A Resurrection-Shaped Life

In this article I am sharing some reflections on Episcopal Bishop Jake Owensby’s book, A Resurrection-Shaped Life: Dying and Rising on Planet Earth (2018), and relating it to my cousin who was buried yesterday.

Characteristics of a Resurrection-Shaped Life

1) Those who live a resurrection-shaped life are hopeful. Owensby’s slim book is neither directly about Jesus’ resurrection nor the resurrection of Jesus-believers in the future. Rather, it is about one’s manner of living in the here and now.

Owensby asserts that “it’s in the depths of loss and sorrow that hope brings us to new life” (p. 51). Jesus had said to his disciples, “Blessed are those who mourn” (Matt. 5:4). Even though they did not understand this as they mourned Jesus’ crucifixion, they experienced that blessedness when Jesus was resurrected.

So, “the resurrection of Christ gives new meaning to our experience of grief” (p. 52). Those who live a resurrection-shaped life embrace, and are embraced by, the blessing of hope even in the midst of grief.

2) Those who live a resurrection-shaped life are joyful. Perhaps it is largely because of their hopeful attitude, a resurrection-shaped life is characterized by joy as well as by hope.

Owensby (b. 1957) doesn’t write much about joy in this book--except for his several references to Joy, which is his wife’s name. But joy definitely seems to be a by-product of a resurrection-shaped life.

The third chapter of Owensby’s book is “Recovering from Shame and Blame.” (I was pleasantly surprised to see this chapter just after posting my article about shame on April 5.) Those who live a resurrection-shaped life have learned to overcome shame. That is because, as Owensby writes,

Overcoming shame involves changing our minds about ourselves. And Jesus came in part to help us do precisely that. Jesus changes our minds about ourselves by changing our minds about God (p. 36).

3) Those who live a resurrection-shaped life are helpful. That is, they regularly engage in loving service.

To cite Owensby again,

Life centered on caring for ourselves turns to dust. A life devoted to the growth, nurture, and well-being of others stretches into eternity. A resurrection-shaped life is love in the flesh (p. 102).

And this gets us to my cousin Carolyn, who was my oldest first cousin on the Seat side of the family.  

The Resurrection-Shaped Life of Cousin Carolyn

Carolyn Houts passed away on April 12 and her funeral/burial was yesterday, on Good Friday. Carolyn, who celebrated her 77th birthday last month, died peacefully, sitting in a chair waiting for the delivery of her Meals on Wheels lunch.

After serving for nearly 34 years as a Southern Baptist missionary to Ghana, Carolyn retired in 2010 and had lived in Grant City, Missouri, since 2011. My blog article for 7/5/10 (see here) was about Cousin Carolyn, just as she was returning to the U.S., and I hope you will read it (again). 

Carolyn Houts (1942-2019)

As I said in the eulogy that I gave at her funeral yesterday, it seems quite clear to me that Carolyn lived a resurrection-shaped life. Hopefulness, joyfulness, and helpfulness were definitely characteristics of her life.

As we observe the celebration of Easter tomorrow—and I realize there will be a great variety in the way readers of this blog will celebrate Easter—my deepest prayer is that we all will not only know what a resurrection-shaped life means but will, in reality, be able to live such a life.

Happy Easter!

“The Smile of a Ragpicker”

Last April (in this article) I wrote about Dr. Takashi Nagai and made reference to The Song of Nagasaki (1988), the brilliant biography of Nagai by Paul Glynn, a former Australian Catholic missionary to Japan. Because that was such an enjoyable read, I soon read Glynn’s next book, The Smile of a Ragpicker (1992).

The latter is the inspirational story of Satoko Kitahara, an outstanding Japanese woman who was born in 1929 and died of tuberculosis on January 23, 1958, while still only 28 years old.

MEETING BROTHER ZENO

Kitahara Satoko-san grew up in Tokyo as a privileged child of an aristocratic family, the descendant of samurai warriors and Shinto priests. While a teenager, though, her lifestyle was seriously thrown out of kilter by Japan’s entry into World War II. She began working in an airplane factory and lived in constant fear and anxiety. To make matters worse, during that time she contracted TB.

Four years after the war, though, Satoko-san was able to graduate from college. Later in 1949 she was baptized as a Catholic Christian. The following year she met Zeno Zebrowski, a Polish Franciscan friar who had gone to Nagasaki in 1930 with Fr. Maximilian Kolbe (whom I wrote about, here, last August). Satoko-san was greatly influenced by this 59-year-old man who had little education but a huge heart of love for needy people.  

Brother Zeno worked tirelessly to help the injured and destitute people in and around Nagasaki after the explosion of the atomic bomb in August 1945. His meritorious activities became known throughout Japan, and in 1949 even Emperor Hirohito visited the orphanage Zeno operated in Nagasaki Prefecture.

Zeno then went to Tokyo and began a tireless ministry there, working on behalf of the 6,000 or more homeless and needy people who lived in Ari-no-Machi (literally, “Ants Town”). It was there that Satoko-san met him.

BECOMING A RAGPICKER

The slum section along the Sumida River in Tokyo was called Ants Town because of the thousands of people who lived there in such a small area and because of the constant activity in their desperate efforts to survive. Their means of survival was largely through collecting and then selling materials discarded in the trash. They were euphemistically called ragpickers.

Satoko-san sought to help the ragpickers, and spent time as a volunteer tutoring the children of Ants Town. But after hearing a man express his scorn for people like her who came condescendingly from places of privilege to “help” the poor and needy, Satoko-san examined her own life and work.

Consequently, according to Glynn, she came to this live-changing conclusion: “There was only one way to help those ragpicker children: become a ragpicker like them!” (p. 146). And that is what she did, much to the consternation and disapproval of her family.

Satoko-san spent the remainder of her much-too-brief life living in poverty as a ragpicker, and as Glynn emphasizes, she was widely known for the loving smile she had for the people she lived among.

BEATIFYING THE RAGPICKER

Two years ago, fifty-seven years after her death, Satoko-san was beatified by Pope Francis on January 22, 2015. Publically recognized for the “heroic virtues” she displayed in seeking to improve the lot of the people in Ants Town, she became the first Japanese person declared Servant of God by the Catholic Church.

How is it that so many of us do so little to help the needy when Satoko-san did so much? Moreover, how can people of faith be happy that beginning today the U.S. has a billionaire President who seems largely unconcerned about the plight of the poor and marginalized?

The Woman Who Worked for God and FDR

In February 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the newly elected President, came to see a woman about becoming the labor secretary in his Cabinet. There had never before been a woman Cabinet member. This woman, though, would not agree to take the job if FDR did not agree to support her goals.

She faced FDR squarely and ticked off the items on her list: a forty-hour workweek, a minimum wage, worker’s compensation, unemployment compensation, a federal law banning child labor, direct federal aid for unemployment relief, Social Security, a revitalized public employment service, and health insurance. Quite a list!

The woman in question was Frances Perkins, and she did become FDR’s Secretary of Labor, serving in that position for Roosevelt’s entire 12 years in office.

The story of her meeting FDR and presenting her conditions for accepting his invitation to join his Cabinet is told in the prologue of Kirstin Downey’s definitive biography of Perkins, The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience (2009).

Frances Perkins was born on April 10, 1880, and when she stepped down from office in 1945—twenty years before her death in May 1965—she remarked to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, “I came to work for God, FDR and the millions of forgotten, plain, common working men” (Downey, p. 398).

Born in Boston, Frances graduated from Mount Holyoke College, where she was president of the graduating class of 1902. She led her class to choose “Be ye steadfast” for their class motto, words taken from 1 Corinthians 15:58, which ends, “ye know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord” (KJV).

A couple of years after graduating, Frances moved to Chicago where she had considerable contact with Jane Addams and Hull House—and also considerable contact with poor and needy people. According to Downey, when friends once questioned her as to why it was important for people to help the poor, “Frances responded that it was what Jesus would want them to do” (p. 18).

In 1909 Frances moved to New York City, and on the afternoon of March 25, 1911, she was having tea with friends near Washington Square Park in Manhattan when they heard fire sirens. She was one of many who rushed to gaze in horror at the fire that had broken out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.

The second chapter of David Brooks’s book The Road to Character (2015) begins by relating Frances’s experience on that fateful afternoon. Brooks remarks, “After the fire, what had been a career turned into a vocation. Moral indignation set her on a different course. . . . She became impatient with the way genteel progressives went about serving the poor.”

Perkins’s way to serve the poor turned out to be as Secretary of Labor. By being the woman behind the New Deal and the “conscience” of FDR, her contributions to helping the poor were numerous and praiseworthy.

She instigated Social Security, which many of us benefit from now. She also established the nation’s first minimum wage law and the first overtime law, from which many of us have also benefited. And those are just some of her many meritorious accomplishments.

At her funeral, the minister read the Bible verse Perkins recommended to her college graduating class 63 years earlier. Indeed, she had been admirably steadfast in working for God and for FDR—and she did that by laboring tirelessly for “the millions of forgotten, plain, common working men” and women of the country.

Remembering Albert Schweitzer

One of the outstanding persons of the twentieth century died 48 years ago yesterday. That was Albert Schweitzer, who passed away at the age of 90.

Schweitzer was born in 1875 in a town that had been part of France until the region was annexed by Germany four years earlier. By 1900 he had become a noted organist, had completed his doctor of philosophy degree, and was a Lutheran minister and seminary professor.

In 1904, though, Schweitzer felt God’s call to become a missionary to Africa. But he decided that in order to serve best in the jungles of Africa he should become a doctor, so he entered medical school. Upon completion of his medical training, but before leaving Europe, he then had to raise money to equip a clinic.

Finally, on Good Friday in 1913, Dr. Albert and his wife Helene, a nurse, set sail for Africa. They immediately began their medical work in Lambaréné, a small outpost in what was then known as French Equatorial Africa and now as the country Gabon. They soon were overwhelmed with patients.

It was not long, though, before World War I began. Since the Schweitzers were German citizens, they were seen as enemies of the French, who ruled the country to which they had gone. So they were placed under house arrest, and then in 1917 were moved to an internment camp in France.

By the time the war ended in 1918, their mission in Lambaréné had been destroyed and they were heavily in debt for medicines and supplies ordered for an African hospital that no longer existed.

During his first years in Africa, Schweitzer began to emphasize “reverence for life,” which became one of his “trademarks.” That emphasis is similar to a central idea in Buddhism, and there is even a Buddhist temple in Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan, that bears Schweitzer’s name. June and I enjoyed visiting there several years ago.

In 1924 Schweitzer journeyed back to Africa and started from scratch once again. This time his work flourished—and gradually became known around the world. Dr. Albert became so well known and his emphasis on reverence for life so admired that in 1952 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Worldwide attention and acclaim led some to look for flaws in Schweitzer, and, indeed, there did seem to be some. In the 1950s he was accused, perhaps rightfully, of being paternalistic, colonialistic and even racist in his attitude towards Africans.

Still, those who leveled such criticisms had not labored or suffered anything close to the extent that Schweitzer had. And they certainly had not done nearly as much to help so many people in physical need.

Once when asked how he had accomplished so much, the old doctor responded by repeating what he had earlier told some of his students: “I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.”

Those are certainly words well worth considering as we remember with appreciation the long and productive life of Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who died on September 4, 1965.

Note – Recently read/viewed and recommended: “Albert Schweitzer: Serving a Higher Calling,” chapter 15 in Ace Collins, Stories behind Men of Faith (2009) and “Albert Schweitzer: Called to Africa” (2006 film).