As my mother accurately described in his obituary, Dr. Ralph Vernon Ford was a man who embraced terreauty, the place where beauty and terror intersect. But let’s be honest, my grandfather was terreauty.
He was always pushing us beyond our physical, emotional, intellectual or spiritual limits of comfort. His style of interpersonal interaction was sure to raise blood pressure, Grammy's most of all, but also yielded beneficial change in the recipient. And so, despite how scary he could be, we all kept coming back for more. He always had more popularity than he'd wished for.
His capacity to terrorize was certainly related to how much, how hard, and how long he studied. His head was constantly being filled. To process all of that information, he had a steno pad system. All the highlights or inspired thoughts that came out of all of that reading were recorded in stacks of steno pads, in---as is so typical of doctors---his indecipherable handwriting. Many great thinkers have gained their fame by publishing writings such as filled those steno pads. But his pads never had an audience.
A few months ago, I found myself in what felt like a particularly fruitful season of meditation with Jesus and the Bible. I felt like God was giving me countless insights, and I just didn’t know what to do with them. The frustration mounted to existential crisis, and so who would I turn to, but to Grandpa. I asked him why, after he’d loved and consumed so many books in his years, he never wrote a book of his own insights. He told me that while I suffered from logorhhea, (which he defined as diarrhea of the mouth), he always had the opposite problem and felt that he simply had nothing worth saying. Having overwhelmed so many people with his big words and intimidating speak, it is hard to reconcile that statement with our experience. But I believe he truly felt that way.
He said that instead, it was simply enough, as he read and studied, to have encountered God and His truth. If it brought him closer to Jesus, then the effort, the insight, was worthwhile and had met its ultimate end. As profound as it sounded, the answer didn’t fully sit right with me, but I tried to embrace it nonetheless.
I once heard a story of a monk from centuries back. He crafted wooden spheres with exquisitely detailed religious imagery. When these masterpieces were discovered, they were collected to be put into a museum display. But in the process, one of the spheres was accidentally broken open. Inside, where no human eye would have seen if not for this mishap, were additional carvings, as exquisite in detail as the exterior. Why put so much effort into art that would not be seen, unless the artist believed in a God who sees all? Unless the artist was working to please, honor, and glorify Him alone?
I think Grandpa was something like that monk.
He certainly did great things, worthy of the public acclaim he received. But the result of all his study and steno-pad fillings was not a great novel or piece of fine art. It was his capacity to speak directly, powerfully, personally, tough-lovingly into our lives. We are the hidden interior of his artwork, each uniquely crafted for the glory of God alone.
And I rather prefer his story to that of the monk. The monk makes a simpler metaphor perhaps, but if Grandpa railed against anything in the past few years, it was solipsism. Solipsism is the view that nothing can be known to exist except for the self, not even the person sitting in front of me, much less a greater community around me. The greatest danger of any line of thinking for Grandpa was that it could imply or lead to solipsism.
I think even in well-intentioned and very spiritual pursuits, a temptation towards a sort of religious solipsism is great. Solitary intimacy with God is sublime. And I think it was a temptation I may have mis-interpreted from Grandpa's answer about the use of his insights. But while Grandpa was finding satisfaction in drawing closer to Christ, something else was happening on the outside. Grandpa was speaking into lives in a way that was shaping the communities of his Navy ship crew, Berachah Church, The Pork-Chop-Gang, Grace Bible Church Sunday school classes, Bethel Church, River Oaks Country Club, Carmel Presbyterian Church, Friday morning breakfast walks, his tennis group, his hunting buddies, his mens ski trip groups, his extended family and all its tangents.
Private intimacy with the Word, with a capital W as in John 1, pours forth something that is not necessarily expressible in words, but that results in the building up of other individuals and community. Loving God should result in neighbors getting loved. Grandpa terrorized innumerable individuals into living more beautifully in community. This love, that I believe was the Triune God's every intention in Christ's incarnation, death, and resurrection, is anything but solipsistic. Because of course, one can not truly draw closer into intimacy with Jesus Christ without also drawing closer to His Body, the Church, a community of human beings. Ter-reauty.
One of my most poignant memories of the terror incited by Grandpa was when my sister, Lauren, and I traveled alone with him to Italy in high school and were often left stranded in our hotel rooms or in the middle of a busy train station while he wandered off to unexplained destinations for “a walk,” carrying all of our money and passports precariously in the ankle of his sock. He left us terrified and confused. Lauren and I would huddle together and start making plans for what we would do if he never came back.
And now, that greatest fear my sister and I shared has become a reality. We've been left alone without him in a world where we wish we could forever turn to him for medical advice, vocational direction, comic relief, and grandfatherly affirmation. Thank God he did not live life solipsistically.
Thank God he did not focus only on his own relationship with us individually. Thank God he co-labored with Emmanuel, God-still-with-us, to steward the power of Christ within us. Thank God he didn't just care about us as unique persons, but us as members of our families, members of our communities, members of the Body of Christ. Because thanks to him, we do not lead solipsistic lives. We live lives well interwoven into a web of support and purpose. He was foundationally instrumental in our lives, but he would not stand for being our center. That position he reserved for Christ, which nothing and no one can take away from us, even and especially not death. I think he'd be more satisfied that he'd accomplished that than all of his wealth, fame, power, love, and rugged good looks combined.
