Editorial: Accept Me, Dangit!

Since I didn't write anything else this weekend, I present my 'autobiographical essay' for admission to Luther Seminary. Bonus: When I became a Christian, I was the same age as that girl in the quote I open with. Extra Bonus: That was Peter Powers who said I had an increasingly sophisticated mind!

I appreciate any remarks you might have.

“The child is not dead, but sleeping.” - Mark 5:39

I sleep well; I’m a good sleeper. I pass my dormant hours without much interruption. I’ve slept through thunderstorms, fire trucks, and ambulances. I sleep like the young. I sleep like the dead. But the world, of course, has never paused with me. So I’ve also slept through more than 6 million murders, 2.3 million rapes in America alone, and the deaths of 56 million children to starvation. All these things occurred while I was not watching, throughout the unconscious nights of my existence, only one third of my time upon this earth.

And while I cannot argue with Salman Rushdie when he says that “nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time,” Christ points me precisely in that direction. The crux of faith is neither belief nor works, but consciousness: increasing mindfulness of Christ. The onus of Christianity is not on words or deeds but orientation. Disciples want to be like Christ. I want to step behind Christ’s eyes. And the vision of Christ beckons me into empathetic wakefulness, into awareness of sorrow and consciousness of joy. The light of my faith shines on and through and from a cosmos of mounting complexity and thrilling tension. I hum with paradox. A broken, healing world hums with me.

When I was twelve, I wanted to kill myself. Afflicted with what I would later recognize as a depressive disorder, I contemplated suicide. I did not because of a unique and reassuring vision: alone in the bathroom one morning, I imagined myself swimming along the surface of a lake. The water, I knew, was the undying love of God. Utterly transported, I would not and could not sink. Though to this day I have not learned to swim, the vision implies more than simple grace.

My Christian mother was asking me to make a decision about the church. I was fast approaching the age of Methodist confession and confirmation even as I fell further into inarticulate grief and unaccountable isolation. Connecting to God was difficult. Everything was, save this: fishing with my un-churched father at a nearby lake. This recognizably supplied the waters of my vision. God was doing through me what I am always doing myself: reconciling opposites, joining pious mother to unbelieving father, getting faith and doubt to talk.

I said yes to Jesus at the same time I said yes to church and my mother and yes, above all else, to the waters of the love of God. I also said yes to joy and yes to a self not bound by the sorrow I had so inchoately felt. The sprinkling of my baptism shone golden in a springtime light. I felt months of simple elation. This too, it seemed, was mine. I did not understand. Terrified and astonished, I wanted to hide the joy that threatened to burst right out of me.

Television, of all things, provided clarity. After Sunday service, I would hurry to watch a series of debates between a conservative and a liberal theologian. At the end of a particularly heated topic, they talked about being friends despite their disagreements. “What I respect about you,” one said to the other, “is that even when you err, you err on the side of love.” And I knew: I wanted to err on the side of love, forever. Intellectual argument, at a slant, had given me direction and a way to articulate a dazzling transformation.

So when I had the choice between state schools and a small, private Christian college, I chose the latter. My secret motive was to hear intelligent people talk about God, to continue the conversation. I never tired of it. That the debates got harder and the questions more complicated only intensified my interest. For my first two years I read theodicy, all the explanation and justification, it seemed, that anyone had ever given for suffering. And I found no answer, no sufficient grounds for a good God to allow even my adolescent depressions, let alone permit humanity’s broader ills and deeper cruelties.

At the bottom I found Dostoevsky’s “sticky little leaves” opening in spring. I sat on the campus lawn beneath a budding oak tree, at the nadir of despair. I watched the patterns of shadow and sunlight on the grass as clouds swept overhead, and remembered chasing them as a child. Again, it seemed I did, and the field was not made of grass, but the love of life in God. What else encompasses both darkness and light? What else endures through joy and sorrow, pain and bliss, but the God who is love, and who authors life? And what can one do but live and love in kind? When a philosophy professor remarked that Christianity, in sum, is a simple celebration of creation, my head pointed toward my heart. One feasts on life by the gut, the stomach, when understanding ends.

And my comprehension would end, again, of course. Fueled by an anomalous acedia, my postgraduate non-theism ended in Minneapolis, when I got off the light-rail after visiting a friend. Twenty people, seeing the Bible I was reading, had spent most of an hour quizzing me about God. I departed the train in a daze. I got lost somewhere in the four blocks home. It took me three hours to find my way in a city I had inhabited for more than a year. It had never occurred to me before that God might be authoring my confusion, might be casting me into urban wilderness because I had a different path ahead.

That my third vision subsequently depicted God as a sandstorm of ancient and incomprehensible force only deepened my commitment to the spiritual discernment I had begun. Through conversations with the vicar of the Episcopal church that I had begun to attend, I heard a call. Just as the answer to my fledgling despair and rapture of God was conversation, just as the answer to evil was my embodied response of love, so the answer to adult ambiguity and an unfathomable God was clear proclamation and one decision at a time.

So, I loved the stranger and shouted about the silence. Taking an opportunity, I taught a series of classes at my church on the kinesthetics of God working in the world – yes, but how does it happen? – and the nature of truth – yes, but what does it actually do? These classes led to sermons, and my lay speaking in the church. I delight in seeing another person understand, in passing the fires in my mind. I volunteered to blog as the church’s amateur theologian so that I could continue at all hours.

Thus I’ve stayed awake. I cannot sleep for any of these things; I sit up each night before I speak. Why shouldn’t I? Grief need not be the only thief of peace. Just listening to a lecture wakes me up, let alone speaking out. And I’m the only person I know who found undergraduate study easier the harder the classes got. I did not understand when a professor remarked that I had an increasingly sophisticated mind. But I should hope that wisdom would increase. I would strive for deeper knowledge, and welcome more adept intelligence. So much religious language about awakening must mean something.

I think so that others can think. Always coming out of caves, I waken so that I can awaken others. The years I spent at a Christian college were joyous not so that I could possess them, but so I could find a way to transmit to others that illumination of thought and delight in words about God. My first favorite writer, after all, was Martin Luther. As we confess, so we believe. As we believe, so we live our lives, so we give embody our mission and our purpose. A school tied to confessional tradition should not be remiss in education, in waking people to awakening.

I want to teach. More specifically, I want to teach theology to students not very different from the person I was the day I sat beneath an oak and realized that love is the field upon which all being plays. Christian faith is helped tremendously not by more thinking or less thinking, but by right thinking about God. Happily, this can be achieved by rigorous consideration and modest amounts of sanity and grace. Because theology is nothing if not embodied, good thinking toward God changes lives. We live out our ideas no matter what they are. How then can we not even determine what we believe?

Through my church, I started my project at Wikicreedia.org, where any believer can contribute to a new creed, not so that anyone would jettison ancient beliefs, but so that everyone could deeply and collaboratively confront their meaning. I believe the current church is in disarray about not only what is true, but about what truth does. Nonetheless, church is the chief place where meaning about God can happen, the reception hall of heaven’s wedding to the world. I must attend. On our pilgrimage to Christ, we are left to walk only with other pilgrims.

I believe this must be enough, though I believe we need to go together, to be all of one body even when we are not all of one mind. While I affirm the Nicene and Apostle’s Creeds each Sunday, I am glad I do not agree with each policy, decision or theology of the Episcopal Church. And I am grateful that my current church welcomes me to walk alongside them regardless. It beckons me, in fact, to constantly edge closer, to bump hips and hands with the rest of the bride of Christ.

Sleep is relentlessly individualistic. But my awakening has been into the simple awareness that I am not alone. Individual moments punctuate greater themes. The lake of God’s love meant a mentor who saw me through confirmation, introduced me to formal theology, and began the conversations about belief that limn my life with meaning. The field of God’s love meant two years of intimate debates with a friend about the paradoxes of free will and God’s sovereignty, and the intuition that response is a kind of answer to deep riddles. And yes, the storm of God’s love meant discernment, re-involvement with a Christian congregation and the end of an estrangement from our Trinitarian God.

Such developments should not surprise anyone. The universe is proving intricately relational, and love is demonstrably the best kind of human relationship. And I must say that the best type of love is Jesus Christ. I believe that the purpose of human life is to plunge whole-heartedly into the paradoxes of love, into all its immanent secrets and transcendent disclosures. I believe that truth takes the shape of relationship: self and other, similarity and alterity, answer and question, known and unknown. I believe that truth is thus fractal, not fractious. I believe that Catholicism gave us Martin Luther as surely as Newton gave us Einstein and my initial love of argument implied that I would one day write, speak and teach about God. All answers contain the next questions, and all questions lead to some new assurance.

This progression is not triumphant linearity but the turns and terms of a conversation we have with God about the nature of ultimate reality. Truth is not relative, but simply larger than we are. Truth bursts our understanding as though we ourselves were wineskins. Like Saul on the road to Damascus we are blinded not by darkness, but by light. In a world overwhelmed by meaning, we grope our way forward with words about God. I would hope that my time at Luther Seminary would prepare me to extend a hand to other pilgrims, and thus transmit a fire very much brighter and fiercer than myself.

From the Lectionary: The Readings for Sunday, May 3

Acts 4:5-12

5The next day their rulers, elders, and scribes assembled in Jerusalem, 6with Annas the high priest, Caiaphas, John, and Alexander, and all who were of the high-priestly family. 7When they had made the prisoners stand in their midst, they inquired, "By what power or by what name did you do this?" 8Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them, "Rulers of the people and elders, 9if we are questioned today because of a good deed done to someone who was sick and are asked how this man has been healed, 10let it be known to all of you, and to all the people of Israel, that this man is standing before you in good health by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead. 11This Jesus is 'the stone that was rejected by you, the builders; it has become the cornerstone.' 12There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved."

Psalm 23:1-6

1The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want.

2He makes me lie down in green pastures;

he leads me beside still waters;

3he restores my soul.

He leads me in right paths

for his name's sake.

4Even though I walk through the darkest valley,

I fear no evil;

for you are with me;

your rod and your staff-

they comfort me.

5You prepare a table before me

in the presence of my enemies;

you anoint my head with oil;

my cup overflows.

6Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me

all the days of my life,

and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD

my whole life long.

1 John 3:16-24

16We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us-and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. 17How does God's love abide in anyone who has the world's goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?

18Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. 19And by this we will know that we are from the truth and will reassure our hearts before him 20whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. 21Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have boldness before God; 22and we receive from him whatever we ask, because we obey his commandments and do what pleases him.

23And this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us. 24All who obey his commandments abide in him, and he abides in them. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit that he has given us.

John 10:11-18

11"I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. 12The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away-and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. 13The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep. 14I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, 15just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep. 16I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. 17For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. 18No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father."

Editorial: Bearing Witness

Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, "You are not at peace." They were startled and terrified, as though they were all ghosts. He said to them, "Do you not even know why you are frightened, why doubts arise in your hearts? Look at your hands and your feet; see that you yourselves are broken. Touch your wounds and see; for ghosts do not have flesh and bones as you do." And when he had said this, he showed them their hands and their feet. While they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, "Have you anything here to eat?" He gave them pieces of broiled fish, and they took it and ate it in his presence.

Then he said to them, "Remember my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you-that you would suffer for my sake, and that my kingdom is not of this world. But you do not need my name to suffer. The world will hurt you because it is not of my kingdom, and I am going away from you. But take heart! For I have overcome the world, and in the wounds of your sides and in your hands and feet you bear witness to my coming and my going. And verily I tell you that on the last day the testimony you bear in blood will be washed away. Repent, and you will be forgiven. The kingdom of this world will be condemned by your blood, and you will be raised up as the stones and pillars of the kingdom that is to come."

It didn't go that way, of course. But I'd like to think it could have. I'd like to think that we might all share in the recognition that absence and presence, comings and goings, mark a relationship as surely as the nature of the people in it. And that's what we do, right? We throw coming-home parties and we give the people we care about a proper sendoff, because it matters where they are and we aren't the same for their leaving or their return.

And I would certainly like to think that all the ridiculous sufferings of this world, all the cruel absurdities that chance and will and powers and principalities unjustly inflict upon us are the things that condemn it, just as much as our own idolatries and betrayals condemn us personally. I'd like to think that God's kingdom acts by vastly different rules, and that every time one of us is arbitrarily harmed the tally grows against the anti-kingdom of this world because our sufferings are not meaningless, but that by living through them we are gathering an account of what a world without God is like.

And obviously, I do believe these things. But I doubt that we are very good at thinking through and acting on their implications. The absence of God doesn't get much play in churchy circles. Sad Saturday barely makes it unto the back of most bulletins, let alone very many minds. And if you ask people what Tenabrae is, you might hear something about it maybe being a band. (I'll admit it was a new service for me, and an instant favorite).

I've said a few times, for comic effect, that I made a horrible atheist because I kept going to church and still tried to pray. But that was precisely the right thing to do, both during college and the longer stint after graduation. One of the things that our culture has so massively wrong is that non-believers leave the church. It's the faithful who should go out into the world! And it's the devastated who should flock to congregations as places of healing, comfort and shared witness to what happens when God isn't there anymore, because God's absence matters in the way that a lovers' does.

But you see how backwards that all sounds. We celebrate God's presence constantly, and the last thing we are prone to do when we lose faith and hope is to talk to people in the pews about it. At least, that's the last thing I'm prone to do, and I assume I can't be alone in this regard. But it shouldn't be a confession! It should be a conversation that doesn't surprise anyone. We should always be singing the Psalms. Because the world does hurt, and it hurts beyond our capacity to bear it. That's what suffering means. But it should never mean that we are alone, and it should certainly never mean that no one has time to hear our witness, our testimony, to see and touch the wounds in each other's sides.

"I come not for those who are well, but for the sick." That's one statement of Christ's that I won't invert. How often we miss that. How often we sit in the pews and face the altar, as though Jesus Christ himself might not walk in the door at any second. As though the face of Christ incarnate were not written into solemn passersby. And how often we sing songs of light and providence, as though our silent pains and pangs, as though all our doubts and debts and darknesses were not hymns of unspoken yearning for the God most high.

Notice: The Future is Already Here

Well, I've been looking for a theme for this semester, and along with the editorials, a project to pad out this space. And since I just spent the last two hours pulling books from the library from noted futurists for an outside project, it would seem I have it here.

This has always been a sore spot between me and Christianity, not that it insists on traditional answers to social and religious issues, which is fine, but that it completely fails to ask non-traditional questions at all, even as society moves in markedly different directions. It then spends the next fifty years playing catch up before it can even legitimately ask what happened.

What, for example, is the Christian stand on privacy? My legal friends say that this might be the next fifty years of constitutional debate, but what does Christ or the spirit of Christ compel us to think about these issues? How are we as Christians to frame them? What about issues of copyright protection and intellectual ownership? Hmmm? Ask these questions in religious circles and you get most often crickets chirping your answer, or simply a pat admonition to follow the laws of the land - which, right or not, is not comprehensive advice, nor is it strictly biblical.

There was a time when Christianity was a forward-looking religion, when the expectation of the age of Christ to come surpassed any current issues; indeed, it seemed to relegate the first Christians to waiting in a puddle and ignoring the polis entirely. I wouldn't advocate that we return to this, obviously - but I would say that the opposite, of debating for the next hundred years issues that the broader culture has by and large moved on from, is not the cure that Christ would look for.

Rather, I would urge that Christ would have us prepare for His return and shape the future in His image by healing the world we actually live in, rather than the subculture that we imagine that we inhabit or once lived in as citizens of a long-lost America. There are issues far larger than sexuality, pop-culture and church polity that impact millions upon millions of people everyday. Climate change is one of them, but threatens to become the only voice we hear. But what about peak water? Soil erosion? The invasive presence of technology in our lives? Our increasingly fraught and complicated relationship to health and biology, the very gifts God gave us? Where is the well-considered voice of reason and Christian tradition on these topics, and many others?

You won't find it here. But you will find me, ever curious, thinking and asking further questions as I engage some of the most prescient thinkers of our time - and, of course, the time to come. Recently, our Vicar has been taking us through something of an idea about what the Emegent Church might look like. This is fine, but there are larger questions to consider and broader questions that simply living in this modern world forces each and every thinking, caring Christian to ask and answer, no matter how they feel about the current state of this church or any other.

I hope you'll join me, or at least follow along at home.

Love Poem: Blind as a Bat

Blind as a Bat

Divine Oneness
is like being in sunshine.

So why be afraid
of the bat-natured ones?

If they're the cause of your worry,
come out of hiding -

There's no need to run
from those who can't see.

Sahabi Astarabadi

Love Poem: Without Hindrance

Without Hindrance

When the morning of friendship with God begins
to dawn,
the soul becomes distant from the entire world.

You then reach a place in which each breath of the
soul,
without the eye's hindrance,
can see the Friend.

-Sayf al-Din Bakharzi

Notice: the Readings for Sunday, April 26

Let's think about them. My own comments to follow.

Acts 3:12-19

When Peter saw it, he addressed the people, "You Israelites, why do you wonder at this, or why do you stare at us, as though by our own power or piety we had made him walk? The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God of our ancestors has glorified his servant Jesus, whom you handed over and rejected in the presence of Pilate, though he had decided to release him. But you rejected the Holy and Righteous One and asked to have a murderer given to you, and you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses. And by faith in his name, his name itself has made this man strong, whom you see and know; and the faith that is through Jesus has given him this perfect health in the presence of all of you.

"And now, friends, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers. In this way God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, that his Messiah would suffer. Repent therefore, and turn to God so that your sins may be wiped out,"

Psalm 4:1-8

Answer me when I call, O God of my right!

You gave me room when I was in distress.

Be gracious to me, and hear my prayer.

How long, you people, shall my honor suffer shame?

How long will you love vain words, and seek after lies?

Selah

But know that the Lord has set apart the faithful for himself;

the Lord hears when I call to him.

When you are disturbed, do not sin;

ponder it on your beds, and be silent.

Selah

Offer right sacrifices,

and put your trust in the Lord.

There are many who say, "O that we might see some good!

Let the light of your face shine on us, O Lord!"

You have put gladness in my heart

more than when their grain and wine abound.

I will both lie down and sleep in peace;

for you alone, O Lord, make me lie down in safety.

1 John 3:1-7

See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.

Everyone who commits sin is guilty of lawlessness; sin is lawlessness. You know that he was revealed to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him. Little children, let no one deceive you. Everyone who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous.

Luke 24:36b-48

Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, "Peace be with you." They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. He said to them, "Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have." And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, "Have you anything here to eat?" They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence.

Then he said to them, "These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you-that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled." Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, "Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things."