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February 19, 2003
Hello everyone,
Have you ever felt jaded or cynical? Ever felt like your spiritual life was shipwrecked on the rocks? I certainly have been experiencing this a lot lately, which makes it difficult to find much inspiration or motivation to write anything of much encouragement. I decided it would be wise to see if I could find the root of the problem. I started with the basics: without God, there is no sense in what I do whatsoever. All spiritual diagnoses must start with God. I realized that the problem was stemming from my own sense of inner poverty; my own neediness and lack of intimacy and connectedness with the Father.
When I get feeling like this, I often blame it on Christianity around me, finding fault with it as a sort of scapegoat rather than taking the real “heart issue” to God, admitting my own emptiness, and together with Him looking at the core issues that breed such ignoble negativity. Perhaps my tendency toward this kind of cynical “scapegoatism” can be demonstrated in a link I recently mailed a handful of people entitled Jesus Sells: What the Christian Culture Industry Tells Us about Secular Society. This essay looks at the booming multi-billion dollar Christian industry in America, ending on a hopeful note that jarred my senses back into a realization of the many (often unlikely) avenues God can use. I have frequently looked at the commercialism I see in Christianity around me and felt disillusioned by it all, but I think, as always, the biggest problem is within me, regardless of it.
There is, of course, a time and a place to take inventory of our Christian enterprises to see if they are operating within the parameters of Biblical principles. However, such evaluations should be approached from a stance of objectivity born of a humble spirit, the sort of spirit that allows a bit of leeway, erring—if it must—on the side that provides the benefit of the doubt. During the times when we react with cynical and ugly feelings toward what we are seeing, we should probably bite our tongue and reserve our judgment for a brighter day and a bit more prayer. If we don’t, we will likely find that our feelings have colored our perception, a cauldron of caustic venom spewing from our lips.
What we really desire is relief from it all, which is ultimately a holy longing, a deeply seated discontent that God and God alone can fill. No program or presentation, no article or essay, no video or media event can ever take us there unless God speaks to us through it. We often have the best intentions, yet we keep falling short. Have you ever wondered why this is? I think a lot of it stems from the way we lead our lives.
The vast majority of us are too busy. The amount of time we spend in church, for instance, is an extremely small percentage of the total week. We spend most of our time at work or school—depending on where we’re at in our lives—and the remaining time gets eaten up in one way or another—running errands, changing diapers, making beds, doing laundry, you name it. What free time we have we tend to covet because we feel we deserve this time to unwind. So we spend this time watching television, surfing the Internet, talking on the phone to friends, reading a book, or in some way trying to escape the routine and boredom we so often feel. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as we do need a healthy amount of rest and relaxation.
However, the one thing many of us fail to budget much time for is the cultivation of our relationship with our Lord. We all know that when we spend time in prayer we find peace there. We have felt from time to time the goodness of God’s grace and known the sweetness of surrender. But we so easily forget—we have no time, after all. We forget that this helps us redeem the time we do have. Have you ever noticed how much time we waste in relentlessly telling ourselves we are wasting time? A moment of two of prayer, and much of this feeling of being overwhelmed, driven, and restless would evaporate into the peace that passeth all understanding, allowing us, for once in our lives, to unwind and truly take pleasure in the time we do have. Isn’t that really more to the core of our statement “I don’t have enough time”? Isn’t it more like “I feel so frazzled I could scream and if I could just get caught up I wouldn’t feel so frazzled”? Isn’t that closer to the truth? Doesn’t our longing have less to do with time and more to do with sanity? And what does it take to get sanity? A few moments spent in prayer certainly go a very long way. Perhaps this is why when we pray we seem to have more time. For that matter, maybe we really do have more time in a sort of miraculous way. (Hmm. That’s a question to ponder.)
Before I go further, let me say what I am not saying: I am not criticizing anyone for not doing more—being more charitable, trying to be more kind, fill in the blank. I am simply saying that the reason we often lead such bored, empty lives that are always bustling with burned out energy is that we do not take time for the holy. While we still believe very firmly in God and pledge our allegiance to Him, we do not experience the intimacy of a close relationship with Him in our lives. Deep down inside we all know how it feels to touch the heart of God, to feel the cleansing, purifying sense of His Spirit as it washes over us. We know what it is at times to be living in the flow of life, sensing that we are a part of a picture far bigger than any we could have ever dreamt of ourselves. We do not flow with the Spirit because we do not take the time to acquaint ourselves with the Spirit’s ways, we do not orient our ear to the Spirit’s still, small voice, we do not take time to be holy.
So you see, it really has very little to do with other people’s brand of Christianity: it has everything to do with a fresh touch from God. When we feel discontented, this is God calling our name. We say there must be more. This is the feeling of holy discontent, one of the ways God calls to us through the darkness. We feel bored, empty, hollow: through this God can speak: this is holy discontent. When we feel plagued by worry, anxiety, besetting doubt, the Master is calling us to trust through holy discontent. Through our holy discontent, the Master calls out to us: “Come unto me, all ye that are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). “‘If any man is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me,’ as the Scripture said, “‘from his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water’” (John 7:37–38). Yes, holy discontent. The reason we lack is because we do not ask; we do not find, because we do not seek. Yet holy discontent can lead us home: “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3).
Before I continue with my current thread of thought, allow me to digress and share some of the struggle that led to these hopeful observations. Looking back across my life history, I can see that I have always been haunted by the “God question,” even when I was in the depths of my darkest despair. I can remember one time when I came home for a visit, still a little strung out. When my mother’s eyes met mine, she involuntarily looked away. She was later to tell me she was looking into the eyes of a man who was haunted. Yes, the one thing that has remained consistent throughout my adult life is that whether I do right or wrong, I am haunted by the “God question.”
These past several weeks, I have been experiencing a tremendous bout of doubts. It can make it incredibly difficult to keep writing a Christian newsletter when you aren’t even sure what you believe anymore. One evening in particular I sat down, head in my hands, and half praying, half searching my soul, I asked myself what I believed. I mean, what I really believed. Did I believe in heaven? I wasn’t sure I could answer that question. Did I believe in God? Well, yes. At least I hoped He was real: I needed Him to be. Then the thought occurred to me: For a person who so often is plagued with doubt, you sure do spend an awful amount of time concerning yourself with spiritual matters. You sure do fuss and fret over a Christian newsletter no one forced you to start and no one is forcing you to continue. Why can’t you just turn your back and walk away? It was then, like never before, I realized I was a hopelessly haunted man. I realized there is only one direction to go, for I have traveled the other way and ended up getting nowhere. If that way led nowhere, then this way must surely lead somewhere. Otherwise, nowhere is the only destination.
I concluded that a good rule of thumb is that one should weigh the odds, pro and con, in one’s mind. If one can come up with more reasons to believe than disbelieve, he or she should act as though this were true. If he or she could come up with more reasons to disbelieve than believe, then perhaps the question should be set aside for a later time. We do this all the time in “real life.” For instance, my friend’s car stranded him beside the road. What did he do? He went through his mental checklist, knowing a bit about cars and even more specifically, the past history of this particular car. Going through the list of possible reasons, he concluded it must be the fuel pump. Acting as though this were true, because he had more reason to believe than not believe, he bought a fuel pump, put it on, and soon he realized that what he didn’t know for certain but felt he had good reason for believing—indeed, it turned out to be the truth.
Beyond this, I am convinced that if we approach life in this fashion—that when we find we have more reason to believe than not to believe something and then act as though this something is true in our quest to discern the truth—we will find, as we travel toward this destination, it will tend to automatically fine-tune and adjust itself. If the problem in my friend’s car had not been the fuel pump, he would now have narrowed the possibilities down; we all have to start someplace. I have a quotation on the Monsieur Renaissance : la page des citations page that occurred to me one morning in that period between sleep and wakefulness: “What we learn today must often be torn down tomorrow—the mountain height that looms before us today, tomorrow becomes the path trodden under our feet.” I was delighted to find a similar quotation in Moon Over Morocco Proverbs (a page of largely Muslim sayings): “Even the loftiest of mountains begins on the ground.”
No, the point remains: we have to start somewhere, and in a world where very little can be proven beyond doubt, we can at least ask ourselves if we have more reason to believe than not to believe, and if so, we can then act as though it were true until our life further refines this “act of faith” into the experience of knowing through living: through practical life experience, or wisdom, as we would say. Does this not fit in with one of the myriad of meanings in my friend’s statement I mentioned last week: “So many just follow, and few search”? You have to start your search at the bottom of the mountain, but you don’t have to stay there. However, many people never seem to get off the ground.
So I was to the point of despair, uncertain of what I believed anymore. I realized, however, that there was something that was always true about my life. In fact, it was the very thing that drove me to ruin in the first place. It was the despair that there was no God “up there,” that my actions meant nothing, that the only consequences I would ever suffer existed solely in the here and now—incarceration maybe, a bullet through the head perhaps? and then the lights would go out: another addict gone to an early grave in a meaningless world where God did not exist except as the figment of unenlightened people’s imaginations. My life had no meaning because my life had no God. I stopped praying. I stopped believing. And I stopped living. I was a mere ghost peering out from behind sunken eyesockets. I was a haunted man.
In my introduction to the second half of the feature article in Age of Auden, Part II, I first use a quotation from the text, then continue:
. . . Not too long afterward, he [Auden] wrote of his conviction that Jesus is Lord: “I believe because he fulfills none of my dreams, because he is in every respect the opposite of what he would be if I could have made him in my own image.” But why not one of the other great teachers, like Buddha or Muhammad? Because, Auden wrote, chillingly, “none of the others arouse all sides of my being to cry ‘Crucify Him.’” . . .
I always used to wonder why it was that Jesus warned His followers that they would be persecuted for His sake, that others would hate them because of Him. How could such a gentle, caring, and compassionate man who never did anything but help others arouse such hostility? Yet, in my own way, I hated Him too. I now realize, however, that this hatred—often manifesting in the way I used to bitterly spew His name from my lips any time something happened that even slightly inconvenienced me—was due to my own blind rebellion. There are really only two gods: on the one hand there is God, on the other ourselves; most of us would prefer to worship ourselves. God cramps our style and shows the truth where it is most unwelcome, namely in revealing that the worship of the latter is at the root of all evil. Show me the most evil man you can find; I’ll show you a man consumed with his own selfishness. The two are inseparably linked.
Most people prefer to gather around them a great number of “teachers” to say what their itching ears want to hear. Jesus, on the other hand, claims that the world hates Him because He testifies against it saying that its deeds are evil; He doesn’t tell people what they want to hear, He tells them the truth, for it is the truth and only the truth that will ever set them free. Indeed, this is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Light’s very nature is to expose the secrets hidden in the darkness, like the child who flips on the light and watches all the frightening creatures go scurrying back to their dark sanctuary under his bed.
Yes, whenever we feel hatred for something, we can rest assured it has gotten us, sunken its claws into our hide and won’t let go. We do not hate when we do not care. And hence, the one thing I felt so many intense, burning emotions about was my loss of faith: this issue of never knowing for sure whether God exists: this issue of deciding that I had fewer reasons to believe than to not believe. But when you decide you have fewer reasons to believe than not believe, there is still that haunting margin of doubt: a doubt largely devoid of hope.
Many atheists and others who loudly decry God have actually been raised around Christianity and have become disillusioned with it, not because they believe it intellectually inferior, but because of the way they saw it portrayed. Perhaps even more than this, they have held high expectations of God and have been angered and deeply hurt when their prayers seemingly went unheard and unanswered. They reason, “God can do anything. He could have kept my mother from dying of cancer. But He didn’t. If that is the way God is, I want no part of Him!” Again, we have to listen to what they are not saying, rather than getting taken in by the surface anger. The heart of the issue is usually an issue of a wounded heart, not an intellectual objection, though it will often be camouflaged in these trappings. In fact, many skeptics are sincerely convinced of the contrary, believing they have purely intellectual grounds for dismissing God. Perhaps they do, but often there are also deeper emotional issues involved than they care to admit.
It would seem that often those who are the most blasphemous are in many ways the ones who care the most. These are the ones who, when and if God ever does get a hold of their lives, fulfill the expression: “The worst sinners always make the best saints.” All that anger, all that hostility, all that rage is a dead giveaway that there is someone who is haunted by the “God question,” as I have been all my life. And very often it is the person you least like to be around and would least expect. Take Ted Turner, for example, the mega power behind CNN, well known for his caustic stance toward Christianity. Many evangelicals can’t say enough bad things about this man and not without good reason. Yet did you know that, according to the well-written article God Bless Ted Turner: The Mogul among the “Losers”:
Turner really was a deeply religious boy, despite his father’s emotional abuse. He intended at one point to become a missionary. Then, when he was a teenager, his younger sister Mary Jane contracted a form of lupus, and suffered terribly before dying a relatively short while later. All his prayers for her recovery—an hour a day, he said—were for naught.
“She used to run around in pain, begging God to let her die,” he recalled. “My family broke apart. I thought, ‘How could God let my sister suffer so much?’”
These events happened nearly half a century ago, but he speaks of them as if they had occurred last week. Though none of the journalists pressed him on the point, Turner, who has described himself publicly at times as either an atheist or an agnostic, began talking as if he were justifying himself at a tribunal.
“Look at my philanthropy!” he said. “The Bible says it’s better to give than receive. I sponsored that religious conference at the United Nations. It cost me $600,000.”
Do you hear a soul in hell, a soul haunted by the “God question”? You see, whatever you think about spirituality, it is not a mild affair. In fact, it would seem that most of us seem to think it is quite important in one way or another: either we hate it, we love it, or like me, we feel an ambivalent mixture of both. There was an entry several years ago in RBC’s devotional Our Daily Bread on Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the famous late atheist. See if this is not the portrait of a woman who, during her lifetime, was also haunted by the “God question”:
Madalyn Murray O’Hair was perhaps the most notorious atheist of the 1900s. Often profane and sarcastic, she was a powerful debater who shouted down her religious opponents.
After O’Hair mysteriously disappeared in 1995, her diaries were auctioned to pay back taxes she owed the federal government. They reveal an unhappy human being who didn’t trust even the members of the American Atheists Association. She passed this harsh judgment on herself: “I have failed in marriage, motherhood, and as a politician.” Yet she yearned for acceptance and friendship. In her diary she wrote six times, “Somebody, somewhere, love me.”
What was it that made Madalyn Murray O’Hair feel she couldn’t place her trust in God? What was it that made her answer the “God question” the way she did? I don’t know. Maybe research would reveal the answer. But no one becomes a dedicated atheist without first considering the “God question.” We may say he has not considered it deeply enough or that he has closed his mind to its possibilities and we may very well be right in saying so. But we can rest assured that on some level he has considered this question. And it is this portrayal of the least likely candidate considering deeply the question that makes Flannery O’Connor’s stories tick. She loved to take a character who claimed a superficial faith and show it to be hollow, inferior even to the antagonist who was belligerent and sacrilegious.
You see, sacredness is really only sacred when it meets the grime and dirt of reality. Sacredness that cannot touch filth is useless. When it does connect, it is not only practical, but beautiful as well. In fact, all beauty must in some way connect to flesh and bone to be considered beautiful: again, we see the picture of the sacred meeting the mud and dust of reality. The sacred must connect to the Source which makes all things beautiful in their time.
I suppose if I had a bone to pick with Christianity as I sometimes see it represented, it is that Christians can easily fall into a way of thinking where they see themselves as high and mighty, untouched and untouchable by “the world.” (To my shame, I too have been among these ranks.) Such persons, however, not only come across as being arrogant, but their theology is backward. The very Lord we serve occupied the servant’s place, just as He expects us to do. We are absolutely no different than anyone else in the world except that by the grace of God we are being made new, plugged into a “tower of power” that provides us the strength to hold our head high in quiet dignity when the trials of life come crushing down. As our progenitors have said so wisely for so many years, “There, but by the grace of God, go I.” The gratitude we feel when we realize this truth is the impetus that spurs us on to want to make a very real and positive difference in the lives of those we see around us. We are no different, we are no better, we simply know the One who knows all answers. This is an important point, by the way.
We who claim to know The Answer, nonetheless do not know all answers—we should not act as though we do. The thing that gives us our winsomeness in the eyes of a watching world is that we know the One who has all knowledge; when the storms of life swirl around us, as storms of life do, the difference in our lives and theirs is that we endure the storm with a quiet dignity and grace—an assurance born of our time-tested faith. We too have been haunted by the “God question,” yet we have connected to its source: the holy discontent we feel has carried us beyond. Yet we still do not know all answers. We do, however, know the One who does. It is our daily dependence on Him that makes us stand strong and tall, ordinary mortals in every sense of the word, yet showing supernatural fortitude and courage in the teeth of trial and affliction. This is God’s specialty, to take ordinary mortals like you and me and transform us, a day at a time, throughout a lifetime, into creatures that radiate His glory. This is the sacred meeting the grime and filth of reality.
Throughout the pages of history, we see this same thing happening. The nation of Israel was a nation of nomads, wanderers, homeless persons aimlessly combing the hot desert sands. We read the similarities in the literature of the people who surrounded them and see how it parallels the bible. Doubt enters our mind and we wonder, “Did the Jewish people simply lift these stories from other cultures?” But we’re looking at it all wrong. What we have is a picture of the sacred entering the flesh and blood reality of the world. We would expect a certain sameness in the Jewish people and their neighbors. They are ordinary mortals. But the other thing we would expect to find, we do: Their God is a little different than the other gods of the other peoples. Their God is really their only difference and a huge difference at that. This is the sacredness amidst the mundane reality, the fire that turns an ordinary bush into a message board of the holy.
We read that our Christmas and Easter celebrations have pagan origins, that even our marriage ceremony with its rings and its veil can be traced back to the customs of the Greco-Roman world. We wonder, “Should we continue to observe these holidays? They do originate from pagan sources, after all.” Yet we have it all wrong. Of course the holidays are going to be reflective of pagan culture. Where did Christianity grow its deepest roots if not in the Western world, pagan to its core? Yet the difference is not the dirt and grime, for we are inescapably bound to this element: we are no different than anyone else in the entire world, we are no less pagan. The difference is once again found in God. The pagan holidays, like the atheist who comes to Christ, have been revitalized, transformed, given new meaning. Yes, you could say it is the same old pagan holidays, just as you could say it is the same old atheist. But you would be overlooking the obvious difference: God.
In the world we see around us, many people are haunted by the “God question.” Many believers are filled with holy discontent. What we are all in search of is God, the great equalizer. Otherwise, all of our Christian merchandise is only so much commercialism, our Christian churches are only so much beautiful architecture, our Christian message is only so much carefully crafted rhetoric. Without God, life is hollow and devoid of all meaning. How about you? Are you haunted by the “God question?” Do your dark times of doubting, worry, anxiety, fear, despair: do these times reveal that this idea of God must be really important to you? As I was sitting there, my head in my hands, wondering what it was I believed, I came to a simple answer in response to the “God question.” God, if You are there, walk with me so that I may feel Your presence. Then You and I together can conquer all fears, doubts, trials, afflictions, and when we have stood throughout all of this, together we can conquer death, the final enemy. Do I believe in heaven? Yes, as long as I can believe in God. All things hinge from our response to the “God question”; a hinge, though small, is a vital part of a door. It doesn’t matter how rational, how sound, how solidly nailed together that door may seem, if the hinge falls apart, the door is worthless. How about you, my friend? Does your door have hinges?
God bless,
Eric
Jesus said to the man, “If you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes.” Immediately the father of the child cried out and said with tears, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”
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