Reflections on Mortal Goods by Ephraim Radner, Part Seven

I find two things particularly encouraging as Radner brings the first major section of Mortal Goods to a close.  He has already laid the groundwork for a conversation about “Christian politics” by reminding us that life is rooted in what God gives us, lives of sojourning and beauty in every respect (even in the difficult and chaotic).  His last turn, then, is about the “incompleteness” of a life.  That “incompleteness” partially manifests itself in our need for others, and of our lives being embedded with the lives of others whether we like it or not.  And to make sense of this, he turns to a monk I’m quite fond of: Benedict of Nursia.

I’ve been either thinking about or around the ideas of Saint Benedict for almost two decades now.  He became a part of my own faith journey early on in my time in Hawaii.  His “rule” comes back around into my orbit every few years in different ways, from different sources.  And he comes back around this time through Radner.  Benedict has a great vision for what it means to live simply and in community in a way that makes God central.  Radner writes:

It turns out, however, that in Benedict’s vision, saving one’s soul, as it were, is just life with others, not a common life as a means but as the very shape of “service” (a great Benedictine term) itself.

And then:

We cannot live without others; we cannot live with them as we choose.

Benedict’s Rule has much to say about such living, most of it “practical” while all of it being deeply “spiritual” in a way that would catch many of us off-guard in our modern way of thinking about community.  The monks: they are getting something right, something that we should learn from.

The second thing that I find encouraging as Radner brings this section of the book to an end is the added detail about his own life: his growing up, his missionary service, the “evolution” of his understanding of life across the years.  He speaks soberingly and realistically, which is a nice contrast to other writers who say great things but don’t necessarily root those things in their own lived experiences.  Radner does that here to a proper amount, and it is encouraging.

The shape of this life, my life, is hardly clear in light of this.  But just because of this comprehensive inclusion of us all in the wide spin of God’s creation, we are placed within a wider act of God, a defining relationship of receipt.  I am willing, therefore, to offer this life, though it seems so formless in its pieces.  Grace holds it together, even as the formless “it” is still something given over to me and seems to constitute all I have.  Though I alone can offer it, dislocated and incomplete as it is, my life’s jagged form is my own kind of grateful gathering of those I live with.  My life— and thus my offering— takes in my mother’s and my sister’s lives (and deaths), my children’s and my friends’, my spouse’s, and all the smaller and greater joys and catastrophes of their existence. My offering rephrases them all, articulates their forms in a singular and intentional fashion.

And so all of the threads, the good and the bad, are redeemed in their being brought to God as the offering of a life.  Not something taught often, even for Radner, but now being taught for others (those like his own children).  Near the end of the section’s final chapter he writes this:

We shall need to learn to live with all the upendings of our tiny spheres of life, endure them, find light within them, and then offer them up to God.  And someone must teach us how. This is what any Christian political responsibility bears most heavily as a calling.

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This is a good and necessary stopping point for these reflections, for me and for now.  These last few posts have been highlights of the book for me.  I’ll definitely revisit the ideas of the book, though not as part of this “series.”  For years I have felt the importance of the little things, the regular things, in life (first thanks to writers like Frederick Buechner and now through writers like Ephraim Radner).  It’s the stuff of “ordinary time” for me.  I’m grateful for the way Radner sets the stage for conversation, sometimes provocatively, always interestingly.  And I’m glad he “lands” with some more biography and with a mention of Benedict, who I always think has much to teach us about Christian life together.