The Is and The Ought

by Jeremy Adams

Table of Contents
Part 1 appears
in this issue.

conclusion

The next day I rushed home to uncover the mound of largely inconsequential mail. Finally, under a jury summons that piqued me the instant I saw it, lay the church bulletin. I tore it open and immediately began scanning for his name. It was the third name I saw and to my great delight was the longest announcement in the bulletin. Rather than a glib sentence, I found a self-touted exposition on his exploits and adventures.

Anton Shenkman has been doing missionary work with a church headquartered in Waco, Texas. He writes, “I have been in the Republic of Uganda these many years trying to do the work of the Lord. Much excitement has transpired since we arrived two summers ago. According to the Ateso-speaking natives in our village, Uganda has just won its independence and the first president, Edward Mutesa, and first Prime Minister, Milton Obote, are getting ready to take office. Not too many converts in this part of the world as they are more worried about subsistence than salvation. Last year, I was taken hostage for two weeks by some Ugandan teenagers. They thought I was English and they were planning to exact revenge on me for all the evils and spoils of Imperialism. They finally let me go when I started singing the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ and pointed fiercely to myself. I then sang the anthem of England and shook my head ‘no’. I will be back soon, I hope. I am definitely different.”

The brevity of the letter left me in a state of protuberant curiosity. I simply wanted to know more. He was finally experiencing “The Is”, and I wanted to know how it had affected and changed him.

He finally came home seven months later, almost three years after he had disappeared. I picked up the program from one of the ushers one Sunday morning and I saw him in the program as a “guest speaker.” I swivelled my body and head in anticipation of spotting Anton. While the regular minister was away on vacation, the replacement minister mawkishly attempted to entertain and inspire us without giving any theological substance in his sermons. But Anton’s appearance livened up the ecclesiastic prospects on this particular Sunday.

The service began and I had yet to spot him. His segment of the church service was fast approaching and I began to wonder if he was even in attendance. The minister issued a brief introduction and a man with hair down to his shoulders rose from the front row. He was holding a piece of paper in his right hand, which trembled as he approached the pulpit. My palms had suddenly become moist and my heart had assumed a velocity normally reserved for exercise. He never made eye contact before he began speaking. He simply stared at his piece of paper. The complete lack of fluctuation in his voice immediately caused a majority of the audience to become comatose. Once again I was situated in the familiar position of being the only one who was listening to what it was he had to say.

“The past few years have been a time of many firsts for me,” he started off by saying. His nerves were making him virtually inaudible.

“I was asked to come here today and share my missionary experiences in Africa. I am no Paul, I guarantee you. In fact, during my three years in Africa I converted not one soul. Before I left for Africa I thought I had a great many answers. But the sickness, the despair, the famine, the violence and political instability and corruption changed my perception of everything.”

There was an element to his speech that had previously been absent. It took me a few moments to identify this quality, but before long it was apparent. His newly acquired humility changed his persona in such a dramatic and monumental fashion that he almost sounded... well... normal.

What he said next commanded attention from the entire congregation, even from those who made it a habit of ignoring him.

“The one thing in Africa that will stick with me is that life there is defined by illusion. The government that is supposed to serve the people actually betrays them. It’s like so many other things in life. We don’t really see stars, but we see their light from millions of years ago. We don’t really know one another; that is, we don’t know the character of one another’s souls. We only know the words that come from our mouths, which are discursive and easily open to misinterpretation. We think our own thoughts or suspend the reality of pain and assume that God is present in both cases. I suppose the best evidence of my point is that I went to Africa as a missionary and returned as a skeptic. My reasons for this change are intertwined with my experiences. That’s all I’ll say.”

He stopped and looked up from his prepared speech for the first time to gauge our response. Our eyes immediately locked and he extemporaneously said something that I will never forget.

“The Ought and The Is are not like the yin and the yang. There is no equilibrium. They are like oil and water in the human soul.”

With that he stepped down from the pulpit, walked down the center aisle, and vanished from the church. In the aftermath of Anton’s skeptical benediction no one ever saw or mentioned him ever again. They did hear news of him, however. Still, he never returned to our church to worship or make an appearance in the church bulletin again.

Had the story ended here, however, I would not have begun it at all. Remember that Anton was a young man of grandiose pronouncements. It was his destiny, I suppose, to become a man of grandiose action. Surely the man who vanished from the church was not the man Anton had in mind when he conceptualized himself as an adult that everyone would listen to. Who and what he would become surpassed even his own youthful ambitions.

For years after his exit from the church, I wondered what had happened to him. Did he go to graduate school, join the Peace Corps, or work in one of those cubicle offices the typical American worker has come to despise? For ten years I intermittently asked myself these questions. I never thought they would be answered.

As the years passed, the mental capital invested in the whereabouts of Anton Shenkman dwindled down to an occasional remembrance of his grand axioms and behavioral oddities. I got married, had my own children, and prayed that my profession and family would flourish within the same world Anton had come to skeptically renounce. But in the back of my mind I always remembered that the second phase of his time line was concerned with “enrichment.”

Three weeks ago I received a letter with the name “A. Shenkman” written on the upper left-hand corner of a dirty and crumpled envelope. I paused for a moment, perplexed at first because I rarely gave Anton a last name in my mental ramblings of him. The letter was curt and purely impersonal. But the odd thing about the letter was that it was written years ago yet sent merely days ago.

June 1972

You are the only one who understands The Is & The Ought. That is why I write to you. After my exit from the church, I wandered the country for a while before I finally met up with a young woman, Janice, who said she was on the road looking for God. I told her I thought we were a good match because I had lost Him. We wandered the highways for months before we ended up back in Waco at my old missionary church. It occurred to me that Christ intended men and women to live together because it is only then that they can experience the love God created us to experience in the first place. What I didn’t expect is that marriage can also aid us in feeling the malice and wrath that only Satan can supply. After we got married we signed up for another tour of duty in Africa, except this time only for a year. The year went better than I could have imagined. We taught natives how to read, awakened them to the splendors of baseball, and even converted a handful of them to the community of Christ. The week before we were planning our departure, Janice told me she wasn’t going to be leaving the village. When I asked why she informed me that she had fallen in love with one of the male natives and that her interpretation of the Bible allowed for divorce. Funny... I always thought the Bible was filled with what “Ought To Be.” I never thought it would be used as an instrument for rationalizing “The Is.” I’m lost...

Anton

The letter was sent, I assume, to prepare me for today’s local newspaper headline. His face was captured in a mug-shot in the aftermath of a rampage that took the life of his uncle, the parish priest, and almost mine. He was arrested two blocks from my house. The church I grew up in was burnt to the ground though there is no clear link to Anton, at least not yet. I received a phone call shortly after opening the paper with his voice on the other end.

“I wasn’t coming after you, you know?” he said.

“Anton,” is all I could muster.

I must have sounded terrified because he responded by saying, “Don’t sound so scared. I only get three minutes on the phone. Maybe they’ll listen to the adult Anton now.”

“Why did you do this?” I asked.

“You can’t show people ‘The Ought’ by acting out ‘The Ought’. I did that by going to Africa, getting married, being an all-around decent fellow, and still nobody listened to me. Only by striking out in the most dreaded and depraved manner are people horrified by ‘The Is’ and seek refuge in ‘The Ought’. Christ allowed for free will because without the possibility of evil there is no good, without Hell there can be no Heaven and without ‘The Is’ that I have created, people will never ponder the content of ‘The Ought’. That’s why.”

“But what about all that stuff about life becoming art, about synthesizing ‘The Ought’ with ‘The Is’?”

“You know I became a malcontent after my first trip to Africa. I tried it again, but it was love that stabbed me the second time.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” I bravely retorted.

“People are now going to think back on all the truth I revealed through the years in those church meetings. But nobody was listening, and now they will. Truth can have an evil torchbearer, you know. Look at all the good wrought by the Holocaust, by slavery, by every malevolent institution we have now abolished from the face of the Earth. Now my message will go forth.”

I hung up the phone with a dashing realization that made my soul ring out with a sensation of fright I had never known.

Perhaps he had planned it from the beginning.

Anton spoke of the dominance of illusion in life; the last segment of his time-line spoke of “Revelations”; he even mentioned that modern man was shallow because of his unreflective tendencies.

But how did he expect his “Truth” to be spread, I wondered.

He called me back almost immediately and said but a single sentence before hanging up: “Although you definitely didn’t plan it this way, I knew you’d be my apostle some day.”