Wrestling with Atticus

Wrestling with Atticus--February 20, 2017

"For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.  So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.  For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!" [Romans 7:19-25]

I have been wrestling with Atticus... in the mirror.

Okay, consider this your spoiler alert.  You have had nearly a year to have read Harper Lee's second published novel about the Finch family, the curious and complicated Go Set A Watchman, which came out last year, more than five and a half decades after the seminal To Kill A Mockingbird, the consciousness-waking staple of many a suburban tenth-grade English class.  So if you have not read Watchman, just consider this a fair warning: in what follows, you may discover spoilers about beloved characters you knew from back in the days when you first read about Scout, Jem, Atticus, and Boo Radley.

So here's the bind I am in: I don't know what to make of the deep disappointment and disillusionment I now feel for a fictional attorney from a fictional county in Alabama.  As a high school sophomore, Harper Lee's creation, the widowed father of two and legal defender for an innocent black man in a rape trial in the Jim Crow south, stood out like an impossible standard of moral courage.  Atticus was willing to take on a lost cause simply because it was the right thing to do.  He was a voice of compassion and wisdom in Mockingbird, and to my fifteen year old (white middle-class) mind, he was a shining example of the possibility of genuine respect and understanding between races in America. I remember being shocked at the passages in the novel where other (white) citizens of Maycomb accuse Atticus (it was shocking to my mind that this was something used as an accusation in the first place) of being a "n----- lover," because Atticus was willing to give a solid defense to his client Tom Robinson over against white accusers.  And I remember the awe and appreciation I had for Atticus knowing that he was never afraid or ashamed of being given that label, when there were lots of seemingly respectable citizens of 1930s Maycomb who were scandalized at the idea of treating "those people" as social equals to whites. My adolescent mind had to that point still been pretty well shielded from learning about the worst of the segregation-era South, but Atticus stood out even to that more sheltered earlier version of myself as a picture of moral clarity, compassion, and courage. Atticus cast a grandfatherly shadow over those formative years for me, as one more picture of what a true man was supposed to look like.

Some part of me wishes that was all there was to the story.  But of course, as the news was buzzing about in 2016, apparently Harper Lee had written another novel about Atticus and Scout, set in the 1950s when Scout is a grown woman going by her given name Jean Louise, and Atticus is an old man.  Well, of course, sequels are hardly shocking--but the twist with this second book, Go Set A Watchman, was that it had been ostensibly written before To Kill A Mockingbird, even though the characters have all aged and the novel is set later.  That makes To Kill A Mockingbird a "prequel" before that was a word, but for all the world other than Harper Lee herself, Watchman was arriving fifty years after Atticus had first appeared on the page.

And the final shock (consider this your last spoiler alert) of this second trip into the world of Maycomb, Alabama, was that as an old man, Atticus has now joined up with the local "White Citizens Council" and is looking to stop the advance of "those people," including those bus boycotters from Montgomery (that would be Martin Luther King, Jr., and company), and those who were marching for an end to segregation.  Even though buzz about the book had given me a sickening suspicion about where the story would go, I will confess that reading it felt like a gut punch.  No, not Atticus... not our Atticus.  Not the one who had taught me to walk around in another person's skin to understand them!  Not the one who was willing to become the object of mockery and threats--even the endangering of his children--in order to do what was right by defending his client! Not this man who had taught such powerful lessons, not only to me but to countless teenagers over the last fifty years whose eyes were opened by To Kill A Mockingbird! What an awful surprise--to see the people you most respected (fictional or real) revealed to be cowards and sell-outs, undermining all that you thought you had learned from them.  And worst of all to me, if it is indeed true that Harper Lee had written this book first, then in her mind, Atticus had been this man all along, even if the side we all knew and loved was all the public knew.  It meant that, rather than there being some tragic event that could have led Atticus to turn in such a bigoted direction, that streak must have been there in his fictional heart all along.

It is a difficult thing to lose faith in the people you counted on as your moral compass.  That is true whether they are living breathing persons or fictional characters. It is hard to see someone not merely selling out, but to discover that they had perhaps sold out to something awful long ago, and you had just never seen it before.  Some part of me seriously grieved last year to have lost the Atticus Finch who had lived in my imagination for twenty years before.

So... here's the fifty-thousand dollar question for me: which is the real Atticus?  The enlightened quixotic defender of Tom Robinson, or the bigoted old man who aligns himself with the "White Citizens Council"?

Or... am I forced to consider the possibility that a very clever author wants us to see both are true, and that both reside in the same character? That is a scary possibility, in all honesty, because if I recognize that a beloved literary hero can have these streaks of nobility and bigotry side by side in him, I am going to have to admit that there are parallel streaks in me, as well.  I am going to have to prepare myself, not only for the likely possibility that there are other (real) people in my life whom I have respected but who have let me down with some awful beliefs or prejudices, but I am going to have to prepare myself for the reality that there are places in myself I do not want to see the light of day, places of which I would be ashamed to admit or be forced to see.  As much as it was hard last year to read about a beloved fictional hero's clay feet, there is the yet harder task of looking at my own clay feet as well.

Of course, it turns out that this has been part of the struggle for the people of God all along.  It certainly was for Paul, the apostle responsible for half of the New Testament, who laments here in Romans 7 about the struggle within himself.  Paul has been wrestling with the Atticus in the mirror, too--he wants to live faithfully and truly in line with the way of Jesus and the character of the Reign of God.  But he also feels this tension inside between that impulse toward the path of Jesus and the pull backward into the old self-bent hatred and greed and avarice.  Paul feels the pull in both directions, wanting to love like Jesus and give himself fully to the gracious reign of God, but also yanked in the opposite course like Atticus at the White Citizens Council.  And Paul knows that it is a terrible mess to be pulled like that, when he wants to give himself fully to the way and love of Jesus.

You and I are in that boat, too.  You and I live in that tension.  I realize we have been looking all this month at the call to turn from our old self-centered aims and toward the priorities of God.  But I don't want to oversimplify that, or make it seem like it is a simple one-time choice like buying an Apple or Android.  Even if we get a moment where the clouds part and we can say clearly and courageously, "Not my will, O God, but yours," there is the tension within us all the while, with some part sincerely seeking to reorient ourselves around the mercy and justice of the living God, and some part just bent on putting "me first."  Some part of each of us would defend Tom Robinson because we know that the Kingdom of God looks like love for the marginalized and justice for the powerless... but some part of us would sell out to the White Citizens Council with Watchman's old man Atticus, too.  If we are honest, there are uncomfortable streaks of both within each of us--the faithful, courageous, grace-filled, open-eyed followers of the crucified Jesus on the one hand, and the fearful, cowardly, self-focused, closed-hearted lovers of self on the other.  We are both.  And we are going to have to live with the wrestling between two ways of being Atticus every morning when we start the day... and then as we live it out.

I want to be honest here--this is not an easy struggle.  Like the famous line of Solzhenitsyn reminds us, the line between good and evil does not run through states, or classes, or political parties, but cuts through every human heart.  Each of us is a fearful sell-out, and each of us is a faithful seeker.  It may well be in these days that you, too, have felt like you have lost some heroes, respected mentors, or friends, like I have been grieving over the Atticus of my tenth-grade literature class.  But beyond just feeling disillusioned at others, if we are honest, we are going to have to look at ourselves, too, and hold up to Jesus the jumble of mixed motives, secret shames, and honest yearning to do what is right that comes with each of us.  We are going to have to take that saint-and-sinner hodgepodge and hold it up to Jesus himself, trusting him to love us as we are, but also to heal us like a surgeon and cut away the cancers inside us that we did not want to admit were eating us alive from the inside.  We are going to have to admit that we are, each of us, part of the problem in this sinful world, and that we are striving to be a part of God's merciful movement to heal and mend.  We are going to have to trust that Jesus can love us while we are still wrestling with Atticus in the mirror, and to allow his love to give us the courage to start again, striving after God's will rather than the old bent.

Lord Jesus, we are torn between old familiar patterns of fear, self-centeredness, and hate on the one hand, and your new order of things in grace and justice.  Here we are, a jumble of everything.  Take us, Jesus.  Take us and love us into your new creations.