[Dialogue] Spong 10-19

[kroegerd@aol.com]

October 19, 2005
Surveying Fifty Years with the Class of 1955 

It was a strange experience to approach the downtown Los Angeles Theatre Center on a Sunday evening early in October. Why? Because the billboards advertising the play at the Tom Bradley Theatre had large prints of my face on them. From the top of my head to the clerical collar was a slash of different colors separating my face into two unequal portions. The playbill announced: "Will and Company presents: 'A Pebble in My Shoe - the Life and Times of John Shelby Spong', written and directed by Colin Cox." On the inside cover Will and Company stated its purpose: "We will strive for egalitarianism and unity in our artistic adventure. We look to present works that examine and challenge stereotypes of color, creed, ability and gender. We want to promote discussion, evoke emotion, incite action, encourage change through entertainment in which the audience cries, feels, laughs, thinks and is made sufficiently angry to take action." Later, this playbill introduced the cast: Stephan Wolfert playing Jack Spong, with Mike Peebler and Dawn Stern in multiple roles. 
My wife and I took our seats and settled down for what was to be the most unusual and unanticipated night of my life. I wondered first if anybody would come. Those who are responsible for counting the house, however, told me that almost four hundred people were present for this premier, about twice the number expected. I was anxious about how this audience would respond, but when the final curtain fell, the audience rose as one to give the play and its actors a standing ovation. Personally, however, I was not prepared for the roller coaster of emotions that I would experience as this two-hour drama (including intermission) unfolded. 
How did this play come about? In the year 2000 Harper Collins published my autobiography that they entitled, Here I Stand, a deliberate attempt on their part to link me with Martin Luther and Reformation. My working title for this book had been "My Struggle for a Christianity of Integrity, Love and Equality," which they agreed to carry as the subtitle. It had been a hard book for me to write for many reasons. I wondered first, who besides my mother would be interested in reading it. My editor at Harper, who by this time was a good friend, countered by saying: "Jack, during your lifetime you have lived through five major cultural revolutions that have deeply impacted the Christian Church and by luck, intuition or political acumen you have been in the center of each of them. If you could tell your story you would be telling the story of many others because all of us have had to walk through those revolutions." It was a compelling argument. The five revolutions were the changes in racial consciousness that led us to move from the cruel repression of segregation to cries of "Black Power" and "Black is Beautiful;" the feminist revolution that led us to redefine what it meant to be both female and male; the revolution against religious imperialism that manifested itself in the claim that one religious system possessed the entire truth of God and that all others reflected little more than pagan or heretical distortions, an attitude that has expressed itself historically in religious wars, persecutions, burning heretics, the Crusades and the Holocaust; the revolution in our understanding of homosexuality and sexual orientation, in which we moved from seeing homosexuality as unnatural and immoral, to viewing it simply as different from the majority; finally there was the inevitable revolution about how the Bible was to be understood since the Bible could hardly be the "Word of God' if it had been wrong on each of these prejudices. 
My qualifications for writing this story lay in the fact that as a child raised in an evangelical church in the Bible Belt of the South, I had grown up being taught that segregation, sexism, anti-Semitism and homophobia were not only the will of God, but were supported by appeals to the sacred Scriptures. Yet in the course of my life I had become one who was once named "Public Enemy #1 of the Ku Klux Klan in Edgecombe County, N.C.;" a radical champion of equality for women in both church and society; a partner with a rabbi in a dialogue that deeply challenged the anti-Semitism of the city of Richmond; and the bishop who ordained the first open, honest and publicly partnered gay man to the priesthood of my church, provoking a debate that was destined to break the back of my church's homophobia. My journey just might be a way for other people's journeys to be understood, was my publisher's thinking. 
Once I began to entertain the possibility of writing this book, one other obstacle loomed large. For an autobiography to have integrity it must be honest and that requires the willing vulnerability, not just of the author, but of those closely related. For example, I could not tell my life story without revealing that my father was an alcoholic for this fact changed my life dramatically. Yet he was also the father of my sister and my brother who might not want that part of their lives made public. In a similar way my self-understanding and values were also shaped by the debilitating mental illness that for fifteen years engulfed my first wife, Joan, before she ultimately died of breast cancer in 1988. No one could possibly understand my life without knowing this piece of my history. Yet this troubled, but still beloved, woman was also the mother of my daughters who might prefer to keep this difficult chapter private. The affected people had to agree before I could undertake this project. They did, and so I engaged this task. 
Writing this book was in many ways therapeutic. It required me to revisit transforming times that I had shared with people who had been important in my personal growth and this allowed me to appreciate anew what they had meant to me. I also roamed over painful, distant memories, raising them to consciousness and allowing them to be healed anew. The writing task went quite rapidly and the book was published to mark my retirement in 2000. Two years ago through the combination of a suggestion from a friend, a small grant made available by a non-profit foundation, and a conversation between my publisher, Mark Tauber, and Colin Cox, a talented Hollywood playwright, this play, "A Pebble in My Shoe," was commissioned and now I was watching the story of my life unfold on that stage before me. Some scenes brought out of the audience gales of laughter. One occurred when I, as a 24 year old, newly minted priest, met the first couple I was to marry. I had notes from my training filed in a pre-marriage manual and felt well prepared to assist a prospective bride and groom into marital bliss, including sexual bliss. My first wedding, however, turned out to be between a 70-year old thrice widowed woman and a 69-year old twice widowed man who had between them five children and six grandchildren. My pre-marital sex notes were completely out of touch with their reality and the scene in which I was portrayed as coming to that realization in their presence was hilarious. Another in which I quoted some of the more absurd texts in the Bible to counter those who quoted Leviticus to condemn homosexuals brought down the house. 
There were also moments that for me were so emotional as to bring forth both literal tears and a shaking body that I could not control. Reliving my first wife's descent into mental illness and later her death made me deeply aware that those wounds have not yet healed. I was forced to relive the hostility that I had absorbed from the Ku Klux Klan, including its threat to rape my 6, 3 and 1 year old daughters, if I did not stop my "race mixing foolishness." The angry response I received from homophobic fellow bishops when I moved against that prejudice was brought anew to my consciousness. The disillusionment I felt at the betrayal of those liberal hierarchical figures who talked courageously, but who, when the pressure came, collapsed and ran for cover in the closet of institutional security, was endured anew. The experience of watching the gay man for whom I had risked my whole career, self-destruct before my eyes and thus enormously increase the hostility that my critics were heaping upon me, brought back those sleepless nights when I wrestled with whether or not I had done the right thing. 
Other moments, however, were of such joy that I smiled from head to toe. One such scene recalled the time when I, as a new bishop, laid my hands on the head of the Dean of St. Mary's Cathedral in Johannesburg making him Bishop of Lesotho in South Africa, thus launching a fabulous career. His name? Desmond Tutu. Another was the portrayal of my growing relationship with one Christine Barney, who in 1990 became not only my wife but so much more. She is my partner in every phase of my life personally and professionally. She is also my soul mate; the one who gives my life its ultimate sweetness and wonder. 
When the play was over, the curtain calls finished, and the applause silent the audience was invited to a reception to meet the cast, the play's creator and director, the producer, the stage manager, the persons in charge of costumes, sound, lighting and sets, and the graphic designer, all of whom were essential to the play's success. Of this group I had only met Colin Cox once, yet I found myself embracing each of them, especially the actors who had brought this play to life. It was as if I had known them all my life, and as if they had lived inside my skin. 
Time alone will reveal this play's future. Its trial run was six performances in Los Angeles. Everything after that depends on the response. It could range from being one among several offerings in a repertoire that a traveling company offers to universities and churches around the country, to a major production playing in the theaters of America's leading cities, to being turned into a television special or even a motion picture. It must first be good enough to attract financial backing. That is beyond both my power and control but I will watch with interest. Memories of opening night, however, will long linger in a special place among my souvenirs. 
? John Shelby Spong 
Note from the Editor: Bishop Spong's new book is available now at bookstores everywhere and by clicking here! 
Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong
Carl Galler via the Internet writes: 
I'm interested on what your comments would be regarding N. T. Wright's recent book, Resurrection of the Son of God. 
Dear Carl, 
N. T. (Tom) Wright, who is now the Anglican Bishop of Durham in the U.K., is one of the best-known evangelical writers in the English-speaking world. He has an encyclopedic mind for biblical data and biblical trivia. He is an effective communicator but, underneath it all, I find him to be little more than a fundamentalist with style. He expends his considerable ability not in seeking the truth but in defending the traditional view because he has identified that traditional view with the truth. 
When he writes about the Resurrection, he assumes that it was an act in history that could have been photographed, with the body of Jesus resuscitated and therefore physically touchable, and a literal tomb that was actually empty. I do not now recall but I suspect he also thought the earthquake was literal, the darkness that covered the whole earth from noon to three p.m. on the day of the crucifixion was literal, and the angel who rolled back the stone was literal. I know he has defended the literalness of the wandering star that was supposed to have led the wise men to Bethlehem. Needless to say in each of these assertions he finds the great mass of scholars in total disagreement. 
I think the Resurrection was far more than a literal resuscitation of a deceased body. That is in fact a later developing understanding of resurrection that you will not find in Paul or even in Mark. I see it as a stunning mind and eye opening experience that enabled human beings to stare into the realm of the spirit and there to confront a God beyond the limits of time and space. This experience gave human beings an entry into an ultimate and life changing sense of transcendence. 
I suggest that you read Tom's book, Resurrection of the Son of God, and then read my book Resurrection: Myth or Reality? - A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Easter and decide for yourself. 
If you do that, I hope you will write again and share your thoughts with me. I promise you I will run your letter as part of this column. 
? John Shelby Spong 
 
Dick Kroeger
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