[Dialogue] 1/31/13, Spong: Malcolm Warnock 1905-2012

Thu Jan 31 09:28:52 PST 2013

     HOMEPAGE        MY PROFILE        ESSAY ARCHIVE       MESSAGE BOARDS       CALENDAR

	Malcolm Warnock 1905-2012
	He was a remarkable man, a superior lawyer and one who worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. He had many, many friends and I was privileged to be one of them. I knew him for 35 of his 107 years. More than that, I knew him in some deeply personal settings. I walked with him as his wife Dorothy sank into a state of unknowing. It was the onset of her dementia that caused him to move with her into a setting where she could be cared for and he could be near enough to share time with her every day. The sad thing was that increasingly she was not aware of that care that was constant and deeply loving. Malcolm would go to her room each day to visit, to sit, to eat a meal with her, to play the piano and even to sing to her in the hope that something of his love and concern would be communicated. I will never forget him singing “Annie Laurie” to his uncommunicative wife.
	I also knew him as an energetic and vigorously competitive tennis player. Malcolm and I played doubles as part of a tennis foursome every Friday morning for almost 20 years. Malcolm was clearly the best of our six players – six because schedule conflicts made two regular substitutes necessary. Whoever teamed with Malcolm generally won. Malcolm is the third of those six players at whose funerals I have been privileged to speak. In effect, Malcolm forced me to retire from tennis, because when he defeated me consistently when he was over 92, I knew I had no future in this game.
	I knew him as a devoted member of Christ Church in Short Hills, New Jersey. He was a sidesman – that is Christ Church, Short Hills, vocabulary for a lay reader or chalice bearer. He was also the regular narrator at their Christmas Pageant. Though active in his church, Malcolm was an uncomfortable Christian. That is, he was uncomfortable with traditional, ecclesiastical thinking and ecclesiastical language. He knew how to separate the authenticity of his own God experience from the explanation placed on that experience by the ecclesiastical institution – explanations that were to him always both time bound and time warped. So he sat loosely to creeds, to liturgical forms and to doctrinal concerns. In this, Malcolm and I found common ground and became kindred spirits. He was also an avid reader of every book that I wrote over the course of our friendship. Many times, I seemed to articulate in my writing the religious concerns he always had. Yet he was faithful and persistent in his constant quest for truth and for insight, even for that truth and insight that are so often lost in creedal formulations. It was this intellectual and even theological interest that was the glue that bound us together over the years.
	When our Friday morning tennis court time was up we would sit around a table over coffee and have what was frequently a mini-theological seminar. Over the years, many topics were covered and some of those discussions would find their way into the content of my writing, but without footnotes attributing the ideas to Malcolm.
	When tennis became a thing of the past with both of us, we still met once or twice a year for dinner and an evening of conversation together. Those times took place primarily in the dining room of the institution in which he was living. They would begin regularly with hors d’oeuvres and drinks served in his room before we would go downstairs for dinner. As the years rolled by those meals became only an annual event. We celebrated Malcolm’s birthday together every June from the time he turned 100 until his 107th birthday this past summer when we saw him for the last time. He was bright, alert and ready to tell us about what had become an annual ritual in which he was honored at the Princeton University graduation as their oldest living alumnus. Malcolm held that title and even set a record that is longer than anyone else in Princeton’s history. He outlived every Princeton alumnus in at least the seven years following his graduation.
	It was at his 100th birthday dinner that my most indelible memory of Malcolm occurred. He greeted his guests, dressed in his tuxedo, wearing an imposing Abraham Lincoln type top hat on his head, and with his children and grandchild at his side. Christine and I were honored to be among the few non-family members present at this gathering. By this time, I was long retired, but I continued my book writing career and Malcolm had continued to read and to comment on my work. When I published what I presumed was to be my last book entitled, Jesus for the Non-Religious, a title that appealed to Malcolm and with which he identified, I turned my attention to a long held passion of mine to explore the meaning of the claim that we Christians make that death is not the end of our personhood. When we went to this 100th birthday dinner, I had begun what was to be some massive reading of all aspects of this vast subject. I was certainly not sure that this study would ever result in a book, but I knew I would enjoy the exploration.
	In the course of that 100th birthday gathering, near the end when people were preparing to leave, Malcolm turned to me and out of the richness of our past conversations said, “Well, Jack, what are you working on now?” I responded, “Malcolm, I am trying to find a doorway that will allow me to talk about life after death in such a way that a scientifically trained citizen of the 21st century could respond without turning off his or her brain.” I thought that Malcolm at age 100 might have some existential interest in this subject. I was not prepared for his response. He broke into a loud and a sustained laughter that left me standing with the quizzical smile of one who is slightly embarrassed. I was trying to brace myself for whatever his verbal response might be, but feeling somewhat vulnerable. When he finally ceased his laughter, he replied, “That is the silliest thing I’ve ever heard of you trying to do.” Before I could say a word, he went on to pose what he saw as my problem. “Who are you going to interview for this project?” he asked. “Where are you going to do your research into this subject? Your passport may get you to China” he continued, “but it will never get you to the place where that question can be studied.” Finally, he concluded his comments by saying: “If this turns into a book it will be the shortest book of your career. It will have three lines: 1. Nobody knows, 2. Nobody can find out, 3. The End.”
	When he finally fell silent and I had a chance to pick myself up off the floor, I offered Malcolm two points in reply. First, the fact is that this subject, which might be called both “the unknown and the unknowable,” has never stopped human speculation. The greatest libraries of the world contain countless volumes in which learned men and women have sought to explore humanity’s ultimate limit and the source of humanity’s deepest anxiety. Some of those volumes have become classics in the literature of the western world. One thinks of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained or Paul Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, for example. More important, however, I told Malcolm, I did not in this project plan to engage in speculation into the unknown. I rather planned to approach life after death through the medium of life itself – about which a great deal can be known. Can I go so deeply enough into the meaning of life that I can touch the limits? Can I discover the edge of humanity where it appears to enter the divine, where time ceases and eternity begins and where the barriers that surround life fade away and we discover that there is a universal consciousness in which we all participate? If I can do that, it will be through that means that I will approach the subject of life after death. Although still skeptical, Malcolm at least began to understand that I was not on a mission to affirm the pious claims of traditional religion or to defend the popular ecclesiastical definitions of God, who seemed to use life after death as a method of behavior control or even to affirm the reality of those now empty realms that we have in the past called heaven and hell. When my study did lead to a book that was published in 2009 under the title Eternal Life: A New Vision: Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell, I took a copy of it as my gift to Malcolm when we attended his 104th birthday party and later received from him his imprimatur. Malcolm approved of that book because of who Malcolm was and how Malcolm lived.

	The only way I know how to approach the subject of eternity is to live fully in the present. The only way I know to discuss timelessness is to engage deeply and fully the gift of time that we now have. The only way I know how to approach the idea of divinity is to be fully human now, expanding all limits, transcending all barriers. I understand God as the Source of life empowering me to live fully; as the Source of love enabling me to love wastefully; as the Ground of Being giving me the courage to be everything I am capable of being. So it is in living fully, loving wastefully and being all that I can be that I experience the presence of God and it was, I am fully convinced, this same God experience that caused the followers of Jesus to view him as one in whom and through whom God was present. So they said of Jesus: “God was in Christ.” What this phrase was seeking to communicate is that somehow, in someway, through some means, they saw the presence of God in the fully alive, wastefully-loving Jesus.
	This was the God that Malcolm also understood and this was the God with whom Malcolm lived. He worshiped this God of life, love and being by living fully, by loving wastefully and by being all that he could be. To Malcolm, God was not a being to be pleased, so much as God was a verb to be lived.
	He was a remarkable man. I am glad I knew him. I am confident that in his life he crossed the barrier where time enters eternity, where the human enters the divine and where the consciousness of the universe begins to include the consciousness of this incredible man.
	~John Shelby Spong
	Read the essay online here.

	Question & Answer
	George Gardiner from Green Lake, Saskatchewan, Canada, writes:
	Question:
	You are of the persuasion that Jesus was deserted by his disciples. Do you believe that is “literally” true? Does that mean you are “literally” selective of the Bible as you accuse the fundamentalists of being? My feeling is this: no matter what we do or accomplish in the “physical” realm ultimately we will make that final journey alone. Regardless of the number of people who are “present” or have taken up “our” cause, we face death one on one.
	P.S. I hold your work and world view in very high regard. Thanks very much for that and all that you have done for me and those like me.
	Answer:
	Dear George,
	It is not quite as you seem to imagine. I don’t treat anything in the Bible as literally true, for most of it is interpretive material not the work of eyewitnesses. This is especially true of the gospels that are written 40-70 years after the crucifixion and in Greek, a language that none of his disciples spoke. That hardly makes for a literal text.
	Not to be literal, however, does not mean that the substance of the text is not true. The first gospel, Mark, is quite clear that when Jesus was arrested, all of the disciples forsook him and fled (see Mark 14:50). The later gospels temper that in various ways to whitewash this apostolic abandonment. Mark even has Jesus quote Zechariah (Strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered) to justify their abandonment. One does not do that unless the abandonment was real.
	By the time the gospels were written, the disciples were heroes. Yet the fact of their abandonment was so deep in Christian memory that it could not be omitted, so it was explained and justified as the fulfillment of scripture. Those are the things that have convinced me that the abandonment of Jesus by the disciples is a fact of history.
	I hope this clarifies your question. Thanks for writing.
	John Shelby Spong

	Announcements
	New events added to the Bishop Spong Speaking Calendar!

	Like this one:

	Title: “Eternal Life: A New Vision – Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism. Beyond Heaven and Hell”

	Apr 12-14 2013

	Center for Faith Studies at Countryside Community

	Event: Friday-Sunday

	Sat. 9 a.m. Lecture (Registration 8 a.m.)
	11 a.m. Lecture
	Sun. 9 a.m. Worship
	11 a.m. Worship followed by Talk Back Session

	United Church of Christ
	8787 Pacific Street
	Omaha, NE 68114

	Contact: Cyndi Kugler Tel: 402 391-0350 x 121
	E-mail: cyndik at countrysideucc.org

	Visit the Bishop Spong Speaking Calendar

Any questions or concerns, please contact us at support at johnshelbyspong.com or 503-236-3545.

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