Listen to the Mustn’ts (axed Duke Div essay)
December 20, 2008
I got ready to post this a while back after I submitted my Duke Divinity School application. This is an essay that I wrote under the first requirements I got from Duke. When they revised them, it didn’t fit anymore and I had to write another one. I since have heard from Duke and learned that I have been admitted and am being considered for one of their big scholarships. And that was without this gem of an essay you are about to read. I just had so much fun writing and revising it that I had to post it.
Listen to the MUSTN’TS, child. Listen to the DON’TS.
Listen to the SHOULDN’TS, the IMPOSSIBLES, the WON’TS.
Listen to the NEVER HAVES, then listen close to me.
Anything can happen, child, ANYTHING can be.[1]
This poem by the late Shel Silverstein was among the favorites in my family when I was growing up and is still referenced periodically to this day. My father in particular seemed to glory in its cadence and the way it flowed from his tongue. The result is that this poem is etched indelibly into my brain. Despite its earnestness, I can’t say that it ever was spoken with any profundity in my household. Indeed, as often as not it was modified in one of several humorous ways. My parents who never so much as swatted my siblings or me always told us that their comment at parent-teacher conferences would be to tell the teachers that they don’t hit us enough. In the same spirit, the last line frequently became an ironic, “I can beat you up my child, just you wait and see.”
Commitment to the notion that “ANYTHING can be” in the midst of echoing common wisdom about a tame and contented God has anchored my recent exploration in the Christian faith. I’m finding that this poem’s warning resonates deeply with my frustration in a Church that has too often reduced God to a predictable and undemanding force. This “dignified, businesslike, Rotary-club god”[2] stays within the bounds of our unimaginative theologizing, neglects to act in the world, and exists solely for our comfort and want-fulfillment. Worship of this inept god inevitably falls flat. In contrast to this, and perhaps in the spirit of Shel Silverstein, I have found myself newly embracing the wild, unpredictable God who acted throughout the Old Testament in amazing, baffling, or distressing ways (and sometimes all three at once) that we can scarce comprehend. Foremost though, this God came down into creation, flouted the MUSTN’TS, SHOULDN’TS and DON’TS, proclaimed an upside-down gospel that defied the WON’TS, IMPOSSIBLES and NEVER HAVES, and consented to death on a cross. This death though, this apparent surrender to the world’s brokenness, was really a promise for wholeness. In the Resurrection, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob booms, “anything can happen, child, ANYTHING can be.”
