[Dialogue] 8/13/15, Spong: Paris in the Late Spring: Part I, A Publication

Thu Aug 13 04:54:52 PDT 2015

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Paris in the Late Spring
 Part I, A Publication

Imagine waking up on your birthday in Paris, France. It is mid-June, the air is fresh, and the sun is warm. You can smell the croissants baking. You are in the company of your wife, the person with whom you share your life so completely and with whom you are still deeply in love. That was my experience recently, and it seems safe to say that life doesn’t get much better than that. New things, however, kept being added to the wonder of that moment in June. Let me relate this story to you.

Christine and I were in Paris because my books, newly-translated into French, were beginning to make an impact on the French speaking people. On this 2015 visit, I would first be given the chance to lay my thoughts out before a predominantly Protestant audience in one of Paris’ largest non-Roman Catholic Churches, the Temple de l’Oratoire du Louve. Secondly, I would also have an opportunity to speak in the large Roman Catholic Church of St. Merry. No, that is not a typographical mistake, St. Merry’s is the name of this magnificent structure. I would be welcomed to this church and introduced to its Catholic audience by a man named Jean Verrier, the convener of a large group of French intellectuals that meets regularly in this space.

On this trip I would also be interviewed on video by Dr. Valerie Nicolet-Anderson, the professor of New Testament at something called the Free Protestant Faculty of Theology in Paris. This institution today trains most of the Protestant clergy in France. Some of its students would be in attendance at all of my public events during this week in June. I also did a recorded (audio and video) interview with Guillaume Genetet at a Paris business known as “The Rare Bird Bookstore.” This interview will be edited into proper sound bites, mass produced and used to introduce my work to all of the independent French bookstores during the coming months. French bookstores have not yet been consumed by the mass-media chains like Amazon and Barnes and Noble. My interviewer at this event was Jeannie Raymond, the publicity director of the religious collection of my French publisher, Editions Karthala of Paris.

In all of these settings, I signed books, answered questions and developed for my French audiences the theological themes that have marked my career. I sum them up in four sentences: 1. God is not an external being, supernatural in power, but is the “Ground of Being.” 2. The divinity of Christ can no longer be understood as God coming down from above, but as Jesus transcending all human boundaries and bringing the human into the experience of the divine. 3. Any church, which continues to violate the humanity of women, racial or ethnic minorities or gay and lesbian people does not understand the essence of the gospel. 4. Biblical literalism is a form of idolatry and is itself heresy.

Many of my ideas were new to the numbers of my various French audiences. They were not, however, offended by them so much as they were intrigued. Many of the historical trappings of Christianity still live in France, but the vast majority of its citizens are no longer regularly involved with “church.” Given this low level of interest in organized religion, I was pleased to discover that my ideas were received as something “new to consider.” Questions asked of me by my audience included: “Well, do you still pray and, if so, how?” That came from a PhD. candidate from the Ivory Coast in Africa. “Who then was Jesus’ father?” That came from an exile from the Roman Catholic Church, who was in his mid-to-late fifties. ”Does the divinity of Christ not depend on the truth of the Virgin Birth?” That came from a woman in her forties, raised in Evangelical Protestantism, which she had long ago abandoned. Most of these people never assumed that they would find a forum in which such questions could be asked in honesty and where authoritarian and judgmental answers would not be forthcoming.

To add to the joy of this spectacular experience, Christine and I also had lunch with the Dean of the American Cathedral in Paris, the Very Reverend Lucinda Laird, who served as a highly respected and much loved priest from the Diocese of Newark during my years as its bishop. At this lunch, we recalled the “good old days” in our diocese in which ministry was vital, issues were engaged and controversy raged, but also in which the church thrived. From those days, seven of our clergy went on to become Cathedral Deans and eleven went on to become bishops. It was a heady time in the Episcopal Church’s history.

 So these four days in Paris were ecstatic, affirming, life-giving and stretching. How did this happen? What made these climactic experiences possible? That is a story of the miracle of life itself, its accidental quality, its mystery and its connections that deserves to be told.

About five years ago through correspondence addressed to this column, we became aware of a man named Ray Rakower, a French Jewish citizen and an oil executive, whose business contacts had made him a citizen of the world. Fluent in his native French, as well as in both German and English, he indicated his desire to translate some of my work into French. As our contact grew, the remarkable story of this man’s life began to open to us. When still a child, Ray and his mother escaped the Holocaust through the kindness of a German soldier, who let them through a closed passage way into Switzerland. There they found safety. Ray’s brother and his father were not so fortunate and they perished in Adolf Hitler’s gas ovens, victims of the Holocaust. Appreciative of his Jewishness and possessing a mind that ranged far and wide, Ray became a scholar of religion. He came to Germany when Christine and I were there visiting with Gerhard Klein, a Lutheran pastor, who was the translator of my books into German. The four of us along with Gerhard’s wife Antje had a wonderful time together. It was there that Ray decided that he would translate into French: Jesus for the Non-Religious. Then he would see if he could convince some French publisher to publish it. When his translation was complete, he then went personally to visit every French publisher he could find. It was a high risk project. He was proposing that an American author, unknown in France, writing on religion, an enterprise widely ignored in France, might be a profitable venture for a French publisher to undertake. Publishers stay alive only by paying attention to their “bottom line.” Ray Rakower was turned down a number of times. If this man was anything, however, it was persistent. Finally, he found some interest in a publishing house named Editions Karthala, making his case to its owner Robert Ageneau. It was a fateful meeting, a turning point for many lives.

Ageneau was a former Roman Catholic priest who had worked in Africa. Disillusioned by his African experience with Catholicism, he had resigned the priesthood, entered a “spiritual exile” and gone into the publishing business. The books Karthala published had a heavy emphasis on Africa, its politics, its economics and its colonial past. He tried to open Africa to modernity, not through religion, but through other intellectual pursuits. A single man and thus having no heirs, his business provided him with a living, satisfied his vocational and professional needs and allowed him not to think or to worry much about the future. There still burned in his heart, however, a yearning to be in touch with something that was ultimate, something in which a sense of transcendence could be found. He saw hope for accomplishing this goal in the manuscript that Ray Rakower presented to him. So he agreed to read it. That was a crucial decision for him and for me. Ageneau, liked this book, but was not fully satisfied with Ray’s translation, so he got others to work on the text. When the second printing came out these “others” included a brilliant young woman named Abigail Bassac, whose English was shaped by her parents, both of whom had been high school English teachers in their native France. Abigail also had deep theological interests and was pursuing them as a student at the Free Faculty of Protestant Theology in Paris. In that capacity and with her outstanding ability in language, she had already read some of my work in English and was drawn to it. Then Karthala contacted my American publisher, Harper Collins, to negotiate the rights to a French translation. Finally, they got in touch with me to ask if I would be in Europe anytime during the next year (2014) to help publicize the launch of this book.

Christine and I had indeed scheduled ourselves that year to go on a hiking tour in the Bordeaux region in the Southwest of France to see the pre-historic cave paintings at Lascaux and Les Eysies. Hiking vacations had long been part of our life. In 2005 we had walked 190 miles across England from the Irish Sea to the North Sea. We had on this occasion actually planned to be Paris for two days before taking a train to Bordeaux where our walking vacation was set to begin. With some re-scheduling, we managed to extend our time in Paris from two to four days so we prepared to assist in the French launch of Jesus for the Non-Religious, entitled in its French version Jesus for the 21st Century. Karthala then hired Abigail Bassac to serve as my translator for all of the lectures and media events that they managed to schedule. She was terrific!! This project was, I recognized, a huge risk for Karthala to undertake. Robert Ageneau was, however, willing to absorb that risk. With his staff, he planned an initial publicity campaign. Lectures were scheduled and a press conference was set with the secular press. What was the result? The book was a modest success and that success set the stage that led to the magical events of June 2015 that I will describe in this column next week. So stay tuned. Same time, same station.

~John Shelby Spong

Read the essay online here.

Question & Answer

Condol Mays, via the Internet, writes:

 Question:

I would like to know if you believe in universalism.

 Answer:

Dear Condol,

 Thanks for your letter. I have chosen to respond to it, but with the caveat that no format like a question and answer column can possibly deal with this subject. A question regarding universalism is asking what is the nature of life. How are all things related? When did individualism arise in human history? How does universalism relate to religion? And many more.

 Historically, the western Christian Church opposed universalism because in their judgment it undercut individual responsibility and it presumed to suggest that the motivating power found in the reality of hell and the threat of eternal punishment was not ultimate, but relative. In the East, universalism was encouraged because it seemed to unite all people into a particular understanding of humanity.

 To respond to your question in the simplest terms, let me say that I believe all will be saved in that I believe that all lives are part of who or what God is. I have become convinced that individualism is more of a mirage than it is a reality. It would take a book to say more than that.

 When I wrote my book, Eternal Life: A New Vision-Beyond Religion-Beyond Theism- Beyond Heaven and Hell, I tried to address this subject. It took more than 300 pages.

 My best,

 John Shelby Spong

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