Ellett, Kent

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LeavenVolume 23Issue 2 The Stone-Campbell Dialogue Article 101-1-2015Personal Integration as Eucharistic HomecomingKent Ellettkentellett@att.netFollow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/leavenThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Religion at Pepperdine Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Leaven byan authorized administrator of Pepperdine Digital Commons. For more information, please contact paul.stenis@pepperdine.edu.Recommended CitationEllett, Kent (2015) "Personal Integration as Eucharistic Homecoming," Leaven: Vol. 23: Iss. 2, Article 10.Available at: http://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/leaven/vol23/iss2/10The 2013 Stone-Campbell Dialogue met in Indianapolis, Indiana, to explore possibilities forhealing ministries, particularly to veterans who served in the military. The overall theme of theDialogue was Healing and Soul Repair. This is one of three sermons presented at the GreatCommunion service and is followed by a second sermon from that service.After World War II William Tecumseh Sherman Williams went over to his son-in-laws house and picked him up.Where we going? asked Archie Ellett, who in less than twenty years would reach the pinnacle ofworldly success in becoming my great-grandfather.Ill tell you when we get there. Sherman replied. (Abrahamic call narrative, here)Grandpa Shermans dad had marched with Union forces through Georgia. But the son, a gentle,Campbellite elder (not an oxymoron), marched through the hills and hollers of Monroe County, Indiana instead,recovering from his fathers victory. Pulling into his grandsons driveway my great-great-grandfather Shermanset about healing his son-in-law, his grandson, and the rest of their severed family. Three generations of mengathered around the family table. I know none of the conversational detailsonly that through GrandpaShermans tearful eyes they all saw Jesus. Both my great-grandfather Archie (who also became an elder inthe church) and his son (who became a powerful preacher) got to come home. There were literalhomecomings in the years to come that had been impossible for years. I knew nothing of this story until acouple years ago. All I ever experienced was Great-Grandpa Archie proudly listening to his son proclaim thewonders of Jesuss reconciling love.I tell this story in order to say that human beings cannot be defragmented like hard drives, mysticallyrewired while the rest of us sleep. Psychic re-integration is a kind of homecoming that can and should takeplace around a family table. Is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ? Paul asks (1Cor 10.16). Christian salvation is recapitulation. It is the experience of all things reconciled and integratedunder one head, even Christ (Col 1.20). So we should not be surprised to experience healing as a kind ofsocial integration where walled-off parts of the self also learn to speak lovingly to each other.1 In RobertFrosts words from The Armful: Extremes too hard to comprehend at once are still things we care not toleave behind.2 Healing is a kind of sitting down in the middle of the road and stacking our lives in a better loadso we can hold our whole selves, in the language of the poem, bottles and buns, together close to breast.3 Tobe walled off from ones children, like my great-grandfather, is to be walled off from hopes and dreams. To bewalled off from a spouseto have to start over, as we say, is to sever a certain kind of relationship withPersonal Integration as EucharisticHomecomingKent Ellett1. While not totally unaware of its use in psychoanalysis, my use of the word self is more influenced by readings of Kierkegaardwho calls us to a purity of heart which wills one thing. This, together with my lifelong internal dialogue with sometimes warringparts of myself, accounts for my usage.2. Frost, Robert, The Armful, in The Poetry of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, 1969), 2667.3. Ibid., 198.THE STONE-CAMPBELL DIALOGUE LEAVEN  93your past. When we are invited by Las Vegas to a vacation from ourselves with the false assurance thatwhat happens here stays here, we are actually being invited to live a fragmented lifeto have profoundmemories that must be walled off from family, work and all that constitutes the self. It is to live in the midst ofone of those Faulkner novels I cant make it through. What happens there is that the self is disintegrated.The problem is not just that home does not understand what has secretly happened to usthe problem is alsothat we no longer have a knowable self to lug home.Upon coming home from the First World War, C. S. Lewis rather famously established a treaty withrealitya kind of fixed frontier against his experiences of horribly smashed men still moving like halfcrushed beetles. Memories of the war were, in his words, cut off from the rest of his experience.4 Thesewere not the only frontiers fixed in him. Unable to tell a meaningful story about the childhood death of hismother, unable to speak or tell the truth to his father, enraged by peers and teachers, it is perhaps nocoincidence that in his autobiography Lewis admits that there was a huge and complex episode upon hiscoming home that still could not be told without greater brokenness late in life.5Guilt that cannot be integrated into a story of forgiveness and liberation must sublimate itself, creatingghettos of ongoing denial. The craving to appear . . . the temptation to pretend . . . to engage in what iscommonly referred to as putting our best foot forwardall these must choke down ignorance and hideinability, agedness, and smallness or whatever else contemporary culture shames. Trauma that we cannotexperience alongside the God of the cross, and loss, un-grieved apart from the hope of resurrection, dividesinto suppressed enclaves of the soul that soon lack structural integrity. Rage often runs away from the past likean adolescent who cant wait to blow his hometown. Or it flees the future like an old woman seeking thesecurity of Egyptian slavery where there were plenty of leeks and onions. Divided souls cannot hold past andpresent together, nor can they own their own sin and forgiveness, failure and dignity, and hurt and hopetogether. As Frost suggests these are extremes too hard to comprehend at once. We have looked into suchpersons eyes. And we have seen that the lights are on but nobody is home. The psyche is so divided thatspeaking to such people, or trying to get close to such people, is like trying to have a relationship with ananswering machine.The lights are on but nobody is home. This is the essential creed of the pantheist. For increasing numbersof Westerners there is an indifferent, impersonal mystery at the heart of the worldthis mystery shinesthrough all thingsbut there is no personal God truly there to welcome us home, and meaningfully locate ourlives.Grandpa Sherman knew the Christian tradition invites folks to a table where there is a personal Presence,who socially and mystically and vocally confronts and forgives. The gospel is that not only are the lights on inthe kitchenthere is somebody home at the table! Someone to bear our guilt and acknowledge it as true, butwho nonetheless will not let us go. We can eat Living Bread, and behold his form (John 5.37; 6.48). And as aresult the Lord Jesus still lights the eyes of the disintegrated, inviting those who were once, as professed by theapostle Paul, a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence (1 Tim 1.12) to tell coherent stories abouttheir lives. Our very brokenness, as in the case of Paul, becomes an integral part of our future witness. Thus,Paul makes sense of his own violent past. Precisely for that reason [that he was a violent man] he says, Iwas shone mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display unlimited patience (1 Tim1.1316).Everything else is icing. Nothing else we do will matter if we cannot set and sit at a table where we tastethe Bread of Life who is bringing all things together whether things on earth or in heaven into himself.Robert Richardson said it well: It is here [at such a table] we may revive the recollections of the past and bidthe burial places of memory to give up their dead that we may go with them into the holy city.6 Here is a tablethat connects us with buried parts of the self and with the saints of all ages. Heres a place to call home4. Lewis, C.S., Surprised by Joy (San Diego: Harcourt, 1955), 196.5. Ibid., 196.6. Richardson, Robert, Communings in the Sanctuary, ed. C. Leonard Allen (Orange, CA: New Leaf, 2000), 5758.94  LEAVEN Second Quarter 2015where no part of ourselves is abandoned or left unclean. Here is a home where our whole spirits, our wholeemotional life, our entire social, economic and physical embodiment come together with blameless integrity (1Thess 5.23). There is a table that invites us to live and tell a coherent story. Welcome home! Come! Eat andchallenge and forgive one another as a foretaste of the perfect integration that is to come.KENT ELLETT IS A MINISTER FOR THE SPEEDWAY CHURCH OF CHRIST IN INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA(KENTELLETT@ATT.NET).

Personal Integration as Eucharistic
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Personal Integration as Eucharistic Homecoming

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