Reading Claypool #6: God the Ingenious Alchemist and The Hopeful Heart
Walter B. Shurden
John R. Claypool, God The Ingenious Alchemist: Transforming Tragedy into Blessing (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 2005, 77 pp.)
John R. Claypool, The Hopeful Heart: (New York, NY: Church Publishing, 2017, 96pp.)
In the “Introduction” to Martin E. Marty’s brief 114-page book, October 31, 1517: Martin Luther and the Day that Changed the World, James Martin wrote, “My favorite genre of writing is a short book on a big topic written by an expert.”
Who doesn’t like that genre? A short book . . . on a big topic . . . written by an expert!
In the first article in this series, I miscounted and said that John Claypool published 11 books. He actually published 12 and, interestingly, of those 12 books, six were less than 100 pages long. Only one of the other six books numbered 200 pages.
Claypool wrote short books. He wrote on big topics, especially the topic of “transforming tragedy into blessing.” And because of his personal tragedies in life—growing up with little sense of self-worth, losing his 10-year-old daughter to leukemia, and losing his marriage at the peak of his ministry—he was about as close to being an expert as a Christian minister could be on that subject.
I have commented several times in previous articles in this series about the importance of the book of Genesis in Claypool’s preaching. In the early 1960s, while Claypool was still a pastor among Southern Baptists, the Southern Baptist Convention experienced a controversy over the interpretation of the book of Genesis. The controversy stemmed from a book, The Message of Genesis, written by Professor Ralph Elliott of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. The controversy came to be known as “The Genesis Controversy” or “The Elliott Controversy.” Claypool responded promptly to the conflict by preaching a series of sermons on Genesis 1-11.
Throughout his parish ministry, Claypool “conducted a large number of short-term and even year-long studies of the book of Genesis.” He said that he was “shaped and reshaped” by the dialogue following these studies, especially in his last two parishes, Christ Episcopal Church in San Antonio, Texas, and Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
When Claypool began teaching preaching at the McAfee School of Theology in Atlanta in 2001, he utilized the book of Genesis as the basis for courses during two entire semesters. And he said that the contents of God The Ingenious Alchemist “is the distillation of some 45 years of ‘asking, seeking, and knocking’ regarding the truths of this ancient and inspired segment of Holy Scripture.” One can hardly overemphasize the centrality of the book of Genesis for Claypool’s preaching and his personal theological vision.
Beginning with the “Introduction” and throughout God the Ingenious Alchemist, Claypool sets forth his theological vision of life more clearly and more specifically than he does anywhere else in his published writings. It is a vision rooted in the earliest chapters of Genesis and elaborated on in chapters 25-50. You will find this theological vision scattered throughout many of Claypool’s writings, but nowhere as systematically enunciated as in this little book.
It is a theological vision that begins with creation. Claypool, like many theologians/philosophers before him, pondered the question: “Why is there something and not nothing?” And with a theology that accentuated the sheer delight of existence itself, the Episcopalian priest said, “The Ultimate Mystery behind all things—the One who is life, has life, and possesses the power to give life—must have said, ‘This wonder of my existence is something too good to keep to myself. I want others to experience the ecstasy of aliveness and to share the essence of the joy that is the very heart of my Being.’”
Claypool’s playful, imaginary conversation of God with God’s self is one that Claypool obviously enjoyed. He repeats it often in his published works. This fictional dialogue with the Divine also provided this sensitive preacher, so in touch with the fragility and fruitfulness of life, another means to say again, “Life is gift.” Divine generosity is the heartbeat behind all things. “The Holy One,” as he often called God, created to “give something of God’s self,” and “not to get something for God’s self.”
Whereas other preachers and theologians would stress creation as Exhibit A of God’s omnipotence, Claypool saw it as God’s gladness and bliss about being itself. For Claypool, in creation the Holy One lifts a toast TO LIFE!
And then come humans! Made in God’s image! And because they are made in God’s very image, they have real power and authentic freedom. Without these—“real potency and genuine freedom”— humans could never know God’s kind of ecstasy of aliveness. These two features of humanity are central to Claypool’s theological vision. However sovereign and omnipotent, Divine power never compromised the freedom and creativity of human beings.
Continuing with his anthropomorphic language, the Holy One, said Claypool, clearly ran a risk. The gifts of human creativity and human freedom meant that things could go awry. And they did. “The humans who were called into being in order to experience God’s joy abused their freedom and moved in the opposite direction.” Human beings arrogantly ignored the one thing that constituted God’s joy—love. They reversed the pattern of creation and turned what was good and beautiful back into chaos.
Where does this leave the Generous One who brought something out of nothing and wanted only delight for humans? For Claypool, the Generous One becomes the Merciful One, and this leads to the title of his book and his vision of God as “The Ingenious Alchemist.”
Alchemists tried to find a way to transform lead into gold. They worked to take one thing and turn it into something better. This, Claypool said, is what God does as recorded in chapters 25-50 of Genesis and throughout the Bible. Moreover, it is what God continues to do in our lives. Using the stories of Jacob and his family, Claypool uses example after example “in which egregiously wrong human actions are redemptively transformed into occasions of growth and blessing.” Claypool’s retelling of the story of Jacob and his descendants in God the Ingenious Alchemist makes for a good but thoughtful Sunday School curriculum on the book of Genesis.
God, the Ingenious Alchemist, is profoundly collaborative, retaining both human freedom and Divine freedom. Claypool said, “The central contention of this book is that we must honor both of these participants and hold firmly to the hope that, while Divine ingenuity never abolishes human freedom, it does possess the potency to transform even the worst of actions into occasions for growth and blessing.” Claypool loved to quote that line from Frederick Buechner that, “The seemingly worst things were never the last things.”
Is Claypool’s theological vision a fanciful and irrelevant abstraction or does it have an end in view? It held pastoral intent for us, his listeners and readers. He wanted “to open for you a pathway to hope and to make it possible for you to believe that, through thick and thin and the very worst of times, the Ingenious Alchemist can still do the best of things.”
“It is this theological vision,” he says, “that can enable you to move from a life of fear and despair to a life of courage and hopeful coping.” Claypool always wanted to help people live better, more joyfully, even when “life had worked them over.”
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Appropriately, Claypool centered one of his very last books, The Hopeful Heart, on the subject of hope. He viewed “hope as the very fuel that animates our human species.”
Two convictions undergirded all that he said in this small, 92-page book on hope. First, “Hope is utterly essential” for our wellbeing. Hope is to the human spirit what breath is to our physical bodies. Claypool reversed the familiar adage, “Where there is life there’s hope,” arguing that the deeper truth is, “Where there is hope, there is life.”
His second foundational conviction was that hope had to be based in reality rather than in wild fantasies. “There is nothing simple or magical about the act of hoping, for there is always the risk of disappointment,” he said. Unrealistic expectations lead to inevitable disillusionment. Hope must be reality-based.
So, where and what are the authentic resources for hoping? Claypool gave two. The first road to hope is to admit that we do not know enough to embrace despair. Acknowledge mystery, he begged, the true context of our lives. “In any given moment we never know the full extent of what is happening about us . . . and the only appropriate response is genuine humility.”
Claypool recalled that at a particularly hopeless moment in his own life, an elderly rabbi told him that the only unforgiveable sin for a Jew is the sin of despair. “Despair is presumptuous,” said the rabbi. “It is saying something about the future that we have no right to say because we have not been there yet and do not know enough.”
John Claypool repeated the phrase “despair is presumptuous” for the rest of his preaching ministry. Even more, he made it a fundamental part of his spirituality. He was a “hope-er.”
If some things that Christians do not know should lead us to humility, other things that we do know should lead to confidence and hope. What we do know, Claypool said, is the nature of the Holy One and what Claypool called “the Great Story that courses through Holy Scripture.”
That “Great Story” is about creation and the Holy One who created to share the joy of aliveness. But the “Great Story” is also about how the “Holy One,” even in the face of “the mystery of iniquity,” never gave up on the desire to share divine joy with the whole human race. Some accused Claypool of being a liberal who did not believe the Bible. Ironically, it was the great sweep of biblical history, “the Great Story,” that gave him hope!
In the most interesting chapter in The Hopeful Heart, John Claypool discusses three forms or manifestations of how God’s grace brings us hope. These are (1) miracle, (2) collaboration, and (3) endurance. Again, some will be surprised to hear this so-called great liberal preacher say, “I do believe in the possibility of miracles, those times when things happen for which there is no human or physical explanation.” These are the events, he said, that leave us with “slack-jawed amazement.” Without diffidence or apology, he called these events “miracles.”
Claypool said that the second way God’s grace brings us hope is through collaboration. God moves alongside us, inviting us to join forces with the Divine in bringing about a solution to our difficulties. This collaboration, said the preacher/priest, is the one God employs most often in bringing us help and hope.
While Claypool believed that at times God solves our problems for us (miracles), and at other time solves our problems with us (collaboration), he also believed that there were tragic events in life without solutions. We are left only with endurance. He called this kind of hope “the gift of endurance.”
It was this gift that he saw in his 10-year-old daughter’s dying with leukemia. “I cannot begin to describe the incredible maturity and courage that I saw develop in my little one as that disease ravaged her, and yet she never became bitter or lost her love for life.”
But Claypool, too, experienced something of that gift. On one unspeakably horrible day for his daughter, when he was feeling the pain of his powerlessness, he wanted to run screaming out of the room. He then said, “From somewhere far beyond me, an Energy not my own had silently enveloped me like a gentle mist and enabled me to resist running away in panic, and to stay connected and be present for my suffering daughter.”I have wondered for some time what Claypool’s preaching was like before his daughter died. Some day, a graduate student hunting a PhD topic will make that study and comparison of before and after. Claypool gives a lead when he said that he became a very different person from the one he was before Laura Lue’s death. Of himself, he said, “I sense that I am more humble, grateful and sensitively attuned to the suffering of others than was the case before this ordeal.” Watching your 10-year-old daughter suffer and die will do that for you.
Two comments as I conclude this series “Reading Claypool.” First, of the 12 books John Claypool wrote, he published three books while still a Baptist, two books in the process of his transition to the Episcopal Church. But most of his books, seven, were published while an Episcopal priest. One must conclude that the culmination of his lifetime of thinking and preaching came in his role as a priest in the Episcopal Church. It was the room in God’s great church where he was most himself.
Secondly, John Claypool wanted to live life to the fullest, even in the face of its sometimes-piercing pain, and his one purpose in life, as I perceived it, was to help others live in that fullness as well. One night, after reading Raymond Moody’s small book, Life After Life, John had a vivid dream, flushed with powerful images. Here is his description and a bit of his interpretation of that dream:
“I dreamed I died physically, moved through a dark tunnel, and came out into what can best be described as ‘kindly light.’ There was no visible object or figure, only a great sense of warmth and acceptance. Then a Voice said, ‘Welcome, my child, I want to ask you some questions.’”
“I stiffened in fright and thought to myself, ‘Here comes the judgment and my condemnation.’”
“But the Voice said, ‘First, I want to ask you, can you weep over all the mistakes you made, over all the pain you have caused other people, over all the ways you have failed to live up to your highest and best?’”
“I began to think about the many things in my life that were occasions for regret. Genuine tears began to come up from the depths of my being, and I cried as if my heart would break.”
“But then the Voice spoke again. ‘Let me ask you something else. Can you laugh over all the good experiences you have had, all the good jokes you have heard, all the funny things you have seen?’”
“Again, I began to remember back over all the joys of my life and started laughing as I had never laughed before, and so help me, it seemed that that ocean of light was laughing with me! If you have never heard the laughter of God, you have missed something absolutely ecstatic.”
“Then the Voice spoke yet again. ’I need to ask you one more question. This wonder of aliveness—do you want any more of it? Do you want to go on living?’”
“I remember thinking that there was no predestined answer. I really did have a choice. I pondered slowly all the pain and pleasure that I had known from living, and then from the deepest place in my being I said, ‘Yes! Yes, I do want some more of it!’”
“With that the Voice exclaimed delightedly, ‘Come, then, you blessed of the Father and enter into the joy of your lord. Plunge deeper in and further on,’ and with that I swam off into the ocean of light.”
Claypool ended by saying, “I do not claim for this dream any ultimate authority, but I do believe it corresponds to the highest and deepest notes of the Christian vision. To enter the Kingdom of Heaven, what could be more essential than being able to weep over our sins, to laugh appreciatively over all our good times, and to say from the depths of our beings, ‘Yes, Lord, I want more of it.’”
— Walter B. Shurden is Minister at Large at Mercer University
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