“Has anyone done a retrospective of the life and work of James Loder?” asked a colleague while we were standing in the academic processional line, awaiting a Convocation for a Doctor of Ministry intensive. “Yes, of course,” I answered. “But he was quite complicated and complicating, in his great light and great shadow.” I fleshed out what I meant in conversation with her, and the academic procession began. I’ve been thinking about this exchange ever since, with a felt-sense of invitation or a beckoning of some kind. Spirit plants seeds for our learning/teaching like this, I’ve found…[image from 2001, the last graduation Loder was to attend].
Thirty years ago I began my doctoral work with James E. Loder, after graduating with my masters and completing a senior thesis with him, in independent study “of how he arrived at what he offered.” Science and theology. Soren Kierkegaard. Michael Polanyi’s work and his own journey through a “transformative moment” into what he called the logic of the Spirit. He was a towering psychological figure in the practical theology department at this seminary, wielding spiritual and political power through both direct and indirect means. He was also the loneliest man I’ve ever known, to be honest, even as he wrote in depth about theological intimacy with God. He was conflict-averse, particularly at home (I was to learn), which meant his indirect wielding of power could be unkind. (Clear is kind; unclear is unkind, ala Brene Brown today). His loneliness led him to rely upon his students’ energies and affections in ways that sometimes weren’t the most ethical or healthy. Many of his doctoral students had been in therapy with him prior to beginning doctoral studies, which ultimately established strange dynamics of posturing and competition for alignment with him in doctoral seminars. His pedagogical (andragogical) style could be called narcissistic though this way could heal a student’s spiritual maturing, even as it could just as easily wound. He was human, in other words, a play of light and shadow as a mortal critter like all of us.
The secondary literature texts I have on my bookshelf rarely focus on this shadow side of Jim Loder, focusing more fully on his scientific, theological, ecclesial contributions going largely unnoticed or integrated into theological disciplinary understandings today. When I fleshed out the response to my colleague above, I quipped that current “retrospectives” felt more like hagiography than an honest, critical review of the complicated-complicating man I knew Loder to be. Which is what academics and publishers expect anyway, avoiding the messy details of a human life. Particularly when/if it could be remotely slanderous of such an esteemed figure in a seminary’s history. Living within the bounds of Princeton Seminary for eleven years, I heard plenty of human stories about professors and visiting scholars over the years, all being very human yet acknowledged only in whispers. Which ones were true? Which ones were not? Most went unspoken, given the extensive resources Princeton stewards. Easy mark for litigation-scoundrels, so whispers were always quiet, quieted. And I don’t want to dishonor the life and work of one of the most important mentor-figures in my own life, my life’s work in writing and seminary teaching.
Discovering some of this shadow-side of Jim Loder was grievous for me, after all. 1995 was a perfect-storm year when science&theology, Soren Kierkegaard, and my coming from a family of educators all converged to land me in Loder’s energies, his Introduction to Christian Education class. I was gob-smacked by Spirit, imprinting upon him like a duck to a mother-duck. He nourished something in me, simply in how he was. Or I recognized something about myself intuitively, intimately, as I grew to know him as professor-mentor, then older brother to my own fledgling scholar-self. I worked with him for the last seven years of his life, learning then researching-writing my dissertation, defended successfully in 2001. I sang at his bedside with seminary colleagues after the aneurysm collapsed him in the bank. I found myself sitting in the Loder-kitchen for an hour with his grieving wife, Arlene, the day of his death. She and I were in a recurring loop of incomprehensible grief, her seeming disbelief that death could happen to anyone truly faithful. His death was one of the most jarring, grievous ones of my life, leaving me without a patron in a disciplinary field/profession requiring patrons. But more importantly, leaving me as a grieving student, a bit adrift in a professional path I had chosen only because of relationship with him. What was I to do as a practical theological PhD when I had no interest in the academy and could not imagine becoming a professor?
So learning of his shadow-side, in the years following his death and in the years of my early academic-establishment-life, grieved me. Made me angry, actually, given I did not have a healthy relationship with sadness yet. Loder had a pattern of wielding power indirectly against students who began to develop their own voices in their work beyond his control. This pattern began earlier with some women than some men I know. Begin to develop your own voice, your own work, divergent from what he offered, and he’d withdraw his support, his encouragement, perhaps even indirectly move political power against you. Witnessing it for the first time with a beloved professor denied tenure, I encountered this story again and again with those who had graduated years before I ever knew of him. I pondered how that hadn’t seemed to happen to me, but realized that he died about six months after I completed my PhD. I’m sure it would have come my way as well, this indirect refusal and/or political wielding of power, attempting to prevent any divergence from his work.
Yet his work–which I caught more than read or was taught–has undergirded my entire professional-vocational life in practical theology, seminary teaching. It informs all my teaching, sometimes in content, most often in the integration of that content into a primary relational approach to students’ learning, even in mostly online-learning settings. I digested his Chalcedonian “method” so thoroughly that it has empowered me to stand amidst irreconcilables in today’s fragmenting currents, sensing unities that are only pregnant, not yet present. Bridge-building in rancorous denominational schisms. Inter-traditional friendships which disciplines may call 'interfaith' or 'interspirituality' but which I call Spirit-friendships formed underneath, through, and beyond traditions. His work grounded everything that has come to pass for me in a Christocentric flow of Spirit’s movement–fully human, fully divine, in the Person of Christ, known in the power of the Spirit in the Spirit/spirit intimacy my body knows, deep in my bones. He brought great Light into my world…
…which means of course his Shadow had to be large too. You cannot have one without the other, as they are yin/yang for any spiritual maturity toward wholeness, a Love that is willing to suffer (via any historic wisdom tradition’s sense, I’d argue).
All of which points to one of the most substantial but currently-implicit contributions his work offers us today: living faithfully in the Void, the nothingness, that is here, is coming. A point driven home to me recently when I was unexpectedly connected with the grandson of James Loder, a youngish law school graduate curious about his grandfather’s work. A pathway seeming to unfold even more as I reconnected with the elder daughter of James Loder, a woman who has done the difficult but sacred work of ancestral-lineage healing and cycle-breaking necessary for any healing-wholeness to come from deeply wounded histories.
I don’t know what is being Invited of me, of us, here. I do know enough to recognize the seeds and sprouts as Spirit moves gently, persistently, in our lives of seeking, yearning.
Something in me wants to wrap James Loder in an embrace of a Love willing to suffer, a seeing of his heart so very bound up in irreconcilable forces he could not transform–for himself or for his family. I want him to know that even his most shadowy self serves sacred purpose he could never imagine. I want to honor how heavy it must have been for him, to carry the Spirit-yearnings of so many, the fears and hopes projected onto him because he wrote about this transforming moment in the vernacular of his own discipline–expertise–all while his personal life was so very lonely. I want to honor the wounds he left behind in his students’ lives, grieving them in some honest way. Because it was this part of him, his work, that empowered me to withstand my own encounter with the Void, language and responses for which today’s congregational Christianity has utterly no capacity or interest. I have been angry--enraged, even--at the church, then at the God the Church bound in my own life, for so very long. Yet God/de, this Force and Flow that never let me go, led me into a journey into the senseless Void...pulling me through and out to the other side of it, into a freedom beyond any forgiveness I did or did not intend. I've not understood my most recent book in these terms until now...which is curious, is it not?
The world does seem to be falling apart at the seams. There is faith and abundance on the other side of the Void, in a Holy with Whom one can only surrender to know, be known in. The lacuna of loneliness in Loder’s life may be a new wardrobe door, then? Is he willing to companion his later generations so to open it with us?
I wonder…and we are listening, Jim. Be in touch as you are Led, will you?
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