Small World River Rising

Small World, River Rising

Rev. Clare Butterfield

St. Augustine never came to the pig roasts that my family held every spring, in our barn, for the farmers who were our neighbors and for the members of my father’s department at the University, down in Central Illinois. At no time did the great wide front doors slide back and the sandaled fifth-century sage wander in, shaking the sands of North Africa from his shoes, to join us in roast meat, Aunt Ruthie’s southern cole slaw, and my mother’s sheet cakes, from a recipe in the Farm Journal, to which my parents, inexplicably, subscribed. But we will put him in the story anyway. We will do it because St. Augustine believed in good men and a good God, and in building the City of God, and anyway this is a story of complexity.

It is early in the day yet, on the day of the pig roast we are having, and my Uncle Dean, who was not my uncle really, has wandered down from his farm to ours, to help my father dig the pit in the middle of the dirt floor in the part of the barn we use for riding horses on rainy days (do not ask me to explain my parents’ desire to do this). They will be busy together for a long time yet, digging and kidding each other, and starting the hickory smoking, slow cooking the meat for hours and hours until the odor of it would drive even the staunchest vegetarian to distraction, so we have time to talk about why St. Augustine is invited to join us in this story, though on the real day in question he wasn’t there.

Augustine’s life span wrapped the end of the fourth and the beginning of the fifth century. He died in 430. And he was one of the most powerful minds of the early church, though there were things about him that no longer strike us as helpful or illuminating. He took an exceedingly dim view of sex, for example, but remember that he also thought that frogs grew out of the earth. He was, in fact, a great fifth century mind, and this is quite forgivable, even laudatory, in a man who actually lived in the fifth century. Leave his less satisfactory ideas, for the moment, and think only of the man, born to a pagan father and a Christian mother, educated in Carthage, converted to Christianity in Rome, and, for the last thirty years of his life, Bishop of Hippo, in North Africa. His final work, City of God, was written over many of those last thirty years, and was completed just prior to his death, when the Vandal tribes were threatening the city.

It’s a big book. We won’t try to do it justice. But here, in a nutshell, is what it says about good and evil, and the acts of the will. God, Augustine says, is all good. God is goodness itself, and God is the author of all that is. “God supremely exists, and therefore he is the author of every existence which does not exist in this supreme degree,” to put it in the exact words of the saint. God supremely exists, and because he is existence, being itself, and all things come from him and all things are contained in him, God is unchangeable, immutable. All things and all times and all time before time flow together in God, and all that is good comes from him. That’s Augustine. Does it strike you as beautiful, poetic, poignant, even, the thought of this early converted pagan living on the edge of the crumbling Roman empire, thinking his beautiful thoughts, with the Vandals knocking at the gate? It strikes me that way. There is a delicacy about St. Augustine that makes me willing to overlook much in him.

So there is God, goodness itself, unchanging and unchangeable, and all that comes from his is good. Then how is it that anything evil exists? Well, this is Augustine’s explanation for the existence of evil. All is good by nature, and goodness, because it is created, may exist on its own. No so evil, because evil is not created, having not come from God. Evil is a choice that those beings capable of choice (guess which kinds of beings those are) can make, when they assert their own wills against the will of God. Evil is the absence of goodness, a turning away from God’s goodness, as darkness is the absence of light. It has not cause, says Augustine, for God is the cause of all, but comes from a voluntary falling away from good.

I think the guests are beginning to pull their cars up to the barn at this point, so perhaps we ought to return to them. Throughout my childhood, my father participated in an active technology exchange between the University of Illinois and the state university in Mexico, in Mexico City, so some years we were there a lot and other years our friends from Mexico were here. In this particular year there were several professors and their families and a number of graduate students taking their turn in the States. In this particular year also, we invited, as we always did, not only all the people from the computer science department (all faculty, some staff, graduate students) but most of our neighbors from the adjoining farms. And in this year as well on the morning of the pig roast it began to rain. It rained all day.

It was, as it turned out, the day of the hundred-year flood. If you’ve lived in the Midwest for any length of time you know this means it rained in good earnest, but you also know that most of us have lived through seven or eight of these hundred year floods so it’s not quite as grave a matter as it may sound.

The little creek on our placed flooded pretty regularly, in fact. Most springs it swelled up beyond its customary six inches depth to several feet over its banks. When we first lived on the place my father built a couple of plank bridges over it, enough to take a tractor over, but the first two washed out in pretty short order. We found their remains later, downstream. It was bad enough that when he built the third one, the one that’s still there, he buried telephone poles deep down into the banks to anchor it, but in spite of that when he had the formal dedication ceremony, and of course summoned Uncle Dean down for the occasion, Uncle Dean expressed his skepticism of my father’s bridge-making abilities by showing up in hip waders.

So of course Uncle Dean was there all day, back and forth, poking fun at my father to a degree that might have been dangerous for a lesser man. Uncle Dean had been a tail-gunner in World War II, he and his best friend, Harry, together, and they were inseparable for the rest of their lives. Uncle Dean put in a patch of sweet corn every year at the edge of his field, and every summer my mother and my sister and I would troop off to Aunt Ruthie’s kitchen with Harry’s wife while the men, Uncle Dean, his friend Harry, and my father, went out to the field to pick it, and we would blanch and freeze enough pints for all of us until the next summer. In the self-absorption of childhood, I accepted this act as generous but a natural part of our lives. Only recently did it occur to me that it meant that early in the spring every year, year after year, Uncle Dean, whom I loved more dearly than any real Uncle, stood in his field and measured the seed and thought about me, his dutch-niece from down the road, and measured some into the hopper just for me.

Generosity was one of his typical traits. I never heard him utter an angry word in my life. I never hear him fear, never saw him tired until right at the end with his cancer, never knew him to do a dishonest thing, to take secret advantage, to deal unfairly. Watched him hitch up a little wagon to a riding mower on a visit twenty-some years back, and pull my little boy around in it to their perfect mutual delight, though the pain in his hip that he thought then was arthritis made the jarring sore and his walk stiff.

He had been in the European theater, Uncle Dean, and had no doubt seen some things that he would never consider appropriate to tell me about. I’ve noticed myself from my own friends who were in Vietnam, that the more they saw the less they had to say about it. Into the barn he came that day though it rained and rained and department members were calling all day to cancel. The little creek, the ditch behind our house and barn, was rising.

What we ended up with that night was food for about 80 and 30 people there. The farmers who could still get through, or who never allowed a little matter of weather to keep them from where they wanted to go. And all the Mexicans who didn’t realize that the rain was anything significant. The bridge between us and Uncle Dean and Aunt Ruthie was washed over and impassable, but they’d come down early and there were two other ways around to get home, though both took them four miles out of their way.

I think about that night a lot now. Think about what a strange configuration of humanity it was. Mexican college professors and graduate students, who commented on the beauty of the river, thinking that it was always sixty feet across, instead of its habitual eighteen inches, who watched the willows and cottonwoods toss and bend in the late-day rains and dip their heads down to the rushing current. Farmers and neighbors who accepted all these strangers into what was, after all, their turf, as graciously and naturally as if there was nothing at all unusual about the assortment. My own family, in the midst of it, and me, in particular, thinking of this as a normal occurrence, and trying to be discreet as we peeked out the back door of the barn in case the river rose up high enough that we were actually cut off from the house, or needed to advise people to bolt for their cars and flee to the mountains. Graduate students from several continents, and whatever other stragglers from the department hadn’t been too frightened to brave the flood. And because there were so few of us, and because the Mexican students had brought their guitars, we sat there in the barn long into the night, after the rains had stopped and the river crested below the back barn door with a few feet to spare, and sang whatever songs any handful of us had in common.

And that’s when the Saint walks through the barn door. After all those years in the desert he probably likes the rain. With his talk about evil being an act of the will, but with his own beautiful complexity of thought recognizing that wise men may sometimes be forced to participate in evil which they do not choose. St. Augustine looks around the barn, helps himself, maybe, to some of Aunt Ruth’s cole slaw, listens, puzzled to the songs in Spanish (it probably sounds like bad Latin to him) and wanders over to where Uncle Dean and another neighbor are sitting, smoking their cigarettes, laughing quietly over something they wouldn’t repeat in my presence, talking to the college professors about whatever they had to talk about and enjoying the music. He can tell, though neither of them is a Catholic, or even a churchgoer, that they are Godly men, and he likes them for it.

The point of the City of God is a little remote for us now. It is that we must not love the world too much, even as we work here to build the best of cities, the city of man. Because the best of our actions in our life on this earth are pointed elsewhere – toward the construction of the City of God, where our goodness will flow out of us as God created it, and all will be well. We’re practicing here, in other words, for our true lives there. I don’t know about that. The dead keep their secrets, and if that city is what awaits us I guess I’ll be surprised to get there. In that case, I do sincerely hope the Universalists were right.

By the end of his life Augustine was living in a city threatened closely and immediately by war, and war of a particularly savage and brutal kind, though all wars are savage and brutal. He speaks a bit more obliquely at the end of City of God than he did at the beginning of the evil tendencies of humans, of “the dark influences which were in us at birth” and less of a simple turning away from God’s light. Time has darkened him, as it will most of us, I suspect. And yet he speaks of our restoration, of the restoration of all the saints to the City of God on the Sabbath Day.

“The saints will have no sensible recollection of past evils” he says, “they will be completely erased from their feelings.” And we, too, will be restored. He says it this way: “We ourselves shall become that seventh day, when we have been replenished and restored by his blessing and sanctification. There we shall have leisure to be still, and we shall see that he is God….”

I don’t know about the City of God of the blessed Saint. But if he had wandered up our driveway that night, in his sandals through the rain, and followed the sound of singing and the smell of hickory smoked pork (and chicken too, for the Muslims and Jews) hissing in the occasional drip from a leaky rafter, I wonder if he would have thought that he had found it at last. His still and quiet Sabbbath day, “when we are perfectly at rest, and in stillness see perfectly that he is God.”

Now I happen to think that Augustine was right to say that the nature of the divine is revealed in nature – that the use of our senses can guide us to insights about the divine. But I think his conclusion about God’s immutability was wrong – too limiting.

And I don’t believe in the city of God either, though, as I mentioned, I’m prepared to be wrong about that.

I think the city of God is here – there is no other city. But there is complexity and emergence and I believe that while Augustine may have started us on the path of trying to learn about God’s nature by looking at all the things for which God is the source (this is called natural theology) he came to some conclusions that even he might not come to if he had all the information about the world in front of him that we have in front of us.

This is a story of complexity. I said that at the start. Here’s why I meant by it. Not only have singular and unlikely groups of variables, sometimes they’re people, gotten together to create particularly memorable nights (with or without the presence of ancient saints and sages) but complexity happens all the time. And what emerges from it will be different and more wonderful than anything that might have come from a more linear process.

The world was a very small place that night, getting smaller and smaller, with the river rising. You may have noticed that in the 40 or so years since then it continues to shrink. Other people who were there that night might remember it differently and tell it to you differently. I choose to remember it this way. All the barriers down, no obstacles of language, history, culture, class, or different ways of thinking. Farming men in late middle-age explaining to Mexican computer scientists how their crop rotations worked, with the memory of evil, at least at that moment, erased from their feelings. The waters cresting just short of the back door. And the music twisting in the smoke up by the rafters, while over in the corner the old saint looks on, the threat of Vandals long out of memory, tapping his sandaled foot, at rest and smiling.