Jerry Levin's Great Escape

Jerry Levin’S Great Escape

Beirut Diary, by Sis Levin (InterVarsity Press, 240 pp.; $14.95, hardback). Reviewed by Wesley G. Pippert, former senior UPI Middle East correspondent and now director of the University of Missouri Washington Graduate Program.

Beirut Diary is Sis Levin’s story of 1984, the year her journalist-husband Jerry was held hostage by Shi’ite Muslims in Lebanon. It is also the story of her own journey in coping with the ordeal and conquering it. Levin’s book is powerful, fast-moving, and clearly and vividly written.

There are critical subthemes: How Jerry Levin, agnostic, opera-loving CNN bureau chief in Beirut and grandson of a rabbi, came to faith in Christ during his 11-month captivity. How Sis Levin, his evangelical Christian wife, almost in desperation, brushed aside State Department caution and timidity and herself became an effective player in the labyrinth of Middle East politics.

Levin arrived in Beirut in December 1983—about the same time I was on temporary assignment there—and Sis joined him in January. Three months after Jerry’s arrival, he was kidnaped on a Beirut street. Sis stayed in the Middle East for a short time as the leads quickly evaporated; then she returned to the United States for even greater disillusionment.

Fair-Weather Friends

Gradually Sis realized the people she should have been able to count on weren’t helping—not CNN, and not the U.S. government. The State Department kept telling her: Don’t speak to the press, you will endanger the hostages’ lives. Finally she figured out why: “[T]his hostage crisis is probably an embarrassment to President Reagan in this election year. I remembered his promise in the Rose Garden in 1981 after beating Jimmy Carter—whom he defeated in large measure due to the Iranian hostage situation—that America would never be held hostage again. Public awareness of the seriousness of the hostages’ plight could be devastating. And I knew the truth.”

(Things are not much different now. Last summer Rep. Paul Henry [R-Mich.] sponsored a resolution to designate AP Beirut bureau chief Terry Anderson’s birthday—the fifth he has had in captivity—as “National Hostage Awareness Day.” President Bush signed the bill with no fanfare whatsoever, thus forgoing media coverage.)

As 1984 wore on, Sis decided to go public. She met Landrum Bolling, then director of the Ecumenical Institute between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Bolling looked saintly, but he knew how to operate in the Middle East. Within weeks, he and Sis were in Damascus, and through a series of seemingly miraculous events, she found herself telling her story in a private conference with the Syrian foreign minister.

With typical Middle Eastern mystery, the foreign minister smiled and said, “I will be in touch with you again.” He was, several times.

Weeks passed. Then, one February day Jerry noticed the guard had secured his chains carelessly. That night Levin knotted together his blankets, crawled through a window, dropped to the ground, and ran away barefoot. An almost-smiling Syrian soldier picked him up and delivered him to freedom. Did he escape? Or was he allowed to escape?

Eternal Choices

Sis Levin’s ordeal in trying to secure her husband’s freedom was dramatic enough. But there is more to this book.

Hours after they were reunited, Jerry told Sis that months before, early in his solitary confinement, he had mulled over eternal questions. He finally came down to the choices: “Believe in God, or not believe in him.… Reject Jesus or accept him.” So, Jerry said, “I did believe.” And he prayed for the first time.

During her husband’s captivity, Sis Levin’s own spiritual walk was deepening as she wrestled with the issues of forgiveness and peacemaking. “Forgiveness must begin with looking at the hurtful situation or person honestly until you understand your own reaction,” she learned. “Almost always, there is a lie to be discovered.”

“There was a context to the hostages’ captivity that was full of history and insensitivity, bad choices and pain. The kind that comes when a nation abandons dialogue and embraces military force,” she found.

Those questions have driven Sis and Jerry Levin ever since. They force all of us to deal with critical questions about the ancient enmity in the Middle East.

Sis Levin’s book clearly is sympathetic to the plight of the Arabs. That point of view, once in short supply in evangelical circles, has become more common in recent years. As we have been putting tough questions to the Israelis, perhaps we now need to put some tough questions to the Arabs:

1. How can the Arabs blame Israel for every one of their problems as they seem to do? The seeds of civil war in Lebanon were sown by Britain and France long before Israel became a state.

2. Acknowledging the Arabs’ grievances, we must ask: Is it ever justified to use terrorist tactics? I think not, and even Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, is moving toward that view.

Terrorism is terrible. It has become an art form in the Middle East, and Jerry Levin got snared. So did Terry Anderson. It is God’s mercy that Levin is free—and a believer. We pray for those still held.

Leapfrogging History

Illusions of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America, 1630–1875, by Richard T. Hughes and C. Leonard Allen (University of Chicago Press, xviii + 296 pp.; $29.95, binding). Reviewed by Randall Balmer, a historian of American religion who teaches at Columbia University. He is the author of Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America.

For the earliest settlers, the New World offered that rarest of opportunities—the chance to start anew, to build institutions from the ground up. Religious leaders found that opportunity especially seductive because they were thus freed from the ecclesiastical accretions of the centuries. They could fashion their beliefs and practices according to the dictates of their own consciences instead of the whims of hierarchies in Rome, London, or Canterbury.

Very often, as Richard T. Hughes and C. Leonard Allen argue in Illusions of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America, 1630–1875, Protestant leaders in America claimed the purity of the New Testament church as their sole model. In so doing, they were able to leapfrog centuries of church history, ignoring both the insights and the lessons of the past, in search of some untarnished—albeit imperfectly understood—primitive ideal of the New Testament. Underlying this belief in the ability to appropriate “first times” was the persistent myth of objectivity—the fatuous assumption that we can read and interpret the Bible in its original purity, absent our own cultural biases.

Although the restorationism of Alexander Campbell is the best-known American example of this quest for the primordium or “first times,” the authors contend that the restoration ideal pervades American history. Drawing on the work of Sidney Mead and especially Theodore Dwight Bozeman (toward whom the authors are almost embarrassingly obsequious), Hughes and Allen contend that the American search for some mythological primordium began with the Puritans, extended even to Thomas Paine and the Enlightenment tradition, continued with Baconianism and Common Sense philosophy in the nineteenth century (which rationalized this myth of objectivity), and finds its most recent incarnation in Allan Bloom’s best-selling jeremiad, The Closing of the American Mind.

The nineteenth century provided especially fertile soil for this enterprise. Mormons, Baptists, and “Christians” (Disciples of Christ) thrived in the early national period, and sectarians used the appeal to “first times” to cut through all the confusion engendered by religious pluralism. “To proclaim one’s own sect a reproduction of the ancient, apostolic order,” the authors write, “was to anoint one’s sect the one, true church while all others were merely historic, tradition laden, and therefore false.”

Restorationism’S Dark Side

If this quest for the primitive seems merely quixotic or benign, Hughes and Allen point out its more pernicious effects. Beyond the arrogance implicit in claims to have appropriated the biblical primordium, restorationism has figured into Southern defenses of slavery and has issued in coercive domestic and foreign policies, even as politicians have insisted on a kind of “national innocence still rooted in unswerving fidelity to the primordial principles of ‘Nature and Nature’s God.’ ”

Evangelicals, moreover, get hit from both sides of the temporal continuum. While many evangelical preachers summon their congregations to a New Testament, “first times” purity, they complement these teachings with warnings about the end times, the coming apocalypse. The result is a suspension between two ideals—the ideal of a primitive past and the ultimate ideal of new heavens and new earth—with a consequent devaluation of the present (“This world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through”).

Hughes and Allen offer a beguiling thesis. The restoration ideal has, I think, both less and more explanatory power than the authors claim for it. The apparent ubiquity of this theme leads to the question, Is there any movement in American Protestantism that was not in some way restorationist? The authors insist there are such, but they provide no examples. Hughes and Allen overreach somewhat in trying to construct an interpretive template through which to view all (or most) of American Protestantism. On the other hand, the ahistoricism that plagues American Protestantism, especially evangelicalism, reaches well beyond the Baconian readings of the Bible and the Common Sense ideal of nineteenth-century hermeneutics. In recent years, the mythology of “first times” has prompted all sorts of hyperbolic claims for America’s Christian origins and the piety of the Founding Fathers. In that way, religion and politics have been hopelessly intertwined in the quest for the elusive primitive ideal in American history.

Hunted By The Hound Of Heaven

Between Heaven and Charing Cross: The Life of Francis Thompson, by Brigid M. Boardman (Yale, 410 pp.; $37.50, hardcover). Reviewed by Alzina Stone Dale, author of T. S. Eliot: The Philosopher Poet.

The late Victorian poet Francis Thompson is familiar to most of us only as the author of the hauntingly beautiful poem The Hound of Heaven, with its familiar opening line, “I fled Him down the nights and down the days.” Few know much about his short life, with its poverty and drug addiction, or have read the poem The Kingdom of God: In No Strange Land, from which this biography’s title comes. Still fewer know that he was raised and died a Christian.

Using Thompson’s unedited notebooks and letters, Brigid Boardman has reconstructed Thompson’s life to show us a poet who speaks to our condition. For, despite the Romantic imagery of his work, G. K. Chesterton had summed him up accurately by saying that Francis Thompson was

a shy volcano [whose] sky-scraping humility, his mountains of mystical detail, his occasional and unashamed weakness, his sudden and sacred blasphemies [show that] the shortest definition of the Victorian Age is that he stood outside it.

Boardman, too, calls Thompson a modern, who, believing in the affirmative value of the arts and imagination, wrote that he was struggling to be the poet “not of the Return to Nature but of the Return to God.”

Raised by middle-class parents who were Roman Catholic converts, Thompson was caught between his church’s stern and negative emphasis on sin, penitence, and good works, and his own dreamy, poetic instincts. As a boy Thompson wanted to become a priest, but because of his introspective nature, his schoolmasters denied him ordination. His doctor father then sent him to medical school, but Thompson, hating blood and surgery, failed his examinations, although he retained a lifelong interest in science and nature.

He fled to London, hoping for a literary career, but ended up on the streets, becoming addicted to opium, which was cheaply and legally available. This experience gave Thompson a lifelong sympathy for the poor and homeless and made him seem something of a social radical to the church of his day. But if there were no other way in which Thompson’s story could speak to our time, his struggle with opium is painfully reminiscent of our “brightest and best” who also turn to drugs when faced with failure or despair.

After three years on the streets, in 1889, when he was 30, Thompson was suddenly rescued—literally and figuratively—by Wilfrid Meynell, editor of the Roman Catholic journal Merry England and husband of the poet Alice Meynell. The rest of his life the Meynells paid for Thompson’s room and board and detoxifications, and published his essays and poems. But they never quite let Thompson go—or grow up—and after his death they edited his published work, hoping to maintain his image as an orthodox Catholic “saint.”

In writing her biography, Boardman’s purpose was to “rescue” Thompson from that image and the later one of an addicted decadent, and her account of the writing of The Hound of Heaven can stand as a paradigm for the rest of Thompson’s career. Sent to stay at a monastic house to complete his drug withdrawal, one dark December afternoon he began to write about the Christian concept of the pursuit of the soul by God, which led to self-revelation and acceptance. He described it as part of a process that reached back to the earliest records of human hope and fear, and Boardman shows that his notes reflect his insight that this cry came not only from the psalmist and early Church Fathers, but from the natural world where the fear of death was built into ancient myths and rituals. The “godless” Romantic poets also fired Thompson’s imagination, for it was Shelley’s line “Once the hungry hours were hounds” that began the poetic process.

Filled with Thompson’s own brand of brilliant imagery, the poem opens in the cosmic world, then fleeing from time, moves from the reality of London’s streets to opium nightmares and man’s perennial search for a substitute for God in his creation. Boardman insists that the poem does not end in a mystical union between the soul and God, but that, trying to reconcile his poetic vision of beauty with the Christian vision of heaven, Thompson left the divine invitation open.

In a later poem he was to suggest that

… your estranged faces,

… miss the many-splendoured thing.

But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)

Cry;—and upon thy so sore loss

Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder

Pitched between Heaven and Charing Cross.

Thompson died in 1907 at 48 of tuberculosis combined with drug abuse, having enjoyed brief spells of fame and little fortune. Boardman sums up Thompson as a poet who, according to strict literary standards, was not great, but one who had a great vision. He saw that the essential values of Christianity are common to all human experience and are best communicated through the symbolic language shared by religion and poetry.

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