Hauerwas, Against the Grain

Many people could write a memoir like the one Stanley Hauerwas has written; only Hauerwas would. He “would” because he’s unabashedly honest and candid and Texas brash. He not only tells the tragic story of a mentally ill wife (and mother to their son Adam) and some of the insider bickerings that occurred at Augustana, Notre Dame and Duke, but he does all of this without settling scores with his academic critics. In this memoir, Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s Memoir, offers the occasional “I don’t know why they don’t take my nuances more into account” but instead of a blow-by-blow defense of his views, what we get in this memoir is the inner fabric and inside story of the real life of Stanley Hauerwas, warts and all. He tells some, or more than that, details I’d rather not know, but once the story is told I realized we wouldn’t understand the story without those realistic details.

Only Hauerwas, as he tells his story, could buy a home in the mountains in order to escape from work on weekends only to discover he and Paula go to church so often they didn’t have time to go to the mountain home. So they sold it.

“I try to be a church theologian,” he writes. “I am not interested in what I believe. I am not even sure what I believe.” Vintage Hauerwas to say it like that. It’s the tension between claiming to be a theologian and not knowing what he believes that creates the tension. But he goes on to clarify: “I am much more interested in what the church believes. I have discovered this claim invites the skeptical response, ‘Which church?’ I can only reply by saying, ‘The church that has made my life possible.’ The name of that church is Pleasant Mount Methodist, Hamden Plains Methodist, the Lutheran church at Augustana, Sacred Heart, Broadway Christian Parish, Aldersgate United Methodist, and the Church of the Holy Family” (254). There you have the robust ecclesiology at work in Hauerwas.

Kris, my wife, is normal. She’s healthy and she and I have loved one another for four decades. Without her and the peaceful environment she has created in our home — a peace I’m not sure I could have created — I could not have done what I have done. Without the peace she has created in this home I could not be a writer or a professor because both require (for me at least) a calm, sane and tranquil life.

Hauerwas’ life was hell for much of his career because his first wife, Anne, was mentally ill. Hauerwas describes Anne matter of factly, more matter of factly perhaps than I needed to know, but there are no hints of bitterness or a zeal to put her down. But she made his life hellish. Hauerwas found family with his son, Adam, with whom he forged a wonderful friendship and about whom he writes with love and even admiration.

Admiration comes to mind when I think of what Hauerwas wrote and accomplished — books, articles, editing, supervising dissertations, engaging with others — during his years with Anne, who left him, a divorce followed and then Hauerwas married Paula Gilbert, a Methodist minister and gifted administrator at Duke. But I was sucked into Hauerwas’ story as he told his story because I kept wondering how he did it … and all I can say is that it was his Texas bricklaying grit absorbed in the goodness of God’s gifts and grace that gave him the courage to go back to work every day.

What emerges on every page is that, while Hauerwas is often described as a contrarian, which he undoubtedly is, he’s a seeker for truth, one who won’t let pat answers fall without being swept aside and even dismissed. His bricklaying background pushes him to get to the bottom of things and to be unsatisfied until he builds an edifice that will stand squarely and boldly on top of the gospel, and nothing but the brute facts of the gospel.

Here are some of my favorite lines in this book:

“I had begun to date a young woman who also went to Pleasant Mound, which meant I was beginning to sin.”

Two people he knew: “who thought they were theological radicals, were actually, like so many Protestant liberals, pietists in existential drag.”

“We were married in San Antonio at her [Anne’s] home church. We drove straight to New Haven, and into hell.”

“I simply lack patience with cant. As a result, I often seem to lack any political sense.”

At Augustana in the Quad Cities: “I was smart, but I had not yet learned to listen.”

“I believe that through the cross and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth we live in a new age, but that is why theologians do not have a position. Rather, our task is to help the church know what it has been given.”

“For me, writing turns out to be my way of believing.”

“… over the years I have to the judgment that Southern civility is one of the most calculated forms of cruelty.”

Vintage Hauerwas: “When Christianity is assumed to be an ‘answer’ that makes the world intelligible, it reflects an accommodated church committed to assuring Christians that the way things are is the way things have to be.”