UNMASKING THE HOME EC THEOLOGIAN [11-27-24]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—UNMASKING THE HOME EC THEOLOGIAN [11-27-24]

 

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. Helen will cook a special meal, as she has for 66 years. I shall be thankful for the meal, yes, but primarily for her presence. So, I share this story, because it gives me a chance to give thanks for the real theologian in our family.

I have long wanted to write a novel about a theological detective, solving crimes not just while being clergy, like Harry Kemmelman’s rabbi books, or G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, but solving them by applying theology stuff, not detective stuff, to the mystery. I even started a couple of times, but always got derailed by real life. So I have written the following as a short story. It’s first-person, but not a memoir. [Warning: it’s long, 1000 words instead of my usual 500.]

 

I put the last book back onto the top of the stack. Almost two feet high. 13 books. All started. Some half-finished. And not a single one that I’m willing to continue.

            I reach for the remote before I realize the TV is out. My wife tried to reprogram it so it would “work right.” Now it doesn’t work at all. So she’s in the kitchen revving up some supper. I have until tomorrow, when the doctor will tell me I’m dying. I have until tomorrow to learn who can restore Christian unity.

            I’m not a super-hero, didn’t get bitten by a church mouse to give me special theological powers, although I have encountered a few church rats in my secret forays. I’m just an average theological detective. I’m hired to infiltrate into supralapsarian congregations to find out if any of their members are secretly infralapsarians. That sort of thing.

But I’m secret, not like the big gun theological detectives, who advertise on TV, like “Brother Hammer, The Devil Dasher.” If anyone finds out about Sister Mary Justice and me, the game is over.

No, nothing like that. Sister Mary Justice and I aren’t romantically entangled. Sister Mary Justice isn’t even her real name, just what she goes by in the nether world of theological chicanery that we inhabit. She needed a Protestant to do some nailing on the door of the bishop while she slipped in the back way, and she’d heard of me through the grapevine, the one they squeeze to get the juice for communion. Or Eucharist, as she prefers to call it, acting like she doesn’t even know Protestant words.

My cover in the world is as an expert witness in heresy trials. I’m the world’s leading expert on patripassionism. The problem is, there are no heretics anymore. Anything goes. Otherwise, you’re being “judgy.” Especially patripassionism. Everybody believes that God suffers, and if you look at what we’ve done to God’s world, there is good reason to believe that.

On the dark theological web, though, as a free-lance theologian detective, I am known as the Protestant expert on Catholic theology, or The Methodist Jesuit. Nobody knows that the cross around my neck hides a millstone placed there by my mentor and hero, The Rev. Franco Fudge, Doctor of Divinity, the President of The St. Fiacre University School of Theology. It was he who first realized my talent for duplicity, and my fondness for disguises. [1]

It was the All-Saints party. I was dressed as Huldrich Zwingli, because all the Martin Luther and John Calvin costumes had already been rented out. I was swaggering around, trying to act like a Predestinarian, when Dr. Fudge wiped his mouth and said, very quietly, “You’ll never pull that off. Everyone can tell you’re an Arminian.”

“What can I do?” I gasped, forgetting for the moment, because of his august presence, although it was November, that being an Arminian, I have free will and so can do anything I want.

“Come with me,” he whispered. “History will judge me harshly for this, but I’m going to introduce you to Sister Mary Justice. She’s the one dressed like Martha Stewart.”

“Martha Stewart? At a theology Halloween Party?”

“All Saints, not Halloween. She is trying to infiltrate a new underground movement known as Home Ec Theology. They eschew traditional Aquinian systematic theology categories in favor of recipes that ostensibly produce potluck casseroles but are actually instances of hypostatic union.”

“The two natures of Christ?” I gasped. “But…”

“Yes,” whispered Dr. Fudge, “it may be their devious ploy to unite the two so long divided, Unitarians and Trinitarians, since it is anathema to both alike. Can you imagine a world where Unitarians are taken seriously? I shudder even to think about it.”

“But isn’t anathema reserved for gays alone?”

“No, that’s abomination.”

Now Sister Mary Justice and I were tasked with learning the true identity of the Home Ec Theologian, the one person who could single-handedly reverse the Christian divide that had lasted a thousand years, The Great Schism of 1054.

 I whispered the password, “Filioque.” She passed it back, doing a remarkable imitation of an Italian vesper sparrow: “Feelly-oh-ohkay. Feely-oh-ohkay.”

“Remember the words of Mother Teresa,” she said. “Go home and love your family.”

She pulled a censer from out her robe, waved it in the still air of the ecclesial alley, and disappeared in a cloud of holy smoke.

I did as she said. I went home. I looked at my wife, fixing supper in the kitchen, the way she snuck a lettuce leaf under the Jello until it was almost hidden from all but the eye of unanimous discernment, the way she cleaves a loaf of home-made bread neatly into two parts…

Of course, the two natures of Christ, hypostatic union. I suddenly knew her secret identity. The Notorious HET. The Home Ec Theologian.   

John Robert McFarland

1] St. Fiacre is the patron saint of hemorrhoids sufferers.