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Home Is Always the Place You Just Left: A Memoir of Restless Longing and Persistent Grace
by Betty Smartt Carter Paraclete Press, 2003 240 pp.; $15.95 paper |
It wasn't till I got to seminary that I discovered there was more than one way of counting the commandments. I'd learned the method of Luther's Small Catechism, used by Roman Catholics as well, wherein commandment number two prohibits taking the Lord's name in vain. But the Orthodox, the Reformed, Anglicans, Baptists, and sundry others on the American scene say that the Lord's-name commandment falls into third place; second place is reserved for the prohibition against graven images.
This discovery having taken place at a Reformed seminary, it necessitated a great deal of argumentation. On the side of the graven-image people was the fairly forceful argument that the commandment is in Exodus and Deuteronomy, and furthermore that's how the Jews number their commandments—and if anyone knows how the commandments go, it's the Jews. The reason for Lutherans and Catholics doing otherwise is that, since the incarnation, there are doctrinally sound, even doctrinally imperative reasons for engraving an image of God in the person of Jesus, and therefore old commandment two is now obsolete. Take whichever reason you like: I see the reason in both, though naturally I favor the latter over the former.
However, as it turns out, the graven-image business never really was the sticking point for our debate. It was that if the magic number ten were to remain in the Lutheran and Catholic reckoning, you had to have two commandments about coveting. The original Hebrew contains two distinct sentences forbidding the coveting of the neighbor's spouse and the coveting of the neighbor's property respectively, but the point still stands that the Jews themselves don't split them into two like we do.
As such, my interlocutors found it quite bizarre to fill up a full 20 percent of the tablets of the Law with covetousness, of all things. Idolatry, murder, adultery, theft: now there were some serious sins. But coveting—simply to want something not your own, not even actually taking it away yet, which is covered by previous commandments? And when you consider the fact that our entire economic system is premised upon cultivated coveting in the form of advertising, it becomes that much harder to figure how mere wanting could cause as much destruction as the two-commandment division would seem to imply.
Betty Smartt Carter's painful "memoir of persistent longing" is, in fact, a tribute to just what damage wanting can do. In the introduction, Carter confesses that she'd rather not tell her story; she'd rather retain some shred of dignity and keep silent. She remarks, understandably enough, "It gives me no joy to remember how low I've sunk. Certainly it gives me no joy to reveal this sinkage before the world." The story is told not to glory in the sinking depths, though, but to glorify the God who pulled her out of them.
From the very beginning of the book, this God-centered orientation sets Carter's testimony apart. In a world of tabloids and reality TV, the depths to which Carter sunk will not be deep enough to satisfy a glutted viewing audience, accustomed to run-of-the-mill scandals revolving around sexual betrayal. The wanting contained herein is not the wanting of soap operas and presidential impropriety. But that's exactly what makes her story an interesting one—a lifelong battle against an underrated sin, and sin is always a scandal before God, no matter how indifferent its human practitioners have become.
Carter's desires started out innocently enough: desire for safety, warmth, and mother. As she grew up in her evangelical Presbyterian household, she learned to want more: she wanted to see a miracle, she wanted to be a missionary, she wanted to share Jesus' cross and to feel the Holy Spirit in her heart. Holy desires, to be sure, but these desires cannot comprehend the absence of their object. The terrible silence of God is not tolerated by the wanting heart, and when faith begins to quail, myriad other desires come rushing in, demanding to be wanted more.
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