If you ever visit York, England, with Susan—as many students, colleagues, and friends have done—she will take you to the Minster and whisper to you about its goings-on. “Medieval churches are always under reconstruction,” she will say—and you will feel as though she has said something that is multilayered about art and architecture and faith, and you will need to think about it some more. What does it mean to be always under reconstruction?
That may be the central question that Susan Felch has been exploring through her long career. We see it in her scholarly work, during which she has found new ways of understanding major figures and uncovered artists whom the canon has ignored. She has given a new angle of vision into the ways in which we regard Queen Elizabeth I—as a witty and educated and lucid writer herself. She has brought Anne Lock into the canon with her The Collected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock, so that a once-obscure Calvinist now appears in the Norton Anthology of English Literature and speaks to students across the continent. And now Susan is at work on an edition of William Tyndale’s work, a writer whose texts have been almost shockingly unstudied; this means trips to library after library, diligently bringing to light textual problems and stories that no one has explored. Certainly, this is part of what it means to be always under reconstruction.
In her teaching at Calvin, in off-campus programs in her beloved England, and indeed, all over the world as a representative of the university and as a renowned scholar of the Renaissance and Reformation, Susan has asked this same question. She has long taught the senior seminar for English majors at Calvin, and in that course she poses that question at the center of her studies. What does the study of a text do for and to a reader? What does one gain in terms of cultural awareness and subsequent commitment through the study of a literary text? Her teaching has made straight the paths of convoluted interpretive problems, and particularly explored what the buckling of meaning and art might mean to a person of faith. But another way of saying this is to focus, again, on reconstruction. Her gift is her ability to ask students to fight through stasis to new understanding and to embrace the implications of that understanding. What could be more important in a university education?
And as we think about what it might mean to constantly be asking how to construct anew, perhaps we should note what, if Shakespeare were to write a scene about Susan, he might have put into asides—aimed at the audience mostly for the sheer pleasure of the thing. So, here’s an aside: Susan loves British detective stories. Here’s another: one of her favorite books is Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth. Some more: She is skilled with a rapier. She is skilled at sculling. She is skilled at calming cats. And, she is skilled at listening. She is skilled at discerning with kindness the needs of others. She is skilled at showing what it means to love another as oneself. I write as someone for whom Susan Felch has been a blessing for many years.
At the end of The Good Earth, there is a terrible scene in which we learn that the children of Wang Lung, who do not share his commitment to the land, will undo everything that he has worked for after his death and will themselves fall into decay as a family. When we think of the art that Susan has shown in her teaching, in her scholarship, in her career with the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship, in her innovative work with faculty through the writing cohorts and seminars she has founded and led, in her reconception and leadership of the Developing a Christian Mind course, we think of someone who sees much further than Wang Lung. We think of someone who is enabling a new generation to be themselves constantly under reconstruction as they work for the construction of the new kingdom, where there will be no more scaffolds and no more pounding at the stone, and where the blessings that Susan has helped to bring to all of us will echo in new and vital ways that we cannot yet imagine.