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A Strange and Wayward Thing: The Spiritual Journey of a Southerner

by Sidney Kelly

214 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #03-0184; ISBN 1-55395-821-7; US$20.50, C$23.00, EUR17.00, £12.00

The spiritual journey of a young man from a small, southern town traveling through Yale Divinity School, further graduate studies, and teaching for many years at a small women's college. In the later years illumination was found through the scholarship of the women's movement for his students and for himself.

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about the book      about the author      sample excerpts or Table of Contents      catalogue info

About the Book The author's deviant spiritual development began with the adoption of his grandfather's rejection of the notion of hell. As a ministerial student in the mid-50's Yale Divinity School provided more questions than answers. This gave rise to further graduate studies at Princeton and Vanderbilt, accompanied by continued existential and intellectual wrestling. There followed a spiritually tumultuous teaching career for many years as a professor of Bible at Salem, a small women's college, in North Carolina. In the later years an illumination for the author came from scholars within the Women's Movement, especially Rosemary Ruether and Carol Gilligan. These memoirs focus on issues raised in graduate studies of religion and, then, recounts pedagogical problems encountered in presenting a modern study of religion to undergraduates, especially Biblical Studies. Help in teaching women was found in the Women's Movement and, serendipitously, provided a new and satisfying spiritual orientation for the author. A degree in and some practice of counseling was an important contributing factor.

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About the Author Yale Divinity School was the first great turning point in my intellectual life. It was both challenging and devastating, leaving me with far more questions than answers, and yet with the confidence that I would enjoy pursuing biblical and theological studies. Further graduate studies were done at Princeton Theological Seminary and Vanderbilt University where answers to questions led to deeper questions. After completing doctoral studies at Vanderbilt I began teaching at Salem College, a small, liberal arts college in North Carolina. There I wrestled with pedagogical problems, adding these to the substantive biblical and theological ones. In my efforts to teach women relevantly, I both participated in Women's Studies and increasingly read materials coming from feminist scholars in religion. There I discovered Rosemary Ruether and Carol Gilligan. These scholars led me to a new religious orientation which satisfied both my pedagogical and long standing spiritual problems. A degree in and some practice of counselling contributed to this satisfying conclusion as did my course work in "religion and literature," "religion and mental health," and "Eastern Religious Traditions."

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Sample Excerpts or Table of Contents

Chapter One - Mother and Granddaddy

The only thing my mother told me about my grandfather's religious beliefs was, "papa doesn't believe in hell." This fragment of his religious life, passed down to me, was a fruitful gift.

Barely a teenager it occurred to me, if there is no hell, then, there must not be a devil. I took this conclusion to our elderly minister, Mr. Ragan, for confirmation. To my surprise he adamantly maintained that the Bible says there is a devil, so that's it. Period. With one blow, two authorities, the preacher's and the Bible's, suffered a grave loss. I didn't know anything about the Bible. I had assumed it was true and that the preacher would know about it. But something was wrong. Mother had told me that Granddaddy had read through the entire Bible twice -this had been years ago when he had had only two books, the Bible and Moll Flanders. Thus, either the preacher had missed something that granddaddy knew through his thorough reading of the Scriptures or the Bible itself had made a mistake. Either preachers or the Bible could be in error - or both.

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"Life is a strange and wayward thing...in the great sad River of Chance and Change...where I...a broken boat...drift afloat In the little noontide of love's delights Between two nights," that is, from womb to tomb.

How deeply those words seemed to resonate within me, and after all these years, still do. Death became the point of fascination, the question mark at the end of this strange and wayward thing that drifts in the great sad River of Chance and Change. That summer of 1949 I gazed off into space a lot * as, I remembered, granddaddy had done. Everything became quiet, slow, and solemn. It was not scary. It was just weird, incredibly weird. The awareness that we were all going to die. And the strange and wayward part was now I, we, were living, for what, why? What could be more bizarre, that we were living and didn't know the meaning of being alive? How absolutely incongruous! What an unbelievable situation. It was like a cosmic joke, maybe even a good-natured joke, but wildly absurd, even laughable. It made my skin crawl, a shudder to come over me. Not a monstrous or fearful thing, but rather, a fascinating and baffling mystery, provoking inordinate curiosity about death.

Yet death was supposed to be the answer, the resolution to the puzzle. That was certainly what I had heard, that after we die, in that great "somewhere," we would understand it all, it would all make sense. Death was being with God and was to be the great revelation about life. God or Socrates or granddaddy would explain it all. You would have to die in order to understand your living? I chuckled over the paradoxical pun:death did not seem a viable option!

The whole "strange and wayward thing"was made doubly so when all the people, walking around the beach, seemed totally oblivious to the situation. It was as if a conspiracy of silence kept it a secret. What a secret I had the illusion of getting on top of the house with a megaphone and shouting all around, "You are going to die, you are going to die. Would the people hearing be surprised and shocked, would we just stare at each other with glazed eyes? My megaphone message was not intended as a threat, like the prelude to a hell-fire and damnation sermon. It was just something, the most important something, that everyone...should...know...should comprehend -an informative public announcement. I didn't have any suggestions on what the hearers should do about it. I supposed we would all simply be baffled together. But not to be baffled was to miss the whole point, that life is a strange and wayward thing, between two nights.

"Curiosity killed the cat." -that would be my motivation, sheer curiosity. However, I did not get very far with suicidal thoughts, rather I came to a very logical conclusion, the inevitable one, I suppose. Since death as a revelation about life was not an option, the opposite would have to be the case, life would have to be a revelation about death. Yes, confronting this life-death mystery, one would have to approach it from the life side.

I had heard, of course, passing reference to the mystery of "life's unanswerable questions." However, that was it, simply a passing reference, a thing you left to the preachers. Leaving the mystery behind, one simply got on with the practical business of day-to-day living. But could folks have really confronted this mystery, and really left it behind? This was no idle fancy, something that could simply be set aside. This is what my living was to be about, to understand my/our being here. This audacious commitment was not due to any arrogant presumption about my intelligence -normal intelligence would do -but to the felt intensity of the experience.

I did not then make plans; map out a strategy, for pursuing this enlightenment. I don't think I did anything at all. Rather, I began carrying around in the back of my mind and deep in my bowels this creepy sense of mystery and a questioning curiosity about it.

So began my journey through "this strange and wayward thing.

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Anthropology and the Old Testament

Napier also introduced us to strange anthropological ideas of these ancient peoples. He referred to their mode of thinking as mythopoetic. For example, there was the power of the spoken word. Isaac could not take back his mistaken blessing of Jacob, intended for Esau (Genesis 27), because the spoken word had its own inherent, objective power. Powerfully spoken, it brought into being what it signified. This was the background for the ancient belief in curses and blessings. Similarly, the prophets were respected for their great word-power. They did not simply foretell the future; their prophecies were thought to "foremake"the future. When Jeremiah prophesied that Jerusalem was to be destroyed (Jeremiah 19:11), his hearers shuddered and the civic leaders tried to shut him up. He had released a power that would one day destroy Jerusalem unless more powerful countervailing word-power could be sent forth. Likewise, this was the mode of thinking behind the picture of God creating the heaven and the earth in the first creation story. When The Almighty uttered the words, "Let there be light," God's word-power made it happen! "And there was light"!

This word-power helped us better understand the prophets, why they were so respected and opposed, and to understand one of the accounts of creation, but how was it to help me understand contemporary religion? I did not believe in curses and blessings, word-power, except possibly in some watered down, psychological sense, not in this realistic, "mythopoetic" way. And if God does not create or act through word-power, how does he act? With his "out stretched arm" (Jeremiah 27:5) did not help much.

And so it was, on and on; every class was like a flash of sheet lightning that illuminated the landscape. I had a major revelation every day and a half dozen minor ones. The illuminations both resolved some problems and revealed new ones.

Another of Napier's lessons in biblical anthropology I will never forget. Years later I would duplicate it in my own Old Testament classes. We were studying the stories of Samuel, Saul, and David in the Book of First Samuel. Samuel, before dying, had announced that Yahweh rejected Saul as king in favor of David. Saul, the faithful warrior of his people, was about to go into battle against the Philistines who were threatening to take over the land. (The land is still called Palestine from the Philistines.) Before the battle, Saul wished to consult with his erstwhile confidant, Samuel, concerning the outcome of the battle. Samuel had recently died, so Saul went to a medium, the witch of Endor, and requested that she call up the ghost of Samuel. She did and the ghost of Samuel announced to Saul that he would die in the up-coming battle. (1 Samuel 28) Napier brought this story alive for us by playing the witch of Endor scene from Honniger's opera King David. The opera was in French, but no matter, this primitive, chilling, awesome, ghostly tale shocked us into an awareness of the strange, mysterious biblical world of three thousand years ago.

Again, it was the case that the better I understood the ancient biblical world, the less it seemed relevant to my own world. Were we to believe in witches who called forth the dead for messages about the future? Moreover, the biblical historian censored Saul for his visit to the witch of Endor, noting that such practices had recently been outlawed. Outlawed? Not exposed as superstition? Still more, we learned that the ancient Hebrews did not believe that the dead survived, that is, there was no after-life belief in heaven or hell. Rather, the dead went to Sheol, the grave or pit, in which they lay as in deathbed weakness. Could the dead, then, be "brought up"for guidance? Was it so common that it had to be outlawed? It began to appear that the underbelly of Old Testament religion was a quagmire of primitive customs and beliefs.

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Catalogue Information

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