THEY CAST THEIR NETS IN GALILEE: STRIFE CLOSED IN THE SOD
Born of the Mississippi planter class, William Alexander Percy experienced a childhood of wealth and privilege built on the backs of poor African American sharecroppers and Italian immigrants. His grandfather, whom he was named after, served as a Confederal colonel in the Civil War. His father, LeRoy Percy, was elected to the United States Senate in 1912. The Percy family controlled some 20,000 acres of cotton producing land in the Mississippi delta, and it was undoubtedly the proceeds of this racially fueled labor that paid for his matriculation, like his father before him, at the University of the South.
As a graduate of the College and a current seminarian at the University, I see so much of William in the story of this institution. It’s well understood that the University was intended as both a playground and classroom to train up the plantation class — Bishop James Otey of Tennessee clearly stated that the intention was to create a university that would “materially aid the South to resist and repel a fanatical domination which seeks to rule over us.” (1) Early Chancellors, Vice-Chancellors, and professors were former Confederate generals. The Episcopal Church was explicitly part and party to this system of slavery, racism, and exploitation.
As a child raised within the landed gentry of the Deep South, William exemplified this system of class and race oppression… except when he didn’t. His father lost his Senate seat just two years after being elected by the state legislature when he was defeated in a popular election in 1912 by James K. Vardaman, a white supremacist, who ran on the platform of repealing the Fourteen and Fifteenth Amendments. Vardaman attacked the Senator for being too liberal on race issues. In the early 1920s, both William and his father openly campaigned against the Ku Klux Klan’s attempt to move into Greenville, and under their family’s influence, they were successful in denying the KKK’s attempt to elect white supremacists to local office.
It was in the midst of this struggle, of the fight by beneficiaries of the Mississippi plantation system against the populist white supremacy movement, that William published Enzio’s Kingdom: And Other Poems. Included in the volume was “His Peace,” (2) the last four stanzas of which became the hymn we know as “They Cast Their Nets in Galilee.” The last verse speaks to the struggle William and his father were caught up in:
The peace of God, it is no peace,
but strife closed in the sod.
Yet let us pray for but one thing-
the marvelous peace of God. (3)
While undoubtedly falling short of the religious and ethical standards of our day, it speaks volumes that William, who abandoned his Catholic faith during his time at Sewanee, understood that the peace of God requires struggle and conflict. It is not the cheap “peace” of disaffection, or detachment, or indifference. It is not found in a mistaken sense of laissez-faire from the world around us.
The Apostles knew this well. Within the Roman context of the Gospels, Jesus and his companions defied the political and social mores of their day. Jesus refused to yield the Word of God to the scrupulosity of the Pharisees, frequently accusing them of hiding behind the letter of the Mosaic law to protect their positions of privilege. For openly defying the religious authorities and preaching the Word of God, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, God incarnate, was murdered by the Roman authorities. To quote the modern-day philosophers of Run the Jewels, “Never forget in the story of Jesus, the hero was killed by the state.” (4)
As William’s poem, and our hymn tell us, the following years would cost the Apostles everything. John, “homeless in Patmos died.” Peter, “head-down was crucified.” I don’t think it a coincidence that so many stories of the martyrs of the Church convey a sense of peace, acceptance, and joy in their death. In life, they found the peace of God through their struggles, and their deaths — their strife closed in the sod — was a fulfillment of that struggle.
What then are we, as inheritors of Christ’s teachings, the examples of the Apostles and martyrs, and of two millennia of struggle by Christians before us, to make of this new rise of populism and white supremacy? How are we, the Church, to respond to the reelection of President Trump to the highest office in the United States? In the age of social media, the 24-hour news networks, and the never-ending campaign cycle, so many of us feel overwhelmingly bombarded by strife. It feels natural, and indeed healthy, to withdraw from this cacophony. But the Gospel requires something different.
The Good News of Christ insists that we continue to live our faith loudly in the face of mass deportations, an intentional dismantling of affordable healthcare and time proven vaccination programs, increased rates of homelessness, anti-LGBTQ hatred, and efforts to roll back a hundred years of social progress in this country. In recent days I have seen reels on Instagram threatening the life of a former Sewanee classmate turned clergy in the Lutheran Church, simply for publicly identifying as a member of the LGBT community. It is my deep fear that such hatred, often clothed in the wolfskin of “Christian nationalism,” will only become more blatant and bolder as we move deeper into the President’s second term and this new Congress.
I’m not going to browbeat the importance of voting. As a recovering former Congressional staffer, I’ve seen the lethargy and frustrated resignation of voters first hand. The reality of the next four years is the only one we have. They are the reality of the incarnation of our Lord, and we, as His children, have been commanded to live his Good News within them. While the Church is not partisan, it is political in the original sense; it concerns itself with issues that affect the polis, the body politic. We are called to be God’s hands and feet in this world, and that may require bold action within the polis that defies the secular powers.
We are fortunate that we have saints honored by The Episcopal Church that we can look to for guidance. Blessed Jonathan Daniels, the Episcopal seminarian brutally gunned down by a white supremacist during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, comes to mind. As does Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Archbishop Oscar Romero and the martyrs of El Salvador. The witness of Harriet Tubman, Thurgood Marshall, Pauli Murray, Vida Scudder, Archbishop William Temple, and so many others show us that it is possible to challenge the social norms of our society.
I’m thankful to have similar role models closer to home as well. In the spring of 1953, the entire faculty of the School of Theology (minus one), the University Chaplain, and the chair of the Religion Department of the College resigned their positions in protest after the Board of Trustees voted to keep the seminary an all-white institution. Thankfully, the Trustees reversed their decision shortly thereafter. In the decades that followed, reformers within, and connected to, the University continued to push this institution to remodel itself more closely in the image of God’s kingdom. In 1963, African American men were first admitted to the College. The first women were enrolled in 1969. Today, the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation continues to grapple with this heritage and seek to understand what it means to be a university that embraces the entire South. Like William Alexander Percy, our history is not perfect. But we continue to engage in the strife.
All of these saints, both those in the Lectionary and those whose names are lost to history, have called us to a reformed version of the common life illustrated by Christian virtues and ethics. This is the task that has been set before us. It was, at times, the hope of the generations before us that government, with its New Deal and technological and economic progress, would be this agent of change. Instead, as we face the intentional dismantling of our governmental institutions and social safety nets, we must shoulder this cross and carry it not just to the pulpit and the altar on Sundays, but out into the world and our daily lives.
One hundred years ago, William Alexander Percy published the poem that would become “They Cast Their Nets in Galilee.” William’s own struggle, however imperfect by our standards, against the white supremacy of his day is joined with the struggle of the Apostles against the Roman empire, the leaders of the Civil Rights movement, and the reformers of this University. Their witness is a powerful and necessary reminder that God's peace is not quiet contemplation, but the peace of knowing what we as Christians are called to fight for within our communities. God’s peace is being buried in the secure faith of a life well fought, having strived to fulfill the work the Gospel calls us to do. As it has always been for those before us, such a life is inherently one of conflict, but that struggle reveals the marvelous peace of God — an inner peace derived from fulfilling your obligations to God and your neighbor, no matter the cost.
Steven Deyle. 2005. Carry Me Back : The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life. New York: Oxford University Press.
Percy, William Alexander. Enzio’s Kingdom: And Other Poems. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1924.
Percy, William Alexander. “They cast their nets in Galilee.” The hymnal: as authorized and approved for use by the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America in the year of Our Lord MCMXVI. New York: The Church Pension Fund, 1920.
Run the Jewels. “walking in the snow.” Track 6 on RTJ4. BMG Rights Management, 2020, digital release.
