This Littler Light: Some Thoughts on NOT Changing the World

By Jesse James DeConto

Like other evangelical kids, Jesse James DeConto felt called to shine the light of truth into the world. His job as a journalist and his young marriage, though, would radically change him. First, he learned that Christians have no corner on truth: Working out in the world, trying to be the "Roaring Lamb" he'd been trained to be, he met atheists and agnostics who seemed to do better at embodying Christian love than many Christians did. Confessing the church's failures was one thing, but the author had to face his own weakness the hard way, when the cheap threads that held his marriage intact finally snapped.

Jesse found himself at the end of his twenties with a broken bank account, a broken body, and a broken family. In the midst of that pain, he discovered his brokenness better equipped him to share God's grace than his striving ever had. He learned to say with theologian Karl Barth that "his importance may consist in his poverty, in his hopes and fears, in his waiting and hurrying, in the direction of his whole being toward what lies beyond his horizon and beyond his power."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Nov 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781630870126

Jesse James DeConto

Jesse James DeConto is a writer and musician. He has degrees in philosophy from Cedarville College, journalism from UNC-Chapel Hill, and Christian studies from Duke Divinity School. He spent eleven years with newspapers in Ohio, New Hampshire, and North Carolina. He is a contributing editor at Prism magazine, writes regularly in The Christian Century, and performs with his indie pop band The Pinkerton Raid. He lives in Durham with his wife and two daughters.

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Acknowledgements

Amemoirist owes thanks to every person who has crossed his path, for better or worse, because every encounter shapes his life and his story. I won’t acknowledge every teacher, mentor, editor, friend, and colleague who has made this book possible, for I would have to list everyone who has made my life possible. They would be mere names to you, reader, and they are so much more than that. I trust some of them will receive the thanks implicit in telling the stories of how they have made my life what it is. At times, some of them might not recognize themselves, as making this story readable required combining a few different people into one character where it would not diminish the deeper truth of the narrative. The central characters all play themselves, as well as I understand them.

There are characters in my story whose names I have changed, the facts of our relationships I’ve obscured for their protection, because this is my story, and no one else should have to own it. For them I give thanks, for whether we’ve built one another up, torn one another down, or simply lived life together, they have taught me about myself, about this mysterious existence on planet earth, and about the God who created us. Let me say a special thanks to the woman I’ve called Joy, who encouraged me to write this story years before I started, though I’ve brought no great joy to her life. I have purposed in this book to do no harm, to her nor anyone else. I mean for this story to serve as a tiny gift to the world, not some vain self-justification. You, reader, will have to decide whether I’ve succeeded.

With that said, let me express my particular gratitude to those who have made this writing process possible. Thank you to Jason Byassee, Lucila Vargas, and John Utz, who helped me to plumb the connections between my faith and my writing. Tim Conder, Melissa and Kevin Mehm, Mackenzie and Philip Henry: Thanks for encouraging me to take the leap from a stable job to find the time to write this book, among other things. Thank you to Mark Schultz, who remains a supportive editor, even after I quit the job you hired me for! Thanks to Isaac Villegas and Lauren Winner, who oversaw Duke Divinity School’s Spiritual Autobiography course at the old Durham Correctional Center in the summer of 2011. Isaac and the inmate-classmates there read and heard early drafts of some of the stories that make up this book, and their encouragement pushed me to think bigger. That fall at Duke, another course on women’s spiritual memoir with Rick Lischer required me to write one of these chapters, and I just kept going. When I got to chapter 7, I went back and poached from an old essay I wrote for Kevin Heath back at Cedarville College and another, Midwestern Radicals, that Jim Sparrell had acquired and edited for the old and much-missed Mars Hill Review.

Margot Starbuck, Phil Christman, Enuma Okoro, Vince Rocchio, Philip Henry, Damon McGraw, Angela Miller, Kevin Meadows, Brett McKey, Chris Breslin, Cleve May, Abi Riak, Rebecca Kuhns, Susan McSwain, Tommy Grimm, Sarah Kate Fishback: Thank you for the constructive criticism that buffed my rough manuscript into something I hope is worth reading. Rodney Clapp, my editor: Thank you for believing in an unknown author; I can only hope that my writing might make a fraction of the difference for some reader that A Peculiar People made for me. Ben Barnhart: Thanks for guiding me through my first literary contract deliberations as the voice of grizzled experience! Greg Veltman and Benita Wolters-Fredland: Thank you for the opportunity to present part of this book at the Calvin Festival of Faith and Music. I had met Rodney at the Festival of Faith and Writing a year earlier, so this, my first book, is proof that Ken Hefner and the Calvin College Student Activities Office are making a difference in the lives of writers and musicians.

Mom and Dad: Thank you for a lifetime of encouraging me to spend my time doing the things I love, rather than always doing what’s prudent or expected. And thanks for the free babysitting, real-estate brokering, and home repair advice and/or labor that help to free up my time to do what I love. And Marco, Katie, Suzanne, and Steven: Thank you for following me from New Hampshire and Florida and making our home here in North Carolina. I could not have lived through this story without you all.

Lily, thank you for our daughters, and for trying to love me inasmuch as you were capable. I have tried to care for you as best I can while telling my story as truthfully as I can.

A.D.G.P.D and C.R.E.G.P.D—thanks for putting up with a dad whose job seems to have no recognizable end each day. Living with a writer and musician is not the easiest thing for a kid, but I hope you can see me dreaming and you can dream yourself. You’re not allowed to read this book until you’re older, but when and if you do, I hope you’ll see that your mom and I have always loved you and will always love you. Neither one of us is perfect, and there’s not much use in blaming anybody for what happened between us. The important thing is that we all learn from one another’s experiences. That’s what this book is for—to try and share what I’ve learned through some very painful times, in hopes that someone else might learn something, and maybe avoid the same mistakes. We have to tell the truth as best we can, even if it’s painful, because knowing the truth can help us live with the grain of the universe, instead of fighting against it.

Julie, I wrote this book because you wouldn’t let me go to Mexico to research for another book. Your sixth sense for what’s going to work in real life helps us dreamers to get things done. You are the reason this book exists, and not just because you gave me permission to blaze a new career trail when it didn’t make much sense financially. Thank you for your work at home and at Reality Ministries, work that goes a long way toward sustaining our family, so I can take some risks in my own work. More importantly, thank you for building a redemptive life with me and the girls. You’re the woman of my dreams, from the days when I still dreamed, sowing peace together on the battlefield. You are a constant in a story of unresolved endings.

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All scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com  The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™ 

Scripture quotations marked NASB taken from the New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation Used by permission." (www.lockman.org)

Scripture quotations marked KJV taken from The Authorized (King James) Version. Rights in the Authorized Version in the United Kingdom are vested in the Crown. Reproduced by permission of the Crown’s patentee, Cambridge University Press.

The author also acknowledges his use of quotations from the following works:

From Bread for the Journey © 1997 by Henri Nouwen. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins. All rights reserved.

From The Epistle to the Romans © 1933 by Karl Barth. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, USA. All rights reserved.

From All We Are Saying © 2000 by David Sheff. Reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press. All rights reserved.

From Slouching Toward Bethlehem © 1968 by Joan Didion. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved.

From Flood © 1995 by Jars of Clay. Reprinted by permission of Brentwood-Benson Music Publishing. All rights reserved. ASCAP.

From Bus Driver © 1997 by Derek Webb. Reprinted by permission of Niphon, Inc. (admin. By Music Services) All rights reserved. ASCAP.

From I Will Sing © 1989 by Rich Mullins. Reprinted by permission of Universal Music — Brentwood Benson Publishing. All rights reserved. ASCAP.

From Will You ©1990 by Wade Baynham. Reprinted by permission of composer. All rights reserved.

From Tourniquet and Pour Kid © 2006 by Bill Mallonee. Reprinted by permission of composer. All rights reserved.

From Days Go By © 1996 by Duncan Sheik. Reprinted under fair use from Atlantic Records. All rights reserved.

From I’m Happy With Myself © 1994, All I Need is Everything © 1996, Bothered © 1997, The World Can Wait © 2001, and Snow Angels © 2007 by Over the Rhine. Reprinted by permission of composer. All rights reserved.

This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine!

This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine!

This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine!

Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine!

Hide it under a bushel, no! I’m gonna let it shine!

Hide it under a bushel, no! I’m gonna let it shine!

Hide it under a bushel, no! I’m gonna let it shine!

Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine!

Don’t let Satan whoosh it out, I’m gonna let it shine!

Don’t let Satan whoosh it out, I’m gonna let it shine!

Don’t let Satan whoosh it out, I’m gonna let it shine!

Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine!

Let it shine till Jesus comes, I’m gonna let it shine!

Let it shine till Jesus comes, I’m gonna let it shine!

Let it shine till Jesus comes, I’m gonna let it shine!

Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine!

—This Little Light of Mine, Harry Dixon Loes

Introduction

We used to sing this song in Sunday School, as far back as I can remember, way back when I was learning to use a big-boy potty and tie my shoes. The little light was our faith in Jesus, and letting it shine was sharing it with others, who didn’t know him. Jesus loved the little children, all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white, they were precious in his sight, Jesus loved the little children of the world. He would make us FISHERS! of men, FISHERS! of men, FISHERS! of men, if we followed him, if we followed him, if we FAW! LOWED! HIM! I should dare to be a Daniel, dare to stand alone, dare to have a purpose firm, dare to make it known. Even if they fed me to the lions.

It took almost thirty years for me to really see This Little Light in action. Before that, it was mostly an ideal standard that made me feel guilty for not living up to it, a measuring stick that set me in competition with all the other little lights around me; if I shined a little brighter, you’d try too. But two years before Occupy Wall Street demanded economic reform at the national level, the candles lit in Charlotte, North Carolina, as hundreds of protestors marched on Bank of America and Wachovia in the fall of 2009. In the midst of the subprime mortgage crisis, with people facing ballooning interest rates and foreclosures on their homes, organizers delivered a theological statement against what they called usury—the Old Testament sin of collecting interest from the poor.

This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine! sang seventy customers inside the cavernous lobby at BOA headquarters.

Even in my bank, I’m gonna let it shine! they sang, marching seven times along the gleaming glass and polished marble walls, like Jesus throwing the moneychangers from the temple, like the Israelites marching around the walls of Jericho, and the walls came a’tumbl-in’ down!

Till we get an answer, we’re gonna let it shine! they sang, as four Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers arrived to confer with bank employees.

Oh, I’ve got my card, y’all, I’m gonna let it shine! they sang, assuring the bank officials sent as buffers from the upper floors that, yes, they were Bank of America customers and they just had some questions about the puzzling fees and rising interest rates that were showing up on their monthly statements, about why their friends and families were losing their homes.

I hadn’t known This Little Light of Mine was an anthem of the Civil Rights movement. I hadn’t known this little light might shine through simple acts of justice: sitting on a bus, ordering coffee at a lunch counter, or transferring your money to a credit union built for people, not profits. I didn’t know all these little flames, brought together in a simple Sunday school song reverberating around an office building, could enflesh the presence of God, even if they weren’t hot enough or bright enough to right the wrongs, or turn oppression into justice or usher in the kingdom of God. I didn’t know it could be enough just to catch a glimpse of that kingdom, wherever two or three were gathered in Christ’s name. I didn’t know that when Jesus taught us to pray, Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors, he really meant debts—currency, paper, not just spiritual shortcomings. I didn’t know this little light might actually free people, here on earth, not completely, but at least give them a bit more freedom from from things like debt, or hunger, or poverty, or violence, or loneliness. I didn’t know the light of the world, the city on a hill, what Martin Luther King Jr. called the Beloved Community could show people what it meant to be a Christian, could preach the gospel to every creature and use words only if necessary. I didn’t know this little light really could be little, because there were lots of them, and even when they all shine together, they were never meant to replace the One Big Light.

I thought I had to use words. I thought lots of people had to hear those words. I thought I had to live up to those words. And I thought I had to do it alone. I thought the salvation of the world, at least some of it, depended on me.

1

Please, Jesus

For just the tiniest smidge of a fraction of a nanosecond, I opened my armor and let the pain show. I had to be strong, but Langley saw through me.

Are you OK? he asked when we met outside North Carolina Central Prison on St. Patrick’s Day, 2006.

Hours earlier, I lay on an operating table and allowed a young urological resident to cut into my manhood, to sterilize me, to make sure I would never father a son, to protect my dear, sweet daughters from adding more stress to a home already full of it. I had scarred my body to save my marriage. Even as I lay there and let the doctor stick a knife in me, I was hoping for a miracle, hoping this fix wouldn’t take.

Not long after our second daughter’s birth, Lily had started pressuring me for a vasectomy. She’d been through two surprise pregnancies, one ending in a miscarriage that had sapped her will even to get out of bed. After we married—at twenty-two and twenty-three years old—she often said she’d never planned on a marriage or a family. When she said things like that, like when she wrote that short story imagining her life with that biker dude she’d rejected in favor of me back at our Baptist college, I took it to heart: She was unhappy, and it was my fault. Aurora had the little sister she’d asked for, and Lily was done. For a year and a half, my wife pestered me, relaying her Appalachian grandmother’s concern: When’s he gonna get fixed?

On the one hand, I thought it was the loving thing to do. Lily was constitutionally frail, with a minor heart condition, multiple allergies, and what you might call a low zest for life. She said birth control made her stomach hurt. We’d already had one condom fail. She’d given me two precious girls, she didn’t want any more, and she certainly didn’t want to endure another miscarriage, so how could I make her take that risk? And was I myself willing to take the risk, knowing the conflict in our home?

On a brief detour from my daily newspaper career, I was taking five graduate-school classes, working as a research assistant, freelance writing to make some extra cash, and trying to figure out my next career move so I could buy Lily a house. We were living in a brand new student family apartment at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and I worried about what the neighbors thought about my screaming: about her hot iron that burned a hole in the kitchen counter, about the uninsured bills we were paying to an alternative healer because Lily didn’t trust mainstream pediatricians, about another meal left for me to cook or laundry to wash when I got home, about her hours of aimless web-surfing, about credit card bills that were eating into our savings because she had to have the best of everything. No one in my shoes would have wanted to deal with her selfish idiosyncrasies, and no one in her shoes would have wanted to deal with my hot temper.

I thought I understood her unhappiness, and why she tried to fix it with fancy clothes and fantasies of the good life. Not only had her parents abandoned her to her grandparents when she was a baby, but they had flitted into and out of her life, giving her glimpses of the wealth and freedom they seemed to have chosen over her. They flitted, that is, until her mother decided she didn’t like me—or didn’t like the idea of her daughter getting married—and refused to come to our wedding. That kind of rejection might make anyone turn inside herself and never come out. But my understanding it wouldn’t mend the tear it caused in our marriage. In fact, it only played upon my weakness: my pride, my need not to fail, my intense probing to heal her wounds, which instead seemed to cut her deeper. The strife was the strife, regardless of how much I might have believed I would resolve it one day. How could I bring another child into this home?

Still, it didn’t feel right, altering my body like this, permanently. I’d never even been able to pull the trigger on a tattoo, for goodness sake. It seemed to me there was something sturdy in the Vatican’s ban on birth control, something worth reckoning with. I mean, I didn’t think having six or seven kids would be the responsible thing to do, but was it right to say, no, never, no more, after just two? Didn’t God make us male and female to procreate? Wasn’t our creativity how we displayed the image of God on earth? And could you get any more creative than making a new human life? As much as Lily had insinuated, how could I feel guilty about our first pregnancy, our precious, unexpected Aurora? Wasn’t that God’s plan for marriage? Weren’t our little girls something to celebrate? Did I have a right to cut asunder what God had created? Was there any way to reconcile these two competing moral duties: Loving my own flesh and loving my wife?

I had thought about consulting the busy priest at our Episcopal church, or maybe Duke University’s eminent theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas, who worshiped with us and surely had thought about the ethics of birth control. But why bother them with something so personal? I had good, dear friends, but they were spread out all over the country, even the world, and I didn’t think any of them could relate to my predicament. Whenever they asked, I would tell them that marriage was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do. Nothing they could say would ever change that. We were raised by churches that taught us divorce was wrong in all cases, but they never talked about what those cases might look like. It was like this: If there’s adultery, the wounded party has to forgive. And if there’s forgiveness for that, then there must be forgiveness for just about anything. If you were in a bad marriage, you just had to work harder. That sort of categorical imperative made sense to me: I thought I was as smart and capable as just about anybody, and where I was weak, I just had to outwork ’em. I thought I could keep my marriage intact by force of will. Just trust and obey.

Mom suggested maybe twenty-nine years old was a bit young for a vasectomy, but this was my cross to bear. As I saw it, this operation was my self-crucifixion, my obedient, joyless martyrdom, the climax of my tortured submission to my wife’s will, the apogee of my stoic self-reliance, my sacrifice for our salvation. Six moves in six years of marriage because one day I’d be able to make her happy. Estrangement from my parents and siblings because she needed me all to herself. To prove my worth to Lily, I made myself worthless to another woman. I went all in. I was either going to knock the ball out of the catcher’s mitt, or break my neck trying.

Yeah, I’m fine, I told Langley. I just had a minor surgery.

The doctor had told me to rest, but I couldn’t miss this night. It might turn into a once-in-a-lifetime experience. See, this night Langley would get himself arrested with fourteen other activists protesting the execution of convicted murderer Patrick Moody. More importantly, some of Langley’s friends would sit with Patrick’s mother Rondelle on the night she knew her son would die. Lily always said activists like these were just looking for attention, and sometimes I thought maybe she was right. But no matter what I thought about civil disobedience or the death penalty, I had to acknowledge the suffering of a murderer’s family: They had raised a child who became a killer, and now they had to watch him die. The only people who had it worse were the victims’ families, but at least they had society on their side. If you think about it, a murderer’s family had also been victimized in a way: They had lost the innocent child they once knew, and it was that innocent child—not just a cold-blooded killer—who would shake and sputter and finally stop breathing in that execution chamber. Not only that, but those families also had to suffer as guilty by association. Their son or husband or brother or father was a murderer. I shuddered to think of what that must feel like, and I had to admire people who offered their time to soothe some of that suffering.

I kind of feel like Patrick’s sick, and we know he’s going to die, and that we’re kind of together for a funeral, and it’s kind of a natural thing, and not that, you know, he’s going to be executed and he shouldn’t be, Langley’s wife Sheila had said the prior evening. She was two months pregnant, characteristically thin, in her late twenties with long, straight, brown hair, the daughter of a Catholic-hippie family from rural New York. Langley, also long-haired and skinny from a vegetarian diet and frequent fasting, had rearranged bedroom furniture around their home in Raleigh, North Carolina, to accommodate Patrick’s extended family—his brother, aunt, uncle, stepfather, and mother.

He’s going to die and that’s sad, Sheila went on, but the fact that he’s being executed isn’t really being talked about, which is fine. It just feels like it’s a regular funeral. You know?

Yeah, it’s really interesting. You can see ’em get quiet, and they’re thinking about it, said her housemate Roberta, in her forties, pensive, bookish, with pixie hair and dark-rimmed glasses, a mother of two boys, with her youngest, a teenager still at home. And then they say, ‘That is really sad.’

Sheila: Because how do you think about it?

I know, said Roberta, shaking her head, exhaling sharply, chuckling darkly.

Sheila: I don’t know how else you deal with it.

We were in the kitchen of Nazareth House, the Catholic Worker intentional community that Langley, Sheila, Roberta, and her husband Scott had recently opened to offer hospitality to the families of death-row inmates at North Carolina Central Prison. We lounged against the cabinets I had helped to scrape and paint, or sat on the old gray-on-white speckled countertop, just inside the back door with a little placard that said Peace to All Who Enter Here. I’d been writing for newspapers and magazines for six years, and I, too, was trying to make peace—not only for people suffering through no fault of their own, but also peace with myself. I had become a journalist because I wanted to make an impact on the world for Jesus, but I had spent most of my career writing about the problems of the privileged, like high property tax rates or Not-In-My-Backyard real estate squabbles. I envied these Catholic Workers, helping people who actually needed help. My writing had helped poor, hungry, alienated people, too, here and there. But I felt like my hands were too clean. Spending time at Nazareth House got me closer to the action—maybe even closer to God. The name Nazareth had symbolic power: Being from Nazareth made Jesus an outcast in Jerusalem. North Carolina’s abolition movement, led by Duke Divinity students and the grassroots People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, liked to remind the public that Jesus himself was the victim of capital punishment. Like so many who die on the death row, he was from a backwater ghetto, lacking money or cultural status.

Langley and Sheila were the kind of people who skipped showers and fueled their old Benz diesel with recycled vegetable oil. On the day they met, they were both on CNN after getting arrested in D.C. protesting U.S. military aid to Colombia. A little sign in their bathroom said, If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down. Hanging out with these Catholic Workers was part of my search for spiritual identity. Being near people who were radically following Jesus in lives of sacrificial love—well, maybe they’d rub off on me. They were teaching me to speak up for environmental protection, oppressed workers, and a robust pro-life platform to include opposing war and the death penalty. I’d watched them cull from dumpsters to feed themselves, distribute food in the streets, and go to jail for what they believed in. They were my heroes.

I figured if Jesus had given me this platform to reach tens or hundreds of thousands of people with my writing, the least I could do was to use it to amplify the voices of the poor, the mourners, the meek, the hungry, the merciful, the pure-hearted, the peacemakers, the persecuted—all those people Jesus had called blessed in his Sermon on the Mount. Jesus, after all, had been a prisoner himself, and he counted prisoners among the least of these we Christians ought to visit. If you end up on death row—as most murderers don’t—you were probably too poor to afford a good defense. If you love a man on death row, you go broke paying for lawyers, hotels, travel, and meals: You’re not only in mourning, but you’re poor and you’re hungry. And if you love people who love people on death row, you’ve got to have the most merciful and pure of heart, because you’re inviting no great joy into your life—more often, it’s devastating sadness. And, on top of all that, you’re asking for persecution. Case in point: Over my several months of traveling back and forth from our home in Chapel Hill to watch these Catholic Workers doing their work, Lily had the same message for me:

Why are you wasting your time? Killers deserve to die.

Of course, she had some precedent for saying such a thing. We’d both grown up in churches that taught us Moses’s eye for an eye but not Jesus’s turn the other cheek. I had come to think the latter was the one that really mattered, and she hadn’t. I had twin callings: Compassionate journalism and compassion for my wife. And they were at war with each other. I was at war with myself. I would return from writing a story about energy-efficiency with free samples of compact-fluorescent bulbs, and Lily would complain about the quality of light they gave out. I would proudly pedal my bike back and forth to work, or ride Chapel Hill’s free buses that stopped every fifteen minutes near our house, or write a column about how weaning ourselves off Middle Eastern oil might help make the world a more peaceful place for our girls, and Lily would complain about not having a second car.

We had moved to North Carolina two years earlier. On one of my first visits to our Episcopal church, I had struck up a conversation with a middle-aged woman. I told her I was worried—about our second daughter then in Lily’s womb, about my demanding independent journalism project on Latino immigrants, about living in a new place, far from anyone who knew us.

We’re going to need some help from this church, I told her.

Well, I don’t have time to get involved with anything else right now, she said, but I’m sure you’ll find someone who can help you.

And, in fact, the church’s Sunday school director had cared for three-year-old Aurora overnight when we’d gone to the hospital, an assistant priest had visited there us after Rowan’s birth, and a few women had delivered meals as Lily recovered. But after that, we were alone. That had been the choice we’d made. It had always been that way. Lily had never adjusted to the cold, hard winter, nor the cold, hard temperament of my native New England—the place she’d hoped would impress her estranged mother, a native Appalachian who had given her up at six months old to jetset from Boston to London to Los