Growing up Underground is the autobiography of Jane Alpert, a young student radical of the sixties. She was born in May, 1947. Her family was Jewish, her grandparents having come from Russia to escape the pogroms. One of her grandfathers, after his arrival in the States, gave up his orthodox faith and became a socialist in the 1930s. Both Jane's parents were quite gifted intellectually. Her mother, for example, graduated from high school at fourteen and from Hunter College at eighteen. The family lived in the New York City area. Three years after Jane was born, her brother Skip was born. When her mother was pregnant with Skip, her car was rammed by another car. As a result of the accident, Skip was born with birth defects. He was of "above average intelligence, but almost blind with respiratory difficulties and permanently stunted physical growth. I remember him as a large, inert lump who took all my mother's time and attention."(2) Since her mother was involved with Skip, Jane received the attention of her father when she was quite young. He adored her and told her wonderful stories of magical worlds, all of his own creation. In 1956, her father took a new job, vice president of the Linz Glass Company in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. It was there that Jane first became aware of the fact that she was an outsider, not only because she was Jewish, but also because she was from the city and unaccustomed to country ways. She also encountered segregation and "fantasized that the next time my family moved, it might be to the Deep South. There I would be one of the heroic white children who welcomed black children to her school."(3) When she was twelve, her family moved back to New York, where she was once again an outsider. While in Pennsylvania, she had become "country," and the New York kids teased her mercilessly for her Appalachian accent. She was given the nickname "Doggie" after she gave a talk on various breeds of dogs. Throughout junior high school she never had a friend. In spite of her social difficulties, however, her academic work was excellent. Once back in New York, her father took the family savings and opened his own business. Prior to that, except for when she was quite small, Jane scarcely saw her father. He left home before she awoke and normally returned after she had gone to bed. With a family business things changed for the better. Jane would often help him in the office, and they had the most wonderful times together, eating out on the way home, feeding the pigeons, watching him play chess at the Chess Club. Her happiness did not last long. Through no fault of his own, the business failed within six months. As a result, he lost his self confidence and disappeared. They later found him in a hospital, a shell of himself. When he came home his personality temporarily changed. He "became unpredictably abusive, and would hurt and startle me with his sudden outbursts. But I also found a kind of sweetness in the violence, since when the storms were over, he would hug and comfort me, and weep over what had become of us."(4) Her mother took over the family. She found a job selling encyclopedias while the father recuperated from what was called a "nervous breakdown." In 1960 Jane started Forest Hills High School, two academic years ahead of her age. She continued to do well academically, read constantly, and began to make friends. Among other influential books were those of Ayn Rand.
Although I rejected Rand's right wing economics and political philosophy by the time I was fifteen, certain elements of the novels, which had more to do with psychology than with social ideology, stayed with me for many years. The Fountainhead had planted in me the idea that bombing a building could be a morally legitimate form of protest. Atlas Shrugged portrayed the social revolutionary as a hero. And Dominique and Dagny, brilliant, powerful, yet sexually passive heroines who submit to the men they love, remained my role models long after I had forgotten where I first heard their names.(5)
As high school unfolded, Jane became increasing alienated from her parents. Her father had recuperated from his failure and found a job, but Jane was bitter because of the way he had allowed her mother to humiliate him during his "illness." "If only he had left her and taken me with him! I would have helped him without ever inflicting the humiliation on him that my mother did."(6) As for her mother, Jane was convinced her mother hated her and she hated her mother in return. Nothing seem to work between them, and Jane became increasingly independent of her parents. Jane continued to do well academically, developed an interest in radical politics, and became increasing preoccupied with sex. She made several friends, intellectuals like herself, bohemian and generally rebellious. She was rather in awe of one of them, Beatrice. Beatrice was brilliant, sexually precocious, and daring. It was Beatrice who introduced her to drinking and petty thievery. Jane was also enthralled by the freedom fighters in the South who risked their lives to fight segregation. She pictured herself "in a knot of black and white students, singing freedom songs as we rode into the South, facing down armed mobs as we disembarked. I imagined myself explaining my commitment to TV journalists, then graciously stepping aside so that my black friends could speak in their own behalf." (7) As a result of her academic work and test scores, she was accepted into several colleges. She chose to go Swarthmore. While at Swarthmore, she was troubled by that fact that she was not a virgin, nor was she beautiful in the conventional sense. She wrote to someone she thought could relieve her of her virginity, suggesting they get together for a weekend in New York. They did, and he "got the job done with surprisingly little fuss." She returned to Swarthmore "feeling slimy," and then she began to slide, "imperceptibly at first, into depression."(8) In the fall of her first year at Swarthmore Jane took part in her first demonstration. Franklin School, the black school in the nearby town of Chester, was poorly staffed, physically run down, and horribly over crowded. This was the result of years of neglect and indifference by those with resources and power. Jane joined with others in a march to protest these miserable conditions. They met at the school and marched toward the business district of Chester. Jane was exhilarated.
On that brisk fall morning under a strong sun, linked on the left to a middle aged black man in work clothes, on the right to a young Franklin School student, I glimpsed the utopia preached by Martin Luther King: a culture in which all were equal, in which no one was made to feel inferior because of skin color or poverty or age or disability, in which a neighbor was someone whose arm you could hold. As we sang freedom songs, tears came to my eyes from the wind and the emotion I felt.(9)
That night, Jane called her parents hoping for their support. She didn't get it. As if talking to one of his employees, her father ordered her not to participate in any more demonstrations. Hurt and angry she hung up, determined to go on. Also, that night, 150 windows were broken at the school and seven black children arrested for the crime. When the demonstrators assembled the next day, the mood turned ugly. Most of the demonstrators were convinced that the vandalism was the work of segregationists. Once again they marched into Chester, determined to enter the major's office which they did, chanting and singing as they marched.
I was prepared, or so I thought, for arrest, even for police brutality. But I was not prepared to find a wellspring of anger inside me, tapped by the chanting. As if hypnotized, I was frantically stamping my feet, cheering "Freedom! Now!" long after I was too hoarse to make a sound. I had stopped thinking about Franklin School, the citizens of Chester, the evils of racism and poverty. The utopian vision that had tugged at me yesterday was gone. In its place was something else, a fury that tore out of me with a life of its own, primitive as infancy. I was screaming against everyone and everything that had stood in my way the boys who had rejected me, the man who had fired my father when I was nine, my absent father, my mother, my brother. I wasn't the only one in the crowd who temporarily lost control. When the police arrived, the entire mob sighed audibly, as at a long awaited climax.(10)
Some Initial Reflections
At this point, I would like to introduce a few ideas and then return to the narrative. Theologically, God is revealed by Word and Spirit. The divine Word is Jesus Christ, while the "Word written" is Scripture. The biblical narrative, enlivened by the Spirit, makes sense of the Christian life and directs Christian action in church and world. All persons have a narrative which make sense of things, and all are animated by spirit. The term "word" can be understood to refer to the ideas, images, words, events, stories, and histories that come together to create the story that gives meaning and direction for life. For Jane, some of these events, stories, and images were: 1. Her Jewish ancestry and their fleeing from the pogroms. 2. Her socially radical grandfather. 3. The cruel accidents of life, especially the accident that led to her brother being an "inert lump." 4. The wretchedness of her father's life, the one person she had adored as a child. 5. Her alienation in Pennsylvania and then again in New York. The taunting of the other children. 6. The images from Any Rand lithe, sexually powerful women who were willing to blow up things and control their own destiny. 7. The image of herself as a freedom fighter, graciously liberating her black brothers and sisters. 8. The allure of certain of her friends, their independence, intelligence, and flouting of convention. As a result of these events, stories, perceptions, Jane developed an internal myth or personal story. It was this myth, this matrix for making sense of things, that directed her choices and eventually led her to engage in acts of sabotage. The biblical word used to describe the dynamic process of forming a personal story is "spirit." Human spirit is not some ethereal ghostly thing, but rather, it is the self, the whole person understood as animated by power and choice.(11) From a biblical perspective, the human spirit does not act alone. There are evil spirits and there is the Holy Spirit and these impact the human spirit. Jane, under the impact of the spiritual powers that drove her, picked out certain images, stories, and ideas out of the welter of impressions that flooded her soul throughout her life. She created from them her own images and shaped the evolving story into a complex set of feelings, hopes, thoughts, and actions that made her a dynamic self engaging life, making sense of the world, and acting with direction and power. It was spirit, her spirit and the powers around her, that gave her the energy and power for life, enabling her to make her way in the world, eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We do not always see spirit at work, and this is especially true of evil spirits. Without our awareness, they shape our perceptions, drawing attention to certain aspects of the world while hiding others, enlivening certain images, feelings, and stories and subverting other images, stories, and possibilities. From time to time, however, spirit becomes evident. This often happens in social situations. The Holy Spirit, for example, often becomes manifest in worship. For Jane, the powers that drove her became evident during the demonstrations. On the first day of the march into Chester, she "glimpsed the utopia preached by Martin Luther King ... tears came to my eyes from the wind and the emotion I felt." The next day, she was once again animated by spiritual powers: "The utopian vision that had tugged at me yesterday was gone. In its place was something else, a fury that tore out of me with a life of its own, primitive as infancy. I was screaming against everyone and everything that had stood in my way ... " The utopian vision was not really gone. Both it and the "fury that tore out of me" were the direct result of the abuse she had received. The term "abuse" however, implies that there was something good, beautiful, and true that was violated, desecrated, and humiliated. The "utopia vision" she saw the first day of the march is the hope that the original good and beautiful will be restored. There is truth in this vision. It is the story of Eden, the original goodness given by God. Everyone, unless their soul has been seared into a cinder, longs for this and does so from the beginning. Jane was no exception. She was born with tender needs and inchoate hopes. She and her family had their dreams. These were violated. She was damaged, and with time, she damaged herself. Among other things, she willingly lost her virginity and felt "slimy." She began to sink into depression. But Jane and her family were not only abused by people, they were abused by life itself. It was a freak accident that caused her brother to be an "inert lump." It wasn't her father's fault that his business failed, nor her fault that she was born without the beautiful profile and lithe body that men presumably value. Where then, could she go with her pain? The abuse festered inside of her like a bomb waiting to explode. And for a moment it did. There was "a fury that tore out of me with a life of its own, ..." That fury is spirit. It is power, energy directed toward its object. In this case, its aim was destruction. The spirit had become so powerful that it was no longer her. It was an alien spirit with a "life of its own." I do not know Jane personally. I cannot really uncover her spiritual condition. Though coming from very different circumstances, I encountered some of the realities she so well describes. Like Jane, I was a student radical. In my case, I am convinced that I was invaded by evil spirits, spirits that drove me toward behaviors similar to Jane's. This is not to say that I or Jane was the simple product of environment, heredity, or the pawn of evil spirits. She was a passionate person, driven by intelligence and a hunger for love. She, like all of us, was responsible in some mysterious way for the formation of her personal story and for her actions. She made choices. So do we, and we are responsible for them. Further, Jane's story, her personal myth, had no transcendence. She did not believe in God, no power from beyond the world. Like her socialist grandfather, she had no religious faith. Her personal story was limited to this world and only this world. Therefore, if something was wrong, she could not blame God. She could only direct her rage toward something or someone in this world. For Jane, the object of her rage was international capitalism, racism, the mistreatment of women, the evil of anti-semitism. But note those who manifest these evils are not only guilty of their specific crimes, but in the moment of spiritual manifestation, the guilty parties take the blame for the freak accidents and cruel blows of life. Of course, someone rammed her mother's car, but why did it have to be her mother that was rammed? And even if rammed, why did her baby brother have to be so horribly born? And why couldn't Jane have been born beautiful, or why couldn't her father and mother have the life that their brains and hard work merited? It was bad luck, and who is going to pay for the bad luck? Sooner or later, lacking transcendence, whoever is in front of you must pay. So, during the second day of the march to Chester, she screamed in rage not just for the sake of the neglected students at Franklin School, and nor just against those who had abused her and her family, she raged because of the inexplicable heartless treatment that she and her family had received at the hands of life itself. And who was the target of this rage? At that moment, the only available targets were the mayor of Chester, the police, or the segregationists lurking somewhere in the background. And this is logical. Without transcendence, the objects of our rage become human beings, either oneself or others. Further, without transcendence, the self is not only driven to see some aspect of the world as evil, there is also the tendency to envision other aspects of the world as supremely good. When very young, Jane adored her father. He was her only joy. In one sense, this is normal. In the beginning, parents are like gods, the source of life itself. When this god failed her, she instinctively turned elsewhere. For example, she made herself a god. She envisioned herself as a savior of black people. Or, among her friends, she idolized Beatrice. Beatrice was brilliant, sexy, and defiant. It was Beatrice who got Jane to steal from a library, and when Jane's mother found the books, Jane scarcely cared. "As long as I had Beatrice's approval, my mother's hardly mattered to me."(12)
Revolution
Once Jane had formed her personal story, it became a matter of following her vision to its logical end. Initially she followed the career path of someone of her background. She became interested in classic Greek literature, graduated from Swarthmore, took a job in a publishing firm as an editor, and started graduate work at Columbia. That track, however, did not run in the direction of her personal story. Sooner or later, something had to give, and it did. It happened when she met Sam Melville. Sam Melville was a dream come true. He worked for the Guardian, the local radical rag. He had been beaten up by the police in a demonstration, his dad was a communist, he played the guitar beautifully, was a poet, a master in bed, and he conveyed a sense of dramatic personal magnetism. He didn't expect to live for more than two or three years because he was going to die in the revolution.
"This country's [Sam said] about to go through a revolution. I expect it to happen before the decade is over. And I intend to be part of it." He gave a chuckle that was like a wave lapping at a beach, then vanishing. "The truth is that none of us can help being a part of it." (13) Radical politics, an air or masculine authority, and a deliciously illicit sense about sex Sam mesmerized me that night.(14) The combination of sexual love and radical ideology was more than irresistible. It consumed me."(15)
After Sam, everything changed. He moved in with her. For all intents and purposes, he became her god. She eventually quit her job as an editor, dropped out of graduate school, and became active in radical politics. In this process, several aspects stand out with special clarity. First, she became a part of Sam's fantasy world. This not only included revolution, but also sexual fantasies based on dominance and submission. He was the dominant partner and she the slave. During sex she would murmur "Yes, Master," or "No, Master," humbly thank him for her orgasms, and invent an elaborate master/slave dialogue that Sam found sexually stimulating. Secondly, the tendency to idolize others remained constant. It began with Sam, but extended to others as well. One of the most magnetic was a young woman named Pat. Jane's response to Pat was similar to her response to Beatrice. She first met Pat in her kitchen talking to Sam and another friend, Neil. "The stranger then smiled at me so radiantly that I was rooted to the floor."(16) Pat was, to put it simply, brilliant, beautiful, and radically hip. She "cultivated that careless, sexy look, but few managed it with such ease."(17) That first night in the kitchen, Pat showed Neil, Sam, and Jane a chart diagramming Columbia's intimate ties with the military industrial complex. When Pat got up to leave, Sam said, "Come back soon, ... His voice had the deep, helpless, tone characteristic of his sexual arousal."(18) Thirdly, she and her radical friends adopted a strict Marxist ethic that applied to all aspects of life. This ethic was like a religion. It explained everything, consumed everything, dictated everything.
Marxism .. fitted me like a new pair of glasses through which I seemed to see truth for the first time. I learned to take politics personally, applying movement ideas to every aspect of my life. If I was unhappy at my job, it was because I was "alienated labor": reading and passing judgment on academic manuscripts which had no relevance to anyone outside the ivy walls. If my love affairs had not worked out, it was because I expected them to conform to a "bourgeois model," leading to marriage and child rearing within a nuclear family even though I had known all along that the ideal was a failure. The tiniest of my worries excess pounds, for example, or the stubborn limpness of my hair were also the fault of capitalism, which had spent billions to convince women that we ought to look thin, rich, and glamorous.
The ethic was also egalitarian, and this applied to their bodies as well as everything else. When Jane went to England as part of her job (she had not yet quite her job as an editor), she lived in constant fear that Sam would take Pat in her absence. Jane could hardly imagine any other outcome since Pat was so much more attractive and radically hip than she was. And it happened. Pat wrote her, saying she and Sam had slept together. Jane decided she would quit her job upon her return to the States. Not only was her editing job counter revolutionary, there was no hope of keeping Sam if she were out of the house during the day. Upon her return from England, it was decided that Pat, Sam, and Jane would have sex together. This was a hideous experience for Jane. Sam ignored her and went for Pat, leaving Jane alone on the side of the bed. She got up and went in the kitchen, trembling. Later she returned, only to find them still physically joined. Further, as political events in the late sixties intensified, it became "clearer" that no normal political solution would resolve the mounting oppression on the part of the government. More and more their thoughts turned to revolutionary action as the only effective response to injustice. As these considerations emerged, their personal contact with the outside world dwindled. There were four of them, Sam, Jane, Pat and her lover Nate. Eventually, they came together as a foursome, sexually, emotionally, spiritually.
We didn't think of ourselves as libertines seeking new thrills. We were much too serious for that. For my part, I came to think of the four of us as a family. At times we seemed a single consciousness, divided randomly into four bodies, four biographies, but sharing a vision to which we had implicitly sworn loyalty. We believed that the world could be cleansed of all domination and submission, that perception itself could be purified of the division into subject and object, that power playing between nations, sexes, races, ages, between animals and humans, individuals and groups, could be brought to an end. Our revolution would create a universe in which all consciousness was cosmic, in which everyone would share the bliss we knew from acid, but untainted by fear, possessiveness, sickness, hunger, or the need for a drug to being happiness.
Finally, they began to put their fantasies into action. Sam showed up one day with two underground revolutionaries from Canada. They were on the run, in hiding. Jane and the others sheltered them, gave them guns, information, and helped them high jack a plane to Cuba. Next, Sam decided they should steal a large quantity of dynamite. They did so, keeping it in the refrigerator. Then they set off their first bomb, a building belonging to the United Fruit Company, one of the major exploiters of Latin American labor. A few days later, out of the blue without planning, Sam announced he had planted a bomb in the Marine Midland Bank. This shocked Jane since they had not checked the bank to see if employees were present when the bomb was set to go off. Nor had they informed the press of their action, linking the bombing to the international struggle for liberation. Nor had Marine Midland been chosen for its connection to that struggle. As soon as Jane learned about the bomb, she called Midland, warning them that the bomb was soon to explode. Bank security thought she was a crank. The bomb detonated at 11:00 PM, wounding some twenty employees but killing no one. Sam did not bomb Marine Midland for political reasons. His action was personal. Jane had threatened to sleep with another man in retaliation for Sam sleeping with another woman. As an assertion of his dominance, Sam had simply walked into a building and planted a bomb. "Because I had threatened to abandon him, even for one night, by sleeping with another man, he had taken revenge on a skyscraperful of people."(19) Little by little, Jane became to see that Sam was crazy. His radical politics, as much as anything, was a function of his rage and his fragile ego which needed constant reassurance. She often asked herself why she didn't leave him. Among other things she realized that "... Sam was a kind of lightning rod for my own craziness: I was attracted to bombings out of a deep irrational rage, not unlike Sam's own; but I was too inhibited to carry out my fantasies, and I let Sam act them out for me."(20) Once Jane realized that Sam was unreliable, she took over the group and directed them to choose targets relevant to the struggle. In one night, they bombed facilities of Chase Manhattan, General Motors, and Standard Oil. They also sent letters to the press, timed to arrive the next day. Jane composed them.
During this week of antiwar protests, we set off explosives in the offices of Chase Manhattan, Standard Oil, and General Motors. The Vietnam War is only the most obvious evidence of the way this country's power destroys people. The giant corporations of america have now spread themselves all over the world, forcing entire foreign economies into total dependence on American money and goods. Spiro Agnew may be a household word, but it is the rarely seen men, like David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan, James Roche of General Motors and Michael Haider of Standard Oil, who run the system behind the scenes. The empire is breaking down as people all over the globe are rising up to challenge its power. From the inside, black people have been fighting a revolution for years. And finally, from the heart of the empire, white Americans too are striking blows for liberation.
After the bombings, events moved swiftly. Sam had carelessly told the whole story to an undercover agent posing as a radical friend. A few days later, they were all arrested. Jane got bail money from her parents, skipped bail and went underground. Life underground was lonely, difficult, frightening, and at times, degrading. She was constantly on the move and rarely saw any of her old radical friends. Occasionally, she had contact with other underground groups, but these relationships were often strained and hostile. Her parents, however, were faithful without fail. Now and again, she would see here dad as he traveled on business trips and they made arrangements to see each other. Some months after going into hiding, Jane received news that Sam had died in a prison uprising. She wrote a epitaph for Sam to be published in an underground newspaper. Robin, a poet and an ardent feminist, took Jane to task for the essay. They talked all night. As the hours went by, Jane was forced to face something she had never been willing to see. Her problem was not international capitalism, it was men, especially evident in her submissive and irrational attachment to Sam. Nor had she realized that her true allies were other women. It was another conversion experience.
I couldn't have known back in 1968 that my real fight was against male supremacy, not capitalism, or that my real allies were not the men in the radical left, but other women. (21) Now that feminism was a last a powerful movement, and the left as I knew it defunct, wasn't I free to admit my error and move on to where I would always be welcome the women's movement? Robin's argument explained more the mysteries of my life that any set of ideas I had ever come across. She had accounted for my lifelong attraction to radical men, my participation in the bombings, my long, irrational attachments to San and to Lonnie, and my drift into women's consciousness raising group after my brief affair with Tim failed to work out. (22) Female power had a primitive, awesome quality for me, and intimacy with a women could reduce me to greater abjectness than I had displayed with any man. In time I was to play out the same psychic drama with Robin that I had with Sam. (23) That night in Sarasota we forged a friendship of rare intensity which supplied each of us with what she needed most: for me an ideology I could live by, and for Robin, more substance for the myth making that was central both to her politics and her poetry. In the bond we formed that night, the foundation was laid for my break with the past and for my surrender to the government two and a half years later. (24) My faith in Robin was the basis of my sanity; if I lost that, the void would be unbearable. (25)
Eventually, Jane turned herself in on November 14, 1974, four and a half years after she had jumped bail. She was attended by her parents and her lawyers. In the subsequent investigation, she lied to protect others in the movement. Her sentence for the bombings, her jumping bail, and criminal contempt amounted to two years. I am amazed that her sentence was so lenient. A short time later, Pat was caught and brought to trial. In the process, Pat attacked Jane publicly, claiming that Jane had betrayed her. They were never reconciled, a pattern that characterized almost all of Jane's radical relations. In fact, Pat hated her. Eventually, Jane's relationship with Robin collapsed as well. She was told by Robin, her husband, and her son, that she was "destructive to the family and was to be banished from their lives. So Robin disposed of me, finally, with a gesture as extravagant as the one she had used to adopt me, flying 1,200 miles into my obscure San Diego hideout to recruit me into feminism." (26) There is a sense of sadness, or wistfulness, in the final pages of this story. Jane is left with her parents, her history, and limited political commitments to progressive causes. She has grown older, wiser, cautious, and subdued. She knows she had a tendency to need strong personalities, Sam and then Robin, but she apparently has grown beyond that. She often thinks of her mortality, and at one point, she hints at forgiveness. For years, she had sought to formulate a comprehensive metaphysical system, a story that made sense of things. It began with Marxism, it ended with feminism. Both were rejected in the end, although she doubtless retains elements of both. Whether she replaced them with another comprehensive system, the story does not say. It seems unlikely. Finally, she returned to her parents, her middle class values, to life as it had been in the beginning. Sam and Robin had taken her down other paths, and doubtless she still carried something of them with her, but in the end, they led her back to her roots. As she saw it, the difference between the Sam and Robin was "not gender (as Robin wanted me to think and as I believed for years) but something less obvious. For while Sam and leftist thinking had led me underground, Robin and her version of feminism were leading me back to my family, to the friendships I'd formed in college, and to the world of middle class values I had violently rejected in 1969." (27) She came home. The book is dedicated to her parents.
The Lack of Transcendence
As mentioned in previous paragraphs, Jane and her friends were gripped by ideologies that lacked transcendence. As a result, good and evil belonged to this world. In that case, the good could only be achieved by the annihilation of some evil in this world. For Marxism this entailed the liquidation of the capitalist class. For radical feminism, it means the rejection of the male. For Nazism, it meant the elimination of "inferior" races. For Platonism it meant the denigration of the body. For ancient atomists like Lucretius, it meant the reduction of the beautiful and the good to atoms in motion, a reduction still alive in scientific reductionism. For Freud, it meant an ego oscillating between superego and id, sacrificing one for the other and vice versa. For social Darwinists, it means the survival of the fittest and elimination of the weak. For capitalism, it means belt tightening on the part of entire countries to pay off their loans, measures that drive the poor into the dust. When good and evil belong to this world, some aspect of the world must be sacrificed to make the good prevail over the evil. Slaughter is often the consequence. Classical civilization, Greek and Roman civilization, began with life in this world.(28) From that starting point, the ancients observed the obvious polarities mind and matter, the holy and the profane, civilization and barbarism. When mind was raised to a final principal, it became Platonism. In that case, the truly real were the eternal and unchanging ideal forms, and virtue became conformity to this static ideal as discerned by reason. When matter became ultimate, life was reduced to matter in motion, the whim of the great god Whirl. If both the holy and profane are limited to life in this world, then it is only logical to think that great persons are divine and worthy of our worship since divinity is limited to something in this world. For that reason, Caesar Augustus became a god, worshipped because of his virtue (a manifestation of the eternal ideas) and his fortune (blessed by the god Whirl), and by this combination, the defender of civilization against barbarism. It was no accident that the cult of the Caesar emerged, the worship of the emperor as a god with all its attendant potential for horrible abuses of power. Here is a quotation from Charles Cochrane's brilliant analysis of classical culture.
The cult of the Caesar is commonly regarded as a form of Orientalism translated into Italy from the Hellenistic world. But while this may well account for its derivation, it fails to explain why it should have been accepted in the new environment. According, in seeking to trace the genesis of the cult, we must begin by insisting that, so far from being foreign or exotic, it was rooted in theories of human nature more or less explicit in Classicism. From this standpoint it is much closer to the mentality of modern Europe than we should like to suppose.(29)
Similarly, it was no accident that Jane Alpert worshipped her father, then Sam, and then Robin. She had no other choice. She worshipped them because she had no God beyond the immediate facts of life. If we do not love God, we love something else until disappointment makes us loveless. Nor is it an accident that Jane ended up committing sabotage. The student movement lacked transcendence, and therefore, if its logic was carried to the end, it would entail some form of destruction. Contrary to appearances, the student movement of the sixties was not really a counter cultural movement. Many of the students, like their fathers and mothers, shared the same set of assumptions. They and mainstream America believed and still believe that the essence of life can be achieved in life. Once that is assumed, there is a tendency to exalt life as we know it, and for Americans, that life is the American way of life. This exaltation is especially visible during the outpourings that surround military actions. In my lifetime, there has been a continuous stream of wars, interventions, and police actions Vietnam, Chile, Cuba, Panama, Nicaragua, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, the Gulf War and now the war on international terrorism. Virtually all of these wars, invasions, and interventions have had a "religious component," a sense of righteous wrath, the feeling that a holy and just nation must once again defend the world against another "evil empire." Vietnam became an exception, but it began as a holy war against communism. This religious fervor has a root, the U.S. population has made a god out of the American way of life. This is what Scripture calls idolatry, and it stems from a failure to worship a God that stands over and beyond the American way of life. This country can be honored and respected for its rule of law, its freedoms, and its relative lack of corruption, but it is not the Kingdom of God on earth. Further, the student movement could not deal with a fundamental human problem, the problem of evil. They knew, and rightly so, that there were and are massive injustices. They recognized that these injustices were not only individual, but social and economic. In so many ways, they were right. Corporations do oppress people, governments do abuse their citizens, classes and social groupings do exclude and denigrate. But how can one deal with these and other evils? That question must now be addressed.
Has God Done Wrong?
The Christian faith affirms a transcendent God. This God is not only transcendent, but "almighty," to use a term from the Nicene Creed. This implies that God either caused, or at least allowed, all the wretched injustices that happened to Jane and her people: the pogroms, the car accident that produced a brother with birth defects, the bad luck of her father in business, her own lack of physical beauty, and all the cruel injustices of life. Who is going to pay for this? Without God, someone must pay, and from that we have the horrors of history. But if one senses that God is responsible, then it is not unusual to blame God when things go wrong. God can be blamed for most anything birth defects, loss of loved ones, bad luck, accidents, bad choices. Blame turns into bitterness, often in direct proportion to the love of the thing we have lost. One of the most bitter losses is the death of children. It is very difficult for parents to survive this spiritually. Among those I have known, almost all have felt betrayed by God. This sense of betrayal can become a spiritual trial by fire. There have been so many who believed that God is good, and then suddenly, his goodness suddenly evaporates in a brutal event of betrayal. For this and lesser reasons, human beings turn against God. As we turn, we love something other than God ourselves, the world, our children, the movement, the party, wealth and power. It is the loss of these things that make us bitter toward God. In so doing, whether we know it or not, we begin to hate God. Jesus was clear on this.
No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. (Luke 16:13). He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal. (John 12:25)
What has God done about this, this deep and abiding hatred toward him for the accidents of life? The gospel proclaims that "Jesus died for the sins of the world." I want to relate this phrase to my involvement in the student movement of the sixties.
A Personal Example
From childhood, there was something wrong with me, a power within me. It organized my perceptions, guided my thoughts, awakened my desires. It began very very early, in the cold wild wind that made my childhood so dark, lonely, and cold. It was with me in my childhood preoccupation with war, the Korean War and my fascination with pictures of WWII. It gathered intensity when I read the history of Ghengis Khan in the eight grade. It became even more powerful when I was rejected in love, at home and by my first real girlfriend. It reached terrifying proportions as I read economics, history, and Marxist thought in the late sixties, receiving into my soul the hideous suffering and injustice of the world. Throughout all this, this power filtered my perceptions, shaped my thoughts, and guided my actions. It should have killed me, but it didn't. The Lord Jesus conquered it. After I became a Christian, it was cast out of me in the name of the Lord Jesus. In this exorcism the demon was identified as the "spirit of the anti-Christ." It is this spirit that has laid waste so much of the world in the twentieth century. I refer to the wars, the pogroms, the mass slaughters. With its departure, I was illumined. I saw in a moment how it had affected me throughout my life. This exorcism was only the negative moment of a exceedingly positive reality, the baptism of the Holy Spirit. I received the baptism in 1969, a few days after I had committed my life to Jesus Christ. In certain formal respects, the Holy Spirit functioned similarly to the spirit of the anti Christ. Out of the welter of impressions that poured into my soul, the Spirit enlivened the person of Jesus. He became real in the reading of Scripture, through Eucharist, repentance, prayer, and many friends. As this happened, a new picture of the world formed in my mind. That picture was the drama of salvation, beginning with a God who make all things, followed by a fall, law, prophets, Christ, crucifixion and resurrection, and the hope of a final home. By this picture, this gospel, I made sense of the world. Within that great drama was the claim that "Christ died for our sins." One night, in absolute anguish, an anguish that had assaulted me for months, I went down to the church expecting to curse God and be done with it. I was in hell, not just for my sins, but I was tormented because of the endless wasteland of human suffering that had affected me for years. Suddenly I sensed that someone could take my suffering. I cried out, "Put it on Jesus." I was shocked by the intensity with which I wanted him to suffer. That statement, "Put it on Jesus" has many dimensions. In one sense it was similar to the cries of the crowd who screamed at Jesus, "Crucify him, crucify him." It was in the whippings he received, the nails in his hands and feet, the taunting of the onlookers at his crucifixion. Through these cries, these evil deeds, Jesus received the sin and suffering of the world. My cry, "Put it on Jesus," however, was not a cry of hatred and rage. It was a cry of desperation. I had repented of my sins. I knew I hated God. I had told God how I felt about him. But I wanted to love God and make amends. I was suffering, and not just my own sins, but the sin and suffering that had poured into my soul since early childhood. As I cried out, "Put it on Jesus," my suffering that he had received on the cross was shown to be his suffering and not mine. I was instantly healed, my pain vanished. This is only one instance of many millions where God acts in Jesus Christ to deliver us from evil.
God conquers Evil and Suffering on the Cross
Christ's suffering on the cross for sin and its consequence could become effective now because Jesus was not merely a man, he was also God. As God, he could suffer the sin of the world. God suffered. God paid. I saw Jesus in hell. He was there with me. This is clear. God raised Jesus from the dead, and he raises from the dead those who receive the power of his sacrifice. I do not make these claims about the power of the cross and resurrection because of my experience. My experience counts for very little, except it matters to me and those who love me. I make these claims on the basis of Scripture. Anyone who hears the gospel message of the New Testament can see clearly that "God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting humanity's sins against them" (2 Cor 5:19) This reconciliation not only redeems our sins, it show us that God the divine Son has acted for us by bearing our suffering upon the cross. If anyone insists that God must pay for the injustices that plague the world, let them know that God has paid. If anyone accuses God of wrong, let such persons first examine themselves and repent of their wrongs. If anyone wants to be free, let them receive the Holy Spirit, the message of repentance and pardon, and by grace put their sin and suffering upon Jesus. If anyone wants to know the truth of these things, let them consult Scripture and act accordingly. You must know. The Father of the Lord Jesus Christ is not evil. He is good. Let us win through to God and his goodness. He will deliver us from evil. Let us persist until we find his love. Let us find the way. There is a way, even for those that God has seemingly betrayed in the most horrible way. The fundamental sin of this world can be briefly described. Instead of putting our sin, shame, and suffering on the Lord Jesus, we human beings put it on others or ourselves. That is the history of the world, one long litany of aggressions and reprisals among nations, classes, races, families, and even friends. On and on the matter goes. It will only stop when individuals and even whole groups decide to accept God's offer and allow the Spirit to put their sin and suffering on the cross rather than on themselves and others.
What the Church Must Do
Further, it scarcely occurred to Jane Alpert and her many friends that perhaps the church might have something significant to say on the matter of social and economic justice. Of course, she knew of Martin Luther King, and doubtless knew that he was a Christian. Faith, however, plays no role in her thought, and it wasn't simply because she was Jewish. I was there in the sixties. I read the literature and marched in the demonstrations. Myself and virtually everyone I knew paid little or no attention to the church because we had never seen a church where the fundamental evils of society were addressed in any penetrating or prophetic fashion. What church ever deals with racism? Where are the churches that fight for economic justice? What churches fight against the ongoing civil idolatry found on all sides? What must the church do? Do something about these things. I was once the rector of a middle class parish for twelve years. During my tenure, I worked with others in that community seeking a minimum living wage for employees of companies given financial incentives by the city. Except for my wife, none of my parishioners were involved in that effort, and virtually none of the pastors in this very religious town. The Mennonite pastor and the pastor of the trendy liberal church were the only exceptions. Except for a handful of people, none of my parishioner showed any interest in what Scripture had to say about economic justice for society as a whole. On several occasions, I addressed this and other matters from the pulpit. There was little response. At that time, and even now, I felt my efforts were rather feeble and clearly inadequate. If it hadn't been for the forgiveness of Jesus Christ I wouldn't be able to live with myself. As for the indifference of so many people in my parish and other respectable churches, I consider that characteristic of the middle and upper classes in America. Even so, God has not abandoned his church. All over the world there are churches where, in spite of sin and indifference, the love and mercy we all long for becomes real. It happens everywhere. It happened in the middle class church I served for twelve years. People came to love each other. That is what we in the student movement never really grasped. That is what Marxism could never see, with its claim that "religion is the opiate of the masses." When I was a student, we thought we were going to "save" the oppressed. Jesus Christ has already saved the oppressed. In shanty towns, in slums, in the poor villages, under bridges and under trees, in huts and in prisons, the partisans of the Lord Jesus sing his praises, and as they sing, they see and hear the one who overcomes the world. In that moment, they would rather have him than all the wealth and power in the world.
Further Essays
This essay requires at least two more essays. First, I need to show how worship, especially the holy Eucharist, creates a just society, the church. That is the society we all long for, a redeemed society, glimpsed by Jane as she marched that first day into Chester. Secondly, I need to show how the state differs from the church, and how Christians are called to work for justice in the political realm as well as the church. On this second topic, Karl Barth is the best theologian I have known, and I have set forth the fundamentals of his thought in the section on Barth. Barth knew the obvious. There is something wrong with this world, not just individually, but socially, economically, and politically, and we need to do something about it.
A Word of Thanks
I wish to thank Jane Alpert. She gave an honest and compelling account of the student movement. She did not hide her faults, or at least a goodly number of them, nor the faults of those around her. She brought to our attention matters of the utmost importance, the fact of injustice and our responsibilities in this matter. Finally, her account showed clearly why an ideology that lacks transcendence cannot end the viscous cycle of reprisals that make a hell upon earth. There is, by God's grace, a way forward. Put it on Jesus.
Endnotes
1. Alpert, Jane. Growing Up Underground. New York: Citadel Press, 1990. 2. Alpert, p. 24. 3. Alpert, p. 27. 4. Alpert, p. 30. 5. Alpert, p. 37. 6. Alpert, p. 33 4. 7. Alpert, p. 38. 8. Alpert, p. 52. 9. Alpert, p. 54. 10. Alpert, pp. 55 6. 11. The best treatment I have ever seen of human spirit and Holy Spirit is Arnold Come's Human Spirit and Holy Spirit. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1959. For the section on human spirit, see pp. 70f. 12. Alpert, p. 43. 13. Alpert, p. 112. 14. Alpert, p. 115. 15. Alpert, p. 124. 16. Alpert, p. 135. 17. Alpert, p. 135. 18. Alpert, p. 136. 19. Alpert, p. 208. 20. Alpert, P. 208. 21. Alpert, p. 309. 22. Alpert, pp. 309 10. 23. Alpert, p. 310. 24. Alpert, p. 310. 25. Alpert, p. 340. 26. Alpert, pp. 368 9. 27. Alpert, p. 347. 28. The ideas in this paragraph can be found in a brilliant classic, Christianity and Classical Culture, by Charles Norris Cochrane, New York: Oxford University Press, 1944. 29. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture, p. 110.
The Rev. Robert J. Sanders, Ph.D.
December, 2002.
