October

October makes a holy flurry,

bright as a dying saint.

Her shadows tuck away the summer

like sheets of paper spread 

between cotton gowns.

Azure to azure, 

dust, to dust, to grey and dust,

these Autumn days burn 

like wicks in a bowl of oil. 

Christ has died.

Christ has risen.

Christ will come again.

In the throttle of Botteri's Sparrow

light declines 

like a dropped yellow feather coming to rest.

Pity, the wimper of the rose-throated Becard

makes her farewell, "To South! To South!"

while branches bow to earth, fold down and down,

humble as pilgrims met in prayer.

The daylight clings yet to high places, 

as if this wide-turning ball of clay

might resist any interchange

granted to earth by heaven.

Megalomania (a poem)

We approach the Almighty

as if we were a husband coming home from a business trip,

still smelling like that woman from the office,

her makeup on our collar.

We throw our shirts in the laundry room

not caring who sees the marks of a tumble.

The wife can clean that up.

That’s what wives are for.

And when she walks in

holding a toddler on each hip

we say, “Hey.”

She says, “I love you no matter what,"

"I'm so glad you are home."

And we say, “I know you do.”

“Can you get me a sandwich?”

- - -

Art: "Rayograph: The Kiss" by Man Ray

I don't know how to write for Christian readers anymore...

This might be a little too vulnerable, but I'm going to risk it.

I’m a firstborn child with an overdeveloped sense of guilt,  so when the concept of grace finally opened up to me a few years ago, I couldn’t get enough of it.

Some of you will remember the tone and texture of my writing during that that season. God’s love turned me into a poet, and wherever I looked, I saw his gentleness dripping off the edges of the earth. I wanted to draw you into it. I wanted to bathe you in it, and bind your wounds with it, and feed you with it.

Finding security that was bigger than my weakness was so sweet, so riveting for me because I am someone who generally feels too much responsibility. I wanted to shout, “You! You! You! We don’t have to be afraid all the time! God has us!”

And God does have us.

But as time passed, I began to see something new. Something foreign.

There was more going on in the Christian world than just talk about the hope of the gospel. There were people who were abusing the idea of grace.

I don’t mean that I saw people making mistakes and needing forgiveness for those mistakes. I get the shame of that stumbling walk. I understand the despair of failure on a very personal level, because I know what it feels like to be disappointed with myself and the limits of my willpower.

What I saw was different from this. I saw people who called themselves Christians flagrantly defying God’s commands, not convicted about sin, not apologizing for destruction they caused, doing whatever felt right and expecting God to be okay with that. Sometimes they even used God's name to try and support their abuse of others.

I saw them start to bend the Bible to approve of their choices. I saw them start to transform God into a sort of vague spiritual presence who just wants us to be happy, no matter what that happiness costs anyone.

If you’ve noticed a change in my writing the past year or two, that’s what has caused it. This mentality of indulgence without remorse seems to be an infection that is spreading in the body, and it has has broken my heart.

It doesn't break my heart because I'm afraid of sin. I'm not so pious as that. It breaks my heart because of what I see sin doing inside the people who are living like this.

I'm seeing how this sort of living leads to a downward spiral. Defiance leads to doubt, and flagrant sin leads to the death of softness in a soul.

At first I just repeated what I knew into these situations, "Grace, grace, grace, grace!" hoping something would kick in.

Maybe I wasn’t patient enough, maybe I didn't speak grace long enough or loud enough, but the hard hearted seemed to take that sweet gift of God and turn it into something dark. It didn’t wake them up. In some instances, in fact, it twisted and validated what was harmful.

I was confused.

I've heard it said that if you don't teach the gospel in a way that people sometimes take advantage of it, you aren't teaching the gospel at all.

Maybe that's the end of the discussion, right there.

But can grace mean anything of significance in a fallen world until sin means something significant, too?

In watching all of this, I began to see why the law mattered, not because God is hungry for condemnation, but because until we see the severity of what we have done wrong, or the depth of our need, until we look hell in its threatening eyes, can we truly see the value of what we have been given instead?

I don't know.

Our culture is changing, and I am seeing more and more evidence of hearts that are numb to evil. I’m not sure what to do about that yet.

When I was in my 20’s and 30’s, there was such a need for writers like Brennan Manning who spoke the gospel into the damning guilt so many of us picked up in evangelicalism.  I still need Manning’s messages, and Yancey’s, and Buechner’s, and all of those brilliant thinkers who war against the accusations the enemy makes upon my heart.

But how do you speak to a generation that feels no shame? That has forgotten how to blush? That can approach a holy, burning God with hands casually thrown in the pockets, chewing gum, and expecting acceptance without any sort of admission of guilt?

I don’t know.

I know that I don't want to be the older brother standing with pride and judgment, pouting in the field.

I'll tell you the truth. It takes a lot to gross me out. I'm not freaked when I hear about people having sex outside of marriage, or breaking rules to get ahead in their jobs, or betraying their friends, or stealing. I'm not that delicate.

But when I do get freaked out is when I see sin working like a cancer inside people I love. Reprogramming them. Commandeering them.

I'll be honest about one more thing, too. I miss writing about grace.

In the inner chambers of my heart, the writer who was still awed with the tenderness of God is still alive. Almost every week I envy (is that the right word?) writers who feel freed up to speak only about God's tenderness and not about sin's gravity.

I would rather write beautiful, moving messages of comfort. I am a mother more than I am a soldier. Those of you who really know me know that about me.

But grace - the kind of grace that brings life in Christ - is the product of an exchange. How can I offer that exchange if the essential math of it is rejected?

The Christian life is not a universal condition like the sun shining and the rain falling on the just and the unjust. It works by inhalation and exhalation, by the beauty of penitence, by the beauty of dependence, by calling evil evil so that good can be given freely instead.

I'm thinking through all of this lately. I'm asking God to show me how to speak into a world that I believe is losing the greatest gift ever offered while chasing and defending lesser ones.  Are you seeing this, too? Am I the only one? Tell me.

It's a storm inside me lately. I would love to have your prayers on the matter.

The Gospel

The Christian gospel does not teach that whatever we are doing is fine. 

It does not say that because God is love, God is mature enough to be OK with whatever we are doing.

The Christian gospel does not teach us to sing pretty love songs to a deity who keeps his hands out of our business.

It doesn't say, "Hey, just don't judge people or hurt them. Be a decent human being, and that will be good enough."

Opponents to the gospel hate us, because they understand something many modern Christians seem to have forgotten.

The Christian gospel is inherently offensive.

The Christian gospel makes a claim that is preposterous. It says that God has the right to determine what we do and what we don't do.

It makes the claim that his logic, his wisdom, and his authority are higher than our own.

The Christian gospel says that God can set up a system of eternal justice that requires something so primitive as faith. 

It makes no excuses for this. 

In fact, the Christian gospel claims to hide itself at times, to disguise its truth from those who are proud.

The Christian gospel says God has a right to pass judgment on what we do in our bedrooms, with our checkbooks, and with our very thoughts.

The Christian gospel teaches that God is not a passive, doting mother who overlooks and excuses her children's faults, but that there is hard, horrific punishment for our wrongs, and that people we love might experience that punishment.

The Christian gospel teaches that if we spend our earthly lives telling God to back off, that he will allow us to part from his company, and it teaches that our separation from his company is a nightmare we can hardly imagine on this earth.

To the haughty and high, the Christian gospel is laughable.

It is primitive.

Its audacious.

It is unreasonable.

The Christian gospel will not reconcile with the ways of man, because it was not created by man.

It is so severe that it forces us to conclude extremes... either the gospel is lunacy retold by fools... or a terrible lie retold by charlatans... 

or it is a truth that intersects with our limited dimensionality in such a way that we can only slide into it on our bellies and on our faces, in utter humility.

Nervous defenders of the faith are attempting to tidy up the gospel's messes, attempting to make our belief system more dignified and palatable.

But in the end, the offense of the gospel cannot be taken away, because Christ came to be a stumbling block, and many will stumble over him.

He also came to open a door. 

You've seen the movies where a little child alone finds the way, where only one small enough or simple enough can discover what the mighty and the high could not. We have that in the Christian gospel.

I will not soften it for you. I will not try to make this easy. I will not flatter you. I will not try to make what is uncomfortable comfortable.

The Christian gospel is radical. It cannot be received in compromise. It is an exchange that costs everything.

God so loved the world, that he chose one way to save it.

He sent part of himself, a son he loved like his own heart, to receive the punishment that humans deserve.

By doing this, he made a low, low door. It is such a small door that it looks almost comic. 

Surely this one tiny opening alone, in all of the light years of our universe, cannot be the answer. The cosmos is complex, and we are complex inside it. What of philosophy, ethics, science, history? What of the thousands of other gods that have risen and fallen through millions of other lives?  If there is a God, would he finally speak to humanity through a tiny, backward, smudge of a tribe living on the dusty edges of civilization? 

What right would God have to make such a crude and singular thread his bridge into salvation? 

But the Christian gospel says God does have this right, and that this thin, odd path is the one he has invited us to walk. It offers salvation in two palms, and then it allows resistance.

The door swings freely, but you cannot enter it walking upright. You have to get down, down. You have to become a child. 

And you can only pass through stripped down, all merits left behind, like an infant passing naked through a birth canal. 

But for those who are humble enough to choose that passage, who are willing to ask for the forgiveness Jesus provides and to be filled by God and ruled by him, there is life beyond that door.

Either this gospel is insanity, or indecency, or truth, but the Christian gospel is not safe. The sort of love that changes a life rarely is.

It's not about asking "WWJD?"

I don’t think the gospel is primarily about finding a way to get people into heaven, though that is part of it. I believe it is primarily about believers learning to live everyday lives that marry the indwelling force of God with the yielded spirit of a human being.

So many people in the church today are trying to find ways to minimize sin, because they don’t know how to fit sin into their theology. That's because when you reduce the gospel to just getting people into heaven, you end up with an embarrassing problem. You end up with millions of immature Christians who are still twisted with dark, earthly behaviors. How do you explain that to the world?

The church has attempted to deal with this embarrassment in two big ways:

1. The first response has been to try to work up a bunch of regulations to help people doggie paddle out a patched together holiness, a plan for exhausting ourselves, a plan for working to stay afloat on an ocean of sin. Here you have the Gothardites and all that crowd, teachers who hand out checklists for a spirituality rooted in human self-control. That method tends to lead to either depression or perversion. Sometimes both.

2. The second response has been to try to excuse/dispose of the idea of sin almost entirely and just focus on God’s love. Here you have the more progressive crowd that gushes about grace in such a way that hard truth isn’t spoken. It’s all softness with no skeleton. There is a lot of talk here about beauty, about winsomeness, about friendship, and community, and about God as a lover. And all of those lovely things can be true.

But if you look at the deep workings of some of these teachings, you are likely to find that the focus isn't truly on God's love so much as it is on humans trying to be culturally attractive to other humans. Why? Because there is an underlying belief that if we do Christianity right, and if we don't make people too uncomfortable by talking about the fallen state of humanity, then nonbelievers will snuggle up to us, and eventually they will be okay with God, too.

I think both extremes are in error because both extremes trust human power.
I've been in both camps at times. I still fluctuate between them when I get foggy spiritually.

You know, it's scary when we try to live like Jesus and fail. We get overcome with discouragement, doubt, despair, and shame, and mostly we get nervous and try to do something about it. We want to fix it, so we start messing with truth at that critical moment when we are actually standing right on the very brink of what failure is supposed to teach us in the first place.

But this is a bad place to let nervousness lead, because failure teaches us the same thing the New Testament teaches... that we are vessels, made to be filled by a living God in an active way.

The gospel has never been about asking “What would Jesus do?” It’s always been about what He does do.

When sin does show up, or temptation, or epic failure, it’s an opportunity. It shows us a root. It points to a place in our heart where we are acting like independent creatures who don't need Him. Sin shows us where we need to not just straighten up and “live better,” but yield to a greater life force who is able to do what we cannot.

This is what we lose when we try to let rules replace Jesus. This is what we lose when we try to shoo away sin and renovate morality to make people more comfortable as they are.

We lose the very lessons meant to take us to the next level of communion.

April 27

We lost our first child on April 27.
I was so young I barely understood how my body worked.
I was still shy when my husband looked at me in the light.

Eleven months earlier the old man doctor
had noticed my innocence was still intact.

I sat up on his exam table,
grabbing at the corners of my paper gown, trying to cover myself
while he smacked me on the shoulder and chuckled.
"Good job," he said, "I don't see much of that anymore."
"I'm getting married," I said.
Then he tossed me a free pack of white pills
as if they were a trophy.

I stopped taking those pills in November.
We were twenty-two and twenty-four.

Earlier that spring I had bought a white cotton nightgown
with lace around the sleeves,
and years later, when it had turned ivory,
my husband told me how beautiful I had been.
We were both shy in the beginning, I guess.

But that first April 27 I was sitting on a toilet trying not to scream.
My arms were shaking and I couldn't make them stop.
We were losing the baby.

Over the phone the doctor had told me, "Catch the tissue,"
but I knew it wasn't just tissue, so I was shivering.
I knew what I was about to see.

The pains came, and each shudder threw my hands into convulsions.
I held that jar between my bare legs and I was
so scared about hitting the glass against the porcelain,
scared that I might break it open and cut her as she fell
or spill her little body down into the water.

If she were still alive, I wanted to catch her gently
and somehow let her know that I loved her.

I had been following her days like a plane coming over the sea.
She was grown enough to have ten fingers, ten toes,
eye muscles that clenched,
a mouth that sucked in,
kidneys that made urine.
She had made me a mother.

My husband held my shoulders upright in that tiny bathroom
and I wailed, no longer ashamed of my exposure,
because my body was no longer mine alone.
There were three of us.

Blood came, rivers and rivers of blood,
blood in the water, blood in my hands,
and that glass jar shook as if the whole earth
were being torn apart by its plates;
I could not keep it still.

Sounds came from me that I did not understand,
sounds from down in my throat.
Then there were strings of tissue falling. Pieces of womb,
Salt water in my eyes. I couldn't see anything.
I tried to wipe it all away, but more came.
"Oh, God, my baby. Was she in there?"
The edges of the world began to grow black.

I was carried to the car.
I was cold, so cold, and there was so much blood.

At the hospital, my uterus was pulling into knots,
and they stretched me on a bed,
"I don't know if I caught her," I said, "I'm so sorry."
"I don't know if she is still alive."

The man who strapped me down
put a cool, sharp line in my arm and the hallway faded.
"Did you see her?" I asked as the lights came on,
"Was she beautiful? Can I take her home? I need to bury her."
But they had put her into the hospital waste.
Incinerated. A priest had supervised and said the necessary prayers.
That was all they could do, they said.

My husband came to the recovery room.
He pushed my hair to the side and kissed my forehead,
drove me home while I cried into a closed window, looking at nothing.
He carried me to the couch.

I couldn’t stand up for days without blood running out of me,
gravity pulling dust to dust back to the earth.

And then my milk came in.
I held two bags of crushed peas to my chest and wept,
waiting for my body to recognize
that the little sucking mouth I had sustained,
and the two little kidneys,
were gone.

Twenty years have passed, and I am old now.
Sometimes I trust no man at all, nor God,
but wait only for the next set of contractions,
and then lean deep-deep into a dream
that will numb me like a hospital drug.

But there is a time to be awake,
though your hands tremble holding the glass,
a time to revere what has been lost,
to grieve as you try to catch a few ounces of life and bless it,
kiss it, before it passes on.

Like you, I do not want to look at a world
where the loss of innocence is nothing at all.
That passage of a woman's life is marked by blood for a reason.
The stained sheets are carried down to the celebration
because it is a sacred occurrence.

And I do not want to look at a world
where the holy union of a man and a woman
and their bliss knit work of child making
is baptized only by two full breasts crying out for a lost son
who was never considered more
than an inconvenience.

You tell me I don't know, but I do know
what it is like to learn to walk again
after you have been full of child
then emptied of child,
what it is like to leave a concrete building
with nothing but your single body half of what it was.

I know what it is like to hold a lime in my palm
and whisper, "She would have been so small as that,
so large as that,"
and then to move forward into blank years of grief,
watching days on the calendar pass and thinking,
"If she had lived, she would be two today.
Today would be her birthday."

An invitation to the homesick

She was born coal-mining poor in Western Kentucky, about 1923. In the oldest photograph I've ever seen of her, she was about eight years old, standing in a thin, cotton dress and bare, dirty feet in front of a plank shack. Her shoulders sat back naturally like a child born into a higher class, little hands dug into her sharp hip bones, and she didn't smile.

Her daddy ran a pawn shop downtown, selling moonshine and probably marijuana. Come weekends, coal miners brought him fresh animal pelts, and he would carry them out into the back yard to scrape, stretch, and dry in the summer sun. He also knew how to weave strong nets out of rope, nets that took two men to throw into the Kentucky River. Those nets sank down into the quiet, green water bottoms where catfish lived, ancient fish seven feet long.

The old man's body was lean; it looked like it worked by wires  strung under his skin, and he always wore long shirtsleeves, even in the hot summertime, because this was decent and modest. He was modest, but he was not civilized. Once he shot a good hunting dog in front of a bunch of men, just to prove that he would do it.

But he adored his little girl. In the 1930's Effanbee composition dolls began to replace fragile china babies, and the old man spent too much money and bought one. "Unbreakable" was a claim she had to test, so she took the doll out back and chopped its head off with an axe. Then there were tears and tears for days, because she'd never had too much that was too pretty.

By fifteen the little girl looked twenty with the bones and bosom of a movie star. The boys were drawn to her like moths to an electric light. At seventeen, she found a Hollywood haircut and red lipstick. A steady young gentleman with promise fell in love with her, but he left town one weekend, and when he came home on Monday, she was married to a red-haired soldier with a square jaw, an iron chest, and a cherry convertible.

They married then found their differences. He worked the mines double and triple time to stay out of the house. She cut the rest of her hair off and stopped sleeping, working day and night to make her home look like a magazine spread.

She ordered prints of paintings from the Louvre and mounted them in plaster picture frames that she bought damaged at auctions and rebuilt. She found a Lincoln bedroom suit in an old chicken building and took it apart; it was museum quality when she was finished, and someone told me it was worth thirteen thousand dollars at some point. 

Her canvas tennis shoes were always worn through with holes in the toes; there was too much work to do to buy new ones. And it was all done to perfection. From any angle, in any light, flawless. I remember when she painted the kitchen walls fourteen shades of white. The same wall, fourteen shades. The regular whites were all too all pink or too blue.

She bought a kiln to make ceramics, little replications of French and German figurines, vases from Josephine's court. The she learned how to needlepoint and how to cane chairs, how to reupholster with Bloomsbury era fabric, how to layer thin sheets of real gold on old metal. She turned every inch of 3000 square feet above ground to glory while her husband turned to stone, cranking himself far underground in a mine shaft elevator to dig up black rock to light fires to make engines run.

When he was home, they fought, not just with words but with their bodies. When he wasn't home, her rage flew upon her daughters, the oldest by tongue and fist and the youngest by neglect. Cruel, terrible, damning things were said.

I was always nervous to be in that house. When I was about seven, I walked into the dining room and found an iron cage about five feet high, and inside were two little silk birds sitting on a swing. Their bodies were covered over with real feathers dyed indigo blue and deep violet, and their two heads were cocked as if they were having a conversation.

Once I opened the door to touch those birds because they were beautiful, but they were cold and hard, and I felt guilty about what I had done when it was all over. It wasn't a house that wanted touching.

She died early, not ten years older than I am now. You can't live a long life burning like that.

In the years that followed her death, her husband grieved in the way of men who have seen war. He looked for solace in strange beliefs about the Divine, and I remember him standing out in the yard, shouting at the storms to try and make them go away. He hadn't been able to stop cancer from taking his wife, and so he practiced on the lightning and rain.

But he lived in that house she had made; that house where her hands still moved. And the rooms filled up with dust, paper, and clutter while he bought gallon jugs of aloe vera juice and wholesale vitamins. He studied Sci-Fi and tried to write a book, even though the Depression had stolen his education. Then he died, too, and I remember walking through the rooms and finding that iron bird cage.

The dust was so thick on their feathers that all was grey now, only shadows of their jewel colors showed under their wings. I opened the door, still frightened of being caught, though everything was over now, the house was full of ghosts.

I touched their little heads, still cocked in communion. The dust wouldn't come off. It had been worked by gravity down into those feathers. My finger smudged them and made an ugly place, and it would have better off if I had just left them alone.

- - -

I knew from an early age that beauty wasn't simply a hobby; it was a moral good. When my grandmother was dying in the hospital, she lifted my mother's skirt to see if it was hemmed properly. If a thing was worth creating, it was worth chasing to death.

I loved my grandmother, even though she frightened me some. There was so much to admire about her fierce resolve, her passion, her unwillingness to accept anything less than perfect. She would not accept the lies of poverty. She was determined to make the most of every opportunity.

I remember being nine and telling her that I wanted to be exactly like her when I was grown up. I felt the intoxication of quality, of composition, and harmony even then, so deep in my bones that I don't know what I would be if those elements were taken out of me. And I have her fire in me, too. Her restlessness. I did end up becoming so much like her in the end.

I run to art when I cannot make sense of the poverty of the world. I need it like air. Beauty untangles me. But over time I have found that it cannot sustain me. It is not an end in itself. 

Have I learned the toxicity of beauty's lure through generational memory? How many of my ancestors had to find by hard consequence that the wonders of earth point not only inward but outward to another place and another time?

But fool I am, I forget. The sirens still call, don't they? And when I lose my bearings, when I see beauty as a destination instead of a means, I grow restless, peaceless, without anchor.

C.S. Lewis wrote, "The books or the music in which we thought beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing." (30) ... "if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."

Homesick, see? I am homesick. At the end of it all, that's my problem and if you are honest, it is probably yours, too.

It's homesickness that can tempt humans to run themselves kamikaze into the earth of their own creations. It's homesickness that can make us impatient, desperate for immediate remedy. It's homesickness that can cause friends to give up on friends, and parishioners to give up on churches, and elders give up on pastors. It can cause husbands and wives to try and then to quit because we mistook the promise to love someone forever as a promise that loving a single human being might mean we would never be in mortal need.

And then, by fatigue or by necessity, there is a divorce, or a breakdown, or a severing, or a son who runs away from home, and in that backlash, Pandora's box is thrown open, and every tiny demon that has been nursing off disappointment is flung out into the world. They fly like wasps and scorpions into the community: defensiveness, anger, mistrust, pricking at us like hot needles.

Looking for relief, we sink our bodies into other bodies, finding a minute or two of bliss that turns sour and sad in the morning. We know we should walk with Jesus because we have heard the old preachers tell us so. But what does that mean? How can it be done?

We want the ache for heaven met fully on earth, right now, this moment, this year, while the carnival of unbelief roars around us with its mirrors and neon lights, suggesting that heaven is a fairy tale anyway, so we might as well spin the wheel and win a prize.

It is difficult to be sober when the funnel cakes are cooking, when the painted faces pass us laughing, and so we let ourselves be dazzled by it all, tucking a deposit of divinity inside us, but pushing it deep into that same pocket of our souls reserved for Christmas lights, and cranberry clouds, and the tooth fairy.

We are not so childish, not so naive to bank on God like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednigo. When we were fifteen at church camp that summer, we gave God permission to throw us into the fire, working out the math of "even so, we choose the Kingdom!"

But now, we are older, so we reel devotion in, in, in to 3000 feet of managable, masterable space. We haunt auction sales that offer us a bargain, and we bid, and buy, and refinish, and reupholster. We paint our walls another shade of holy-enough. We wear our fingers down with the world of replications of the divine, because we were born dirt poor and our souls have always wanted something more than what we have. We want a refuge that we can hold between two hands. Yet nothing is good enough, and nothing lasts long enough.

Did Satan find Christ homesick in the wilderness when he offered him a Craftsman studio in some lush woods with oil paints, and good brushes, and stretched canvas, and all the time in the world? He threw in good morning light as a teaser, but Jesus knelt in his darkness and chose mystery and submission instead. "Not my will but Thine" costs blood and sweat to pray. It costs following through.

I wonder if Shadrach, Meshach and Abednedgo were shocked that Sunday after singing, "Give me one pure and holy passion," when God said, "Sure, OK" and they were granted the wish? As they were flying into the flames, did they shout, "But there was supposed to be a ram in the bushes!"

Or before they hit the ground, could they see this was a greater gift even, the gift that Corrie ten Boom and Bonhoeffer were also given, to pass through the unknown into a fire in which we commune with the Son of Man?

Did they find in the pit of their stomachs after every lost idol flew like grey ash into the air that thirst was left, thirst for the work of praising God?

I hear, "Well done, good and faithful servant," and at those words, my soul gasps involuntarily, because it is too much to want, and it is too much to imagine.

When a piece of music ends, it leaves a sweetness in the air. It is a sweetness that begs for more. When I try to praise the music, my praise never lands on the right spot, because we can't ever pull the glory of beauty inside us. Lewis said this. He said that we are removed from what pierces us with thirst.

Because we are perpetual strangers in this universe; putting our hands up on a window glass and waiting for a hand to meet ours, pressing souls against souls, looking for some great heartbeat to thrum with ours to bridge this chasm. We want to see how "the door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last."

Oh, these shadows and flickers, so many stages removed from heaven. We are permitted to chase whatever we like, burning our mortality on little silk birds that entice before they return to dust. False love all, love that makes us wake up and then drops us, because what is lovely and desirable points through itself to a promise.

Oh, great God. What a trap this is! All of earth's glories are full of you, and yet you will not be contained by them. I am wooed by you and teased along. What a long time it is to wait for all to come together. Give me oil in my lamp, keep me burning, burning, burning.

You have let me meddle with idols, but they have been hollow. I have consumed what is inside them, then I have thrown their foil wrappers out the car window. Nothing fills. Nothing lasts.

You have let me see this. You have known what I would find after betraying you. You have kept me afloat through my wanderings, preserved me like a box of nard to be burst upon Yourself. And so be it. Burst me upon you.

I come from poor and restless stock, people who tried to build heaven on earth. What else has humanity ever done? I could scrape the skins of dead things to dry in the sun and make a cover for my own nakedness, and I could lower great nets into the dark bottoms of rivers to bring up my own sustenance. I could paint beauty on glass that would shatter when the great trumpet sounds. I could marry for passion over a blazing weekend, and then spend my whole life trying to recover what I had lost. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.

Save me from futility. Let me die for what is worth dying for. Let me live for what is worth living for. Make me sick for the pure air of the North. A cross comes before the crown, they say, and tomorrow is a Monday morning. "A cleft has opened in the pitless walls of the world," so great Captain, let me follow you. Let me follow you inside.

I'm not OK so it's OK that you're not OK.

“What you did wasn’t that bad.”

“I can totally see why you fell into it. I would have done the same thing.”

“Everybody has their stuff. Nobody has the right to judge you.”

These are words friends speak to friends. Words of comfort.
These are words we offer trying to make room inside ourselves for the hard truths of those we love.

We humble ourselves.
We make sure that we are safe, and all of this is good. We should be tender to the broken.

But our tenderness is not enough.
Our tenderness is not enough.
Our tenderness is not enough because our forgiveness can’t heal.

Our culture has grown so ashamed of the idea of sin that
we’ve forgotten how to welcome one another into honest penitence.

We have replaced the gospel with,
“I’m not OK so it’s OK that you’re not OK.”

But that is not the solution, because we are not the solution.

Life-changing grace is not a commodity that you and I can dispense with human empathy or with human blessing.

(How strange that we have come to believe that we have the power to absolve!)

It is not our humility that cleanses, it is God's.

As we embrace those we love with all the best intentions,
we must never stand between the Healer and that which needs to be healed.

A real friend does not deny the infirmity.

She kisses the wound, but only just before she cuts a hole in the roof
to lower the wounded down into the presence of Jesus.

She names the disease,
she hates the disease,
she fights the disease,
she takes the disease seriously, for the disease is lethal.

Friends, in our gentleness we must still let wrong be wrong
so that wrong can be made right.


- - -





Art: "Girl with Death Mask (She Plays Alone)" by Frida Kahlo

7 Types of People in Troubled Times : Which Type Are You?

(Paraphrased in modern language from one of Bonhoeffer's Letters)

- - -

Friends, these are confusing times. In fact, has there ever been a time more confusing than this time in which we are living?

It seems like there are no good options left for us, no good choices, because there is so much chaos and evil in the world.

If we look back into past times of uncertainty, can we find examples of people who were able to wait with calmness and confidence? Or is it normal for those living through upheaval to have questions like ours? 

Evil is tricky, and that is part of our present confusion. It mixes up good and bad so that it is difficult to tell the difference between them.

Sometimes evil puts on a false costume so that it looks like justice, or generosity, or need, of social justice.  

For those of you who have grown up on Biblical principles, watching this masquerade will affirm to you what you have been taught about the deceptive abilities of sin. You will recognize what is happening in our culture, because you have been told for many years that moral confusion would be a work of the evil one.

What are some common reactions of the public in times like these? Let me define seven types of people that you are likely to find over the next few years.

1. THE REASONABLE, NAIVE PEOPLE

Some people will have naive ideas about what is reasonable during times like this. They will think that we can just apply a little bit of P.R. and fix what is broken in the world. They will think that it's possible to make everybody happy, finding a way to appease everyone's sense of justice, no matter how different opposing views are.

When these attempts at diplomacy don't work, naive, reasonable people will get sulky and discouraged and just step aside, letting whoever happens to be strongest take charge of the situation.

2. THE FANATICS

There will also be fanatics. Fanatics live so pumped up on their own ideals that they start to believe that they are qualified for single-handed attacks on evil. But fanatics are often fools. They are like angry bulls rushing at a matador's cape, missing the matador. 

Fanatics are easy targets for evils, because they get snarled up in peripheral issues, freaking out about every situation that surfaces. They think they are doing good by blowing off some righteous steam, not realizing they are falling into a trap laid by more intelligent people. They allow their anger and zeal to lead, not realizing that they are being manipulated. They don't know how to play chess.

3. THE MAN OF CONSCIENCE

Next we have the man of conscience, that noble soul willing to face impossible odds by making hard decisions. But when a situation is too big for him, he has no wisdom to help him know what to do except the guidance of his own gut feelings. 

He quickly finds that he is outmanned by an evil that disguises itself, that plays with his moral inclinations like a cat with a mouse, and that confuses him until he feels dazed and nervous. One day he wakes up and realizes that he is unable to know what is right after all. So, he just begins making choices that he hopes will make himself feel better, which is no help to the greater cause at all.

4. THE MAN OF DUTY

Because other options for attacking evil are so tricky and confusing, some people find comfort in duty. They like simply doing what they are told and leaving the consequences to their authority figures. However, if a person can never step outside of sheer mechanical obedience, the occasional risks necessary to defeat evil will not be taken, and harm will be done as well as good.

5. THE MAN OF FREEDOM

And so we have the man of freedom. He sees how sometimes a deed must be done that violates traditional beliefs about morality and that might ruin his reputation. He is willing to go there. He is practical about his moral principles, and sometimes put those beliefs aside for the greater good. But this also is a trap. Because as this man tries to choose the lesser of two evils over and again, eventually he will not be able to recognize what is good at all.

6. THE RECLUSE

Seeing how dangerous it is to fight evil, how easy it is to make a mistake, some people grow afraid and simply hide. They don't want to be dirtied up by messing with the wrongs of the world, so they act like children and try to find a blanket to hide under and play while darkness takes ground. 

But to hide, we must ignore the terrific injustices being done all about us. Not only is this selfish, but it is ineffective. Withdrawal eventually steals our peace.  Either the internal pressure of what is being ignored will grow too hot to bear, or the passive soul will grow cold harden into the persona of a hypocrite.

7. WHAT DO WE DO THEN?

There is only one sort of person who can thrive in impossible times like these, and it is not the person of reason, of principle, of conscience, of freedom, or of virtue. The person who will thrive in troubling times is the one who is willing and eager to sacrifice everything when God calls him to act in faith, with allegiance only to God. 

A victor in chaos is willing to let his entire life function as "an answer to the question and call of God."

Funeral Service for an Unknown Child

I have been thinking about what we can do in response to the new ‪#‎ShoutYourAbortion‬ campaign.

As a mother, my instinct is to adopt children in danger or need. I am grieving over my inability to do that here.

The least I can do is provide a proper funeral for some of these babies. Their brief lives merit at least this much respect.

If you want to participate in honoring the slain, select a child by searching the hashtag #ShoutYourAbortion on Twitter, then find a respectful, quiet place to pray/speak through the following service. If a married couple is performing the ceremony together, parts can be read by the mother and father. If you are adopting the child as a single person, all the lines can be read by one.

May God heal our land. It is so full of broken hearts and broken lives.

- - -

"A FUNERAL SERVICE FOR AN UNKNOWN CHILD"

- - -

FATHER: I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.(Romans 8.38,39)

MOTHER: We brought nothing into the world, and we take nothing out.

The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. 

(1 Timothy 6.7; Job 1.21b)

FATHER: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is his faithfulness. (Lamentations 3.22,23)

MOTHER: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. (John 3.16)

MOTHER: We come in the name of Jesus Christ,

who died and was raised to the glory of God the Father.

FATHER: We come before God

to remember a child slain by abortion,

to give thanks for his/her life; 

to commend him/her to God our merciful redeemer and judge; 

to commit his/her body to the earth,

and to comfort one another in our grief.

MOTHER: God of all consolation,

your Son Jesus Christ was moved to tears

at the grave of Lazarus his friend.

Look with compassion on your children in their loss;

give to troubled hearts the light of hope

and strengthen in us the gift of faith,

in Jesus Christ our Lord.

FATHER AND MOTHER: Amen.

MOTHER: As children of a loving heavenly Father,

let us ask his forgiveness,

for he is gentle and full of compassion.

(A moment of silence)

FATHER: God of mercy,

we acknowledge that we are all sinners.

We turn from the wrong that we have thought and said and done,

and are mindful of all that we have failed to do.

For the sake of Jesus, who died for us,

forgive us for all that is past,

and help us to live each day

in the light of Christ our Lord.

FATHER AND MOTHER:

Lord, have mercy.

Christ, have mercy.

Lord, have mercy.

FATHER: May God our Father forgive us our sins

and bring us to the eternal joy of his kingdom,

where dust and ashes have no dominion.

MOTHER: Merciful Father,

hear our prayers and comfort us;

renew our trust in your Son,

whom you raised from the dead;

strengthen our faith

that all who have died in the love of Christ

will share in his resurrection;

who lives and reigns with you,

in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

one God, now and for ever.

FATHER AND MOTHER: 

The Lord is my shepherd; 

therefore can I lack nothing.

He makes me lie down in green pastures 

and leads me beside still waters.

He shall refresh my soul 

and guide me in the paths of righteousness 

for his name's sake.

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I will fear no evil; 

for you are with me;

your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

You spread a table before me

in the presence of those who trouble me; 

you have anointed my head with oil

and my cup shall be full.

Surely goodness and loving mercy shall follow me

all the days of my life, 

and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

FATHER: 

God of mercy, Lord of life,

you have made us in your image

to reflect your truth and light:

we give you thanks for the soul of this unknown child,

for the flutters of grace and mercy that he/she received from you,

for all that was good in his/her brief life,

For the tiny body you knit together by your own hand,

for the potential you imparted to him/her.

We we offer our love for a child

who knew no human love on this earth,

except for the love You gave him/her.

And how great a love is Your love.

Your mighty power brings joy out of grief

and life out of death.

Look in mercy on this child we morn.

And as we grieve,

give us patient faith in these times of darkness.

Strengthen us with the knowledge of your love.

MOTHER: 

You are tender towards your children

and your mercy is over all your works.

So for the mother who made this choice,

soften her soul,

grant her repentance.

Heal her memories of hurt and failure,

give her the wisdom and grace to use 

the time that is left to her here on earth,

to turn to Christ and follow in his steps

in the way that leads to everlasting life.

FATHER AND MOTHER:

Our Father, who art in heaven,

hallowed be thy name;

thy kingdom come;

thy will be done;

on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our trespasses,

as we forgive those who trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation;

but deliver us from evil.

For thine is the kingdom,

the power and the glory,

for ever and ever. 

Amen.

FATHER:

Let us commend this child to the mercy of God,

our maker and redeemer.

(A moment of silence)

God our creator and redeemer,

by your power Christ conquered death

and entered into glory.

Confident of his victory

and claiming his promises,

we entrust this child to your mercy

in the name of Jesus our Lord,

who died and is alive

and reigns with you,

now and for ever. 

Amen.

MOTHER: 

The Lord is full of compassion and mercy,

slow to anger and of great goodness.

FATHER:

As a father is tender towards his children,

so is the Lord tender to those that fear him.

MOTHER: 

For he knows of what we are made;

he remembers that we are but dust.

Our days are like the grass;

we flourish like a flower of the field;

when the wind goes over it, it is gone

and its place will know it no more.

FATHER:

But the merciful goodness of the Lord endures

for ever and ever toward those that fear him

and his righteousness upon their children's children.

MOTHER:

We have but a short time to live.

Like a flower we blossom and then wither;

like a shadow we flee and never stay.

In the midst of life we are in death;

to whom can we turn for help,

FATHER:

but to you, Lord, who are justly angered by our sins?

Yet, Lord God most holy, Lord most mighty,

O holy and most merciful Saviour,

deliver us from the bitter pain of eternal death.

Lord, you know the secrets of our hearts;

hear our prayer, O God most mighty;

spare us, most worthy judge eternal;

at our last hour let us not fall from you,

O holy and merciful Saviour.

MOTHER:

We have entrusted this child to God's mercy,

and we now commit his/her body to the ground:

earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust:

in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life

through our Lord Jesus Christ,

who will transform our frail bodies

that they may be conformed to his glorious body,

who died, was buried, and rose again for us.

To him be glory for ever.

FATHER:

Glory to the Father and to the Son

and to the Holy Spirit;

as it was in the beginning is now

and shall be for ever.

MOTHER:

Support us, O Lord,

all the day long of this troublous life,

until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes,

the busy world is hushed,

the fever of life is over

and our work is done.

Then, Lord, in your mercy grant us a safe lodging,

a holy rest, and peace at the last;

through Christ our Lord.

FATHER:

Unto him that is able to keep us from falling,

and to present us faultless before the presence of his glory

with exceeding joy,

to the only wise God our Saviour,

be glory and majesty,

dominion and power,

both now and ever.

FATHER AND MOTHER:

Amen.

- - -

Art: "Views of a Foetus in the Womb" by Leonardo DaVinci

Want to Hear a Bad Joke? It's a Good One.

I’m cutting my own throat by writing on this topic, because I’m still inside the struggle. No matter what I write here, I am probably going to fight this battle a thousand times in the future and fail in most of them. Still, I think it’s important (though embarrassing) to at least bring the questions I’m finding to light.

Lately I’ve been wrestling with how to handle humor. This is a hard subject for me because my mind works fast, and it’s twisted. I revel in wit that is a little bit dark, a little bit sarcastic, and a little bit irreverent. Put me in the company of a few of my closest friends, we can turn an awkward 1970’s photo into a full-out slam party. We are masters of the zing.  We love finding something deliciously bizarre, then spending an hour digging out everything wickedly funny about it.

And I don’t know that such fun is wrong in itself; however, over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about some of the dismissive mockery that seems to be running rampant in the church these days. As I’ve been noticing what some believers are doing to belittle other believers, I’ve had to also look at how I treat those who differ from me.

Sometimes humor can provide a loving buffer between opponents. It can soften differences and bring a healing levity to a tense situation. Other times, though, it can be a cover for insult and division that does harm in the body.

Let me give you an example of how I’ve done this badly. Maybe a story will help show you more of what I mean.

Over the past few years, I’ve had some weird experiences with young earth creationists.  Now I’m fine with believing that God made the world in six literal days, but if he did, I really wish he would pick some different people to talk about it on the national scale. I’m embarrassed by so much of what I’ve seen emerge from champions of this particular cause.

So few of the young earth crusaders seem to recognize where they are in time philosophically.  Many do not see irony in the fact that they are using post-enlightenment methods of argument built upon the same humanism that they claim is destroying America. Because our culture worships science, they want... they NEED... Genesis 1-2 to work like a scientific manual.  It’s impossible to appeal to the fact that God has repeatedly revealed himself in Scripture by symbol, intuition, and poetry, because their felt need is that God would fight the exact battles they want him to fight.

It’s difficult to have this conversation with some young earth advocates, because they live in such fear that the baby of inerrancy is going to get thrown out in the bathwater of a bigger philosophical perspective. Normally I just back out of conversations when statements like these start to pop up, “If you don’t believe God made the world in six days, then that means you can’t trust the Bible, which means nothing can be proven, which is relativism, and this is why people will believe in the antichrist after the Second Coming.”

That's kind of a conversation stopper, right there. The whole thing wears me out, and over the years, as I have watched some of these crazy logical leaps start to fly, as I’ve felt the hot embarrassment of association, I’ve made some hard jokes about extremists in this camp.

I’ve made those jokes to diffuse the frustration I feel about not being heard. I’ve made those jokes to put some space between me and those who do not represent my beliefs. I’ve made them to dispel loneliness, because when I am in a situation where people don’t seem to be thinking clearly, I start to feel isolated. I’ve made them because it’s easier to just mock people and throw them to the side than respectfully disagree with those who don’t have the humility or the patience to hear what I am actually saying.

I’m giving you all of these details so that you will understand the incongruity in something that happened to our family earlier this month.

I was driving home from school while my youngest son was babbling in the back of the van, telling me about his day. He was so excited about a book that he had found in the school library.

My son has known how to read for several years, but he’s just hit that electric point in reading where books are fun for him. I was half thinking about traffic and housework, half trying to listen to what he was saying, when he pulled the book out of his backpack and nearly shouted, "Mom! This book has TRUTH in it!"

I thought that was an odd statement, so I said, "Truth? What do you mean?"

He said, "It's just full of truth about God and the world!"

Then he started telling me about how the fossils were evidence that God punished sin. I thought, "Uh oh. It’s one of those weird young earth creationist books." But I didn’t say that. I just kept quiet and listened.

M opened to the back page and explained how the consequence of sin was death and separation from God, and then he explained the substitutionary atonement with complete accuracy. He wasn’t just accurate, though, he was excited.  He finally got it.

Over the past five years we've worn out at least one Children's Story Book Bible on this kid. I don't know how many times he has heard the gospel in different ways. But something about this little book (or the Holy Spirit using this book) helped him finally process the reality of Christ's sacrifice, so as I pulled in our driveway, I said, "Is this something you are interested in? You would like to have Jesus live inside you?" He was visibly eager but shy, so I crawled into the back seat beside him, and there in the driveway, my son asked Christ to reign his heart.

The book that God used, of all things, was one I would have gently intercepted and urged him to put back on the shelf if I had seen him pick it up.

After he went to bed that night, I held that book in my hands and flipped through page after page of cheesy illustrations. I was just so humbled sitting there at the kitchen table, realizing that God doesn’t need perfect theology to do what he wants in any of us.

This was difficult for me to admit, because accurate theology is one of my biggest values. Even writing this, as I consider some of the rotten teaching running around in Christendom, my stomach feels a little sick. I don't want people to believe lies!

So it was unnerving to admit that God could use even flawed methods to accomplish his ends, and that his sustenance is good news because my own theology is likely so full of blind spots, too. In fact, if I could see the whole of my present belief system, despite all of my reading, despite all of my wit, despite the fine, educated friends I’ve been given to refine me, despite the classes I've taken, if all of my strength were placed beside the blinding, vivid truth of an eternal, omniscient God, I would look like a simpleton. A fool.

I don't mean that all truth is relative, it isn't. I don't mean that we can know nothing about God, because we can. I do mean that if all of my capacity were a book, I would probably look a lot like this one my son picked. No, I take that back. In light of God’s brilliance, I’d probably look more one of those badly-drawn pamphlets you find in a public restroom.

A knot swelled up in my throat as verses like these flooded through my mind:

“One plants and another waters, but God causes the growth.”

“For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”

“But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient days.”

“But Jesus said, “Do not stop him, for no one who does a mighty work in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me.“

- - -

Over the past few days I have been working back through Corrie Ten Boom’s writings, listening to this little lady who knew so much hell on earth, who tested the principles of God through grief we cannot begin to imagine. She sees right through me sometimes, warning me that childlike trust in the power of God trumps all my gifts of cultural or academic insight.

God is alive, she says. And this changes how I need to fight.

But it is so difficult for me to believe that. I'm funny, see? I'm so funny! God needs me to be funny to save America, doesn't he?

I wonder, if God appeared to me in smoke on a mountain and proclaimed, “Thou shalt not meme thine enemies,” would I ask, “Then might I Tweet them instead?”

Sarcastic dismissal is the spirit of our age, and I am a master of it. I do not want to let go of this sword. It's so good for cutting off ears.

Meanwhile I have a husband with 122 hours of graduate training in theology who never mocks or demeans sincere, simple people who are trying to do something good for the kingdom. Even if he thinks their strategy, soteriology, or eschatology are wrong, he speaks of those differences without condescension.

I have been angry with him about this in the past. I have wanted him to charge in beside me and blast apart error with me. (Shazaam!) I've wanted him to humiliate internet loud mouths and cocky church bullies. But I’m starting to see that there have been too many times in my walk with God that I have been enchanted by the glitz and glory of sharp tongues and quick minds that belittle those who love Jesus in the wrong way. I’ve done that because I have felt smart and insightful, because I’ve read more, because I have known better.

But there's no wit on the planet that can match a real gentleman's humility and depth of character. I’m starting to see that what I have disrespected has sometimes been beautiful and not weak after all.

I don’t know yet how all of this fits into speaking hard things in a world that is often too weak on truth. I don’t know where it leaves room for the sort of humor that heals and builds bridges. I do see some instances of sarcasm and ferocity in the Bible, and I need God to show me how and when those might apply.

What I do know is that my heart has been wrong at times. I have been proud. I have been impatient. I haven’t trusted God to be able to use those who clearly don't have it all together theologically.  (Go back and laugh there if you didn't. That was sarcasm.) I also know that God hasn't called me to sit like Statler and Waldorf giving a MST3K play-by-play of American Christianity 2015. It's going to take me a little while to get over that, too, because I was really stinking good at it.

I’m ending this post with an excerpt from C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, which discusses four types of humor and their relative soul health. If you read it, remember, this book was written from the perspective of a demon attempting to trick a Christian into sin, so what is written must be read from that viewpoint. In this book, evil is seen as good and good is seen as evil. You're going to have to flip some stuff. If he says, "flippancy is the best of all," that means it is also most evil, see?

Let me know your thoughts. I'd like to hear what you've learned about this stuff along the way.


RR


From The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis:

I divide the causes of human laughter into Joy, Fun, the Joke Proper, and Flippancy. You will see the first among friends and lovers reunited on the eve of a holiday. Among adults some pretext in the way of Jokes is usually provided, but the facility with which the smallest witticisms produce laughter at such a time shows that they are not the real cause. What that real cause is we do not know. Something like it is expressed in much of that detestable art which the humans call Music, and something like it occurs in Heaven - a meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience, quite opaque to us. Laughter of this kind does us no good and should always be discouraged. Besides, the phenomenon is of itself disgusting and a direct insult to the realism, dignity, and austerity of Hell.

Fun is closely related to Joy - a sort of emotional froth arising from the play instinct. It is very little use to us. It can sometimes be used, of course, to divert humans from something else which the Enemy would like them to be feeling or doing: but in itself it has wholly undesirable tendencies; it promotes charity, courage, contentment, and many other evils.

The Joke Proper, which turns on sudden perception of incongruity, is a much more promising field. I am not thinking primarily of indecent or bawdy humour, which, though much relied upon by second-rate tempters, is often disappointing in its results. The truth is that humans are pretty clearly divided on this matter into two classes. There are some to whom "no passion is as serious as lust" and for whom an indecent story ceases to produce lasciviousness precisely in so far as it becomes funny: there are others in whom laughter and lust are excited at the same moment and by the same things. The first sort joke about sex because it gives rise to many incongruities: the second cultivate incongruities because they afford a pretext for talking about sex. If your man is of the first type, bawdy humour will not help you - I shall never forget the hours which I wasted (hours to me of unbearable tedium) with one of my early patients in bars and smoking-rooms before I learned this rule. Find out which group the patient belongs to - and see that he does not find out.

The real use of Jokes or Humour is in quite a different direction, and it is specially promising among the English who take their "sense of humour" so seriously that a deficiency in this sense is almost the only deficiency at which they feel shame. Humour is for them the all-consoling and (mark this) the all-excusing, grace of life. Hence it is invaluable as a means of destroying shame. If a man simply lets others pay for him, he is "mean"; if he boasts of it in a jocular manner and twits his fellows with having been scored off, he is no longer "mean" but a comical fellow. Mere cowardice is shameful; cowardice boasted of with humorous exaggerations and grotesque gestures can passed off as funny. Cruelty is shameful - unless the cruel man can represent it as a practical joke. A thousand bawdy, or even blasphemous, jokes do not help towards a man's damnation so much as his discovery that almost anything he wants to do can be done, not only without the disapproval but with the admiration of his fellows, if only it can get itself treated as a Joke. And this temptation can be almost entirely hidden from your patient by that English seriousness about Humour. Any suggestion that there might be too much of it can be represented to him as "Puritanical" or as betraying a "lack of humour".

But flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour-plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it,

Thoughts on Truth (Part I) - Introduction and Section I

When I wrote this post, I didn't intend to publish it on my blog. It's way too nerdy for most of the public to have much interest in reading.

I actually wrote this for Facebook as part of a discussion between several friends who have been talking about how to identify truth. However, Facebook is having some sort of technical issues at present, and I can't seem to post there today without the formatting getting all wonky.

So, here it is, if you want to look it over. If you don't care about this kind of stuff, don't worry. I'll get back to the more human bloggishness shortly. As you get alerts for "Thistle and Toad," maybe those of you who don't enjoy philosophy can just skip anything that shows up here with the heading "Thoughts on Truth."




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PART I OVERVIEW: I am breaking this discussion up into short sections. This first section briefly discusses the nature of humans and then moves on to establish some limitations for this discussion. Section 2 will begin to unpack several epistemic theories of truth.)

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NOTE TO READERS: I’ve spent today sketching out some possible approaches to discussing this matter, but it’s difficult to know where to begin. First off, though I’ve read about truth theory some, I am nowhere close to being any sort of scholar in this field. Secondly,  many of these ideas that I am going to present here unpack into complex micro-categories with nuances developed by many thinkers over many centuries. I’m not sure how to give broad strokes without missing important details.

So if you are interested in learning how people decide what to believe, maybe you can just use this general introduction to provide a couple of terms and loose concepts to launch you into a more detailed exploration of your own. 

Blessings,

RR

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1. The Nature of Humans

This is an odd place to start, yet I think it might also be necessary, because every question I will discuss about epistemology (how we know what we know) has been developed by humans. How can we talk about humans knowing what they know without first establishing what the core nature of man is? J.A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom suggests that over the past centuries, Westerners have primarily considered the nature of man in three regards:

a. We are thinking creatures. (Plato-Descartes, etc.)

b. We are creatures of will/volition. (The Great Revivals)

c. We are affective beings (vision/love-driven, daily lives a product of habit)

Smith leans toward the third model, noting how the majority of our life decisions and actions are actually products of habit instead of pure cognition, and that when we do change, that is often because we catch a vision of a better life to pursue. 

I’ve been teaching this book to students for several years now, and every year, as our group has dissected our own routines and choices, we have found support for Smith’s hypothesis. Although we have regularly tried to change our lives by logic and by will, in reality we tend to be pulled through decisions by a more affective “vision of the good life,” that has -- for good or for ill -- captured our hearts and created a sort of gravitational pull. 

In light of this, it’s fascinating to me that both secular and sacred attempts to diagnose and heal human brokenness tend to be rooted in the mind and in the will. Epistemology and philosophy are not exceptions to that rule. As we begin to look at different theories of truth, one of the first things we are likely to notice is that the majority of theories from many epistemological belief systems are grounded in the Platonic/Cartesian presupposition that humans are primarily cerebral. Our default (declared or undeclared) is to believe that the human identity is that of a mind mind toting around a body.

2. Our Limitations in this Discussion:

I find grave holes in this definition of man.  I value reason, of course. I use it every day, and I will use it in what I write here. I also think reason is almost comically dependent upon unprovable assumptions.

Most of the angry, foolish errors that I have seen both in extreme theology and in extreme atheism have begun with a failure to admit limitations in this regard.  So I hope you will allow me to establish one important disclaimer in regard to what is about to be written next. I don’t mind to talk in terms of human reason, deduction, induction, etc., and I will. Such an exercise can be useful and productive. It’s not a waste of time to sort through these things. 

But at the end of all of the strongest theories I have ever studied,  I haven’t found a single one that didn’t require some sort of leap in the dark. I don’t mean this just in regard to conservative, orthodox Christianity. Atheists, progressives, we are all in the same boat, here. 

Words are metaphorical, as Lewis and Sayers have argued. The name of a thing is not a thing. This breakdown in language/reality causes comprehension and communication gaps. Furthermore, the mind-body gap cannot ever be seamlessly bridged, and connecting dots between perception and reality is also impossible. The scientific method, the rhythms of math, all of the secular creeds that are held without question in our present culture can break down if you fiddle with them. We are not as strong as we think we are.

Does that mean that we cannot know truth at all? I don't think so. It just means we can’t proudly carve it out of a rock face using only the plastic spork of human power. We can use what tools we have been given (cognition, intuition, etc.) but the most trustworthy explorers I know have gone into the wilderness eager to kneel, eager to die, and slow to pick up a crown to try and reign. 

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Art: "The Search for Truth" by Rene Magritte (1963)

The New Rules of Lovemaking

He collected holiday socks, was twenty-five years older and a couple inches shorter, but I was in awe of him anyway. He was my favorite professor, and he could unpack a piece of literature into the smallest detail, then blast out a hundred miles and show us how it fit into the larger spirit of its time.

His teaching shaped who I am in many ways, but his exhortation that comes to mind the most is that thinkers should not only look out at the world, but also look backward into what shaped the lenses through which we view it. He called this "knowing where we are in time."

So many times when I have disagreements with other believers, if I will only follow that simple advice, I will discover significant life experiences that have nudged my opponent and me to believe the different things that we do. I might still disagree with another person's conclusion, but if I can be patient and curious, I can usually see why another opinion has been reached.

The same sense of "eureka" happens when I look into some of the criticism progressives are now bringing against the church. They are right in saying that during the 1980's and 1990's there was often a spirit of pride, elitism, legalism, materialism, and consumerism in evangelicalism. It's true that unethical practices took root as conservative politics hijacked religion. I can identify with a lot of the skepticism and disappointment that is fueling modern American Christianity.

Trends in Christianity seem to swing back and forth like a drunk man trying to walk a straight line. When I have studied church history, I have seen how from almost the very beginning, believers have veered to the right for a decade or two (or century or two) until someone thoughtful has noticed the developing extremism and has overcorrected it, causing the church to veer to the left, then right again, then left again.

And here we are in such a situation today.

When progressives first started criticizing evangelicalism, I was relieved and excited. I had felt out of place in straight conservatism, and when more artistic, socially-minded people like Donald Miller and Rob Bell began to voice complaints in language that resonated with my literary sensibilities, I felt hopeful for the church. I thought maybe we could shed the Western errors of our past and begin to speak in a way that finally connected with the secular culture.

A little more than a decade has passed, though, and I feel differently now. What began as a needed call to change has snowballed. Where the church was once infected with elitism, we are now infected with a negativity that ranges from cynicism to open hostility against orthodoxy.

Now, instead of just desiring to connect non believers with God by our relevance, we have made relevance a new god in itself. We allow it to trump awkward or unpopular commands, thinking "God must not mean THAT, because the world HATES that idea." Like Thomas Jefferson snipping out sections of the Bible that displeased him, we emphasize the parts of the gospel that are lavish and safe, while skipping over that which makes us vulnerable to criticism from both progressive Christians and a secular society.

One of the casualties of recent overcorrection is found in how modern believers view sexuality. So many of us were disappointed in the results of religious campaigns like "Why Wait? and Promise Keepers. We saw conservatives try to kiss dating goodbye, then live hypocritical lives. Some idealistic couples who followed all the rules still ended up in unhappy marriages. Some of our "wholesome" old right-wing leaders have been exposed as scoundrels. We are tired of pep rallies and promises that don't hold water.

"And besides," we think, "Is it really that big of a cosmic deal to God what two grown adults do with their bodies when there are so many life-and-death social justice issues at hand? Women are being trafficked. Children don't have clean water to drink. There is poverty, illiteracy, oppression all around. Is God all that concerned about my sex life when there is so much pain in the world?"

Every week my Facebook feed is filled with memes mocking sexual purity. My friends will post pictures of billboards covered in fire with headlines like, "You can't hold hands with Jesus while you are masturbating," and the implied joke is based on the dominant cultural belief that some imaginary god doesn't have any business telling us what we can and cannot do with our bodies.

Most of us are fine with God being love, and even agnostics bubble over with praise about grace. Jesus Version 2015 is an emotional synthesis of Santa and that grandmother who tells the media what a great person you are, even after you have burned down a public building. We ask him to bibbity-bobbety-boo over sick babies and credit card debt, but we either lock the door of the bedroom against him or try to remake him so that he approves of what we do there.

To some extent, even the most traditional, moralistic believer among us takes advantage of the gospel. God has made divine mercy to bear us up as we make mistakes and learn (practically) what it means to have Christ living through us. Growth is almost always a messy process that involves a lot of falling down, so to be given acceptance, even as we fail and get back up again, provides a beautiful security.

But it seems many moderns have forgotten the context of that grace. We take it and run back into our independent lives instead of letting the safety net of forgiveness sustain us as we grow. We forget that we are on a trajectory that ends in seamless communion with a holy Being.

Twenty years ago, when I would hear about believers having sex outside of marriage, those affairs typically happened in the context of two lonely people falling in love and breaking their vows after encountering a "real soul mate." There was also usually a terrible struggle to resist infidelity that eventually just gave way.

Today, I'm seeing that sort of situation less and less. I'm seeing a sharp increase in progressive believers simply being okay with sleeping around. Just a mild emotional connection is needed to justify intimacy, because sex is embraced as a healthy, casual, physical activity that grownups can fiddle with to burn off lust while waiting for a real life partner to show up. Or not. 

If the practice of sex outside of marriage is challenged, the conversation quickly turns to "real" social ills in the world, or a sort of mockery about ancient societal rules that enlightened thinkers can be mature enough to circumvent. Those who embrace liberal sexuality can worship with, pray with, reference God with the very same people they are using sexually, not even blushing before a living God who has commanded them to save intimacy for marriage.

It is now so common to live this way that moderns have developed a blindness to the broken hearts which result directly from this kind of living. When temporary relief ends up crashing, ex-lovers often end up either blaming God for their pain or doubting that He exists at all. To fill the growing, hollow ache that grows like a disease from uncommitted sex, a new relationship is sought, more temporary relief is found, and the cancer of rewriting God's rules numbs us more and more, eating away our sensitivity until we don't even have the ability to repent.

Strong conservatives are in a panic about this, pulling out Bible verses to try to combat it. But most of the progressive believers I know who are actually living in this way lost respect for the Bible's authority long ago. That is why I am making an appeal to my old literature professor's words. Let us begin by simply knowing where we are in time, and then let us see our present in light of our past.

There is wisdom in admitting that we are a product of a pendulum swinging too far the other direction. It doesn't validate extremists who are unlike us to admit that we have also become too extreme ourselves. We can acknowledge the ugly, insular tendencies of the 80's and 90's and the well-meaning corrections of the early 2000's so that we can then see the resulting excesses of our modern time with clarity.

We do not have to simply relax into the currents of our era like flotsam. We can rise up and see why we believe what we do, and then decide if we want to continue to believe it. We can explore the new rules of lovemaking and critique them in light of the past and in light of the future.

Because for many moderns, this lifestyle isn't working. People are still tired. They are still lonely. Repeated violations of intimacy have discouraged us, because sex is powerful, and there is a growing sense that our isolation must be permanent if nothing is truly sacred at all. All of this is interconnected, see?

It's time to admit that even though generations before us erred, we have, too. We have not been so wise and enlightened after all, we have only filled our bellies with the husks the pigs eat. We have taken our inheritance of grace and divorced it from the love and authority that provided the gift. We have taken our Father's generosity out of his bank account and blown it in stolen beds, yet the party hasn't turned out like we had hoped. Despite all we have tried to steal, we are still miserable.

Real repentance is foreign in our time, but if it is rare, it is also beautiful. It is a deep down, honest assessment of all we've tried, simply saying that it has gone sour and that we are willing to receive help and guidance. It is a sweet humility, the kind that draws us to other people when they admit what is obviously wrong about themselves. It tears off the lies that strangle and disorient us. It situates us back in the core of our true selves.

Remember how the Prodigal Father ran to his son who had tried alternate ways of living? He put aside his dignity and lifted his skirts to embrace his son. And moderns who have used sex outside of God's plan, a father waits for you, too. He wants us to release our fingers from the filth that we have tried to rub over and again into our wounds, and he wants to return us to a life under his loving, complete indwelling.

Because there is something bigger going on here than just naughty people needing to live nice. Sexual resignation is not a big joke on you that the enlightened can mock. It's a part of engaging with Divine love as whole people.

Despite the hopeless whispers of darkness, you and I are not just in the business of surviving a couple dozen years of thirst on a dry, worn out planet; this is a classroom, all of it. Working through longings and choosing ultimate good is training. These are our lessons for an everlasting realm that the bliss of human lovemaking only hints at in its very best moments. Delights and wonders are before us that we can not even begin to imagine. 

Look at where we are in time. Look at what has led us to where we are. Then look forward, friends. Look forward.

Authenticity for Artsy Types

One of the most subtle and deadly temptations that I know is the temptation to fit in a particular "inner ring" of society. I don't just mean high society; financial prestige tends to be tempting to only the silliest of people. The inner ring can be any group, even groups of great intellectual or spiritual value that we deem able to give us worth.

I dearly love the essay C.S. Lewis wrote about this temptation in Weight of Glory. One quote is below, and I will also link to a website where you can read the whole thing.

Such clarifying thoughts can be found here. Every time I read them, I feel permission to be a little bit lonely (in a healthy way) while I walk the earth. Lewis's words give me freedom to chase truth with more vigor, and to keep the role of community in proper perspective.

In this era of social networking and creating online personas, this essay should be required annual reading for every sincere artist/writer. Such good stuff.

http://www.lewissociety.org/innerring.php

People who believe themselves to be free, and indeed are free, from snobbery, and who read satires on snobbery with tranquil superiority, may be devoured by the desire in another form. It may be the very intensity of their desire to enter some quite different Ring which renders them immune from all the allurements of high life. An invitation from a duchess would be very cold comfort to a man smarting under the sense of exclusion from some artistic or communistic côterie. Poor man—it is not large, lighted rooms, or champagne, or even scandals about peers and Cabinet Ministers that he wants: it is the sacred little attic or studio, the heads bent together, the fog of tobacco smoke, and the delicious knowledge that we—we four or five all huddled beside this stove—are the people who know.

Oh, I can't stand it. This quote, too:

The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. It will not shape that professional policy or work up that professional influence which fights for the profession as a whole against the public: nor will it lead to those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner Ring produces. But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain.

And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that the secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.

The Fear of Angry Christian Hipsters

Recently I have heard from several friends who are intimidated by the aggression of certain members of the Christian hipster* crowd. I understand that feeling, and I would like to spend some time addressing that fear.

We live not too far down the road from a seminary where quite a few millennials seek theological training. About ten or twelve years ago, I began to notice a trend in some of the 20-30 something students who attended. When they disagreed with older, more traditional thinkers of the faith, they would respond with impatient, explosive insults and snide, disparaging remarks.

I wasn't sure how to process this criticism at first, because I agreed that some of the institutions and individuals these students were criticizing had flaws.** Yet their style of proud, verbal bullying, dismissiveness, and condescension hurt to watch.

In years since, I have seen a rapid increase in this method of rebuking traditional believers, and particularly among those who seem to place cultural relevance as a priority above orthodoxy. It is difficult for me to write that, because I am an artistic person who feels most at home in an environment that is at least a little bit bohemian. I don't tend to follow traditional beliefs on many subjects, and I tend to be rather sarcastic. However, this critical spirit seems to go beyond sarcasm, beyond satire, beyond honest banter. It is a sneering elitism that has become pervasive in Christendom.

And it's not just other people who do this. I fall into it now, too, sometimes. When I see ultra-right wing believers doing foolish things, I can get pretty ugly. I'm embarrassed by their behavior and I want to distance myself from it like a teenage kid whose dad showed up in too-short shorts and black dress socks at a school event. I forget what Lewis said about never encountering a mere mortal, and I start ripping things to shreds.

We tend to hear a lot of criticism these days about how bad the church is. Some of that criticism has been merited, to be sure, but the elephant in the room is that there is a also generation of criticizers in the church that has, in many places become, every bit as ugly the object of their criticism. This group has turned into what it hates without even realizing it.

Many believers have already experienced a taste of hipster Christian hostility, either directly or as a result of watching it directed toward others. It is a normal human impulse to want to avoid more pain, and I can understand why this negative presence in our culture has made some people hesitant to speak about matters of Orthodox faith in public at all. However, as much as I empathize with that fear, I want to use this post to encourage us to have courage to continue to talk about the truth.

When I lay my own bruises and failures aside and think about the most aggressive Christian hipsters I know, I see that many of them carry around a nagging doubt that God even exists. Some run in faith circles more out of habit than out of firm conviction. Some get their livelihood from being "Christian," and they either don't have the courage or the financial means to step away from their jobs once they realize that they have become agnostics. A loss of respect for the centrality and reliability of the Bible is rampant in this crowd, and if you take time to look underneath the outer personas of confidence and quick, biting judgments, you might see that many tend to struggle with deep spiritual disorientation.

I have a lot of empathy for those living such lives. Most of us go through seasons of doubt (I certainly have), and those seasons are frightening and painful. But in addition to the conventional dark night of the soul, hipsters have also passed through adolescence into adulthood during years when the very reality of truth was being challenged, and the resulting moral upheaval led many into early life choices that deaden and harden a heart. The sort critics I am addressing in this post haven't yet fought through all of these barriers; they haven't emerged from their dark forest of doubt into light. In fact, many have given up the battle and have just accepted that life is to be lived without solid edges.

Talking with someone who is humble and honest about this struggle evokes compassion in most of us. Sometimes our souls break and we simply collapse for a while, and that is good to admit in safe company. The disoriented become dangerous, however, when they begin to project their own spiritual numbness into the world and ask others to follow it. Instead of admitting need and seeking help until they find it, some of these critics begin to advocate a new ethic from within their existing poverty. The blind lead the blind, teaching that because nothing is very certain we must only just be kind to one another.

Hard truths about eternity are abandoned. Hard truths about sensitive social issues of our time are abandoned. Hard truths about the reality of the faith are abandoned. Hard truths about God's authority are abandoned. These critics doubt solid things and embrace certainty about doubt. Their gospel is vertigo.

Chesterton wrote about a similar (though not identical) type of person in "The Suicide of Thought" in his book Orthodoxy:

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    "We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table. We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own. Scoffers of old time were too proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be convinced. The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern skeptics are too meek even to claim their inheritance."

and then:

    "...the trouble with our sages is not that they cannot see the answer; it is that they cannot even see the riddle. They are like children so stupid as to notice nothing paradoxical in the playful assertion that a door is not a door. The modern latitudinarians speak, for instance, about authority in religion not only as if there were no reason in it, but as if there had never been any reason for it. Apart from seeing its philosophical basis, they cannot even see its historical cause. Religious authority has often, doubtless, been oppressive or unreasonable; just as every legal system (and especially our present one) has been callous and full of a cruel apathy. It is rational to attack the police; nay, it is glorious. But the modern critics of religious authority are like men who should attack the police without ever having heard of burglars."

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After years of watching this sort of engagement, I have come to think that many of the church's most severe, outspoken, hip modern critics have lost a measure of sensitivity to the Holy Spirit. They do not flinch or blush when violations of truth or goodness are presented to them; instead they allow the lukewarm principles of the spirit of our age to move in where the Spirit of God should lead instead. Embarrassed and restless with the crude, primitive nature of orthodoxy, they have kept only the pieces of Christ's teachings which allow them to blend in with the secular ethic.

The hipster critic tends make snide (often public) scoldings a regular habit. If someone expresses a viewpoint that is socially or politically unacceptable to his particular worldview, the aggressive hipster will not simply disagree with the speaker, he will villainize or insult the speaker. He will mock, attack, and quickly dismiss.

My empathetic side can see that this approach to rebuke generally grows from youthful disappointment into a fullblown cancer of cynicism. It is an odd mixture of aggression and something like sadness.  Still, these rebukes do not ring of the sweetness of God or the hope of the gospel; they ring of pride and shame. They demean opponents, impatiently demanding that others simply shut up instead of inviting them to grow in grace. And if one tries to reach out and grasp what is offered instead, there will tend to be only fog. The aggressive hipster's offering to the world tends to be, "I am more enlightened than they are," instead of, "Glory be to God."

When you are criticized by this sort of person, I hope that you will not let the confrontation discourage you. I know it hurts. That doesn't mean the rebuke you have received is necessarily valid. Maybe there is something to be learned from the criticism you receive. It's always wise to ask God to show us if He is speaking to us through our opponents. But there are also a lot of severe, wild reactions happening these days. It's quite possible that what is said to you has very little to do with a wrong you have done at all.

As thinkers like Sayers, Lewis, and Chesterton have noted, there are deep moral laws written in the universe, and it is the spirit of our time to defy them. That defiance is not only bad thinking but also bad art. Chesterton wrote:

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    "Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe. The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end."

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I think that it is possible, no probable, that many of the bad art makers of our time are trying to help the world with their self-made ethical pabulum. When people who are living in this sort of spiritual confusion encounter an unpopular but orthodox idea, it will (of course) strike a nerve inside them, for the ultimate good of the disoriented tends to be comfort. In the heat wave of an offense, these critics will often attempt to shove in and referee, trying to protect the world from hard moral conviction. This response may be good-hearted, but at times it is also dead wrong.

I agree with millennial hesitations about forwarding false, right-wing memes, political lies, and the fear-mongering that is rampant in our nation. Often I feel hostility right along side them when such things surface. Still, there will be times to speak difficult truths with wisdom.

The aggressive Christian hipster does not just take issue with propaganda, but also with sincere expressions of unpopular opinion rooted in research. It is difficult to please someone who has such an approach to relationships. Though there are many situations when a winsome approach to communicating truth can be found, when it becomes not okay for something unpleasant to ever be said, a problem arises.

Jesus told us that living life in Him would be difficult, and it is difficult now. There are many sensitive issues to be discussed that involve millions of lives. There are angry, frightened, and numb people on all sides of us. Walking through community can feel like walking through a minefield. Still, God lives inside us, and if we are attacked as we attempt to speak what He gives us, He will also bear us up through our times of opposition.

G.K. Chesterton writes, "Joan of Arc was not stuck at the cross-roads, either by rejecting all the paths like Tolstoy, or by accepting them all like Nietzsche. She chose a path, and went down it like a thunderbolt." A thunderbolt. Wow. That image is such a shock in the lukewarm spirit of our age, isn't it?  It's hard for me to even imagine that being done well. The very idea of it is offensive in our time.

There will always be a place for acts of gentleness and beauty. Such tender works are generally the best ones to embrace in these turbulent times. However, there are also situations where boldness is going to be required. We are going to have to say hard things sometimes, too. So, as you embrace the former with your everyday life patterns, I hope you will not be so afraid of the angry Christian hipster that you cannot employ the latter when the need arises.

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Art: "Joan of Arc" by Odilon Redon


NOTES:

*After reading this post, a friend wrote me asking what I considered a Christian hipster and why I was zooming in on that particular group. I thought these were great questions, so I'm including my answer to her here.

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What I am addressing here is not so much an issue of fashionable relevance (surface/style) as it is an issue of ideological foundations (deep truth).

Different versions of elitism definitely show up in different niches of Christendom, and I could have just as easily written a post about those who are stuck in a critical, stodgy anger/fury/tradition.

I think it's probably better to address these groups one at a time, because I would use different quotes, different arguments while addressing that crowd. Although there are some core similarities in the hostility produced, I think internal motivations tend to vary. For example, where I see cynicism resulting from disappointment fueling hyper-critical moderns, I generally see fear (among other motivators that I would have to unpack) fueling those who are hateful with tradition.

In terms of stylistic relevance, I work with teenagers full-time, so I spend a lot of my week adopting the fashions (external, linguistic, philosophical) of our day so that I can relate to their hearts. I don't think that sort of attempt is wrong. In fact, it can be a move like Paul in Athens, using one of the existing pagan gods to introduce the real one.

What I am seeing in certain factions of hip Christianity, though, goes beyond surface imitation of style into a philosophical imitation of hostility against truth. That is what I am attempting to address here.

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**And below is a second comment addressing the question: Why didn't you write about the obvious wrongs of the Christian Right?

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I didn't write the "Fear of the Christian Right" essay because so many people are already complaining about the errors of the right and have been for years. I wanted to start with the group aggression that isn't being talked about as much.

A complaint against the religious right is almost cliché these days. It's kind of what everybody (at least in my world) complains about, and it's really the only socially-acceptable complaint to make in the church in a lot of circles.

I'm irritated with tendencies of the extreme right too, but I have noticed that in many moderns (including myself at times) there is an increasing verbal aggression and dismissal in how those criticisms are levied. Also, the right's most hostile critics seem to be casting a wider and wider circle of blame in their dismissal of late. Not only are true, ugly, extreme right-wingers targets, but any opinion that relates to something considered right-wing is also likely to be treated with hostility. As a result, certain aspects of truth (Orthodoxy) are beginning to be dismissed as well.

Certain opponents to the right have created a culture where they have become (in many cases) the very heart of what they despise in the right, some even more hostile and dominant. It's fascinating how while fighting the self-righteous we can become the very thing we hate without even realizing it. It's a good lesson.

The Autumnal

I know what John Donne said about autumn and older women
but Elegy IX can't make the end of summer okay,
and neither can pumpkin purée.

Besides, Donne hasn't seen my eye bags
or the veins on the backs of my hands.

If he were hanging around these days,
he'd be making out with a twenty-five year old.
She would use emoticons and have a name like Chastyty.
I wouldn't like her yoga selfies
or her hashtags: #namasteyall. #alltheposes. #strong.

I'll tell you what autumn is like,
it's not recognizing your own face
when you pass it in a store window.
It's mammograms, and colonoscopies,
and Facebook dating ads featuring men
who look like your grandpa.

I bought one of those plastic chin exercisers
because I'm scared my jaw line is going to droop,
and I can't grow a beard to hide it.
Well, I can't grow one yet.
Give that a couple years.

Fall is deceptive.
It flickers whimsy and hope
tracing every edge of the world
in alizarine and gold.

It is brazen and unapologetic,
rattling the earth and shaking free
all that can be shaken.

All mortal flesh sinks down, down,
down like six-pointed ice stars
landing on warm eyelashes,
one second a child,
the next second a lover,
then a speck of dust.

I have fallen a long way,
and there are lines around my mouth to show it.

Yet here is Puck still running about the place,
full of mischief and spinning a breeze  that tickles and teases,
while the mayfly folds her little hands.

And creation shouts, "Aha!"
like a woman who looks up from a hospital bed
and sees an angel coming to take her home.

- - -
Art: "Autumn Leaves" by Isaac Levitan (1879)

Starving to Death

If you were starving to death, would you steal food? It's a rhetorical question for most of us. Unless the world changes drastically, the chances of anybody reading this actually starving to death are pretty slim.

However, looking from a slightly different angle, this is also the main question I see men and women in their thirties and forties asking. These middle years are when the idealism of our twenties wears off. They are when grown up disappointments start to take root.

I see husbands in this age group who are tired of their wives rejecting them emotionally and physically.  These men are exhausted because “she always wants me to be something I can’t be!” or because “She doesn’t respect me!” or because “She’s never interested in being my lover!" These men are starving for companionship.

I see women feeling lost in distant marriages. Sure, both partners do the work that allows basic life to happen, but underneath it all the wife is thinking, “He doesn’t take time to understand my heart. He doesn’t even know who I am anymore!” She is thinking, “I used to be an interesting person. I don't like myself anymore. Where have I gone?” She catches herself daydreaming, “I would feel so much more alive if I could be with someone like me. Someone who could adore me again." These women are starving for affection.

I see others discouraged about career and personal dreams they’ve tried to chase. These pursuits have have left a huge gap, and those who live with that gap feel exhausted and embarrassed. They cry out, “I risked everything for nothing!” or “None of this was worth what it cost!” or “They took everything I had and then threw me away!” These people are starving for a sense that all they have done is worth something in a world that feels unfair and meaningless.

Scores of adults are walking around with these questions and others like them, trying to keep going, trying to keep working, trying to keep raising children, trying to save a little here or pay off a little there, but there is a growing sense of futility to it all. And on days when the self-pep talks fade, the hunger grows so big that excuses start to form.  We become reactionary, demanding, impatient.  We can’t walk by the bakery and smell that bread baking without thinking about how easy it would be to steal a loaf.

A husband, after fifteen years of being rejected physically by a condescending, displeased wife, reaches out for a woman who sincerely wants him. A wife, after twenty years of offering her husband her heart without results, stumbles into a man online who adores her. An employee has chased an honest life dream without success too long and finally finds a way to bend integrity, cheating just enough to get ahead.

Finally, after years and years of trying, the decision is made to step around the rules somehow. And if anyone notices this and has the audacity to challenge that decision, a volcanic anger erupts. “Stop judging me! You don’t understand! I was starving! I asked for help that never came! It wasn’t fair! I had to do something to survive!”

In these excuses, a new breed of justice is created. There is a new equation, and it works like this: if I am hurting badly enough, then it’s OK to break the rules. When I am in pain, I deserve to feel relief.

I can understand why people draw those conclusions, and I have drawn them too many times myself. Still, the Bible seems to take a different route. It doesn't say, "Hey, when suffering gets too intense, you can ditch life in Christ. It calls us to die so that we can live. It urges us to run with our hunger-induced temptations back to the God who has promised to be our bread when we are starving. And as far as I can tell, that isn't always a neat little process like you see in the movies. A lot of times it's messy, confusing, and brutal. A lot of times we feel abandoned by God before we understand that he has been chasing us hard and with great love all along.

Because of this, there is a tremendous value to the seasons of life when we feel like we are starving to death. There are lessons we can learn in this very desperation that we cannot learn by reading books or by listening to sermons. Many of us have to experience this sort of raw, comprehensive need to reach the next level of knowing God and His indwelling.

During this learning process, we will likely make mistakes. Hopefully those mistakes won't do us too much harm, though sometimes terrible consequences can result from stealing to fill our bellies. Even if the consequences aren't horrific, what most of us find after stealing is that stealing doesn't fix the problem. The hunger comes back, and often it comes back even stronger. In fact after our remedies don't work, we feel even more lonely, even more unwanted, even more disillusioned with the world and how it works. To find real relief, we have to walk into the situation full on and learn the lesson the pain is teaching us.

If you are in this uncomfortable stage of life, feeling desperate and hungry, I want you to know you are not alone. This is not a bizarre trouble that is only happening to you. It’s epidemic.

If you have stolen and find yourself even more despondent and frustrated, I want you to hear that there is hope in true repentance, though the honesty that repentance requires will probably feel like dying before it feels like living.

If you are staring into the bakery window, quivering because you realize for the first time that you might be willing to take what isn’t yours, I want to just put my arms around you and let you cry on my shoulder. I know you are tired. I know your stomach hurts with a desire for a different life. I know you are disillusioned and trying not to ask questions that scare you to death.

But it’s OK. It’s OK. This is not the end of the story.

The next few months (or years) might be messy, and you might learn things about yourself that you didn’t want to know. My guess is that you probably won’t end up with a bunch of money, a new truck, a new baby, a gorgeous new spouse, or a yard full of cheering fans like those cheesy Christian movies promise. But there are treasures to be gained through this season, treasures that can never be taken from you.

Take heart, friend, and "do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you." You are standing at the doorway of discovering how mighty the gospel is and how terribly much you are loved. The present transformation that is taking place inside you is developing you into a beautiful being who will commune with God for the rest of eternity. He has a plan, even now. This is the beginning of the end of the shadowlands.

- - -

Art: "The Bread Basket" by Salvador Dali (1945)

Hogan's House of Music

Some of you know that I am the lyricist for Ron Block of Alison Krauss, Union Station. On September 25, Ron will be launching an amazing new instrumental record called Hogan's House of Music. As much as I've missed writing lyrics for Ron over the past few months, watching him work on this project has been a phenomenal experience, and I can't wait for you all to listen. He's such a gifted musician. For a preview, click here.

http://www.thebluegrasssituation.com/read/watch-ron-block-smartville

It's Lonely Down Here Where the Holiness Grows

The Bible says some part of me is already seated in the heavenlies, but I can tell that these clay legs of mine, at least, are still stuck down in the mud. It's lonely and scary  down here, and sometimes I'm tempted to find some sort of emotional release. However, like most cowards, I bend the rules instead of flat out breaking them, hoping to minimize danger.

I sin carefully because I'm too much of a wimp to take the big risks. If something I want to do might go nuclear, I tone it down a few notches. I won't steal, but I will covet. I won't divorce, but I will check out of my relationship emotionally when it wears me out. I won't murder, but I will hate.

I'm not (at least so far) the sort of person who commits the grand dirty whamboozie that lands a Christian in the hypocrite section of the evening news, but don't be impressed by that. To look for the grey areas is its own sort of sinister darkness, and to be in darkness at all is to be out of communion, for there is only light in the presence of God. His light is a jealous light that burns away distractions, and so here and there I become Eve sneaking a poisoned pear in the shadows.

But in the middle of the night, in moments when I am alone and quiet, I can feel the disparity between my present life and the comprehensive renovation that Jesus intends for me. I will catch a flicker of submission and long like Hwin to be consumed by God until I get back into the whir of the mundane, where I lose clarity. There is such clutter and noise all around me, and so few people seem to care about a radical sort of obedience that only a fool would chase if Christ isn't real.

The consuming faith of Bonhoeffer and Corrie ten Boom has been replaced with Ann Lamont's brazen, poetic excuses for faith-ish-ness. Hip, thinking believers have learned to call issues of personal morality "complex," and then deftly switch the conversation to social justice. Why? Because it's a heck of a lot easier to build a school in a third world country than it is to wait for healthy, holy intimacy in a lonely life.

I've tried to talk about this with a few of my more progressive friends, but I can tell they they think I'm just not insightful enough. They think I haven't read the right books or experienced the right heartbreak yet. They think I just don't understand how sex with the right people can be healing. They think I'm too closed-minded to see how this shared wonder is in itself an act of grace, no matter how it is obtained.

And maybe there are things I don't understand. I have been hurt in some ways, but not in all ways. What I do understand is temptation. I know how a thousand sweet excuses come in the goblin market cart, and I know how eager I can be to find a glorious reason to do a selfish, terrible thing.

I also know that my generation feels no shame about being consumeristic. When we were teenagers we were sold on a promise that doing God's will would make our lives happy. That's why so many of us were willing to worship him in the first place. But now culture is changing, and it's looking more like faith might mean deaths of a hundred sorts, so (feeling cheated) we defy God's right to determine our rights.

When he doesn't meet our demands in a timely fashion, when loving him hurts, we justify stealing. Then, when stealing doesn't work, we sulk over our breakups and bruises, licking our wounds, and blaming Him that He has let such darkness take over the earth.

In all of this we damage the community. There is so much talk these days about sex being a matter of two grown individuals making a decision, but it doesn't work that way in reality. Even private sex has communal effects. I disagree with Wendell Berry on many things, but I do love this excerpt:

"Lovers must not, like usurers, live for themselves alone. They must finally turn from their gaze at one another back toward the community. If they had only themselves to consider, lovers would not need to marry, but they must think of others and of other things. They say their vows to the community as much as to one another, and the community gathers around them to hear and to wish them well, on their behalf and its own. It gathers around them because it understands how necessary, how joyful, and how fearful this joining is. These lovers, pledging themselves to one another ‘until death,’ are giving themselves away, and they are joined by this as no law or contract could ever join them. Lovers, then, ‘die’ into their union with one another as a soul ‘dies’ into its union with God. And so here, at the very heart of community life, we find not something to sell as in the public market but this momentous giving. If the community cannot protect this giving, it can protect nothing—and our time is proving that this is so.”

 Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community: Eight Essays (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 137-8.

When people we love and trust are involved in acts of betrayal, that hurts us, because they have betrayed us all. Community means we are all intertwined, helping one another toward heaven or to hell, and our secret duplicity feeds another's cynicism. We are all weakened by the weakness of one. Nothing we do in the privacy of a bedroom stays in the privacy of a bedroom. In one way or another, our hidden truth bleeds out.

I've been so deeply hurt by watching this lately; in fact I've been almost paralyzed with grief. And it's not just because I hate sin, but because I'm tempted to give up sometimes, too. When one of my friends decides to live a false life, my own temptations feel a little more unmanageable. I feel abandoned, sad, and discouraged about trying to wait on eternity for the results of my present sacrifices. All sorts of tapes start to play in my head, and it just gets so lonely holding white-knuckled to the truth in the dark.

This loneliness was choking me this week when I began to fall in love with George Herbert (1593-1633). Herbert is one of the metaphysical poets, but until a few days ago, whenever I've had time to explore that era of poetry, I've chosen to read John Donne instead. Donne is riskier and fleshier. He writes from the middle of the fight with his passions. I identify with him more easily, because I am more like him.

At first glance, Herbert seems to write from a place of resignation. I feel a hushed, settled reverence in his writing. He doesn't nail every line as powerfully as Donne, though he does offer some mighty images. However, the greatest aspect of Herbert's work that I have found so far is that he is not ashamed to love what is pure; in fact, he digs more rich beauty out of sincere devotion than I could have imagined possible... which reveals how terribly unimaginative I have been about devotion.

I fell in love with John Donne during that young stage of faith when believers are drawn to authenticity. But where one plants, another waters, and where Donne shows me that a Christian can be a vivid, red-blooded human in struggle, Herbert is showing me that there is an even sweeter beauty beyond that.

Too much that I've read in modern faith instruction stops at authenticity. I need writers who will move me past honesty into that fork in the road that forces me to chose between twisting my struggle into excuses or yielding my struggle to a gospel which empowers me to die the deaths of the new life.

- - -

Art: "Loneliness" by Carlos Saenz de Tejada (1927)

The Punchline

If I am the punchline,

the fly in the plastic ice cube,

that guy who slips on a banana peel,

or Sylvester smashing his face into a wall;

If I am the duckbill platypus

or the Mulligan Stew

thrown together from leftover parts;

If I am the duct tape 

holding the bumper on a navy '97 Corolla,

the R.C. Cola bottle

half full of tobacco juice;

let me stand even so 

with two hands and one heart wide open,

willing to let whatever great, high humor this is

be brought full circle.

Should I be Yorick,

fellow of infinite jest

whose dry, fool skull is tossed back out of the earth

to make one last, best chuckle,

the sky will still crack

and this ache in my lungs

will still soften, 

and I will still be collected to myself

slap my knee,

fold in half with wet eyes

and laugh and laugh,

because I will have caught the joke.