12.30.2013 SS - DR. ROBERT COLES; yancey

when i served as editor of campus life magazine in the 1970s,
more than two hundred magazines crossed my desk on a regular basis.
i would let them pile up to form tall, leaning towers,
then spend an entire weekend day flipping through them in an effort to uncover my furniture.

about half the magazines represented christian organizations,
including missions, denominations, youth associations, colleges, counseling and science associations.
the other half came from secular sources, the magazines you find on the rack at any newsstand.
i marveled at the great gulf fixed between them.
new york editors surely had heard 30 or 40,000,000 born again christians
lived out in the heartlands somewhere,
but who among them had ever met one?
they might as well not exist, for all the mention they got.
meanwhile, christians were busily constructing a counter society
-complete with schools, bookstores, television and radio stations,
and even christian businesses advertising in a 'christian yellow pages'
-in order to protect themselves from the secular humanists bent on their destruction.

going through the stack one afternoon, i encountered the name robert coles
at the bottom of a brief article titled 'why do you still believe in God, in the promise of the cross'?
in, of all places, harper's magazine.
what kind of person could span that great divide with an article on personal faith
in a prestigious new york publication?
over the years i noticed coles's byline popping up in the most unlikely contexts:
a review of the french catholic writer george bernanos in thee NY times book review,
a discussion of kierkegaard and pascal in the New england journal of medicine,
a tribute to dorothy day and her Catholic Worker movement in the New Republic,
a review of flannery o'connor in the Journal of the american medical association.

while other christians bemoaned the bias of the secular press against articles centered on faith issues,
robert coles, a name unknown to most of them
was writing about whatever he wanted wherever he wanted
from an unabashedly christian viewpoint.
i began to look on him as a bridge builder,
a thoughtful writer whom i could trust to direct me to others,
many of whom became my 'virtual pastors'.
for an entire generation of harvard students,
Prof. coles presented christianity as a credible option in the modern world
and through his writings he did the same for me.

in a 1972 cover story Time called coles 'the most influential living psychiatrist in the US'.
when did he ever find time to practice psychiatry? i wondered.
he taught courses at harvard medical school, yes,
but courses in 'the literature of transcendence',
as he called his pet list of novels with spiritual themes.
he seemed a man with a thousand interests
and whenever he discovered a new interest he wrote a book about it:
...more than  60books in all, to supplement well over 1000 articles.

his most impressive work, he five volume Children of crisis series,
ran to more than a million words and earned coles a pulitzer prize in 1973.
..by 1999, as he turned 70, he was still churning out books and articles
and president clinton acknowledged his achievements by bestowing on him
the medal of freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.


as i followed coles's career, he helped me understand
one of the peculiarities of the writing profession: the observer syndrome.

 ....by journalistic background, i lead a more eventful life than many writers.
..i visited a refugee camp in somalia at the height of the starvation crisis.
30,000 people lived in makeshift tents in that desert camp and
40 to 50 babies were ding each day.
never have i felt more helpless. nurses were attaching IVs,
doctors were administering antibiotics
and chaplains were burying the dead
-whereas i, a journalist who had flown 7000 miles to join them,
stood alongside scribbling noes and taking pictures.
never had my role seemed more vicarious, my existence more peripheral.

vicariousness is, after all, a writer's business.
although not everyone can visit a refugee camp in somalia, if i do my job well enough,
readers will gain some sense of what it is like and may even be motivated to help.

...robert coles did that for me.
in his quirky, unorthodox style, he broke down the barrier between observer and participator,
entered other lives, then withdrew to a solitude that allowed him to render them for the rest of us.

..despite his harvard roots, coles hardly fits the mold of an ivory tower academic.
he has practiced a very unusual style of field research,
following children from place to place,
sitting on the floors of heir homes,
asking a few questions, winning their trust.
he rode buses o school with such children,
sitting on undersized, uncushioned bench seats
and gripping the rusty bars on the seat in front of him
as the bus bounced its way to school and back.
he became known as 'the crayon man',
because he would pull out paper and crayons and ask the children to draw pictures.
often the pictures revealed more than the children's words:
one young black girl drew white people taller than herself
and with precise features and the correct number of fingers and toes,
while she pictured herself lacking an eye, an ear or perhaps an arm.

...he made conscious choices to enter the world's hot spots,
stealing into soweto township during the time of apartheid in south africa,
visiting irate white families during the tumultuous days of boston school busing,
listening to protestants and catholics curse each other in northern ireland,
interviewing families in the favelas of rio de janeiro
and in dissidents' basements in poland.

...in massachusetts, not far from C's home, a 19 year old jewish boy wrestles with theodicy
(defense of God's goodness and omnipotence in light of evil).
a guest in his home, a lawyer,showed him the numbers from the concentration camp
tattooed into his arm.
the man said he stopped believing in God then,
because hitler almost won the war
and the 9 year old has worried about it ever since.
'i guess He never interferes;
that's what our hebrew teacher says,
that God doesn't ever try to stop something or start something,
i don't see how He could have sat up there and not stopped hitler!
if the jews are His people, then He could have lost us.
i ask my father, 'then would God have cried,
if all the jews had died in those concentration camps?
dad said he doesn't know;
he doesn't know if God cries or He smiles or what He does....
by his own admission, robert coles's life makes sense only when viewed in sequence.
his father came from england, out of half jewish, half catholic stock.
a physicist educated at MIT, he viewed all matters religious with skepticism.
if young bob quoted shakespeare on heaven his father would say, 'what heaven? show me!
..someone mentioned the Holy Ghost he would ask...what the Holy Ghost was anyway.
in contrast, bob's episcopalian mother, from iowa, had a religious, even mystical bent.
she took her two sons to church while their father waited outside in the car, reading the newspaper...
she knew the bible and the book of common prayer and freely quoted them to her sons.

...he needed to ..'bring alive the 'innerness' of ' the lives of the patients he treated..
he needed to ..'pay attention, actively and aggressively...he determined to discover that tale
and attempt to 'translatge' it for others.

..coles was serving in the air force, directing a psychiatric unit near biloxi, mississippi,
when one sunday afternoon he set off on a bicycle trip along the shore of the gulf of mexico..
rounding a corner, he heard sounds of fighting.
he shook his head disgustedly, wondering why anyone would be belligerent on such a fine spring day
and stopped to watch.

a miniature race riot was under way.
some black people had attempted a 'swim in' at a beach reserved for whites only
and a crowd of white people had surrounded them.
both sides were screaming at each other.
he saw a white man stomp on a black woman's glasses and smash her watch.
the mood was getting ugly and C feared physical violence could break out at any moment.
a skinny, frightened yankee 1000 miles from home,
he squelched any moral outrage, remounted his bicycle and rode away.

that night, working his shift at the base hospital, C heard two policemen
talking about the incident at the beach. they were friends,
gentle and courteous policemen he had grown to respect.
but tonight they spoke in a threatening tone.
'they'd be dead now if it weren't for all the publicity they get, said one.
'they will be if they try it again, muttered the other.

C said nothing. but he felt irresistibly swept up in the drama being acted out in the South.
what moral principle made those black people risk their lives
just to be the first of their race to step into the ocean by an insignificant mississippi beach?
and what force could summon such hatred into the eyes of two mild mannered white men?
he tucked those questions away.

...one day, however, he had trouble getting through the lower class industrial district of Gentilly.
state troopers had cordoned off the major roads because of a racial disturbance.
coles drove over to the site of all the commotion, an elementary school.
there he first saw ruby bridges, a tiny 6 year old black girl.
ruby was the first black child to attend the frantz school
and all other students were boycotting the school in protest.
escorted by federal marshals (the city and state police had refused to protect her),
she had to walk through the midst of a mob of white people who were
screaming obscenities, yelling threats and waving their fists at her.
inquiring, C learned that she ran this gauntlet every day, attending a vacant school
to sit alone all day in her classroom.

as C watched the brave young girl, it occurred to him that she would make
an ideal subject for studying the effects of stress on young children.
it took some time for him to earn the trust of her family,
since no white person had entered their home before.
ruby agreed to cooperate, though, and when they ran out of conversation,
C asked her to draw pictures.

an astonishing thing happened over the next month.
dr. robert coles had come in as the expert,
a pediatrician and psychiatrist
with the full prestige of harvard, columbia and the university of chicago behind him.
he had come to treat an uneducated, disadvantaged black child in the slums of new orleans.
as time went on, however, he felt a reversal of roles taking place.
he was the student, not ruby, and she was teaching him an advanced course in ethics.

at night C discussed with his wife, jane, how he would respond under similar circumstances.
what if a gang of angry, club wielding men and women lined up in front of the harvard club
to block his entrance? what would he do?
he would call the police, of course.
but in new orleans federal marshals had been brought in because the police ere not on ruby's side
-he remembered the policemen's conversation he had overheard at the base.
he would call his lawyer and get a court order.
ruby's family knew no lawyers and couldn't afford them anyhow.
at the least he would rise above the mob by
explaining away their behavior in the language of psychopathology
and perhaps even write a condescending article about them.
ruby knew no such words; she was just learning to read and write.

so what did ruby bridges do in such daunting circumstances?
she prayed:
for herself, that she would be strong and unafraid
and also for her enemies, that God would forgive them.
'Jesus prayed that on the cross, she told coles, as if that settled the matter:
'forgive them, because they don't know what they're doing'.

three other 6 year old black girls were attending another school against similar opposition.
C began meeting with them, too, twice a week.
he got to know tessie especially and her maternal grandmother,
who would greet the federal marshals at 8 oclock each morning with the expression,
'Lord Almighty, another gift!
and then hand over little tessie, who carried her lunch pail to school
between the men in dark suits with revolvers on their belts.
after two months of facing the abusive crowds, tessie suggested that maybe she should stay home.
her grandmother delivered a lecture:
'you see, my child, you have to help the good Lord with His world!
He puts us here-and He calls us to help Him out...
you belong in that mcdonogh school
and there will be a day when everyone knows that, even those poor folks-Lord, i pray for them!-
those poor, poor folks who are out there shouting their heads off at you.
you're one of the Lord's people;
He's put His hand on you.
He's given a call to you, a call to service-in His name!

on C's academic charts of moral development, magnanimous love for enemies appeared right at the top,
a level attained by people like Jesus and Gandhi and precious few saints.
he had not expected to find such a philosophy being lived out daily by 6 year old girls
and their 'culturally deprived' families.

'he got all A's and flunked ordinary living, said novelist walker percy
about one of his characters in The second coming.
dr. robert coles began to wonder if such a description applied to him too.

..a voice from one of C's books:
'last year we went to a little church in new jersey...
we had all our children there, the baby included.
the reverend jackson was there, i can't forget his name
and he told us to be quiet and he told us how glad we should be that we're in this country
because it'[s christian and it's not 'godless'.
he kept on talking about the other countries, i forget which, being 'godless'.
then my husband went and lost his temper;p
something happened to his nerves. i do believe.
he got up and started shouting, yes sir.
he went up to the reverend mr. jackson and told him to shut up and never speak again
-not to us, the migrant people.
he told him to go on back to his church, wherever it is and leave us alone
and don't be standing up there looking like he was so nice to be doing us a favor.
then he did the worst thing he could do:
he took the baby, annie, and he held her right before his face, the minister's,
and he screamed and shouted and hollered at him, that minister, like i've never before seen anyone do.
i don't remember what he said, the exact words, but he told him that here was our little annie,
and she's never been to the doctor and the child is sick, he knows it and so do i,
because she can't hold her food down and she gets shaking fits
and then i'm afraid she's going to die,
but thank God she'll pull out of them
and we've got no money, not for annie or the other ones or ourselves.

then he lifted annie up, so she was higher than the reverend
and he said why doesn't he go and pray for annie
and pray that the growers will be punished for what they're doing to us, all the migrant people.
the reverend didn't answer him, i think because he was scared
and then my husband began shouting some more, about God
and His neglecting us while He took such good care of the other people all over...
and he held our annie as high as he could, right near the cross and told God
He'd better stop having the ministers speaking for Him
and He should come and see us for Himself
and not have the 'preachers'-he kept calling them the 'preachers' speaking for Him.

with his ivy league degrees and his licenses to practice medicine packed back home in massachusetts
robert C embarked on the unique style of work that has not varied for 40 years.

..his work with ordinary people provided a second education for C.
he began to get to know people as individuals,
not as members of a sociological group.
he found in many 'disadvantage' people a reservoir of inner strength
he had not encountered in middle class suburbs or in the schools of the privileged.
where, for example, does an illiterate migrant worker, trucked from farm to farm across the South,
penned up in barns and chicken coops at night, paid a dollar an hour for backbreaking labor
-where does such a person get strength to endure?
according to the behaviorism C had been taught,
such poor people should have been broken by their circumstances or permanently embittered.
instead, much like the leprosy patients dr. Brand had treated in india,
the american poor also showed moments of transcendence and grace that defied explanation.

C's books are filled with verbal snapshots of people who somehow rise above the misery of their lives,
buoyed by grace.
because they talked to him about
God so often, C began attending church with  the poor.
at first, accustomed to church as a solemn,somewhat intellectual experience that lasted exactly one hour,
he found the looseness and the heavy emotionalism frightening.
he sat in the services listened to the sing and watched the minister and the congregation
with a cool, dispassionate eye,
alert for telltale signs of the psychosocial forces at work in the religion of the poor.

again and again he saw migrants and poor blacks and, yes, rednecks too,
profoundly changed by what happened within their churches.
something of great power was set loose in those services, he had to admit to himself,
something not easily explained by the jargon he had learned in medical school.
tired people came away renewed, oppressive pain seemed to lessen, hatred melted
he had no categories from his training to explain what he saw:

'i will try, though; i will try to hint at-maybe this is the way to put it
-the animated spirit of the Spirit,
as one like me has happened to see and hear and feel that Spirit become active, to become an event.
it is an event: something happens, something takes place;
the worshiper feels taken over, feels no longer a person
who only talks about the Spirit, who only uses the word,
but rather, one who at last is on the way, at last is set to DO something, i would even say God somewhere.
in rural churches one is moved and .....

..when asked about the source of strength in their lives, they often pointed to Jesus..

'wwe have the mind of Jesus Christ in our heads' a migrant farm worker said in an interview...
when C took time to reflect on the mind of Jesus Christ as it was actually lived out
-in exile and wandering, in pain, in scorn, isolation, loneliness, the mind of kenosis or emptying
-could he see the profound truth in what the man had said.
'He didn't have to come here, you know' one little girl said of Jesus.

..C came to believe that what he had learned in school about religion
-that as an 'opiat of the people' it dulls moral and political indignation
-was a myth perpetuated by irreligious social scientists who had very little actual contact with the poor.
in the poor he visited, whether in south africa or brazil or northern ireland or the US,
religious faith usually sharpened, rather than dulled, indignation and outrage.

..i realized, in the recapitulation (review by a brief summary)
tour he had led me on,
that i had substituted a new kind of fundamentalism
for the old,one borne of snobbery rather than ignorance.
how blithely i point out the sins and failures of my childhood churches,
and how rarely i dwell on the goodness i also found there.
i used to look down on blacks;
now i look down on racists.
i used to avoid the rich; now i avoid the poor.
so much of history careens along in polarity
-poor vs. rich, white vs. black, catholic vs. protestant, muslim vs. hindu, israeli vs. arab-
with religion raising one more barrier.
C, almost uniquely, has tried to plumb the dignity present in both sides,
simply by letting them speak and by rendering individual human beings in all their unreduced complexity.

C tells of an impromptu sermon martin luther king, jr. gave one day to
at the SNCC office.
the volunteers were growing tired of relentless opposition
and had few victories to show for all their efforts at registering voters and dismantling integration laws.
K sensed the student's temptation to become bitter
and then turn on opponents in the same spirit of hostility they had been receiving
-to become the enemy, in other words.
as K told them:
'a big danger for us is the temptation to follow the people we are opposing.
they call us names, so we call them names.
our names may not be 'redneck' of 'cracker';
they may be names that have a sociological or psychological veneer to them, a gloss;
but they are names, nonetheless-'ignorant' or 'brainwashed' or ';duped' or hysterical' or 'poor white'
or 'consumed by hate'.
i know you will all give me plenty of evidence in support of those categories.
but i urge you to think of them as that-as categories;
and i remind you that in many people, in many people called segregationists,
there are other things going on in their lives:
this person or that person, standing here or there may also be other things
-kind to neighbors and family, helpful and good spirited at work.

you all know, i think, what i'm trying to say
-that we must try not to end up with stereotypes of those we oppose,
even as they slip all of us into their stereotypes.
and who are we?
let us not do to ourselves as others (as our opponents) do to us:
try to put ourselves into one all inclusive category
-the virtuous ones as against the evil ones,
or the decent ones as against the malicious, prejudiced ones,
or the well educated as against the ignorant.
you can see that i can go on and on-and there is the danger:
the 'us' or 'them' mentality takes hold and we do, actually,
begin to run the risk of joining ranks with the very people we are opposing.
i worry about this a lot these days. (from Call to service)

reading K's words and C's response,
i realized that C himself had, for me, turned the spotlight on that very temptation.
i had become the enlightened, right thinking, educated cultural observer
-the perilous stance that C had battled all his life,
the perilous stance of the pharisee.
i needed to rediscover the leveling truth of J' gospel,
which has more appeal to the prodigal son than to his responsible and successful brother.

i needed a change in heart as much as a change in thought.
..i needed to forgive the church that had wounded me
or i would be left with a gospel of law and not grace, of division and not reconciliation.
in his fieldwork, C had unwittingly uncovered a radical who exposed my own masked needs.

i belong, with robert C, to a privileged minority.
everyone reading this sentence belongs, in fact,
for only a small percentage of the world's people has the ability and leisure
to read and the resources to buy a book. 
how do we, the 'privileged ones', act as stewards of the grace we have received?
we can begin, C tells us,
by ripping off the labels we so thoughtlessly slap on others unlike ourselves.
we can begin by finding a community that nourishes compassion for the weak,
an instinct that privilege tends to suppress.
we can begin with humility and gratitude and reverence,
and then move on to pray without ceasing for the greater gift of love.

...after four Children of crisis volumes focusing on disenfranchised groups,
C turned for his final volume to The privileged ones: the well off and the rich in america.
although he followed the same style of interviewing he had perfected in his work with the poor,
he found it harder to get to the rich;
barriers of suspicion effectively shielded him from the inner workings of their lives.

...among the poor he had expected defeat and despair;
he found some, yes, but he also found strength and hope and courage.
among the rich he expected satisfaction
and instead found boredom, alienation and decadence.

..many of the 1960s civil rights workers C consulted came from..middle class families.
their parents nagged them about getting a real job and making something of themselves.
 one of them responded to his mother's concerned prayers over him:
'i wonder what Jesus said, listening to her prayers!
i felt like writing her back and asking her if Jesus ever held 'a regular job'
-or ever 'found himself'.
Jesus, the migrant preacher, who became so unpopular and disturbing to everyone big and important
that He got crucified'.

..comfortable people, he noticed, were apt to have a stunted sense of compassion,
more likely to love humanity in general but less likely to love one person in particular.
did he show comp0assion?\as a harvard undergraduate, he recalled with a pang,
he had treated the dormitory maid as a lowly servant even while earning A's in his ethics courses.

what about arrogance?
a physician, he fought the temptation every day;
he was, after all, the expert, the healer who had come to help the disadvantaged.
pride? what really motivated him anyway,
driving him to get the degrees, pick up the rewards, write all the books?
selfishness? he was generous, to be sure, but he had the luxury to be generous.
he had never been in a situation of absolute dependence, the daily state of many poor people.

C reflected on these matters in that fifth volume,
the book he considers the best of the series but the one most overlooked by reviewers.
ultimately, he came to believe that the most dangerous temptation of all is the temptation of plenty
in the same breath, wealth curses what it blesses.
being privileged, C concluded,
tends to stifle compassion, curtail community and feed ambition.

rich kids who tried to break out of their sheltered surroundings and respond to the call of conscience
presented a threat to others...

..in a strange but undeniable way, the poor were also blessed, for whatever reason,
with qualities such as courage and love and a wiling dependence on God
the irony:
good humanists work all their lives to improve the condition of the disadvantaged, but for what?
to raise them to the level of the upper classes so that they too can experience boredom, alienation and decadence?

by the time the last of the Children of crisis volumes was published, robert C had arrived not in a new place, but in a very old place.
he had traveled thousands of miles, recorded miles of tape and written a million words,
all of which pointed right back to the sermon on the mount.
he had discovered that the poor are mysteriously blessed and that the rich live in peril.
he had learned that what matters most comes not from without-the circumstances of lire
-but from within, inside the heart of an individual man or woman or child.
he had begun his research with a head full of phrases such as 'guilt complex',
'character disorders', 'response to stimuli'.
he had emerged with old fashioned words like conscience and sin and free will.

what was he to make of it all?
he dare not glorify poverty, for his field research had taught him the folly of that romanticism.
nor dare he glorify wealth, which he now saw as a distraction or actual impediment to what matters most.
that is when he turned to a few select men and women
who had made spiritual matters their entire lives' focus.
dr robert C the social scientist continued to pursue his work diligently,
even as a new role also opened up: teacher of spiritual literature at harvard.

...C teaches at duke university as well as at harvard,
but nowhere does he offer a course in his field of specialty
-nothing on pediatrics or child psychiatry or sociology or even interviewing techniques.
instead, he teaches the great novelists and christian thinkers.
his reading list includes tolstoy and dostoevsky, pascal, weil, merton, john of the cross, dickens, flannery o'connor, emily dickinson, robert frost, thomas a kempis, teresa of avila, kierkegaard, bernanos, silone, agee, william carlos williams, orwell, george eliot and C's longtime friend walker percy.
from this list, he tailors literature courses to the needs of specialties:
the course on 'literature of christian reflection' at the college,
one on 'literature and medicine' for the medical school,
another on 'moral and social inquiry through diction' for the business school,
and one on 'dickins and the law' for the law school.

..why do they invite him in?
'i don't know. for idolatrous reasons, probably.
a name listed on a brochure, that sort of thing.
some of the students get the point: i hear from them and i know they've been touched by what they've read.
but it's hard here. this is the citadel of 'secular humanism', you know!

'yet literature has its own power that takes over.
flannery ol'connor wrote a beautiful book of essays called Mystery and manners
and the title alone cuts right through all the social sciences:
novels pay respect to the mystery and manners of individual human beings.
why don't we learn that instead of all this ridiculous jargon and overwrought theory
-the dead language and the absurd simplifications we so often get from the experts?
the novelists are not interested in theory or in turning their brains into godlike pontifical organs.
instead they evoke and render complexity, iron, ambiguity, paradox.
they discover and acknowledge, that each person is a separate, finite mystery,
not something that can be contained in one category or another.

..C talks a lot about his own failures and inadequacies.
he feels he must, to keep at bay the sins of pride and arrogance that stalk a place like harvard...

'like the pharisees, we want to prove ourselves clean, and righteous.
but Jesus and the prophets keep the questions up in the air.
OK, you don't murder: do you hate?
you don't commit adultery; do you lust?
we like to analyze 'the problem of the poor'.
but what are we doing for one poor person?..

...C likes to quote kierkegaard:
'he said that hegel explained everything in life except how to get through an ordinary day.
that more than any other reason, is why robert C teaches literature to business majors
rather than psychiatry to medical students.
'we have systems here to explain everything-except how to live.
and we have categories for every person on earth, but who can explain just one person?

can robertt C explain just one person?
after a career of listening and interviewing, what has he learned about human beings?
can he distill it all into a grand summary?
he thinks for a while and then points to a bible on his desk.

...'we have both sides in all of us, and that's what the bible says, isn't it?
the bible shows us both hope and doom, the possibility and the betrayal.
in its stories, sometimes the favorite becomes fatally tempted
and sometimes the lowly and obscure one becomes an agent of hope if not salvation.
i believe those stories are a part of each one of us.
we walk a tightrope, teetering between gloom, or the loss of faith, on the one hand
and a temptation toward self importance and self congratulation on the other.
both extremes lead to sin.

'some reviewers criticize me for saying the same old things about the nature of human beings:
that we are a mixture of good and evil, of light and darkness,
of potentiality toward destruction or redemption.
they want some new theory, i suppose.
but my research merely verifies what the bible has said all along about human beings.

if i can get some medical student who,
by virtue of attending a prestigious school, is seduced by the sin of pride
-if i can get that student to think of himself and his neighbor as Jesus taught us to,
then i have served some kind of purpose here.
i may be getting a little melodramatic,
but i think maybe Jesus wouldn't mind coming to that medical student
through the medium of one of one of flannery o'connor's stories.
that's how i carry the biblical tradition into this university,
for it belongs there and it's a privilege to call upon it as a teacher.

each year when he begins his literature classes, C reads a quote from novelist james agee.
'i would as soon stand up and read from the gospel of luke, C explains,
but that probably would not work here.
so i turn to  the great literature that gets across that same message,
such as this quotation from agee:
'all that each person is, and experiences, and shall ever experience, in body and mind
all these things are differing expressions of himself and of one root and are identical
and not one of these things nor one of these persons is ever quite to be
duplicated nor replaced nor has it ever quite had precedent:
but each is anew and incommunicably tender life,
wounded in every breath and almost as hardly killed as easily wounded:
sustaining, for a while, without defense, the enormous assaults of the universe.

RECOMMENDED: * the five volume Children of crisis series (vol 5 best) may be daunting
more recent summaries the C has put together:
*The moral life of children
*The political life of children
*The spiritual life of children
*The call of service and The call of stories also draw together summaries of his approach.
*The secular mind (1999) in which C questions the most hallowed premise of modernity,
that we find meaning in ourselves rather than 'out there' somewhere.
*Intellect and spirit by bruce ronda, offers the best overall summary intellectual biography of C
*A robert C omnibus brings together samples from many different writings, mostly essays on literature.