Alien Spies

It was rather unexpected when a parishioner told me a few weeks ago of his dream that we had been sent to infiltrate a foreign bunker where we were to convince a rather unsavory and influential historical character to surrender.  It happened to be the same week that the lectionary text was about Jonah getting sent to Nineveh.  The dream sequence was an intriguing comparison to ponder and provide a few chuckles.  When another parishioner told me shortly after this that Sarah and I had populated his dream as spy recruiters sending he and his wife off to spy school, it set me to pondering.

I remember as a kid discovering that my scoutmaster in Chile was a spy.  Later as a young adult I heard from my best friend about the attempts to recruit him as a spy when he was living and teaching in Kenya.  All of that was decades ago and my only more recent connection with that sub-culture has been through Robert Ludlum novels providing fodder for beach reading.  So one might imagine my surprise in hearing this world come to the surface in two unrelated dreams within weeks.

After recovering from the initial surprise of this theme, I was reminded of a book entitled Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony. Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon wrote it in the late 1980’s, and it remains quite on point over 20 years later.  Much of the orientation of the book is a struggle with the challenging question of how to live “in the world” without being “of the world” – that is, in their term, how to be “resident aliens.”  Of course, the connection I made to the book from the two stories related by parishioners is that spies are indeed aliens in the lands in which they live and work – be that as a teacher, a scoutmaster or otherwise. 

I’d like to think there is something going on in our faith community that is stirring some sort of collective unconscious sense that we are placed and engaged in a society that is foreign to the Jesus-centered tradition we seek to follow.  One of the themes Hauerwas frequently discusses is that ethics is primarily a way of seeing the world rather than a more objective rational engagement.  He appropriately pushes us to seek out the view of reality presupposed by a particular ethical system.  The point brought home is that Christian ethics as laid out by Jesus Christ in his sermon on the mount simply don’t accommodate principles of a culture not based in the gospels.  It is a disquieting argument, as it is when more than one person in one’s faith community begins to at some level recognize how alien we are called to be in a culture that excludes the hungry, the poor, and the marginalized.  It’s disquieting in a good way.