I'm going to start wrapping up this series. I think the main ideas are pretty well in place. But what I think might be helpful are some "incarnations" of what all this might look like in real life, this being free from the slavery from the fear of death and, thus, able to love others fully, authentically and sacrificially.To help with this, let me share a story from William Stringfellow's book My People is the Enemy. I pick this story because it illustrates so many of the themes from this series, showing how they link together: slavery to the fear of death, self-interest, self-esteem, the martyrological identity, salvation as emancipation from the fear of death and sacrificial love as the lived experience of resurrection.
The story...
One witness of God's power in reconciling men is known now in the death of Lou Marsh.
Lou Marsh died in New York City at ten minutes after nine on the evening of January 9th, 1963...
Lou worked for the New York City Youth Board, assigned to one of the East Harlem juvenile gangs..
Lou was beaten to death by four guys. He had somehow persuaded the gang--the Untouchables--not to go ahead with a rumble to which they had committed themselves...Some of the older boys--alumni, so to speak, of one of the gangs in question--wanted the issue between the two gangs to be settled in the traditional way, by a rumble. They resented the fact that Lou mediated the dispute, or at least accomplished an armistice. Evidently they were humiliated that the younger boys in the gang followed Lou's counsel rather than their own. So they ambushed Lou and beat him savagely. He lived for two days in the hospital, unconscious. Then he died...
Lou was a Negro.
He was from a fairly poor family living in the North. He had to save on sleep and work incredibly hard--usually in menial jobs--but because he was intelligent and sensitive, he managed to get a very good education. When I first met him, about five years ago, he was a seminarian at Yale; perhaps he felt somehow guilty about being in such a place as Yale Divinity School at all, while his folks were still where they were and while his people were still where they were in this country. For a time, after he left seminary, Lou, in a terrible way, hated the fact that he was a Negro. It was more than a feeling sorry for himself; it was as if he complained about his own creation, as if he was rejecting his own birth.
It seemed to him, for a while, better not to live than to be a Negro in America.
After leaving New Haven, he moved to New York City. To act out his resentment, he virtually disassociated himself from bourgeois white society, drifting about the city, unable to look for a job, living on borrowed money, and, it seemed, borrowed time, staying sometimes in flophouses or on the streets.
As he would say himself, he went through the whole bit.
But then, at last, he understood that all this was some vanity of pride, that he was indulging in his own self, accusing and condemning himself, punishing and rejecting himself especially for being a Negro; expecting and even, in a way, wanting to be confirmed in this by the rejection of others. Then he realized that he was engaging in suicide.
That was the moment--when Lou was in Hell--in which he knew, I think for the first time, that he was loved by God. That was the event in which by the power of God in the face of the fullness of death, Lou was emancipated--set free to love himself, to love others, and to welcome and receive the love of others. That was the time of Lou's salvation, the time of his reconciliation with himself and with the rest of the world.
What followed was more or less predictable. Having been so intimate with the presence of death in his own life, but having beheld the reality and vitality of the Resurrection in his own life in the same event, Lou was free to live for others.
So that is what he did.
He took this job with the Youth Board and soon was so preoccupied in caring for the kids in his gang that he forgot himself, so fulfilled his love for others that he lost his self-interest, so confident that he was now secure in God's Word that he was not afraid of death.
He was no longer afraid to die the way he died. He knew about the real risks of his job, especially the way he was now free to do his job. The way he died was surely no surprise to Lou. Not that he sough such a death, or any sort of death, any longer, but he was ready to die and was without fear of death. He no longer was in bondage to the alienation of men from each other. He was no longer a pathetic, partisan, professional Negro; he had become a man. Nor was he any longer an imitation white man, a Negro received nominally into white society, as at Yale Lou had been, but never welcomed as himself; he had become a person. Lou himself had been reconciled, and so his existence and life could be, for the first time, not just a symbol of grievance and protest--as valid and needed in American society as that may be--but more than that, a ministry of reconciliation. He had become so free he could give away his own life freely--and surely that is the secret of reconciliation in Christ.
Lou Marsh, when he died, was ready; that is, he had already died in Christ and was so without fear of death. That is the freedom the resurrection bestows upon men.
That is the only way to die, which at the same time means that this is the only way to live.
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