Review of Grace Notes and Other fragments by Joseph Sittler

Review of Grace Notes and Other fragments by Joseph Sittler

“The heart of marriage is a promise.  On the face of it, it’s a crazy promise: two people who have only a partial understanding of each other stand up and make this bizarre statement that they’re going to cherish and care for one another for a lifetime.  They say, ‘I take this one and this one takes me as long as we both shall live,’ not ‘as long as we both shall love.’  To many persons this seems like a mad and risky thing to do.  Yet I would suggest that the madness is the romance.  Without risk there is no beauty or strength or goodness.”  This is Joseph Sittler’s opening paragraph in his reflection entitled “Marriage and Snow on the Mountain,” which appears in an enormously gratifying and worthwhile read Grace Notes and Other Fragments.  “Fragments” is a reference to the brevity of each of the entries in this little book.  I see them as priceless “gems” from which the reader will gain wisdom with each reading and re-reading.

Life Magazine recognized Sittler in the 1950s as one of the top ten theologians in the world.  He was one of the first to see ecology as a religious or spiritual concern and not just one for science.  I knew “Joe” as the theologian in residence where I attended seminary in the early 70s, the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago.As brilliant of a mind as he had, he was also incredibly down to earth and taught as much from how he lived as in what he said or wrote.

Take his thought on marriage from above.  Nice words, but they came from a man who lived them with his beloved wife, Jeanne.  Late in life Joe was blind except for his peripheral vision.  Jeanne was suffering from any number of ailments, including dementia, which made her hallucinate at times and kept her bedfast for the most part.  He fed her, clothed her, and managed most of her care all on his own.

One afternoon mutual friends were visiting them to see how they were doing.  As Joe was feeding lunch to Jeanne she blurted out, “Those kids outside are making too much noise!  They’re upsetting me!”  Rather than note that there were no kids making any kind of noise outside, Joe got up, opened the front door and yelled, “Hey, you kids stop making so much noise.  You’re upsetting my wife.”  He then closed the door, resumed feeding Jeanne, while assuring her that the kids had gone away.

Later while alone with Joe, those visitors asked why he didn’t put his wife in a nursing home.  Surely, with his blindness and her mental and physical liabilities, no one would fault him.  To that very reasonable inquiry, the man who wrote the words quoted above said, “At no time has she needed me more.”

Grace Notes and Other Fragments comes from a man, a prominent theologian of the last century, who didn’t just “talk the talk, but walked the walk,” as they say.  Visiting with this insightful sage from one fragment to the nextis well worth the time.  You will leave wiser than when you came.

Reviewed by Richard Dick, Library Assistant, O’Kelly Memorial Library