Sojourners from the Start

As much as I disagreed with what Stanley Hauerwas said at this year's "Interregnum" at The King's College ("Entertaining Hauerwas"), he and the people who contend with him have been endlessly thought provoking.

In the May 2010 issue of First Things, Gilbert Meilaender reviews Hauerwas's autobiography in the form of a personal letter to his old friend Stan. Commenting on Hauerwas's journey from his working class home in Pleasant Grove, Texas, to the stately academic world of Duke University in South Carolina, he writes, "Of course, leaving home for a new world is in some ways a distinctly American theme. But it is also...the warp and woof of human life."

This set my wind to wandering.

Life is a sojourn from the start. We enter life torn from the warm and familiar, leaving the embrace of mother's protection and setting off in varying degrees of independence and loneliness, seeking friendship and communion from that time on. So Adam began the human journey as we know it cast out of the garden. A later Adam, Noah, preserved life as one cast upon the wilderness of waters. Abraham, the father of the faithful, left behind his life in Ur of the Chaldeans in pursuit of life and friendship with God. Christ left the divine fellowship to sojourn among us, and was even estranged from his Father in darkness of grief, for our life's sake in communion with God. For that life's sake we are called out of the world we called home. In birth and in second birth we are forced into exile, but with no desire to return, pressing on in hope of better comforts.