On Grace and Goldfish Crackers

She looked up at me with those wide brown eyes, the slight lines of guilt and shame on her two-year-old face betraying her inner fears.  I had caught her red-handed.  She’d opened my two liter of Diet Coke and, slowly, methodically, one-by-one, dumped two dozen of her goldfish crackers into the small circular opening.

Beloved daughter.  You make me laugh and want to dance with mirth.

Her penetrating look is searching my face for a response.  Anger?  Irritation?  Laughter?

It was for her own good that I patiently said, “No, honey.  We don’t do that.  That wastes food and drink and makes a mess. Now I have to throw this away.”  But I think she could see the twinkle in my eye that indicated to her I was not angry.

I often fuck things up, God, and make messes.  I have done it yet again, though you have patiently chastised me time and time again.  Like a little rambunctious toddler playing in the kitchen, stand before you a bit fearful and a bit ashamed.

Beloved father, be patient with me.  Delight in me, I beg of you, as I delight in my daughter.  For if I as a human father know how to give good gifts to my children — patience, correction, gentleness, love — how much more will you, Father in Heaven, give good gifts to me, your child?  Amen.

Just Another Prayer

Almighty God and Ground of Being, Ineffable and Eternal One beyond name, You are a mass of contradictions to me:  terrible and fierce like a hurricane yet gentle and soft as an intimate lover, transcendent beyond comprehension yet nearer to me than my own body.  I confess you are a mystery to me and will remain so regardless of how many hours I read, pray, contemplate, or attend to the means of grace.  So I come to you in humility and ask for you to come near to me on this dark day.  All the days are dark, God, since I have lost my precious wife and children and my home and church and dog and, and, and... You have seen my tears, how they have poured out day and night for months on end.  You have seen me in my moments of dark disbelief and nihilism, as well as those moments of fasting, self-denial, and intense communion with You.  I acknowledge even now that as I write this little prayer, I am walking through the valley of the shadow of death.  Perhaps that is a self-pitying way of seeing my life and, if so, deliver me from it.  Yet it seems to describe my soul-state.  Yes, I have much that others do not have:  I have food, shelter, clothing, and good friends.  Despite these many advantages that so many in my world do not have, there is a cavernous darkness within my mind, body, and soul.  I seem to be incapable of forgiving myself for my past sins: for falling into addiction, for the anger and self-loathing that seeped out onto the person I loved the most in this world, for becoming a slave to self.  Perhaps this inability to forgive myself, even after weeks and months of fasting and weeping and crying out to You, is actually a form of pride.  If so, kill it.  I don't want the pride, but I am bound to it perhaps even more tightly than I was once bound to those horrid opiates.

I must turn my heart to gratitude.  I must choose to do so because it is a matter of life and death.  Therefore, even though my heart feels like cursing my darkness and raging against what I perceive to be injustices, I will instead give You thanks.  Thank you for coffee and egg McMuffins every Wednesday morning with an elderly saint.  Thank you for my bright-eyed and energetic daughters, both of whom are healthy and filled to the brim with potential.  Thank you for a mother and father who welcome me into their home when I just need a place to belong.  Thank you for my sister's text messages.  Thank you for the return of birdsongs in the morning as the dead of winter gives way to new life.  Thank you for brief moments of respite from anxiety when I am able to forget myself and just enter a state of flow.  Thank you for good people who pray for me.  Thank you most of all for what I remember on this holy week:  the passion and death of God With Us, the image of divine suffering, and, mostly, for the hope that will dawn on first day of the week very early in the morning. Once again the women will go to the tomb in mourning and once again they will flee in a state of bewildered excitement.

Hear my prayer, even as I utter it from the dark side of the moon.  Amen.

Morning of Mourning

The soft pitter-patter of rain

Awakens me this day

Bringing comfort 

On a lonely morning of mourning 

The soft pitter-patter of footsteps 

Once awakened me

Bringing comfort 

To an entitled, haughty man

Now the snuggles and kisses

That greeted me each day

Have been silenced

To the ears of this broken man

My heart beats in my chest

Yet it is somewhere north of here

My breath continues 

Though I oft wish it would cease

On this morning of mourning 

Alone in my cell

I cry out to You in weak hope,

“Restore, redeem this tragic day!”

Gift and grace You offer to me

Through a soft bed

Through a message from a friend 

But can this stone heart receive?

My daughters, my daughters 

I long and ache for you 

Tis an ache as constant as

The hardness of my stubborn will

“Surrender to the Good Lord,”

My mama whispers to me.

Teach me to accept the tears

and the rain

and all forms of pitter-patter

and the love of friends 

and the agony of grief

and the grace of God

and the deafening silence 

Graciously grant me the grace

To say with truth

“The Lord gives and takes away.

Blessed be the Name of the Lord.”

The Rotten Believer: A Poem

Faith, a fleeting thing,

Is a mist that appears for no reason 

Vanishing at the slightest happenstance 

Unwieldy, uncontrollable 

A ray of sunshine peeking through clouds

A gift granted momentarily from on high

Then removed

God gives and God takes away

Making me a doubter for Him

Disbelief, my closest friend

Save only for the Giver of disbelief 

Shifting sand

Weakness and fragility 

Compels me to echo this truth:

Salvation belongs to God

God, you will me to be

and to be a doubter for you,

A frail, small, rotten believer

Thy will be done

The Dilemma of the Human Heart

Just gonna drop this marvelous quote right here:

Love has no middle term; either it destroys, or it saves. All human destiny is this dilemma. This dilemma, destruction or salvation, no fate proposes more inexorably than love. Love is life, if it is not death. Cradle; coffin, too. The same sentiment says yes and no in the human heart. Of all the things God has made, the human heart is the one that sheds most light, and alas! most night.

- Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

Film Review: Take Shelter (2011)

Watch Take Shelter before reading this.  The less you know about the film the better.  It is an event that happens to the viewer.

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The 2011 film Take Shelter directed by Jeff Nichols must be one of the most memorable and haunting films I have ever seen and should someday be considered a classic of American cinema.  Even without any consideration of the stunning visuals, eerie score, and incredible acting by Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain, Take Shelter compels the viewer's attention solely due to its universal and mythic themes.  In essence the film is a retelling of the story of Noah's Ark:  a storm is coming, take heed, prepare, and risk being considered insane by others.

Much of the genius of Take Shelter is the fact that, until the very end, we as viewers have no idea what kind of story we are watching.  Like the protagonist Curtis we don't know if the visions and dreams of coming apocalypse are valid or if they are symptoms of mental illness, the latter theory given credibility by the fact that Curtis is in his mid-thirties, the same age that his mother was when she was hospitalized for paranoid schizophrenia.  Curtis himself suspects that he is going crazy and seeks out medical help, yet he cannot shake the feeling of impending doom that keeps overwhelming him.

The maxim "to thine own self be true" rests at the foundation of the moral paradox faced by Curtis and by us as viewers.  Do we trust our own experiences or do we chalk up our thoughts to mental illness, trusting the wisdom of the larger human community?  Whether you believe the experiences of Curtis or not depends upon your own judgment about what type of story is unfolding before our eyes:  Is Curtis right and the rest of the world wrong?  Or is Curtis insane?  We don't know... until the final scene.

The parallels with the mythic story of Noah and the ark seem obvious, but the myth itself bears careful reflection for us all.  In the Old Testament water typologically represents chaos and death, whereas the structure of the ark represents order and safety.  Noah, because he is faithful to the voices he is hearing from "God," not only saves himself -- scorning the shame of his neighbors -- but also saves his family and animal creation.

This brings to the fore a perplexing theological question about the role of the prophet.  The prophetic voice always stands outside of the community precisely because she is committed to that community.  The prophet is frequently rejected by her hometown precisely because she has grown to be "unorthodox" according to communal and traditional standards.  The true prophet overruns the tables of the moneychangers, speaks words that others hate to hear, and decides to live according to the "inner light" rather than by merely "falling in line."  The prophets can be described as the loyal opposition because their deep love for their own home community compels them to become a "voice in the wilderness."  Yet the true prophet loathes her own calling because she is constantly aware that she just might be insane and profoundly wrong; she also fears her own pride and proclivity for megalomania.  Thus, the true prophet responds to God's call as Moses did:  "Please choose someone else for I am slow of speech!"  As Caedmon's Call writes from the perspective of the prophet in their remarkable song "Can't Lose You,"

But maybe I missed the nose right on my face
For what's just past it
And maybe I have the gift that everyone speaks so high of
Funny how nobody wants it

The prophet is called to a life of suffering as well, and her greatest suffering is the ridicule and insults of the community that she loves so dearly.  The true prophet fears shame more than she fears death because bringing shame upon the community is the heaviest cross that she can possibly bear.  Yet an inner sense of calling compels her to speak out, even when she is tempted by the idea that a simple, quiet life would be far easier.  Curtis stands as the prototype for a prophet in this case because he follows where his own mind leads, even if it might involve the scorn of friends, family, and community.

What a parable!  Noah's ark/Take Shelter wrestles with deep, universal themes.

500 Years of Martin Luther

Today many of my theologian and Christian friends are posting thoughts and quotes about Martin Luther since the Reformation officially began on this day, according to church historians, five hundred years ago when Luther posted his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg Castle.  Now I'm no Luther expert, but I have found some of his ideas really intriguing and I continue to wrestle with the implications of what he came to believe and teach.  

Two short quotes of Luther have proved to be a guiding light for me this year as I deal with the fallout from my divorce and the unending waves of grief I feel day after day:

1) "Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong ("sin boldly"), but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world."  

When I hear these words I am only able to "hear" them as a child of the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition.  Wesley, when he encountered the work of Luther, found it to be deeply disturbing and too mystical.  In fact, he found the idea so completely confusing as to arouse anger.  In 1781 Wesley described Luther's work as "shallow … muddy and confused … deeply tinctured with mysticism throughout, and hence often dangerously wrong."  How can a true Christian sin boldly, Wesley reasoned?  Doesn't such an idea lead into the darkness of anti-nomianism and anarchy?  I think Wesley never fully resolved some of these tensions in his own mind because, after all, his conversion experience took place while hearing Luther's reflections on St. Paul's Letter to the Romans.  What can possibly be more Protestant than that kind of a conversion!?!

Yet the good news behind what Luther is writing beckons to me too.  It's like a faint glimmer of hope that God is so profoundly big and good and in utter control of history that our own human free will almost seems to fade in importance.  Sure, we do bad things and we do them all the time and these harmful choices we make hurt others around us and even hurt ourselves.  Yet what if the mystics are correct when they insist that God is love and that love wins and that in some very mysterious way that we don't yet fully understand we will -- all of us, according to some! -- come to rest within the arms of a loving God who is far bigger than we can even think or imagine?  Such is the logic of grace.  It is the logic behind old hymns that I grew up singing in camp-meeting tabernacles with words like "Jesus paid it all / All to Him I owe / Sin had left a guilty stain / He washed it white as snow." In other words, salvation is a work of God and not something we ever earn.  As a dysfunctional Wesleyan, I find that very, very hard to believe for any serious length of time.  

The doubting Thomas in me cries out, "But how can God use addiction?" I've wrestled with this theologically for at least fifteen years:  can God really love an addict?  After all, I can hear Wesley saying, "a child of God does not sin."  And what is addiction if not utter slavery to sin and self? (Some would say it is a brain disorder, but I'm not completely sold on that idea yet).  So, anyway, that's why I am intrigued by Luther's doctrine of salvation by grace through faith alone, yet am not entirely sure if I can believe it.

2) The second quote from Luther that has been with me all year was posted by my friend Ken Brewer at Spring Arbor University:  “One becomes a theologian by living, by dying, and by being damned, not by understanding, reading, and speculation.”  

Of course, I find tremendous hope in this idea because it means that even a story as seemingly tragic as my own can be redeemed.  All of my life I have longed to be a theologian.  It has bordered at times on an obsessive-compulsive tendency, as the history of this blog demonstrates.  Try as I might, I have simply not been able to understand my recent divorce and my bouts with addiction.  In many moments my uncertainty has led me into profound despair of life itself and, as I have written elsewhere, throughout this year I have often asked myself the perennial human question: "To be or not to be?"  

Yet what an irony it would be if this path in life that I have taken (did I chose it or not?  I cannot decide) could be redeemed in such a way that through the suffering and damnation I am currently experiencing I might one day come to a better understanding of God.  God, after all, has always been my Ultimate Concern, even when I haven't always acted like it.  Indeed, I think this may have been the fundamental problem with my marriage:  I allowed Courtney to replace God in my life and, when she inevitably let me down as all humans must do, then I grew resentful and angry.  Even now I often feel the temptation to give in to bitterness, yet I know that to do so would be to walk a path toward destruction and death.  I hear St. Paul whispering in my ear, "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."  I'm not always sure what that means, but I want to do my best to follow in that Way.

Christian thinkers and mystics since Pseudo-Dionysius have pointed to a three-fold spiritual path for believers: a trail that leads from purgation through illumination to unification.  Luther's statement above echoes this ancient teaching about purgation.  We must be refined in a furnace of pain for, otherwise, some of us would simply never learn and we would be condemned to a hell of our own making for eternity.  This is a deep mystery:  even Jesus Christ had to enter into death and damnation.  Regardless of whether or not one takes it literally, the church has also always taught that Jesus Christ descended into hell itself prior to his resurrection by the Father.  

At this point in my life that idea brings me deep existential comfort.  It isn't just a "head knowledge," but a "heart reality."  When I can do nothing at all except to pray Psalm 6 or Psalm 77, even in the midst of the agony and tears I cling to this insane Christian idea that God herself/himself is present with us in the pain.  Thus we are called, as my uncle once told me, not to "go around" the pain, but to go "through" it.  I don't really pretend to understand what that means, but it seems wise.  

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God Almighty, thank you for the slightly insane, profane, racist bigot Martin Luther because if you can save a dude like that, you can probably save anyone.  That's the offensiveness of grace.  I believe, but help now my unbelief.  Amen.

The Kalbeliya, Pluralism, and Intellectual Humility

Recently to feed my mind and soul, I've been watching the occasional documentary on Youtube.  Today Raphael Treza's film Cobra Gypsies struck me as deeply profound and beautiful.  The film is his record of three months spent among some nomadic tribes of Rajasthan in northwestern India.  Some of the footage of ceremonies, eating rituals, dances, funerals, etc. have apparently never before been seen by modern western eyes.

Though I could write much more about the documentary itself, that isn't my reason for writing today.  The burning question in my own mind while confronting such a foreign culture through film is this:  how are these nomadic peoples so happy and content with their lives?  Though they have very little in the way of material possessions and by western standards live an extremely harsh life in which they regularly confront death, disease, snakebites, and other natural disasters, yet they are always smiling and dancing and celebrating.  What is it that provides them with this deep peace?  Of course, I don't want to fall into the old trap of lionizing the "noble savage" or of elevating them to a mythical status, yet they do seem from the film to embody a deep, spiritual peace which is largely absent from my own life and the lives of many other busybody, lonely, technology-addicted North Americans that I know.

Kalbelia Snake Charmers

At one point in the film they show a man who, according to the translator, has never before showered or bathed.  He's an elderly man who looks to be in his sixties, yet the people claim not to be bothered by his smell since they understand what he is doing to be an act of worship to God.  The filmmaker then points out that "radical forms of worship" are deeply respected by many nomadic groups like the Kalbeliyas.  Some Christians will insist that such an ascetic act of piety to a false god is mere paganism and darkness.  Yet others like C.S. Lewis often seem to suspect that the sincere worship of another god, albeit a god with the "wrong" name, is in fact worship of the One True God.  Perhaps the most classic example of this in Lewis' thinking can be found in his Chronicles of Narnia in which the worship of the false god Tash turns out to be an offering acceptable to Aslan.

For years I have wrestled with questions surrounding soteriological exclusivism, inclusivism, or pluralism.  Raised within the exclusivist tradition, I began rebelling against it intellectually at the age of seventeen when it became impossible for me to worship a God who would necessarily condemn huge numbers of people to eternal hell simply because they were born in the wrong time or place.  At Asbury I confronted the work of my friend Jerry Walls and, through him, his mentor Alvin Plantinga who seem to argue for a "generous" inclusivism in which Christ is understood as the only way to salvation, but this is to be held in distinction from the "knowledge of the historical person Jesus of Nazareth."  Also influential in my thinking during those days was Gerald McDermott's Can Evangelicals Learn from World Religions? (recommended to me by Rick McPeak at Greenville).  At Asbury I dove deep into the thinking of John Hick, a representative of the pluralist perspective on world religions, through his book God Has Many Names.  Of course all such questions are deeply complicated within Christian theology by their ties to larger doctrines of Christology, divine providence, and so on.  They are explored carefully in many wonderful books and I cannot rehash that huge debate here.

However, all these questions are in my mind this morning as I learn about the "gypsy" peoples of northern India.  Ironically, the whole reason I'm watching such a documentary is because I have befriended a brilliant Christian man from Ahmedabad, India (the fifth largest city in India with a population of six million people, a city which I had never even heard of being the ethnocentric American that I am).  My friend was raised in a culturally Christian home, which makes sense since Christianity has existed in India for basically as long as it has anywhere else in the world.  He immigrated to the United States in the hopes of finding a new life and helping his family back home, which he has done quite successfully.  However, in a very dark chapter of his life Richard nearly rejected the faith of his parents until he decided that he should, in his words, "investigate what it is that I might be rejecting."  Through an intellectual quest that took him through the works of Tim Keller, William Lane Craig, Alvin Plantinga, G. K. Chesterton, Ravi Zacharias, and especially the 16th century Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina, he came to a robust understanding of his own faith and through many long, long conversations I sometimes think that this odd Indian stranger is going to save my own faith too.

But here's the point:  God is everywhere.  The Christian Church has no monopoly on God.  The Holy Spirit blows where it pleases and, though we may try to bottle it up, we simply cannot contain God in any meaningful sense.  Our metaphors are too weak, our language too frail.  As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once pointed out, if we are not able linguistically to describe the aroma of coffee, what on earth makes us think that we could ever describe with words the ineffable nature of the Holy God?  It's a fair question and one that perhaps ought to keep us a bit more intellectually humble than most of us in the Christian academy tend to be.

Politics and the Other

2017 has been a year that has made me less political in general.  As a teenager I was a staunch conservative; since at least 2004, however, I have proudly called myself a liberal.  These days even though I still am a bleeding-heart liberal deep down, I have mostly been lamenting the inability of people within our culture to talk to one another.  I myself am extremely poor at this because, like all of us, I tend to gravitate toward my own echo chambers, a destructive tendency which has only been exacerbated by the rise of social media.

Anyway, this is my experience this morning:  Feeling pretty down and not knowing what to do after my morning prayers I turned on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" only to hear the talking heads screaming at each other about the Russia Investigation, the #MeToo campaign, and every other trending topic under the sun.  My first reaction was to think, "What are we all squabbling about?  I know that this stuff matters immensely, but is this really what life is all about?"  The things I had read in the Psalms and in Thomas Merton seemed far more profound and important than what they were so angry about.  Now I say this with plenty of hesitation because I am an intensely political person.  History/Political Science was my major in college.  Politics fascinates me because I believe that it matters and that it matters on a grand scale for lots and lots of people.

But what if all real, genuine political action is local?  I think this is an intellectual option that most on both the right and the left today do not consider.  It is so very easy for us to hate-watch certain TV shows, get pissed off at how screwed up Washington is, and vent our rage out into the internet ether.  It is like we are all collectively screaming at each other and no one is listening.  But what if the most faithful political action that we can engage in as Christians is to feed the local hungry, befriend the lonely, and share a peaceful life together in small, organic faith communities?  The very alluring alternative is what my professor Luke Bretherton at Duke called "Fabianism": the notion that if we could only fix the "out there" then everything would be all right "in here."

I'm going to be hard on my fellow liberals for a minute.  Liberals are really smug.  Their views of the world emerge from privilege (a fact that many of them cannot help).  Liberals fall into a pharisaical judgmentalism every ounce as harsh and counterproductive as that on the right. And then when someone dissents from liberal orthodoxy -- however anyone wants to define it at the time -- they are shouted down as "racist," "sexist," "violent," and "evil."  I have confronted such venom personally in the classroom up on Chicago's north shore.  The guilt produced by such confrontations can be crushing:  am I supposed to be ashamed for being a male?  for being white? for being born into a Christian home?  for being straight? for being a simple midwestern boy?  I can't help it!  Of course I can strive to learn and stay open minded and listen to varying perspectives, but what if I one day have a perspective that is not in conformity with one particular tyrannical liberal's personal orthodoxy?  When we all go around with a chip on our shoulder saying "I have the right to not get offended by you and I have the right to shut you up if you do offend me," then dialog and free speech disappear.  This is how totalitarian regimes are born.  (I write this right around the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia; we would do well to examine that chapter of the 20th century very seriously to see what exactly went wrong).  Two of my newest friends, a Christian man from India and a Muslim man from Turkey, both tell me the same things:  "Stop feeling guilty for being white!  You white people can't help it and the guilt of it is driving you all insane!"  I often suspect they might actually just possibly be right.

I type this on my MacBook (likely the product of South-East Asian slave labor) in a McDonald's (oh how my orthodox liberal friends would hate me for eating here, but it is all I can afford) with some old farmers sitting in a corner shooting the breeze and sipping coffee.  We are, all of us, helplessly enmeshed in structural evils.  We sin in thought, word, and deed all of the time.  Yet these good farm folk are talking about the World Series, problems with their boats and with diesel motors, how the workers at this McDonald's are related to each other, and so on.  It sounds like they've probably been coming to this place at 9am on Sunday mornings for years.

So do I judge them?  Do I look down on these good, sincere, salt-of-the-earth people?  Do I hate them because they don't have any black or gay friends?  Do I snidely judge them for using a word like "retarded" in their private conversation?  Now I certainly would not use such a word, but are these hard-working, uneducated old white men bad people because they don't use all the proper nomenclature?  They probably have no knowledge of the non-binary, gender-neutral pronouns "zim" or "zey."  Are they evil for that reason?  I think not.

It seems to me to be very important to look at people's intentions.  This was key to the ethical thinking of John Wesley.  Whereas man looks at the outside, God looks at the heart.  Whereas we often look at the actions of "the Other" and attribute it to their own malicious and evil nature, it might often be far more accurate to attribute their words or actions to ignorance.  Yes, it might at times be a willful ignorance, but we do not know when it is willful or not.  Only God knows such things which is why only God is granted the right to judge and redeem.

I know this blog entry covers lots of territory.  I tend to write in a stream of consciousness mode these days.  But I suppose here is my primary admonition today:  Can we all just try to stop screaming for a few seconds and try to listen?  Can we "shut the hell up" for a minute as a veteran in AA recently said to a first-timer in the program?  That takes deep humility to respond with a "yes" to such a question!  Can we actually swallow our damn pride for long enough to gain "ears to hear"?  It seems to me like our collective salvation might be at stake.

Psalm

I believe in what I can’t change
in a hard lesson learned
and the strength from my pain
and I believe
in what I can’t prove
in the joy of not knowing
and the misunderstood

let go of my past
let go of my future
one cloud at a time
yes I’m dreaming

- JJ Grey

Sometimes when our own soul cannot sing, another soul sings for us.