The God of the biblical faith was for me the one who heard the cries of the oppressed and who delivered them. I saw the dialectic of judgment and grace being worked out in the midst of social upheaval. I steeped myself in the prophets and developed, by exhaustive reading of Marxist theory, a sharply analytical, prophetic critique of American capitalism. But for me in those exciting march-filled days, God was always out there, fighting an oppressor that was out there, an oppressor in the evil structure of society, the principalities and powers. I had little understanding of the oppressor inside the deepest part of each of us.
My deep involvement in the movement enriched me tremendously and in no way do I look back on it with regret. But like so many other dedicated radicals, I quickly burned out. Why? For a long time I didn’t understand why, but now I think I know. I initially dropped out because my health broke down, but it wasn’t this that kept me out, for had I known a loving, empathetic response to being sick on the part of my movement friends I would have regained strength—to come back fighting. But that is exactly what I did not experience.
I was sick and few visited me, hardly anyone from my family, my academic and my movement friends. What was worse was that I didn’t even expect them to, so low was my sense of self-worth. If it wasn’t for the love of a husband who stood by me and provided for me, a husband who learned how to love growing up in a missionary family, I think I would have gone stark-raving mad.
As it was, from the long hours of loneliness and virtual solitary confinement, I lost much of my ability to communicate and much of my sense of perspective. I became so inwardly focused that I had difficultly expressing myself outwardly in any way, especially by writing (the skill that was so critical to my sense of self-worth as an intellectual). Even my speech became, in unfamiliar company, halting and hesitant.
I eventually regained my health enough to resume graduate studies at UC Berkeley in California, where my husband and I now live. I hoped to restore my lost sense of self- confidence by pursuing an academic subject in which I had always excelled, the study of ancient languages. I did succeed in proving to myself that I could compete on intellectual terms, for I became an excellent student in cuneiform studies. But after two years of constant study it soon became apparent that the academic game was all too much like the games I encountered elsewhere--the race was not to the swift. I ended up even more embittered and disillusioned, lost in a morass of self-pity. The biblical tradition seemingly meant little to me any more; I had despaired of any meaning in life. But somehow deep down inside I still cared, I really cared.
It was in my darkest hour, in the moment of deepest despair, that faith began to well up in me like a bubbling spring. In the midst of my greatest awareness of the tragedy of the human condition, the inevitability of human sin, I began, miraculously, to hope. For through years of suffering I was finally learning to put my trust in God alone. I realized now how I had laid expectations on others that only a transcendent God could fulfill. I saw clearly for the first time that the gospel message is the final solution to the human dilemma, the only answer to the agonizing questions: why is truth so often on the scaffold and wrong so often on the throne? In Christ I saw embodied the suffering love that does not succeed on worldly terms (cross) but is nonetheless victorious (resurrection): the paradox beyond human understanding.
Then I learned to pray, learned from a group of radical counter-cultural evangelical Christians (CWLF--Christian World Liberation Front*) to whom I turned with a sense of compelling urgency that I can only see as directed by God. The prayer I uttered was the first in my life in which I turned to God in true repentance and acknowledged God's (non-sexist) sovereignty over my life, and, in effect, surrendered. What I experienced in the “hour I first believed” can only be described as “amazing grace,” as a mighty onrush of love, as God’s unconditional acceptance.
Paul Tillich put it so well:
You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you ... The grace of being able to look frankly into the eyes of another. The miraculous grace of reunion of life with life ... the power to say yes to ourselves, ... peace enters into us and makes us whole ... self-hate and self-contempt disappears and ... oneself is united with itself.
Then began the slow, anguishing death of the old self, the long inner struggle that will never in this lifetime be over. Coming to know Christ can be likened to culture shock, when all the old ego-props are knocked down and the rug pulled out from under one’s feet. A maturing relationship with God involves the pain of continual self-confrontation as well as the joy of self-fulfillment, continual dying and rising again, continual rebirth, the dialectic of judgment and grace. For the first time in my life I have begun to have the strength to face myself as I am without excuse--but equally important, without guilt. I know that I am sinful but I could not bear this knowledge if I did not also know that I am accepted.
I now understand the profundity of 1 Corinthians 13, when Paul says that all that ultimately matters is love. Human endeavor without it is a “noisy gong or clanging cymbal.” One may have “prophetic power” (i.e., be a perceptive theologian), “understand all mysteries and all knowledge” (i.e., be an insightful intellectual), “give away” all one has or “deliver” one’s “body to be burned” (i.e., be a dedicated revolutionary), “have all faith, enough to move mountains” (i.e., be an inspiring preacher). But without love these are nothing, absolutely nothing.
One of the weaknesses of Marxist thinking is that love is not central to it. I have always treasured Che Guevara’s words, “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that a true revolutionary must be guided by great feelings of love.” But why is it that he almost had to apologize?
“He who does not know love does not know God; for God is love.” That sums it all up for me. Loving care for each other, sensitivity to each other’s needs, is the mark of true Christians. Not right doctrine, right ritual, right moral conduct, right emotional expression of spiritual gifts, etc.
What is love? This is not a trivial question, given the increasingly common misuse of the word to mean an euphoric high that enables one blissfully to escape rather than painfully to confront the hassles of life. I can best share what I’ve learned by elucidating Paul’s advice, in light of my own experience.
“Love is patient and kind”—love accepts others where they are at, it allows them to grow at their own rate, though insisting that they grow.
“Love is not jealous or boastful”—love does not allow ego-tripping but rebukes others in a way that does not put them down.
“Love is not arrogant or rude”—love does not engage in games of ego projection and oneupmanship, but rather seeks to draw others out.
“Love does not insist on its own way”—love does not lay ideological trips on others, including evangelical trips.
“It is not irritable or resentful”—love does not wallow in bitterness or self-pity, does not waste emotional energy mulling over the ways one has been hurt by others (a hard lesson for me to learn).
“It does not rejoice at wrong but rejoices in the right”—given all the above, love nonetheless persists in arguing for what is right, boldly expressing its point of view though listening to that of others. (Love of another is never an excuse not to be honest.)
In my own experiences the high ethical ideal of the scriptures, “to love thy neighbor as thyself,” was totally out of the range of possibility until I turned toward God. Without knowing that ultimate acceptance that can come only from God, I was trapped in ego-defensiveness, caring only for those who had something to offer me.
But Jesus said: “Love your neighbor and pray for those who persecute you ... (Matthew 5:44). For if you love those who love you, what reward have you?” (5:47). I have seen that God has to sensitize my heart so that I can take the risk of living without expecting reciprocation. It is a painful but ultimately fulfilling process, a process by which the self dies and is born anew.
It is this strength to hang on despite the cost, despite the odds, the strength that can only come from faith, that is sending me back into the fray fighting. I know now that the struggle to humanize the world, the revolution, is a continual process without final resolution until that day when God acts decisively to pull it all together. But as a Christian I can participate in that struggle without succumbing either to despair or to false optimism. I can have realism without cynicism and hope without illusion.
I know that I will always be one of Jesus’ zealot disciples, with the disciples’ question at the ascension forever on my lips: “Now, Lord, will you finally deliver the power to the people?” I will always walk the delicate tightrope between an idolatrous tendency to absolutize revolution and a pietistic cop-out. But it is on that kind of razor’s edge that a Christian must always stand, living in the tension of being "in the world but not of it".
*CWLF was founded in Berkeley in 1969. It was one of the few groups to emerge from the Jesus movement with a politically radical perspective. It fell within the Anabaptist stream of church tradition.
When this article appeared, Edith Black lived in Berkeley and worked with the CWLF. Her article is reprinted with the permission of Right On.
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