From the Director’s Desk
Last week on the Reformed Journal, I reflected on why I was so appreciative of institutional structures, such as “shared governance”—the systems that allow collaboration between all the stakeholders who make a university possible. I shared how I had presented a history of this collaboration at Calvin to our Board of Trustees—and how I relished remembering the many people who made significant contributions to our foundations.
It made me think, too, of what it takes to put on the Festival of Faith & Writing. Here’s a little of what I wrote:
Members of the 2024 Festival Student Committee - just a few of the many hands who have helped make this event possible.
…I loved getting to name people then and over the last fifty years who have worked so hard to build something. Certainly, imperfectly. Certainly, in limited ways or with limited success. Me included. And yet, like the folks who populate the genealogies of the Bible, real people trying to do real work. In a time when the impulse towards destruction seems so prevalent, I was heartened to be able to give witness to the results of so many.
This week that principle of the “work of many hands” finds its expression for me in the opening of registration for its iteration of the Festival of Faith & Writing. Like my ruminations at the board last week, my mind always turns to remember the people who began what was to become the Festival in 1990—long before I or any of my current colleagues were anywhere near the English department—as well as the dozens and dozens and dozens who have contributed over the years. Nothing successful survives over decades without strong foundations and constant maintenance. Whenever something looks effortless, it’s probably exactly the opposite. I know that’s true for the FFW. Although I have been part of stewarding it, in small capacities and large, for many years now, it’s always been very much a shared endeavor.
The questions we examine have been always evolving, but the essentials established in the very first gathering have remained. My current amazing team has found new ways to cultivate that legacy of generous hospitality to flourish beautifully. It’s easy to dismiss or denigrate all the small things—meetings and memos and mobilizing—that it takes to build something institutionally. We make jokes—”For God so loved the world, he didn’t send a committee.” We fail to recognize and appreciate the labor of the builders. Bartleby-like, we’d prefer not to. And yet. George Eliot asks in Middlemarch: “What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?” Surely, that is the question to guide our work. That, and that faithful example of those with whom we join our hands to do the messy work to which we’ve been called.
Those faithful examples are why I love All Saints’ Day—when we recognize the saints, here and gone. For me, one of those current saints—one of the most faithful of the “many hands” who have made the CCFW possible—is editor and author, Bob Hudson. Bob is a true Renaissance man: not only did he bring many books to life as an editor at Zondervan, but he has written books on the most wide-ranging of subjects and genres: a delightful novel, The Beautiful Madness of Martin Bonham; several innovative books of poetry; a useful style guide, The Christian Writer’s Manual of Style; and non-fiction studies on everything from Bob Dylan and Thomas Merton to visions of Jesus to flies in poetry (which sounds weird but is super interesting and profound). And many more.
His latest, Nativity Set: Table-Top Meditations for Christmas, seemed perfect for my theme of “many hands”: it’s a book that takes each figure in a crèche and gives them a voice. Perfect for Advent preparations.
After all, we each are an important part of God’s grand narrative. Many hands that take God’s work where it needs to go.
