On the Not-Adding-Upness of Life

Beloved in Christ,

This past week, a dear mentor of mine died. The Rev. Dr. Lindon Eaves preached at St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia during the time I worked there. Lindon worked in behavioral genetics – specifically, as Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics and Psychiatry for Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine. With a dry wit, a robust English accent, and a penchant for irreverence, Lindon dropped at least one curse word in each sermon and left everyone asking better questions.

In the remembrance given at his funeral service on Sunday, one of his research protégés said that scientists are about “beating back the four horsemen of the apocalypse—war, sickness, famine, and death. Lindon made real headway. He developed new mathematical instruments for us to model the natural world. Even better, he taught other people how to use them and how to make new ones of their own, to better understand how things such as the human mind work, and why, sometimes, they don’t.”

I loved Lindon, not because he was a lion of the scientific world, but because he told the truth, from the pulpit and to our faces. He didn’t try to make it all make sense. In his preaching, he asked questions of God, and of us, that questioned our biases and our innocence. In his presence, he brought a profound hospitality and a wicked sense of humor, not hiding his own proverbial warts, in a way that gave others permission to be their own strange selves. When Brian and I got married, he was the officiant and preacher. And when we sent him a photo of our newborn son, Lindon wrote back a short email: “Good use of DNA.”

In an early (2004!) episode of Speaking of Faith (now On Being), host Krista Tippett gathered a trio of people who straddled the so-called divide between science and faith. Lindon spoke about the life of faith as a response to the “not-adding-up-ness of life" (his segment begins at around the 30 minute mark).

“Anything, religious or scientific, which pretends that somehow it all does add up, is probably lying in the teeth. Life really doesn’t add up, and we are fumbling our way through and trying to make sense of it. All this stuff about God arises out of that.

But where else do you go if you’re trying to have a conversation about the issues that at least some of us find of burning importance? I really do believe the church is in the reality business.”

There is a great deal that does not add up these days. The four horsemen of the apocalypse are visibly present, on our minds in overwhelming, crushing footage of the invasion of Ukraine, the millions dead from COVID, and more. We see teachers having to fight their own administration for the resources they need, we see everyday Ukrainians turning their businesses into defense efforts, and we see not just frontline health workers but also behavioral geneticists turning their efforts to beat back those horsemen. We’re doing it for the sake of the vision God offered through Isaiah and Jesus and Revelation: a world where there is enough for everyone, where every tear is wiped away, where the not-adding-up-ness has been not resolved but healed, where the impossible mysteries are held in love. I'm more courageous and hopeful in the face of those horsemen because of Lindon.

Thanks be to God for the saints who show us how, amidst all that does not add up, to walk the way of Jesus in love, in kindness, and in truth. 

Grace and Peace,
The Very Reverend Susan Daughtry
Dean of Formation
Episcopal Church in Minnesota