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Healed by Stories
Growing Pains:
Learning to Love My Father’s Faith
by Randall Balmer
Brazos Press, 2001. 144 pages.
Many strategies exist for coming to terms with our past. We can ignore the past, as if it never happened; we can invent a new past for ourselves; we can disown and disrespect our past (a favorite among baby boomers who choose to blame the 1960s for everything); or we can take it on, face to face, as Randall Balmer does in this collection of essays about his experience as the eldest son (born in 1954) of an evangelical minister in the rural Midwest.
Balmer takes a cue from the wise and eloquent Terry Tempest Williams, who wrote, “We are healed by our stories.” This enables him to develop an
evangelical theology in a new key, one that sets aside rationalistic argumentation in favor of narrative, opens new possibilities. We might take the notion that Jesus was fully human, for example, as an invitation to be fully human ourselves. That entails accepting ourselves, with all of our blemishes, just as Jesus has accepted us. Being human also means that we have our own narratives, and each of us in the community of faith can learn from others.
The liberating effect of this “new key” is significant for Balmer, for whom “growing up fundamentalist meant living in a tiny world where every question had an answer,” and which was “inebriated with rhetoric about authority.” While he finds some comfort in this “subculture with little room for ambiguity,” Balmer feels called to a life of the mind to accompany his life of the Spirit. Against his father’s wishes and expectations, he takes an academic rather than ministerial track (he is professor of American Religion at Barnard College). The pieces that comprise Growing Pains explore many facets of his efforts to go his own way, while respecting his father, in living his Christian faith in the context of urban life and academia, complete with myriad temptations and ambiguities.
David James Duncan, who grew up in a fundamentalist home and is close in age to Balmer, also uses narrative to make sense of his past. Duncan’s story leads to an embrace of multiple spiritualities in an anti-institutional, celebratory syncretism (“I hold . . . that not only Jesus but Muhammad, Gautama, Krishna, and Rama are Love Personified,” says Duncan, and “I’ve come to believe that the essence of spirituality and chief purpose of life on earth is to love,” and “love seems to me to flow best ‘where two or less are gathered in His name.’”) Balmer, on the other hand, has stayed with Jesus and, one might say, a postmodern approach to evangelical Christian faith and living. Readers of Duncan will find that despite these differences, he and Balmer are not far apart; their sensibilities are kin, and love is at the heart of both men’s work.
As a collection of disparate pieces (essays, talks, eulogies) written over a span of many years, Growing Pains is flawed by the failure to knit these pieces together into a unified whole. Balmer’s father, for example, died in 1997, but is spoken of sometimes in the present tense, sometimes in the past; Balmer is sometimes married to his first wife, sometimes divorced from her. These wrinkles in time and tense are unnecessarily disruptive and confusing. Balmer’s attempt at narrative theology would benefit by a more disciplined use of narrative itself, particularly when his easy prose style invites the reader to engage the book continuously rather than in small helpings.
But this is a small quibble regarding a book that does a great deal in the service of making the evangelical perspective understandable, and even palatable, to those who have grown up outside that tradition. Stories can heal us -- I affirm this along with Balmer, Williams, and Duncan -- and it is our responsibility to swap stories with our co-residents on this planet. Randall Balmer has told us some pieces of his story, encouraging us to listen as well as to tell our own -- to ourselves, for a start, and to others, as our contribution to the healing action of humanity.
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