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The Theologian as Wounded Innocent

Diálogo A Tribute to Alejandro García-Rivera 37 W often learn as much about a person by how they die as by how they live. Indeed, how one approaches one’s own death is often the most accurate reflection of one’s attitude toward life. This was certainly true of Alejandro García-Rivera’s courageous last months. Those privileged to spend even a few minutes with Alex during those days were inspired by his witness to the wondrous, extravagant gift that is our creaturely existence. In the midst of what could only have been a harrowing physical, emotional, and spiritual struggle, Alex never ceased to affirm life, whether by inquiring about the well-being of his students, planning future scholarly projects, welcoming dozens of visitors to his home, or tending the idyllic garden that graces the entrance to that home. It is no coincidence that Alex’s last book, his last testament, is titled, The Garden of God: A Theological Cosmology (2009). This is truly, I think, a masterful work that breaks much new ground in a number of areas, particularly in its call for the articulation and development of a thoroughgoing theological cosmology. In order to appreciate the theological and spiritual richness of this work, however, I think it must be read in the context of Alex’s entire oeuvre, as both a culmination of his entire scholarly project and, at the same time, a groundbreaking new direction for that project. Today, we can only speculate wistfully about how this undertaking, the development of a theological cosmology, might have evolved in the future. It is now left to those of us inspired by his work to attempt, in our own small ways, to take up the challenge he laid before us. To that end, I would like to offer some reflections on the book, The Garden of God, but do so in relation to Alex’s somewhat earlier work, A Wounded Innocence: Sketches for a Theology of Art (2003). I want to postulate that it is precisely this latter eponymous concept—so strange-sounding at first glance—that makes possible and generates a theological cosmology. More specifically, it is the Christian’s own (Alex’s own) identity and life as a “wounded innocent” that breaks open and reveals this earthly “veil of tears” as indeed “the garden of God.” It is no coincidence that Alex locates the origins of his book, The Garden of God, not in some personal experience of beauty, but in his horrifying realization, as a young physicist working for Boeing, that he was unwittingly helping to manufacture nuclear cruise missiles: