from, and practical irrelevance to, the personal integrity of believers – and certainly so, if we put that integrity in terms of biblically specific ‘Christlikeness,’” observes Willard. “And both lack any essential bearing upon the individual’s life as a whole, especially upon the occupations or work time and upon the fine texture or our personal relationships in the home and neighborhood.”[11] The fruits of faith that should be transforming the world and the relationships of Christ’s followers are lacking. “So as things now stand we have, on the one hand, some kind of ‘faith in Christ’ and, on the other, the life of abundance and obedience he is and offers. But we have no effective bridge from the faith to the life. Some do work it out. But when that happens it is looked upon as a fluke or an accident, not a normal and natural part of the regular good news itself.”[12]

The result is that “the resources of God’s kingdom remain detached from human life. There is no gospel for human life and Christian discipleship, just one for death or one for social action. The souls of human beings are left to shrivel and die on the plains of life because they are not introduced into the environment for which they were made, the living kingdom of eternal life,” Willard concludes. “To counteract this we must develop a straightforward presentation, in word and life, of the reality of life now under God’s rule, through reliance upon the word and person of Jesus. In this way we can learn from him how to live our lives as he would live them if he were we. We can enter his eternal kind of life now.”[13]

But we have to cooperate with God’s purposes in our life. We enter into an apprenticeship, a partnership with Christ, learning to listen and walk with him, collaborating with him as he shows us what he is doing in a given situation. “Within his overarching dominion God has created us and has given each of us, like him, a range of will – beginning from our minds and bodies and extending outward, ultimately to a point not wholly predetermined but open to the measure of our faith. His intent is for us to learn to mesh our kingdom with the kingdoms of others. Love of neighbor, rightly understood, will make this happen. But we can only love adequately by taking as our primary aim the integration of our rule with God’s. That is why love of neighbor is the second, not the first, commandment and why we are told to seek first the kingdom, or rule, of God.”[14]

The Cosmic Conspiracy to Overcome Evil with Good

If we align our heart and will with God through prayer and honestly seek to cooperate with what he is doing among us now, “as God’s flash point in reigniting eternal life among us, he inducts us into the eternal kind of life that flows through himself. He does this first by bringing that life to bear upon our needs, and then by diffusing it throughout our deeds—deeds done with expectation that he and his Father will act with and in our actions.”[15] The life of Christ, his love, his wisdom, and his power, flow through us into the lives we touch. “Then we heartily join his cosmic conspiracy to overcome evil with good.”[16]

A “major element in this training is experience in waiting for God to move, not leaping ahead and taking things into our own hands. Out of this waiting experience there comes a form of character that is priceless before God, a character that can be empowered to do as one chooses. This explains why James says that patience in trials will make us ‘fully functional’ (teleion), ‘perfect’ (James 1:4).”[17] Doing things with God’s timing is essential. “Sometimes we must wait for God to do as we ask because the answer involves changes in other people, or even ourselves, and that kind of change always takes time. Sometimes, apparently, the changes in question involve conflicts going on in a spiritual realm lying entirely outside human affairs (Dan. 10:13). We always live in a larger context of activities we do not see.”[18]

Becoming a disciple does not mean doing a few religious things once a week and leaving the rest of our life the same. Authentic discipleship transforms all aspects of life, every day, at work, at home, in all relationships. “So as his disciple I am not necessarily learning how to do special religious things, either as a part of ‘full-time service’ or as a part of ‘part-time service.’ My discipleship to Jesus is, within clearly definable limits, not a matter of what I do, but of how I do it. And it covers everything, ‘religious’ or not. Brother Lawrence, who was a kitchen worker and cook, remarks, “Our sanctification does not depend upon changing our works, but in doing that for God’s sake which we commonly do for our own.”[19]

It’s About the Kind of Person We Become

What God gets out of our lives—and, indeed, what we get out of our lives–is simply the person we become. .”[20] Living as a disciple means emulating Jesus. “We do not just hear what Jesus said to do and try to do that. Rather, we also notice what he did, and we do that too. We notice, for example, that he spent extended times in solitude and silence, and we enter solitude and silence with him. We note what a thorough student of the scriptures he was,

and we follow him, the Living Word, into the depths of the written word. We notice how he used worship and prayer, how he served those around him. We have Bibles with red letters to indicate what he said. Might we not make good use of a Bible that has green letters for what he did? Green for ‘go,’ or ‘do it’?”[21] I sometimes wonder if our churches need to measure not how many people they seat, but how many they send.

This is not a call for activism. Instead it is a call for deep inner alignment with God’s purposes. The means by which we align our heart with that of God is prayer, which is the primary means of forming character. It combines our freedom with God’s power, resulting in service through love. Transformed hearts produce transformed persons, through and through, and deeds arise from the heart quickened by faith. “The deeds of the kingdom arise naturally out of a certain quality of life. We cultivate that life in its wholeness by directing our bodies into activities that empower the inner and outer person for God and through God. In this second part of the curriculum for Christlikeness, then the main task is, by engaging in ways of using the body differently, to disrupt and conquer habits of thought, feeling, and action that govern our lives as if we or someone other than God were God and as if his kingdom were irrelevant or inaccessible to us.”[22] Spiritual disciplines forge the unity of mind, body, and soul.

Willard reminds us that this has been true for all souls throughout all ages of Christendom. The great souls “who have made great spiritual progress all seriously engaged with a fairly standard list of disciplines for the spiritual life. There has been abuse and misunderstanding, no doubt, but the power of solitude, silence, meditative study, prayer, sacrificial giving, service, and so forth as disciplines are simply beyond question.”[23] These spiritual disciplines “aim at the heart and its transformation. We want to ‘make the tree good.’ We do not aim just to control behavior, but to change the inner castle of the soul, that God may be worshiped ‘in spirit and in truth’ and right behavior cease to be a performance.”[24] Our inner substance is actually transformed.

Christ makes disciples and when they become genuinely Christlike, he allows us to take responsibility in his kingdom work. “When we submit what and where we are to God, our rule or dominion then increases. In Jesus’ words from the parable of the talents (Mt. 25) our Master says, ‘Well done! You were faithful with a few things, and I will put you in charge of many things.’…For God is unlimited creative will and constantly invites us, even now, into an ever larger share in what he is doing.”[25] Some of those things are quite surprising.

God’s Grubby People

Dallas Willard gives a reading of the Beatitudes that stretched my understanding of who the “blessed” truly are. He claims that the Beatitudes are addressed to the “hopeless blessables” and to the seriously crushed.[26] “The flunk-outs and drop-outs and burned-outs. The broke and the broken. The drug heads and the divorces. The HIV-positive and the herpes-ridden. The brain-damaged, the incurably ill. The barren and the pregnant too-many- times or at the wrong time. The overemployed, the underemployed, the unemployed. The unemployable. The swindled, the shoved aside, the replaced. The parents with children living on the side of the street, the children with parents not dying in the ‘rest’ home. The lonely, the incompetent, the stupid. The emotionally starved or emotionally dead.”[27] “Even the moral disasters will be received by God as they come to rely on Jesus, count on him, and make him their companion in his kingdom. Murderers and child-molesters. The brutal and the bigoted. Drug lords and pornographers. War criminals and sadists. Terrorists. The perverted and the filthy and the filthy rich.”[28] That understanding removes the “them and the “us” from any people we may encounter. “If I, as a recovering sinner myself, accept Jesus’ good news, I can go to the mass murderer and say, ‘You can be blessed in the kingdom of the heavens. There is forgiveness that knows no limits.’ To the pederast and the perpetrator of incest. To the worshiper of Satan. To those who rob the aged and weak. To the cheat and the liar, the bloodsucker and the vengeful: Blessed! Blessed! Blessed! As they flee into the arms of The Kingdom Among Us. These are God’s grubby people.”[29] Jesus sought them out, and we are called to do the same.

“Any spiritually healthy congregation of believers in Jesus will more or less look like these ‘brands plucked from the burning.’ If the group is totally nice, that is a sure sign something has gone wrong.

For here are the foolish, weak, lowly, and despised of the world, whom God has chosen to cancel out the humanly great (1 Cor. 1:26-31; 6).”[30] We all meet at the foot of the cross. “Speaking to these common people, ‘the multitudes,’ who through him had found blessing in the kingdom, Jesus tells them it is they, not the ‘best and brightest’ on the human scale, who are to make life on earth manageable as they live from the kingdom (Mt. 5: 13-16). God gives them ‘light’- truth, love, and power – that they might be the light for their surroundings. He makes them ‘salt’ to cleanse, preserve, and flavor the times through which they live.”[31]

A Curriculum for Christlikeness

Doctrine is not discipleship, says Willard. To form a “curriculum for Christlikeness,” we need to move away from two objectives “that are often taken as primary goals [and] must not be left in that position….These are external conformity to the wording of Jesus’ teachings about actions in specific context and profession of perfectly correct doctrine. Historically these are the very things that have obsessed the church visible….We need wait no longer. The results are in. They do not provide a course of personal growth and development that routinely produced people who ‘hear and do.’”[32]

“Much the same can be said of the strategies – rarely taken as primary objectives, to be sure, but much used – of encouraging faithfulness to the activities of a church or other outwardly religious routines and various ‘spiritualities,’ or the seeking out of special states of mind or ecstatic experiences. These are good things. But let it be said once and for all that, like outward conformity and doctrinally perfect profession, they are not to be taken as major objectives in an adequate curriculum for Christlikeness.”[33] These are all secondary. “Special experiences, faithfulness to the church, correct doctrine, and external conformity to the teachings of Jesus all come along as appropriate, more or less automatically, when the inner self is transformed. But they do not produce such a transformation. The human heart must be plowed much more deeply.”[34]

The mind and heart must be filled up by the relationship and presence of God, nurtured in an ongoing conversation and partnership. “When the mind is filled with this great and beautiful God, the ‘natural’ response, once all ‘inward’ hindrances are removed, will be to do ‘everything I have told you to do.’”[35]

Training Disciples

How, then, do we teach others to become disciples? First of all, it comes through loving him completely, seeing the magnificence of his person, and allowing his love to fill our lives. Willard tells us, “The key, then, to loving God is to see Jesus, to hold him before the mind with as much fullness and clarity as possible. It is to adore him. For purposes of training disciples, we should divide this into four main aspects. First, we teach his beauty, truth, and power while he lived among us as one human being among others.

“Second, we teach the way he went to execution as a common criminal among other criminals on our behalf….The exclusiveness of the Christian revelation of God lies here. No one can have an adequate view of the heart and purposes of the God of the universe who does not understand that he permitted his son to die on the cross to reach out to all people, even people who hated him. That is who God is. But that is not just a ‘right answer’ to a theological question. It is God looking at me from the cross with compassion and providing for me, with never-failing readiness to take my hand to walk on through life from wherever I may find myself at the time.”

“Third, we teach the reality of Jesus risen, his actual existence now as a person who is present among his people. We present him in his ecclesia, his motley but glorious crew of called-out ones.…So the continuing incarnation of the divine Son in his gathered people must fill our minds if we are to love him and his Father adequately and thus live on the rock of hearing and doing.

“But fourth, we teach the Jesus who is the master of the created universe and of human history. He is the one in control of all the atoms, particles, quarks, ‘strings,’ and so forth upon which the physical cosmos depends.”[40]

Anyone who truly comes to know Jesus in this way, loving him through and through, will want to obey and serve him, not as a duty but out of an abundance of love for him. “Jesus himself knew that this was the key. The keeping of his commandments was the true sign of love for him, because that love is what made it possible and actual. In this love of Jesus everything comes together: ‘If anyone loves me, my word he will keep, and my Father will love him, and we will move in with him and live there’ (John 14:23).”[42]

“In his ‘commencement address’ (John 14-16) to his first apprentices, he once again gives them the all-inclusive commandment ‘that you love one another just as I have loved you’ (John 15:12) After clarifying that this includes ‘laying down our life for our friends,’ and not least for Jesus himself, he makes the following observation: ‘You are my friends if you keep this commandment.’”[43]

Five Dimensions of The Kingdom Among Us

We enter into a changed relationship with Christ, a basis of “loving cooperation, of shared endeavor, in which his aims are our aims and our understanding and harmony with his kingdom are essential to what he does with and through us.”[44] We step across the threshold into the life of The Kingdom Among Us.

Dallas Willard shows us five dimensions of the eternal kind of life in The Kingdom Among Us:

  1. Confidence in and reliance upon Jesus as the Son of man, the one appointed to save
  2. But this confidence in the person of Jesus naturally leads to a desire to be his apprentice in living in and from the kingdom of God….Our apprenticeship to him means that we live within his word, that is, put his teachings into practice (John 8:31). And this progressively integrates our entire existence into the glorious world of eternal
  3. The abundance of life realized through apprenticeship to Jesus, ‘continuing in his word,’ naturally leads to obedience. The teaching we have received and our experience of living with it brings us to love Jesus and the Father with our whole being: heart, soul, mind, and (bodily) strength. And so we love to obey him, even where we do not yet understand or really ‘like’ what that requires.
  4. Obedience, with the life of discipline it requires, both leads to and, then, issues from the pervasive inner transformation of the heart and soul. The abiding condition of the disciple becomes one of ‘love, joy, peace, long-suffering [patience], kindness, goodness, faith to the brim, meekness and self-control.’ (Gal. 5:22)…These are called the ‘fruit of the spirit’ because they are not direct effects of our efforts but are brought about in us as we admire and emulate Jesus and do whatever is necessary to learn how to obey
  5. Finally, there is power to work the works of the kingdom…Great power requires great character if it is to be a blessing and not a curse, and that character is something we only grow [46]

What will the kingdom of heaven be like? Willard tells us “[O]ur experience will not be fundamentally different in character from what it is now, though it will change in significant details. The life we now have as the persons we now are will continue, and continue in the universe in which we now exist.

Our experience will be much clearer, richer, and deeper, of course, because it will be unrestrained by the limitations now imposed upon us by our dependence upon our body. It will, instead, be rooted in the broader and more fundamental reality of God’s kingdom and will accordingly have far greater scope and power.”[47]

We are participating in the eternal life now, living in “now” and the “not yet” simultaneously. “The agape love of 1 Corinthians 13 will increasingly become simply a matter of who we are. But the effects of our prayers, words, and deeds – and sometimes of our mere presence – will also increasingly be of a nature and extent that cannot be explained in human terms. Increasingly what we do and say is ‘in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ,’ and every part of our life becomes increasingly eternal….We are now co-laborers with God.”[48]

Dallas Willard showed many souls the way to enter the “divine conspiracy” with Christ to overcome evil with good in this realm, while looking toward the next. His wise, warm voice will be missed here, but Heaven most certainly rejoices with his arrival. May he rest in peace.

This essay was originally published here in May 2013.

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Books by Dallas Willard

Translations of Works by Edmund Husserl:

Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics (1993). Dordrecht/Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Philosophy of Arithmetic, (2003). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Philosophy

• Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge: A Study in Husserl’s Philosophy (Series in Continental Thought, Vol 6) (1984). Ohio University Press.

Christian Books:

The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives (1988). San Francisco: Harper and Row.

The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (1998). San Francisco: Harper.

Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship With God (1999). InterVarsity Press (USA). (formerly titled In Search of Guidance: Understanding How God Changes Lives)

Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ (2002). Colorado Springs: NavPress.

• The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship (2006). San Francisco: Harper.

• Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge (2009).San Francisco: Harper.

• Revolution of Character: Discovering Christ’s Pattern for Spiritual Transformation (2005). Colorado Springs: NavPress.

• Place for Truth: Leading Thinkers Explore Life’s Hardest Questions (2010). IVP Books.

Notes

1. www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/september/27.45.html?start=3

2. Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1998), page 291.

3. Ibid., page 25.

4. Ibid., page 31.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid., page 22.

7. Ibid., page 11.

8. www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/september/27.45.html?start=3

9. Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, page 38.

10. Ibid., page 41.

11. Ibid., page 54.

12. Ibid., page 55.

13. Ibid., page 58.

14. Ibid., page 26.

15. Ibid., page 27.

16. Ibid., page 90.

17. Ibid., page 250.

18. Ibid., page 251.

19. Ibid., pages 23-24. Cited from Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God, (Old Tappan, NJ:  Fleming H. Revell, 1974).

20. Ibid., page 250.

21. Ibid., page 352.

22. Ibid., page 354.

23. Ibid., page 355.

24. Ibid., page 364.

25. Ibid., page 24.

26. Ibid., page 122.

27. Ibid., pages 123-124.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid., page 320.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid., pages 320-321.

35. Ibid., page 321.

36. Ibid., page 334.

37. Ibid., pages 334-335.

38. Ibid., page 335.

39. Ibid., page 336.

40. Ibid. pages 334-336

41. Ibid., note 12.

42. Ibid., page 336.

43. Ibid., page 367.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid., page 368.

47. Ibid., page 395.

48. Ibid., page 396.

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Russell Kirk, Sage of Piety Hill: Planting Seeds for Generations to Come

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russell kirk

Russell and Annette Kirk with the author

Driving across the snowy landscape of Michigan the day after Christmas in 1973, I was somewhat apprehensive. I had been invited to take part in the first seminar of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in the ancestral home of Dr. Russell Kirk at Piety Hill. We were to spend the next five days discussing his book, The Roots of American Order, which had just rolled off the presses. I had just been named the new editor of Imprimis at Hillsdale College and had scarcely unpacked before heading up north through the woods to Mecosta, but I had managed to finish reading the book. And what a book! It gives a panoramic view of the ideas on ordered liberty that emerge from Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London to converge in Philadelphia in the founding of the American Republic. The prospect of spending several days in the company of this towering intellect whose wisdom encompassed such breadth and depth was intimidating.

I needn’t have worried. The genuine warmth of Dr. Kirk and his wife Annette made staying at the Kirk home at Piety Hill a mesmerizing experience. It was like stepping back in time at least a century, maybe several, to find oneself in a thoroughly Gothic house, steeped in tradition, rooted in the history of multiple generations, and full of beautiful artifacts. It was a place to discuss big ideas in small circles, continuing the conversation throughout the day and into the night, imbibing while drinking in the stories Dr. Kirk told while seated next to the fireplace. After dinner, guests might play the violin or piano, or recite poetry for our entertainment, just as they did in Jane Austen’s era.

This house was for me a magical place, somehow untethered from modernity, overflowing with books and pictures and stories of bygone eras. It was a house literally untethered from a television set, because Dr. Kirk had found the one his young daughters had smuggled into the house against his orders. He picked up the television and literally threw it out the window. The cord caught on the way down the side of the house, leaving the television set dangling there for several days, much to the amusement of the neighbors (and his daughters).

In preparation for celebrating Dr. Kirk’s centenary, as I have thought about the man who became my friend and mentor over the years, it occurs to me that his house was a metaphor for his life. Like his family’s gothic house at Piety Hill, Russell Kirk was decidedly un-modern. His orientation came from looking across the centuries to cull the wisdom of the ages to share it with other seekers of truth. This is the sense in which he was conservative: He set out to conserve the absolute best in thought from the Western tradition to fill the hungry minds and hearts of the next generation to renew the culture. His house held tangible manifestations of these ideas and it would become a frequent destination for pilgrimages of students in search of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. It still attracts them now.

The Kirk house was full of family portraits, handed down through multiple generations, and cherished because of loyalty to tradition. The family portrait gallery was full of interesting and, well… unusual people, from the grandfather who was a banker to the great-aunt who held séances. Dr. Kirk’s books are full of portraits of the family of great thinkers who span the ages: Aristotle, Virgil, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Thomas More, Edmund Burke, and of course Randolph of Roanoke and T.S. Eliot, about whom he wrote illuminating biographies. Dr. Kirk knew Eliot personally as a friend, and the time they shared provided a wealth of insights that found their way onto the pages of Eliot and His Age. The wisdom of the thinkers he chose to write about shaped the intellectual landscape of the world we inhabit. When Dr. Kirk wrote about them in The Conservative Mind, he provided the genealogy for America’s conservative intellectual movement. As their intellectual heirs, we stand in what Edmund Burke called the eternal bond of “the dead, the living, and the yet unborn.” (Since that first seminar, I am acutely aware of moving inexorably closer to the front of that continuum.)

The Kirk house at Piety Hill and Dr. Kirk himself were both venerable and full of quirky eccentricities. The house had steps rounded over the years by thousands of footfalls, odd little passageways, and cubby-holes that make it unique and charming. It is the antithesis of the modern trend that has flattened and streamlined modern homes, making them bland, beige, cloned rows in subdivisions. Dr. Kirk hated ugly architecture and anything that diminished individuality. He found it repugnant and damaging to the human spirit. In a similar way, Dr. Kirk was never bulldozed into becoming a beige bland, modern man. He fiercely maintained his independence, remaining free to write and say what he thought, without having to bulldoze his ideas to make them fit the blueprint of modernity in what he called “Behemoth University.” Although Dr. Kirk spoke at more than three hundred universities in his lifetime, he spent limited time in his career tethered to any single university, except for visiting appointments. He always returned to Piety Hill unaffiliated and unbowed.

The Kirk house was overflowing with books, so many that Dr. Kirk needed a separate building to house his library, where he would sit up late evenings, often working through the night, as he continued the “great conversation” with the greatest minds of the western tradition. He knew them all in the fellowship of ideas, and the books in his library were some of his best friends. With his prodigious, near photographic memory, and a brilliantly impressive mind, Dr. Kirk carried within him a library of the canon of the West.

The front door to the Kirk house was open to visitors from all over the world who wanted to learn. A steady stream of students, professors, and friends in the realm of ideas flowed into Piety Hill for nourishment of mind and spirit. Dr. Kirk not only received hundreds of people in his home, he traveled to speak in hundreds of places throughout the nation and abroad year after year—at universities and conferences, even on television. It’s worth recalling that Dr. Kirk was a national figure who commanded respect from both the political left and the right, one who advised presidents, and who shaped the intellectual landscape of the nation. Both Time and Newsweek called him one of America’s leading thinkers. He would plant the intellectual seeds for renewing America in not only the political and economic realms, but in the moral and spiritual realms, because he knew they are always interconnected.

The seeds Dr. Kirk planted were both metaphorical and literal. The area surrounding Mecosta had been aggressively denuded of trees by lumber companies, so Dr. Kirk made it a personal mission to plant trees. We trudged through the snow with him on walks around Mecosta and he happily pointed out trees he had planted himself. This showed us a side of Dr. Kirk that, despite everything lamentable in an unraveling world, was inherently optimistic. Only a man who cares about the future plants trees he will not sit beneath. He gave the gift of greenness to generations to come because he loved the land and took personal responsibility to leave his corner of the world better than he found it.

Dr. Kirk also left people better than when he found them. On my first visit to Piety Hill, I stayed in the room ordinarily occupied by Clinton, whom the Kirk’s affectionately dubbed their “runaway butler.” He was away on one of his unexplained sojourns, leaving the room free for me. Clinton was a somewhat mentally limited stray the family took in, rescuing him from a life of petty larceny. (His service to the family was a mixed blessing, as he neglected to put out the fire in the fireplace one Ash Wednesday, resulting in a fire that destroyed much of the house. Undeterred, Dr. Kirk and Annette painstakingly rebuilt their beloved house, taking the opportunity to expand and update it a bit.) The Kirks took in a steady procession of unwed mothers, political refugees from places like Vietnam and Ethiopia, and other people in various kinds of need. This was all done quietly, with no fanfare. It was Annette who provided the hands-on care, but the heart of her husband beat in tandem with hers in the commitment to help others by welcoming them into their home.

The willingness to extend a hand to people in need was a natural manifestation of Dr. Kirk’s faith. So were the beautiful religious artifacts that filled the house, some from neighboring churches torn down to be modernized, while others were purchased on travels throughout the world. The house at Piety Hill rested on the foundation of faith in God, and although Russell Kirk never wore his religion on his sleeve, it is clear that his understanding of the world was rooted in reverence for our Creator and the certainty that we will all be judged by Him. He believed that all things in this valley of tears will be perfected in God’s perfect time, and that any lasting order in this world is anchored in the transcendent truth of the world to come.

Sometimes the barrier between the visible and invisible realms is thin. It was very, very thin at the Kirk house, which was, well…. haunted. Various apparitions regularly manifested themselves, especially to visitors. There was a crying baby, a man in a checked coat and lacy cravat, and Dr. Kirk’s grandfather Amos—all of whom appeared to so many people staying at Piety Hill over the years, that it is impossible not to believe that they were in some way real. I was one of those visitors who had an unearthly encounter. So when Russell Kirk wrote ghost stories, it was not always pure fiction, strictly speaking. Although some people chided him for this genre of writing, he sold far many more books of his ghost stories than all his other books together. His tales were published next to stories by Stephen King.

While in Scotland, Dr. Kirk encountered ghostly apparitions. It was also here that after his spiritual awakening from agnosticism, he had an epiphany, in which he was given a clear spiritual sense of his mission, which was to write about the ideas that would inspire the renewal of Western civilization. That is exactly what he did.

In the years since, the life’s work of Russell Kirk has reached people all over he globe, informing their minds, strengthening their spirits, and passing on the fire of Pentecost. I am so grateful to be one of those people in whom the fire ignited. And I am grateful that before he died, I was able to thank Dr. Kirk in person for all that he had taught me and modeled over the years, especially the seamless integration of what he wrote and how he lived: wisdom rooted in faith, imagination, and love. Now one hundred years after his birth, may Russell Kirk rest in the mansions of peace and hear the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” And may his legacy endure forever.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

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The Divine Conspiracy of Dallas Willard

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Dallas Willard

Dallas Willard

One of the great oaks among us is fallen. Dallas Willard, who died May 8 (2013), was a professor of philosophy, a teacher par excellence, and a great soul, capable of inspiring deep faith. As a young Southern Baptist pastor in the 1960s, he left the ministry to study philosophy because he was convinced he was “abysmally ignorant” of God and the soul, and had concluded that Jesus and the philosophers were addressing the same questions.[1] Willard pushed deep into the intellectual roots of philosophy and Christian theology, while nourishing the spiritual disciplines of silence and prayer. The result was a quietly luminous relationship with Christ himself, which shone forth through Willard’s books on discipleship. The Divine Conspiracy won awards when it was published in 1998, setting off a series of explosions in the church world by causing people who called themselves Christians to evaluate their actual relationship with Christ, if they had one at all.

Christ’s Great Commission was to “go and make disciples” and the church is failing to do that, says Willard, and failing rather miserably. A disciple of Jesus is one who is with Jesus, learning to be like him, but as Willard points out, “one can be a professing Christian and a church member in good standing without being a disciple. There is, apparently, no real connection between being a Christian and being a disciple of Jesus.”[2]

If we are not truly disciples, we are missing the opportunity to step into “the divine conspiracy,” the collaboration with God here and now, where he is at work renewing his creation. He invites us into partnership with him. As Willard explains in The Divine Conspiracy, “God’s own ‘kingdom,’ or ‘rule,’ is the range of his effective will, where what he wants done is done. The person of God himself and the action of his will are the organizing principles of his kingdom, but everything that obeys those principles, whether by nature or by choice, is within his kingdom.”[3] This kingdom is among us, and is accessible now.

“Think of visiting in a home where you have not been before,” said Willard in his mellifluous baritone voice. “It is a fairly large house, and you sit for a while with your host in a living room or on the veranda. Dinner is announced, and he ushers you down a hall, saying at a certain point, ‘Turn, for the dining room is at hand,’ or more likely, ‘Here’s the dining room.’”[4] Jesus invites us to step into his kingdom with the same clear directions. There is no suggestion in scripture that the kingdom hasn’t happened yet or is about to happen or about to be here. “Where God’s will is being accomplished, the kingdom of God is right beside us. It is indeed The Kingdom Among Us.”[5] Christ invites us to take part in it now, as partners with God in the “divine conspiracy.”

Co-Conspirators with God

This exhilarating role as co-conspirators with God, agents mixed into the ordinary workings of the world, is the task for which we were born, asserted Willard. But simply showing up to do church-related things is not discipleship, he warned, not by a long shot. We were created to participate in the “kingdom among us” as well as the kingdom of heaven after we die, and that participation should be evidence of God’s life within us.

“The human job description…found in chapter 1 of Genesis indicates that God assigned to us collectively the rule over all living things on earth, animal and plant. We are responsible before God for life on the earth. However unlikely it may seem from our current viewpoint, God equipped us for this task by framing our nature to function in a conscious, personal relationship of interactive responsibility with him. We are meant to exercise our ‘rule’ only in union with God, as he acts with us. He intended to be our constant companion or co-worker in the creative enterprise of life on earth. That is what his love for us means in practical terms.”[6]

“God’s desire for us is that we should live in him. He sends among us the Way to himself. That shows what, in his heart of hearts, God is really like – indeed, what reality is really like. In its deepest nature and meaning our universe is a community of boundless and totally competent love.”[7]

Dallas Willard devoured books as a child during the Great Depression, while he was schooled in a one-room Missouri schoolhouse. “Plato was his companion when he worked as an agricultural laborer after high school. Willard recalls giving his Baptist Sunday school teachers a ‘very bad time’ as a young teenager. He didn’t think it made sense that you ‘got saved’ and were ‘stuck with it.’”[8] His questions led him to some conclusions that pushed the boundaries of his Southern Baptist upbringing.

imagesAfter Willard left pastoring to study philosophy, he encountered Richard Foster, a Quaker pastor, forging a friendship and collaboration that would extend across the coming decades into the ecumenical work of Renovarè, a ministry that transcends denominational lines to foster discipleship in Christ. In addition to teaching philosophy to university students and speaking in conferences across the country, Dallas Willard was the author of The Spirit of the Disciplines; Hearing God; Renovation of the Heart; The Great Omission; as well as The Divine Conspiracy; and a book on German philosopher Edmund Husserl, Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge.

Willard’s philosophical study of reality in phenomenology led him to probe the results of people’s beliefs. He was troubled by the gap between people professing faith and living it. As he explained in The Divine Conspiracy, “According to Gallup surveys, 94 percent of Americans believe in God and 74 percent claim to have made a commitment to Jesus Christ. About 34 percent confess to a ‘new birth’ experience. These figures are shocking when thoughtfully compared to statistics on the same groups for unethical behavior, crime, mental distress and disorder, family failures, addictions, financial misdealings, and the like.”[9]

Where is the Transformation of Character?

“The understanding of a commitment to Jesus Christ has not penetrated our character deeply enough to influence our behavior,” laments Willard, “transformation of life and character are not a part of the redemptive message offered by the church today.”[10] My experience in working with both protestant and Catholic congregations across the country leads me to conclude that he is correct in his assessment. Far too few people who say they believe in Christ show evidence of becoming more like him.

“The current gospels, left and right, exhibit the very same type of conceptual disconnection from, and practical irrelevance to, the personal integrity of believers – and certainly so, if we put that integrity in terms of biblically specific ‘Christlikeness,’” observes Willard. “And both lack any essential bearing upon the individual’s life as a whole, especially upon the occupations or work time and upon the fine texture or our personal relationships in the home and neighborhood.”[11] The fruits of faith that should be transforming the world and the relationships of Christ’s followers are lacking. “So as things now stand we have, on the one hand, some kind of ‘faith in Christ’ and, on the other, the life of abundance and obedience he is and offers. But we have no effective bridge from the faith to the life. Some do work it out. But when that happens it is looked upon as a fluke or an accident, not a normal and natural part of the regular good news itself.”[12]

The result is that “the resources of God’s kingdom remain detached from human life. There is no gospel for human life and Christian discipleship, just one for death or one for social action. The souls of human beings are left to shrivel and die on the plains of life because they are not introduced into the environment for which they were made, the living kingdom of eternal life,” Willard concludes. “To counteract this we must develop a straightforward presentation, in word and life, of the reality of life now under God’s rule, through reliance upon the word and person of Jesus. In this way we can learn from him how to live our lives as he would live them if he were we. We can enter his eternal kind of life now.”[13]

But we have to cooperate with God’s purposes in our life. We enter into an apprenticeship, a partnership with Christ, learning to listen and walk with him, collaborating with him as he shows us what he is doing in a given situation. “Within his overarching dominion God has created us and has given each of us, like him, a range of will – beginning from our minds and bodies and extending outward, ultimately to a point not wholly predetermined but open to the measure of our faith. His intent is for us to learn to mesh our kingdom with the kingdoms of others. Love of neighbor, rightly understood, will make this happen. But we can only love adequately by taking as our primary aim the integration of our rule with God’s. That is why love of neighbor is the second, not the first, commandment and why we are told to seek first the kingdom, or rule, of God.”[14]

The Cosmic Conspiracy to Overcome Evil with Good

If we align our heart and will with God through prayer and honestly seek to cooperate with what he is doing among us now, “as God’s flash point in reigniting eternal life among us, he inducts us into the eternal kind of life that flows through himself. He does this first by bringing that life to bear upon our needs, and then by diffusing it throughout our deeds—deeds done with expectation that he and his Father will act with and in our actions.”[15] The life of Christ, his love, his wisdom, and his power, flow through us into the lives we touch. “Then we heartily join his cosmic conspiracy to overcome evil with good.”[16]

A “major element in this training is experience in waiting for God to move, not leaping ahead and taking things into our own hands. Out of this waiting experience there comes a form of character that is priceless before God, a character that can be empowered to do as one chooses. This explains why James says that patience in trials will make us ‘fully functional’ (teleion), ‘perfect’ (James 1:4).”[17] Doing things with God’s timing is essential. “Sometimes we must wait for God to do as we ask because the answer involves changes in other people, or even ourselves, and that kind of change always takes time. Sometimes, apparently, the changes in question involve conflicts going on in a spiritual realm lying entirely outside human affairs (Dan. 10:13). We always live in a larger context of activities we do not see.”[18]

Becoming a disciple does not mean doing a few religious things once a week and leaving the rest of our life the same. Authentic discipleship transforms all aspects of life, every day, at work, at home, in all relationships. “So as his disciple I am not necessarily learning how to do special religious things, either as a part of ‘full-time service’ or as a part of ‘part-time service.’ My discipleship to Jesus is, within clearly definable limits, not a matter of what I do, but of how I do it. And it covers everything, ‘religious’ or not. Brother Lawrence, who was a kitchen worker and cook, remarks, “Our sanctification does not depend upon changing our works, but in doing that for God’s sake which we commonly do for our own.”[19]

It’s About the Kind of Person We Become

What God gets out of our lives—and, indeed, what we get out of our lives–is simply the person we become. .”[20] Living as a disciple means emulating Jesus.  “We do not just hear what Jesus said to do and try to do that. Rather, we also notice what he did, and we do that too. We notice, for example, that he spent extended times in solitude and silence, and we enter solitude and silence with him. We note what a thorough student of the scriptures he was, and we follow him, the Living Word, into the depths of the written word. We notice how he used worship and prayer, how he served those around him. We have Bibles with red letters to indicate what he said. Might we not make good use of a Bible that has green letters for what he did? Green for ‘go,’ or ‘do it’?”[21] I sometimes wonder if our churches need to measure not how many people they seat, but how many they send.

This is not a call for activism. Instead it is a call for deep inner alignment with God’s purposes. The means by which we align our heart with that of God is prayer, which is the primary means of forming character. It combines our freedom with God’s power, resulting in service through love. Transformed hearts produce transformed persons, through and through, and deeds arise from the heart quickened by faith. “The deeds of the kingdom arise naturally out of a certain quality of life. We cultivate that life in its wholeness by directing our bodies into activities that empower the inner and outer person for God and through God. In this second part of the curriculum for Christlikeness, then the main task is, by engaging in ways of using the body differently, to disrupt and conquer habits of thought, feeling, and action that govern our lives as if we or someone other than God were God and as if his kingdom were irrelevant or inaccessible to us.”[22] Spiritual disciplines forge the unity of mind, body, and soul.

Willard reminds us that this has been true for all souls throughout all ages of Christendom. The great souls “who have made great spiritual progress all seriously engaged with a fairly standard list of disciplines for the spiritual life. There has been abuse and misunderstanding, no doubt, but the power of solitude, silence, meditative study, prayer, sacrificial giving, service, and so forth as disciplines are simply beyond question.”[23] These spiritual disciplines “aim at the heart and its transformation. We want to ‘make the tree good.’ We do not aim just to control behavior, but to change the inner castle of the soul, that God may be worshiped ‘in spirit and in truth’ and right behavior cease to be a performance.”[24] Our inner substance is actually transformed.

Christ makes disciples and when they become genuinely Christlike, he allows us to take responsibility in his kingdom work. “When we submit what and where we are to God, our rule or dominion then increases. In Jesus’ words from the parable of the talents (Mt. 25) our Master says, ‘Well done! You were faithful with a few things, and I will put you in charge of many things.’…For God is unlimited creative will and constantly invites us, even now, into an ever larger share in what he is doing.”[25] Some of those things are quite surprising.

God’s Grubby People

Dallas Willard gives a reading of the Beatitudes that stretched my understanding of who the “blessed” truly are. He claims that the Beatitudes are addressed to the “hopeless blessables” and to the seriously crushed.[26] “The flunk-outs and drop-outs and burned-outs. The broke and the broken. The drug heads and the divorces. The HIV-positive and the herpes-ridden. The brain-damaged, the incurably ill. The barren and the pregnant too-many-times or at the wrong time. The overemployed, the underemployed, the unemployed. The unemployable. The swindled, the shoved aside, the replaced. The parents with children living on the side of the street, the children with parents not dying in the ‘rest’ home. The lonely, the incompetent, the stupid. The emotionally starved or emotionally dead.”[27] “Even the moral disasters will be received by God as they come to rely on Jesus, count on him, and make him their companion in his kingdom. Murderers and child-molesters. The brutal and the bigoted. Drug lords and pornographers. War criminals and sadists. Terrorists. The perverted and the filthy and the filthy rich.”[28]

RenovationOfTheHeartThat understanding removes the “them and the “us” from any people we may encounter. “If I, as a recovering sinner myself, accept Jesus’ good news, I can go to the mass murderer and say, ‘You can be blessed in the kingdom of the heavens. There is forgiveness that knows no limits.’ To the pederast and the perpetrator of incest. To the worshiper of Satan. To those who rob the aged and weak. To the cheat and the liar, the bloodsucker and the vengeful: Blessed! Blessed! Blessed! As they flee into the arms of The Kingdom Among Us. These are God’s grubby people.”[29] Jesus sought them out, and we are called to do the same.

“Any spiritually healthy congregation of believers in Jesus will more or less look like these ‘brands plucked from the burning.’ If the group is totally nice, that is a sure sign something has gone wrong. For here are the foolish, weak, lowly, and despised of the world, whom God has chosen to cancel out the humanly great (1 Cor. 1:26-31; 6).”[30] We all meet at the foot of the cross.  “Speaking to these common people, ‘the multitudes,’ who through him had found blessing in the kingdom, Jesus tells them it is they, not the ‘best and brightest’ on the human scale, who are to make life on earth manageable as they live from the kingdom (Mt. 5: 13-16). God gives them ‘light’- truth, love, and power – that they might be the light for their surroundings. He makes them ‘salt’ to cleanse, preserve, and flavor the times through which they live.”[31]

A Curriculum for Christlikeness

Doctrine is not discipleship, says Willard.  To form a “curriculum for Christlikeness,” we need to move away from two objectives “that are often taken as primary goals [and] must not be left in that position….These are external conformity to the wording of Jesus’ teachings about actions in specific context and profession of perfectly correct doctrine. Historically these are the very things that have obsessed the church visible….We need wait no longer. The results are in. They do not provide a course of personal growth and development that routinely produced people who ‘hear and do.’”[32]

“Much the same can be said of the strategies – rarely taken as primary objectives, to be sure, but much used – of encouraging faithfulness to the activities of a church or other outwardly religious routines and various ‘spiritualities,’ or the seeking out of special states of mind or ecstatic experiences. These are good things. But let it be said once and for all that, like outward conformity and doctrinally perfect profession, they are not to be taken as major objectives in an adequate curriculum for Christlikeness.”[33] These are all secondary. “Special experiences, faithfulness to the church, correct doctrine, and external conformity to the teachings of Jesus all come along as appropriate, more or less automatically, when the inner self is transformed. But they do not produce such a transformation. The human heart must be plowed much more deeply.”[34]

The mind and heart must be filled up by the relationship and presence of God, nurtured in an ongoing conversation and partnership. “When the mind is filled with this great and beautiful God, the ‘natural’ response, once all ‘inward’ hindrances are removed, will be to do ‘everything I have told you to do.’”[35]

Training Disciples

How, then, do we teach others to become disciples?  First of all, it comes through loving him completely, seeing the magnificence of his person, and allowing his love to fill our lives. Willard tells us, “The key, then, to loving God is to see Jesus, to hold him before the mind with as much fullness and clarity as possible. It is to adore him. For purposes of training disciples, we should divide this into four main aspects. First, we teach his beauty, truth, and power while he lived among us as one human being among others.

“Second, we teach the way he went to execution as a common criminal among other criminals on our behalf…. The exclusiveness of the Christian revelation of God lies here. No one can have an adequate view of the heart and purposes of the God of the universe who does not understand that he permitted his son to die on the cross to reach out to all people, even people who hated him. That is who God is. But that is not just a ‘right answer’ to a theological question. It is God looking at me from the cross with compassion and providing for me, with never-failing readiness to take my hand to walk on through life from wherever I may find myself at the time.”

“Third, we teach the reality of Jesus risen, his actual existence now as a person who is present among his people. We present him in his ecclesia, his motley but glorious crew of called-out ones.…So the continuing incarnation of the divine Son in his gathered people must fill our minds if we are to love him and his Father adequately and thus live on the rock of hearing and doing.

“But fourth, we teach the Jesus who is the master of the created universe and of human history. He is the one in control of all the atoms, particles, quarks, ‘strings,’ and so forth upon which the physical cosmos depends.”[40]

Anyone who truly comes to know Jesus in this way, loving him through and through, will want to obey and serve him, not as a duty but out of an abundance of love for him.  “Jesus himself knew that this was the key. The keeping of his commandments was the true sign of love for him, because that love is what made it possible and actual. In this love of Jesus everything comes together: ‘If anyone loves me, my word he will keep, and my Father will love him, and we will move in with him and live there’ (John 14:23).”[42]

“In his ‘commencement address’ (John 14-16) to his first apprentices, he once again gives them the all-inclusive commandment ‘that you love one another just as I have loved you’ (John 15:12) After clarifying that this includes ‘laying down our life for our friends,’ and not least for Jesus himself, he makes the following observation: ‘You are my friends if you keep this commandment.’”[43]

Five Dimensions of The Kingdom Among Us

We enter into a changed relationship with Christ, a basis of “loving cooperation, of shared endeavor, in which his aims are our aims and our understanding and harmony with his kingdom are essential to what he does with and through us.”[44] We step across the threshold into the life of The Kingdom Among Us.

Dallas Willard shows us five dimensions of the eternal kind of life in The Kingdom Among Us:

1. Confidence in and reliance upon Jesus as the Son of man, the one appointed to save us.

2. But this confidence in the person of Jesus naturally leads to a desire to be his apprentice in living in and from the kingdom of God….Our apprenticeship to him means that we live within his word, that is, put his teachings into practice (John 8:31). And this progressively integrates our entire existence into the glorious world of eternal living.

3. The abundance of life realized through apprenticeship to Jesus, ‘continuing in his word,’ naturally leads to obedience. The teaching we have received and our experience off living with it brings us to love Jesus and the Father with our whole being: heart, soul, mind, and (bodily) strength. And so we love to obey him, even where we do not yet understand or really ‘like’ what that requires.

4. Obedience, with the life of discipline it requires, both leads to and, then, issues from the pervasive inner transformation of the heart and soul. The abiding condition of the disciple becomes one of ‘love, joy, peace, long-suffering [patience], kindness, goodness, faith to the brim, meekness and self-control.’ (Gal. 5:22)…These are called the ‘fruit of the spirit’ because they are not direct effects of our efforts but are brought about in us as we admire and emulate Jesus and do whatever is necessary to learn how to obey him.

5. Finally, there is power to work the works of the kingdom…Great power requires great character if it is to be a blessing and not a curse, and that character is something we only grow toward.[46]

What will the kingdom of heaven be like? Willard tells us “[O]ur experience will not be fundamentally different in character from what it is now, though it will change in significant details. The life we now have as the persons we now are will continue, and continue in the universe in which we now exist. Our experience will be much clearer, richer, and deeper, of course, because it will be unrestrained by the limitations now imposed upon us by our dependence upon our body. It will, instead, be rooted in the broader and more fundamental reality of God’s kingdom and will accordingly have far greater scope and power.”[47]

We are participating in the eternal life now, living in “now” and the “not yet” simultaneously. “The agape love of I Corinthians 13 will increasingly become simply a matter of who we are. But the effects of our prayers, words, and deeds – and sometimes of our mere presence – will also increasingly be of a nature and extent that cannot be explained in human terms. Increasingly what we do and say is ‘in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ,’ and every part of our life becomes increasingly eternal…. We are now co-laborers with God.”[48]

Dallas Willard showed many souls the way to enter the “divine conspiracy” with Christ to overcome evil with good in this realm, while looking toward the next. His wise, warm voice will be missed here, but Heaven most certainly rejoices with his arrival. May he rest in peace.

Books by Dallas Willard

Translations of Works by Husserl

Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics (1993). Dordrecht/Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Philosophy of Arithmetic, (2003). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Philosophy

• Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge: A Study in Husserl’s Philosophy (Series in Continental Thought, Vol 6) (1984). Ohio University Press.

Christian Books

The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives (1988). San Francisco: Harper and Row.

The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (1998). San Francisco: Harper.

Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship With God (1999). InterVarsity Press (USA). (formerly titled In Search of Guidance: Understanding How God Changes Lives)

Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ (2002). Colorado Springs: NavPress.

• The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship (2006). San Francisco: Harper.

• Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge (2009).San Francisco: Harper.

• Revolution of Character: Discovering Christ’s Pattern for Spiritual Transformation (2005). Colorado Springs: NavPress.

• Place for Truth: Leading Thinkers Explore Life’s Hardest Questions (2010). IVP Books.

Notes

1. www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/september/27.45.html?start=3

2. Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1998), page 291.

3. Ibid., page 25.

4. Ibid., page 31.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid., page 22.

7. Ibid., page 11.

8. www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/september/27.45.html?start=3

9. Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, page 38.

10. Ibid., page 41.

11. Ibid., page 54.

12. Ibid., page 55.

13. Ibid., page 58.

14. Ibid., page 26.

15. Ibid., page 27.

16. Ibid., page 90.

17. Ibid., page 250.

18. Ibid., page 251.

19. Ibid., pages 23-24. Cited from Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God, (Old Tappan, NJ:  Fleming H. Revell, 1974).

20. Ibid., page 250.

21. Ibid., page 352.

22. Ibid., page 354.

23. Ibid., page 355.

24. Ibid., page 364.

25. Ibid., page 24.

26. Ibid., page 122.

27. Ibid., pages 123-124.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid., page 320.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid., pages 320-321.

35. Ibid., page 321.

36. Ibid., page 334.

37. Ibid., pages 334-335.

38. Ibid., page 335.

39. Ibid., page 336.

40. Ibid. pages 334-336

41. Ibid., note 12.

42. Ibid., page 336.

43. Ibid., page 367.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid., page 368.

47. Ibid., page 395.

48. Ibid., page 396.

The post The Divine Conspiracy of Dallas Willard appeared first on The Imaginative Conservative.

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