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.

Paying Attention to Dreams

For years I was very dismissive of the meaning of dreams.  They seemed so chaotic and random to me that, I argued, any attempt to interpret them was surely just an act of the worst eisegesis.  Yet friends, family, and intellectual influences from all walks of life have cautioned me against such casual dismissal.  The primary person speaking this truth to me was my ex-wife Courtney.  She loved talking about dreams and trying to think together about what they could mean.  Sadly, I was often far too arrogant and dismissive to take her speculations seriously, but now others in my life keep telling me to pay attention to my dreams and I'm starting to suspect they might be right.  Friends like my former professor at Greenville Rick McPeak, my little sister Rachel, the psychologist Dr. Jordan B. Peterson that I have been listening to recently, my mother, and even the old-time Methodists that I study for my doctoral work:  they are all saying, "Take these things seriously!  We don't know where they come from!  In fact, they might even come somehow from 'God.'" Not all these influences would state it quite that way, but the message is the same: reflect on dreams.  So that's what I intend to do in this post.

I had a nightmare three nights ago that hasn't left me and it still haunts me.  Those who know a little about my life this year will perhaps not at all be surprised by the nature of the dream.  It was actually very simple and very short, but also quite compelling and realistic.  I was trying to bridge a deep, endless black abyss between myself and my ex-wife, Courtney.  I wanted so desperately to reach her, but I had no way of crossing the divide.  I tried to start building a bridge to get to her, but I didn't have the skills to make a bridge out of sticks and trees and rocks.  Yet I did the best that I could do.  After I had built the bridge out over the canyon/abyss by about ten feet (which was still a small fraction of how far I had to go), it all collapsed while I was on it.  As I tumbled into the abyss which seemed to be endless, I simply yelled up, "I'm sorry, Courtney.  I tried and I failed."  I woke up horrified by the feeling of endless descent into nothingness.

So what does this dream mean?  On one level it seems rather obvious, right?  My unconscious mind is trying to somehow cope with the tragedy of my divorce.  Now in the dream I seem to be more of a "victim of circumstance" than I actually believe is true because, when I am honest, I realize that frequently within my marriage, I was the lazy one who did nothing and, especially near the end, Courtney was the one trying to build a bridge to me.  Perhaps most accurately I could say that we both made efforts and both of us did rather pitiful jobs at it too, yet our efforts were sincere.

But is the dream also about more than just my marriage?  Could this also be a dream about my deep anxieties regarding death?  After all "the abyss" is the other major character in this little narrative.  The endless blackness and the fear that it evokes within me has been a constant companion my entire life. Into the abyss I have always yelled, "Are you down there God or is it just death all the way down?  Can I trust myself to fall into your hands or am I just imagining you are down there for my own comfort and peace of mind?"  I can hear Freud's voice making me feel shame for my pitiful and weak desire to believe in a God (likely because I have unresolved parental issues).  I can hear Marx calling religion the opiate of the masses.  I can hear Ayn Rand saying that life is chaotic and you simply have to will yourself to power.  Nietzsche seems to sing a similar tune sometimes.  And then the Buddhists seem to keep insisting, "Don't worry; it's all in your mind anyway," which is a message I sometimes find to be good news and other times find horrifying. And, all the while, Ivan Karamazov keeps persistently reminding me of the almost infinite capacity that humans have for evil.  Thank God for Alyosha... and for Dorothy Day and Jane Addams and John Woolman and Dr. King and B. T. Roberts and my maternal grandfather.  Without people like that, I would be lost in the abyss for good.

Sometimes I also wonder if perhaps I am the abyss or that the abyss is within me.  Am I confronting my own sinful, evil nature when looking into the blackness?  I remember going camping by myself once in Kentucky and a mighty thunderstorm came up (I later learned a tornado had touched down nearby).  The fury of the wind and lightning and rain petrified me.  When lightning hit a nearby tree, I wanted to pack up my tent and run away to safety, though something in that moment whispered to me, "Stay.  Face the fear."  I realized why Martin Luther was converted in a thunderstorm; everything within me wanted to cry out to my own St. Anne.  So I did stay the night, but pitifully and within the safety of my dad's old '92 Honda Accord.

I know on an intellectual level that I am in a very dark and difficult chapter of life.  I can conjecture what people must be saying about me.  I am cognitively aware that my friends and former friends must be saying, "Poor Greg!  Look at his life!  I cannot image losing what he has lost."  But then a part of me -- at least during my strongest moments -- just doesn't give a damn any longer what people think about me.  Am I a lost cause?  Maybe.  I don't know.  Am I part of a story that is a comedy or a tragedy?  Only time will tell.  Am I Cain or Abel?  Am I a good son who offers an honorable sacrifice before God and then gets killed for it?  Or am I the evil brother who envies how the Other's sacrifice is honored by God and who then turns into darkness and evil and becomes consumed by the Shakespearean green-eyed monster?  These are all questions that are as mysterious to me as the abyss in my dream.  I fear them, yet I cannot seem to be able to avert my eyes.

In any case, I know this: I lament the ending of my marriage and I would not wish this experience on my worst enemy (by the way, I don't think I have a worst enemy unless I maybe count myself). In the meantime, I will try to keep sacrificing and surrendering more deeply to the One who is in control and has the answers. I will myself to believe in that One.

Pain Changes Us

I've written vaguely and in bits and pieces about this painful year in my life and some who know me well know that it has been pure hell.  Yet it has also changed and refined me in certain ways.  I don't lie anymore. Lies marked my old life and I refuse to mislead people anymore because I am incapable of being honest with myself.  When I say "lie" I mean "telling another what you think they want to hear in order to better yourself in their eyes."  It was a form of people-pleasing.

But I've changed in little, perhaps less important ways too.  I used to listen to news and podcasts 24/7; now I prefer music or silence.  I used to play video games for hours; now all those games are long gone and I prefer to spend my hours walking or sitting in nature. I used to think only as a male, but am now coming to slowly see how "toxic masculinity" warped my mind and theology.  I cry more and worry less.  I'm still deeply selfish and have a very long way to go, but at least I can acknowledge that without it suffocating me.  Many of these inward mental and spiritual changes are also starting to impact my body too; what we believe doesn't matter -- what we do is what counts.

Now I'm rambling, but this is all just for my eyes anywho.  I didn't tell my daughters of these changes, but their little minds were blown when they learned that I drink more water than Diet Coke now and that I've given up dried mango.  Lol.  I love those kiddos.

The Good Life and Living with Irrelevance

I was first challenged to think about the idea of living a life of irrelevance by Henri Nouwen, who has been a constant spiritual guide for me since college.  Nouwen, as many know, left a life of great success as a professor at an ivy league university in order to work in a home for the mentally handicapped.  Through this experience he discovered his true self and became a mystical, spiritual writer who has helped millions.  Ironically, it was only by leaving the academy that Nouwen became a true teacher to us all.  He found that "thrown in on the side" if you will.

I confront a similar choice in my life at this point.  I once believed my life was set out before me quite clearly:  I was going to finish my Ph. D, get a job as a professor (since I have always loved teaching), be a good husband and father, and die holding hands with a soul named Courtney Coates.  Up until the end of January of this year, I still thought that was my life.  Now all bets are off.  In some ways, I am a deeply broken man whose life has been wrenched from his tightly clenched fists and, utterly against my own will, I am starting to experience salvation.  The usually silly 90s CCM band Audio Adrenaline describes my condition in life right now remarkably well.  Laugh at the source if you will, but I think this song articulates some deep spiritual truth:



So now I live in my parents' home and smoke pot.  I have become as irrelevant as I think I can, but who knows?  Just when I think I have lost all I can loose, I sometimes learn that I can still surrender over more to my Maker.  "Pain has been the catalyst to my heart's happiness."  And so I thank God for the pain, I thank her for the struggle.  I seek to repent of the "toxic masculinity" that has invaded my life, practice, and thought.  I am abandoned to my Father in Heaven and my Mother in Earth, to whom I will quite readily and joyously surrender my body for good in her perfect, good timing.