Ducking the Mailed Fist

Soon after leaving seminary, I applied for a post as chaplain to a military school, and through some oversight I was put on the short list. Confidently I boned up on questions I expected to be asked. Never was disillusion more utter. Came the day, and I was ushered before a formidable array of top brass. I promptly discovered that the martial mind roves along lines decidedly unfair.

For starters, a brigadier sent down a curly one. “Do you,” he demanded balefully, “consider yourself a supporter of lost causes?” (Gentle reader of the current, religious, and thoughtful, how would you have responded?) Mercifully I have no recollection of how I coped with the situation. By the time all other candidates had presumably withdrawn and they got around to offering me the job, I had already committed myself to another area where Lost Causemanship was not regarded as a burning issue.

Many years later, a not dissimilar matter arose during my candidacy for a key post in my own denomination. This was admittedly something of a kite-flying ploy, for while the establishment encouraged a nodding acquaintance with the Scarlet Woman, I was known to be in league with her detractors. Again, however, I made the short list.

The selection committee was courteous, friendly, and (like the earlier chaplain-seekers) tactful enough during a lengthy interview to raise not a single theological or religious question. Only on one point did they come close to it. “Are you,” I was asked, “likely to take a strong stand on anything?” This was honesty indeed. Strong stands, it was implied, were definitely Out. I did not get the job, and I could appreciate the wisdom of its not being offered to one with my suspect antecedents.

Now this should be the cue for jumping on my theological steed and rushing madly off in all directions, but today I am resolved on low-keyed, feet-on-the-ground stuff. My fellow columnists on this page can, I know, be relied on to redress the balance toward controversial divinity and spiritual uplift. I want to take a strong stand on lost causes.

I am not referring to those that are irreclaimably lost, like that of the unfortunate ladies who were condemned to carry water in a sieve, or of Sisyphus the veteran stone-roller (though he got a lot of exercise on the side). Nor am I a professional espouser of lost causes, like Dean Burgon, Norman Thomas, and E. M. Forster, who almost seemed to make a career out of it.

Most of us do, however, have our list of incorrigibles. Mine includes chatterers in church before the service begins; unthoughtful hymn-singers expressing a preference for an “oldtime religion” with which they simply could not cope; Christian publishers who do not pay their contributors and rely on their goodness not to hie them before the magistrate; drivers who discuss sanctification while doing forty-five in a thirty-mile zone on the basis that they are “no longer under law.” The latter tendency genuinely mystifies me, and once I summoned up courage to say so to one totally committed to the authority of Scripture. I mentioned First Peter 2:13. “Ah,” he said breezily, “I always add to that one the postscript, ‘provided the ordinance is reasonable.’ ” The theological implications are staggering.

But that is a diversion. My friend Eutychus V has been squeezing impressive mileage out of asking readers what they would do if they were editing this journal. Eut should have known better, and thoroughly deserved the answers he got.

Nevertheless I am not too proud to learn from him. Let me take reader participation a step further, and seek advice on how to get evangelicals to meet literary deadlines solemnly undertaken. Evangelicals, I said deliberately, because piety and procrastination are often found in bizarre affinity. I know that this is a lost cause, and that there will be muttered maledictions on my bringing it up at all, but as the organizer of sundry literary projects past and present I am determined to strike a blow on behalf of editors and publishers everywhere—a much maligned and misunderstood breed.

It is fourteen years since I jauntily accepted my first encyclopedic assignment, one from which men wiser in their generation had recoiled in alarm. Now, a little greyer and considerably less trusting (no editor can have serious doubts about original sin), I would give some advice to those who are rashly contemplating a similar type of work: Don’t do it.

If you disregard this, note the following:

1. No man is a hero to his editor; indeed, many a scholar’s reputation for piety depends upon the editorial silence. The preacher-scribe is very susceptible to the double-think. Will Rogers used to say that no nation should go to war till it had paid for the last one; he might have agreed that no minister should hold forth on moral turpitude till he has fulfilled his own ethical commitments to others. It would be tempting to emulate one Thai radio station and broadcast a list of public delinquents.

2. Theological conservatives are the worst offenders; thus in order to keep the statistics favorable I regularly sneak into the ranks a platoon of those whose theological unorthodoxy is more than offset by their meticulous attention to deadlines.

3. The ideal editor, like the ideal school principal, ought to be slightly unpopular. Coping with a couple of hundred scholars, including the normal quota of the idiosyncratic, I often think of myself in terms of Father O’Flynn, the Irish cleric famed in song and story, given to

Checkin’ the crazy ones

Coaxin’ onaisy ones

Liftin’ the lazy ones

On wid the stick.

4. When sweet reasonableness fails, I try firmness, but the mailed fist tends to be ignored, or brings back reproachful tales of obscure ailments, unparalleled domestic calamities (“my bookcase fell on me”), strange emergencies (“I had to go to Jerusalem”), or faculty in-fighting of gory and disabling dimensions. One brash young professor said didn’t I know that no writer took an editor seriously unless subjected to merciless harassment. He’d caught me out, for I didn’t know that, me with a a touching addiction to Robert W. Service (“a promise made is a debt unpaid”).

5. So we come to sneaky and unscrupulous tactics, and I offer a piece of counsel gratis to the longsuffering who have read thus far: The most effective way to get a long overdue article out of a laggard is to write to his wife. And make it poignant. “But that’s fiendish!” commented a young Episcopalian on whom I tried it last week. That may be so, but it shows a gratifying success rate. In the case of one wifeless scholar I addressed a plain postcard in capital letters to his dog; his tail will forever wag in my heart, for I had the material within a week.

The trouble is, by the time I get around to editing I have been exhausted by the preliminaries. There’s a lesson in that somewhere if I could just lay my finger on it.

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