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July 26, 2006
Hello everyone,
Rome was not built in a day. Most of us have heard this expression before, and if we know anything at all about this ancient civilization, we know that at one time it was one of the greatest empires the world has ever seen. Historians tell us that in and of themselves—if we may speak very generally here—the Romans were not particularly skilled at any one given thing; rather, they were adept at implementing what other cultures had developed, and adroit—shrewd even—in their organizational skills, making for one of the strongest and best organized militaries the ancient world had ever known. They learned from the cultures they conquered, the Greek sense of aesthetic perhaps the best known adaptation that was in turn synthesized into a distinctively Roman style, utility and beauty wed together into one. Thus we say with meaning, Rome was not built in a day.
We have also heard it said that all great things in life take time. Or that haste makes waste. And while we are perhaps not connoisseurs of fine wines, we have at the least all read on occasion that vintage bottles fetch handsome prices because they have been “aged to perfection.” Most probably we ourselves do not have such discriminating palates, but those who do assure us that through the process of time—and under the right circumstances (a consideration scarcely to be overlooked)—aging can bring out the very finest the fruit of the vine has to offer. Now certainly the right kinds of grapes also have to be used in the right kinds of ways: the subtlety and nuance of flavor takes both time and careful preparation.
But then there is the business of our lives. They are, in many ways, very ordinary. So much of life, it seems, consists of mind-numbing ordinariness. We go about doing ordinary things in ordinary ways, ordinary people whose few highlights in life might be what movie we get to see on the weekend or the anticipation of an hour or two off from the kids. That we grow at all seems remarkable, for there is nothing obvious in our environments that would lend itself to growth. Even speaking in spiritual terms, we cannot sustain any kind of prolonged sense of the sacred either, without coming back down to earth. Most of us, it seems, are a bit like the late poet W.H. Auden, whose mind, as Wilfred M. McClay quotes in Grappling with God: The faith of a famous poet, “potter[s] / from verses to sex to God / without punctuation.” But you know, I am becoming increasingly convinced that it is precisely in this dull and tedious land of everyday things and everyday events that true spiritual formation really takes place. The mountaintops are the breakthroughs, but they are not the norms and they are often the culmination of long periods of seeming stagnation and blandness. Do you imagine the aging of fine wine seems in itself very exciting?
Let us pause here, however, and reconsider, for we may not all be on the same page even yet. Many of you have heard about the great uproar surrounding the Episcopal Church and the worldwide Anglican Communion. You have probably also heard—perhaps seen from the inside—that similar issues have been afoot very recently in both the Methodist and Lutheran Churches here in the United States as well. Shortly before the General Convention held this June in Columbus, Ohio, the clergy at Christ Church were I attend officially recommended A Church Asunder written by Peter J. Boyer and published in the April 17, 2006, issue of the New Yorker. One single article, essay, or in our case newsletter, cannot possibly cover all bases; our purpose here is not to launch an extended discussion on human sexuality and the Christian church: there have been many other excellent articles written on the topic (including the one just mentioned) and there will be many more to follow I am sure. For that matter, we are not even as interested in the Episcopal Church in general, except insofar as it provides a profile of trends in contemporary theology and the various manifestations of those professing the Christian faith. As an Anglican priest and seminary provost commented in a church in which a friend and I were recently honored guests, what we see in the Anglican Church is really representative in many ways of what we see globe wide for contemporary Christianity. He characterized all churches as having a fault line running through their middle in which one side looks to a much more traditional understanding of the faith whereas the other has far more progressive ideals in view; he claims that these sides have more in common with each other across denominational divides than with those on the opposite side within their own respective communion. Even the Church of Rome, he claims, is not immune to this dualism, though he suggests it is (in his own words) “papered over” a little bit better there than in its Orthodox and in particular Protestant counterparts.
Let me say one other thing about the Anglican priest: he suggested that at the 2006 General Convention (in which he served as a member of the clergy) that there was a third type of representative there as well: those who were somewhere in the middle who were trying to be peacemakers. He clearly identified himself with one side of the spectrum much more so than the other and saw the middle position as being noble in some ways and spineless in others. For that matter, no matter what subject we wish to mention, the middle position is often seen as ineffectual (and not always without reason) for its lack of taking a clear and definite position as those on either divide would so like it to do. In any event, let us add this third category to Christianity in the large, suggesting that while there may be a warring duality, there is also a middle ground as well. We cannot very well understand any middle positions, however, until we understand some of the basic views we bring to the table. And let us also confine our discussion to those who are working within a recognizable framework of the Christian faith, even if those on the other side of the Christian spectrum believe these representatives either carry issues too far or not far enough. In other words, we are not here concerned with what Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or other such believers are doing within the confines of their respective faiths. We are concerned with those who would be seen by the impartial observer as being representatives of that two-millennia-old religion known as Christianity in all its many manifestations.
What is perhaps ironic about the Anglican Church is that it was itself designed to be a middle way. If we look at the setting of a war-torn England and a great unease between the Puritans and the Catholics, we can far better appreciate Queen Elizabeth’s genius. Even those who have little use for the Christian faith admire the resourcefulness with which she proposed a united church (and of course by extension inroads toward a united continent). What was her secret? Boyer characterizes it simply: “Believe what you want, just use this book,” meaning The Common Book of Prayer. Boyer’s characterization of Queen Elizabeth’s stance should not be interpreted to mean “believe just anything,” however: it should be seen for the historical artifact that it is. What “believe what you want” would have accomplished in Elizabethan England would be the freedom to view Christianity from a High Church, Mid Church, or Low Church perspective as you wish, so long as you rally around this text which will provide unity to your ceremonies amidst the differences in your theological persuasions. The fact that the sources for the Common Book of Prayer were ultimately derived from the Orthodox Church (via the Scottish rites) is telling, for of all the traditions of Christianity, the Orthodox alone have managed to escape all but unscathed, the Church’s greatest sin its pride, and assuming that pride to be of the wholesome sort, it is deservedly proud, for it has withstood the ravages of time perhaps best of all those of apostolic descent (though there is that less than glamorous split circa 1054 between East and West).
In any event, Queen Elizabeth’s goal was to provide a place where both the Puritan and the Catholic could feel at home (provided, of course, that they were willing to see these different perspectives under the new banner of Anglicanism rather than the former designations in whose name blood was spilled). That idea is still preserved in the Anglican Church, where the Eucharist, or Lord’s Supper, is said to embody the “Real Presence,” a term purposely left undefined so that the (more notably Catholic) believer who subscribes to transubstantiation (belief in the literal transformation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ) can understand it in this way, whereas his or her (typically Protestant) neighbor who has been taught that the elements are merely outward symbols of an inner transformation can understand it to mean something like “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am also” (Matthew 18:20). With this understanding of the Real Presence, Christ is literally present in some way, though there is an intentional omission when it comes to defining in exactly what way. This open-endedness is further embodied in the liturgy, where, when presenting the communal wafer, the priest or celebrant solemnly intones, “The body of Christ, the bread of heaven,” and when handling the chalice, “The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation.” The opening statements of the liturgy of the sacraments would seem familiar to the Catholic, whereas the Puritan would feel more at home with the symbolic understandings offered in the latter clauses.
So as Boyer writes, Queen Elizabeth set forth on the one hand (a) liturgical unity, and on the other what the Anglicans call (b) comprehensiveness, the idea that the body and bride of Christ is catholic (universal) in scope—comprehensive—and that all who have been bought by the blood may participate in the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. Or at least, that is what comprehensiveness has sometimes meant. However, Boyer writes:
The big-tent tradition of Anglicanism—what its churchmen call “comprehensiveness”—made the faith especially hospitable to the theological innovations that moved through the Western Christian churches with particular force in the last half of the twentieth century. This new thinking tended to deëmphasize sin and salvation, favoring a progressive theology of social justice and the affirmation of the individual self. . . .
This kind of trend was all but inevitable. We will cite three full paragraphs from Boyer’s article, before we move on to our topic at hand, which, as we have promised, really does not have any direct connection with Anglicanism except insofar as the latter is a microcosm of a much larger picture. We will also take the liberty to label the two poles of Queen Elizabeth’s plan (a) for liturgical unity and (b) for comprehensiveness so that we can get the most “comprehension” out of our reading, pun Freudian but telling:
In the current Anglican conflict, echoes can be heard of a larger struggle within Christianity that has been happening for more than a century. With the advance of science and the growing acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution, key theologians and churchmen concluded by the early twentieth century that the old faith had been essentially disproved. They began to imagine a more reasonable Christianity—one less insistent on miracles, resurrections, and a transcendent God who directed human history from a heavenly remove. Higher Criticism informed a new understanding of the historical Jesus; the Hegelian dialectic shaped a new image of an immanent and impersonal God, an unknowable force whose will was worked through human progress.
The new theology met stout resistance within the churches. The “modernist-fundamentalist controversy” of the nineteen-twenties split some of the mainline Protestant denominations, and eventually gave rise to the modern evangelical movement. The Episcopal Church, because of its (a) liturgical unity and (b) comprehensiveness—Elizabeth’s notion: Believe what you want, just use this book—was better able to absorb the new thinking, or, at least, to mask it. “Under the guise of (b) Anglican comprehensiveness, and under the cover of (a) Anglo-Catholic worship and liturgy, this alien religion took root in the Western Anglican world,” says Leslie Fairfield, a professor of church history at Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry, a Pennsylvania seminary with an evangelical orientation. “The idea was ‘Keep all the same words, change all the meanings, but don’t tell the laypeople.’”
It was an Anglican scholar and bishop, John A. T. Robinson, who inspired the “God Is Dead” vogue of the nineteen-sixties, with the publication of his best-selling “Honest to God,” which posed the question: “Now that we have rejected the ancients’ view of God living in a material heaven above the actual sky, what does God’s existence mean?” His theological heir, Bishop Spong, of Newark, published a provocation that he called his “Twelve Theses” [in the book Why Christianity Must Change or Die]—a call to a new Christianity that rejected the divinity of Christ, the virgin birth and bodily resurrection, and most of the rest of traditional Christian doctrine. The central belief of Christian orthodoxy—the substitutionary atonement of Christ on the Cross—Spong, now retired, pronounced “a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God.” (A Church Asunder)
The Anglican priest who mentioned two camps in all of Christendom, I believe, would sanction the above as the place in which he would draw the line between the camps, not just in the Episcopal Church, but in Christianity at large. We could draw it in other places, probably: for example, if we wanted a slightly more superficial analysis, the character Neo in Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian remarks: “the liberal churches are more free in their thinking and more rigid in their methodology, liturgy, and such. Conservatives are generally rigid in their thinking but more free in their methodology” (148). But if we start talking about “conservative” and “liberal,” we are likely to wind up in sharp dispute when we may not even disagree, for we tend to draw the lines even of these labels differently depending on our initial frame of reference. So then, to be abundantly clear, let us draw the line between two different emphases within the Christian faith and for the sake of discussion, let us go with the more extreme cases. On the one hand within the Christian spectrum is an almost exclusive emphasis on personal salvation and heavenly reward; on the other, the spectrum of social causes is championed to the virtual exclusion of all else: feeding the poor, nursing the sick, defending civil liberties, and the advocacy of advocacy in various other forms. The one stresses a Christianity in which the central importance is spiritual transformation and holiness and the oppressive power of sin is sternly denounced, the other emphasizes accepting others exactly as they are and being accepting one of another while speaking out strongly against social injustice and greed. Again, one focuses on the social gospel—the plight of the poor, the curing of sickness, the general expression of goodwill, and the stewardship of the planet—the other focuses on the salvation of souls and the coming kingdom: put simply, one looked almost exclusively at the here and now, the other almost exclusively at the world to come. That is where we will draw our line and it is upon this line that I will lay down my wee “wittle” head and risked having it thwacked off.
To my mind, while I certainly do understand the leanings toward the here and now and find myself more and more drawn in that direction (some of my previous newsletters from years gone by, for instance, are almost loathsome to me now because they seem excessively heavy-handed in the other direction), I also believe that Christianity is not fully and totally Christian if it does not look at any resurrection or any life to come. Certainly the teachings of Christ and the various epistles have much to say to the here and now—they speak of cups of cold water, the feeding of the hungry, the provision for orphan and widow—but they do not merely stop there, else there would be very little separating Christianity from any other form of benevolent spirituality. For some, of course, that is the point exactly: Christianity is mainly a viable option insofar as it accords itself with other faiths. That is fine, I suppose. I do not believe that the Lord turns aside any who are earnestly seeking. But I do think that the heart of Christianity balances on the horizontal AND the vertical. The great Christian hope has long been the world to come; the power source has always been the belief that the Father is all-powerful and cares for His fragile, earth-bound people, listening to their prayers and that the believer is uniquely empowered by the Holy Spirit, namely through that same life of prayer that connects them with the Father through the intercession of the Son. Now I do not say that I always am so tightly in sync with Christianity in all of these senses: I am as inclined on the one hand to pass by the needy and on the other to question the presentational aspects of the Christian creeds as any other fallible human being alive. But I have also seen and lived both sides of what I am calling authentic Christianity and in my heart I believe them both to be true: my vote, unsurprisingly, is for the middle way.
For example, I do believe that both Jesus and the Father are very real and I do ultimately believe in the world to come. I believe these things mainly based on my own experiences, hardly an infallible guide, but one that has also been attested to and affirmed by countless others throughout the centuries, as is evidenced by the vitality of Christianity all these many years later. (I am surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses.) I do not believe in always being nice-ity nice and accepting of every little thing, for while many things in life are merely foibles (and a great many believers cannot seem to tell the difference between the two), other things—which Christianity has traditionally called sins—I believe are truly unhealthy and it is not true love that turns a blind eye to them (though I am nevertheless very inclined to do so for at least three reasons: (1) it is the tolerant thing to do and certainly preferable to an excessively heavy-handed approach, (2) I am not a saint and thus am hardly qualified to be pointing out things in your life when my own is in such a sorry state of affairs, and (3) I do not always have either the love or the vision to stand for what I believe in my heart is right).
Though I have wrestled with the question many times and likely will wrestle with it again before I draw my last breath, I also believe that Jesus is the sole avenue to the Father. The picture that I have of Jesus, however, is not Jesus the Jewish rabbi (as truly fascinated as I am by that picture), but Jesus the Christ: One glorified and risen and uniquely qualified to judge the hearts of men. As the Christ, Jesus has a heart of love, which necessitates things like justice (standing up for what is right and having a clear sense that there is a real difference between justice and injustice) and virtue (aspects like truth and integrity) along with the properties we much tend to prefer like compassion and mercy. Though I do believe He is the only way to the Father, I also believe He turns no one aside, whether they know/knew to call on Him or ask of Him in this life: I think Him far less concerned with protocol and the knowledge of His name and much more concerned with the human heart. This means that though He is in my mind the only way (exclusivity), the single way (the Narrow Gate that few find in life) through which all may journey to the Father, nevertheless none in this life or the next will be turned aside who desire entrance (wide open and inclusive). However, that is not to say that there will not be those who will turn away, just as in this life there are those who turn away from God. I confess that these beliefs separate me to greater or lesser degree from a lot of Christians, not just in America, but worldwide. They have to do with my ultimate faith in Christ’s mercy and His compassion; “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” and grace never has been based on merit even though “faith works.” My beliefs have even more to do with the Jesus I have come to know and love and the testimony of my own heart. I have a doctor friend who is grieving the loss of a patient, a single mother still quite young, who committed suicide in a particularly gruesome fashion a few days ago. My friend thought that this woman would finally be at peace now, though a co-worker wondered aloud if the issue of suicide might be a factor suggestive of the contrary. These were my words to her (in part):
Theologically speaking—in fact, throw theology out the window. What I believe in my heart is this: Christ turns no one aside: it is we who turn away. And I believe the gate is described as narrow, not because Christ is an exclusivist who will yield Himself up only to the initiated, so to speak, but (a) because He really is the only way (though He turns no one aside: “whosoever wills” is welcome, in this life and the next) and (2) because so few find Him in life and the peace and contentment He offers. And I do not think He loved us enough to die for us “while we were yet sinners” only to turn around and cast us into the outer darkness because we did not see clearly and stumbled: He is the Way, the Truth, and the Light and this is not His way. I repeat again: it is my conviction that if we wind up in hell, it will be because we put ourselves there very intentionally, it will not be merely an oversight or due to a moment of human weakness (such as believing that the pain of this life is too great to bear—the One who Himself cried, “Elohai, Elohai, why hast Thou forsaken me?” surely understands such human frailty). The price has already been paid and I do not believe our Lord takes any delight in giving people “what they deserve.” If He can forgive those who crucified Him because “they do not know what they do,” then I should think He would have it in His heart to forgive a woman who “did not know what she did” in taking her own life. No mother who is seeing the world clearly leaves behind three children: those who take their own lives are never well.
So you see, in many ways I am more in the camp of the social Gospel, and yet not really. For though my views may differ from other believers, I do strongly believe that the answer to life is Jesus the Christ, not because of fear for my soul’s well-being, but precisely the opposite: for the sake of entrusting my soul in love to the one who first loved me. The answer to life is Jesus the Christ because He is the way to the Father, because in Him I find that Narrow Gate to eternal life in both the here and now as well as any worlds to come. So then, I do believe that justice for the oppressed and all aspects of the social gospel in the here and now are important. But these are not my ONLY focus. Perhaps it is as a friend said to me not so long ago: we must walk in what we can accept. (How can we do more?) If all that we hear of the Gospel that we can understand and respond to is the social aspects, then let us respond without hesitation, and—with God’s help—magnanimity of heart. No one should try to guilt us into more, for that is not their place: they may testify of truth beyond and deeper relations, for to testify is to speak of what one has experienced. But there is a difference between such testimony with which the Spirit also bears witness and the forcing of ideas on others before they are ready to hear them. Fine wine takes time; haste makes waste; Rome was not built in a day. It may be hoped that in His own way and in His own time—we can pray sooner than later—the Risen Christ will quicken our hearts and our minds to move levels deeper—to move closer to His heart—so that we may find inner sanctuary, and in this inner sanctuary find faith—the only place faith will ever be found—which is the evidence of things unseen, both in our vision of the world in which we now live as well as our assurance of a continued existence with Him in the world to come. Doctrines, however true, will never convince us by themselves, though the testimony of our own hearts may in time beat in correspondence with that of the Risen Christ, who is alive and who extends His invitation to all. Amen.
But there is one last aspect we do well to cover before leaving off today and it has to do with this inner sanctuary. We have said that faith will only be found here in this inner place and that is true. Our fickle minds will never assure us of anything, for they tend to be rocked to and fro on the uncertain waves of life. But time spent with God in continual communion—as constant as we are able—will begin to instill in us a confidence in things unseen, bearing a kind of testimony far more valuable than empiricism offers to the senses. I am reminded of a quotation I recently read from Thomas Merton in an excerpt from Richard John Neuhaus’ new book Catholic Matters: Confusion, Controversy, and the Splendor of Truth in which Neuhaus, editor in chief of the excellent First Things, the Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life and former Lutheran pastor who became Catholic in 1990 and a priest in 1991, takes a critical look at his beloved faith. Specifically, the quotation he cites from Merton is talking about the Gregorian chant, but we will sabotage Merton’s meaning for our own insidious purposes, crafty devils that we are:
It is an austere warmth, the warmth of Gregorian chant. It is deep beyond ordinary emotion, and that is one reason why you never get tired of it. It never wears you out by making a lot of cheap demands on your sensibilities. Instead of drawing you out into the open field of feelings where your enemies, the devil and your own imagination and the inherent vulgarity of your own corrupted nature can get at you with their blades and cut you to pieces, it draws you within, where you are lulled in peace and recollection and where you find God.
Yes, it is precisely in this place where the Gregorian chant draws Merton that we are most interested at present. We may very well save the planet, feed the hungry, and shelter the poor—and these things are not to be slighted or minimized! for they are of grave importance—but without this kind of inner communion, their lives—our lives—will lack that inner tranquility and peace that we all so long for and desire. But again we are reminded of just how ordinary we are, that inner mocker of which Kathleen Norris speaks giving us no rest. We do not live remarkable lives, most of us. Most of us cannot sustain a spiritual perspective for any length of time before being plunged back into the banality of our own lives where most of us are like Auden, our thoughts freely flitting from elements unquestionably sublime to things beyond question debauched. We are not a spiritual people no matter how much we may pretend otherwise. We need God.
I penned a short note to my sister-in-law recently in which I spoke about an aspect I think must be true about the Kingdom of God. I believe that the picture I have occasionally glimpsed is one profoundly simple and that is why many of us miss it. Allow me to excerpt most of what I have written her (accompanied by minor corrections), not because it offers any great eloquence, but simply because it seems most succinctly to capture what we have been trying to say all along:
I am certain there are times that the wide-open emptiness of the Kansas plains seems but a mirror: at least, I could easily picture myself seeing it in that way. In fact, I have been feeling that way to some degree and have certainly felt that way often enough in life. I have begun to see life somewhat differently as of late, though. It seems that among the types of Christians I encounter these days, many tend to be contemplatives. In some instances, that means what at least appears to be self-inflation and exaltation over very humble trappings indeed, making the oversight even more glaring. But in many cases, it is as though these believers have somehow managed to take the solitude and the wide-open spaces of their lives and transcend them. I do think I understand that in some small way, even if I too rarely feel I realize it.
Maybe it is because I went through a very dark stretch from about December to not so long ago. The truth is, I very nearly lost my faith altogether, though I honestly could not tell you why. And it seems that in this season of life, my faith has become simpler but stronger: still far from consistent and I am very much aware of how unspiritual I remain. But in a rare moment a week or so ago as I was lying in bed, I felt as is God told me that my problem was that my heart was broken. That seemed odd to me, for my heart certainly did not feel broken. But as days have followed, there have been many indications that if not broken, at the least there is much that I carry inside, unaware of or unable or unwilling to release. I have found that in facing those things as they surface—looking the emptiness of my life full in the face—that I have begun to find a new level of rest, contentment, and unburdened faith unlike any I have had in a long time. I suppose that these are the ingredients of a compassionate and “aromatic” life: there does not seem to be any way to acquire true spiritual riches without facing one’s own inner poverty.
And I think to some degree—I do not think I am inventing this idea—to be more spiritual means to be less overtly spiritually minded in many ways: it means to be more child-like and therefore more self-forgetful. (Lots of very “spiritual” people are actually pompous windbags.) I think that though the wide-open spaces can seem a mirror, they can also be the beginnings of a truer freedom as well. It will scare a person to death, for it means a further letting go, but what it is really doing behind the scenes is paring away even more of those things that do not really matter—one cannot help but adopt some degree of “spiritual” (and thus potentially trite) language—and it is these things we associate with “the self.” That is to say, we see such things as comprising our identity and our worth and we fear that by losing them, we will lose ourselves and our reason for being. What we do not see in the painful process is that far from losing our identity and worth, we are in the very process of finding it.
I do, sometimes, feel that I understand something of the Kingdom of God: it really is much different than we often have in mind and much sweeter, though not in a way we would necessarily expect. I suppose what I most have in mind is that we become attached to our quote-unquote baggage and the Kingdom of God, I believe, is about ridding us of all of it: every last little bit. I think in many ways during such times we are losing ourselves, but it is in this act that we also paradoxically find ourselves. It is the difference between the self of our own creation and the self we were created to be: the difference between bodies of clay and celestial beacons of beauty and light.
How much of this related to my sister-in-law I do not know. But it certainly reflects where my own thoughts have been as of late. And it is maddening to me that I cannot long seem to maintain any sustained spirituality: my mind reverts to the gutter so quickly. Yet even here, I feel as though in the relative silence and the stillness of this house as the air-conditioner hums away, the fan serenades me softly at my feet, and the mouse—click, click—reveals its mechanized infrastructure, I have learned something of life.
I spend much of my life in solitude and I do not often mind that: I have grown quite used to my own company, a companion that at times I would like to rap upside the head, but in general with whom I get along quite well. But then again, we do not always talk about serious things either: I mean really serious things. Rather, we often distract ourselves in thousands of small ways. That is not all bad. Life is a rhythm: breathe in, breathe out—we need the external world to keep us sane as much as we need solitude: the two must exist together like inhaling and exhaling.
I have often in the past wondered how our Lord has such patience with us as we are so often such unlovable and ungrateful children. But in the silence I have discovered something of the secret: in the silence I have learned how to become more patient with myself. With patience has come understanding, with understanding has come compassion, gratitude, a better perspective and a more proper (realistic, truth-centered) orientation. It does not mean that we will immediately find ourselves on top of the mountain nor does it mean we will long stay there when we do, but it does mean that we will learn by degrees, for life is itself an open-ended lesson and one that requires a full life-time of learning: Rome was not built in a day.
I have learned, for example, to be more understanding and tolerant of my own sinfulness, not in an effort to dismiss the sin but because I occasionally glimpse something of the Kingdom of Heaven, a wisdom hidden. We tried answering the question “Why do we sin?” in What My Sins Say to Me: Connected to the Dot Numbered One. We should further add here that though we may never fully understand why we sin, we often do so not because we are inherently rotten (I rather think we are somewhere between good and bad, created in the image of God though often willful and at times outright rebellious), but because we are usually running from ourselves, seeking to be what we are not, thinking that the self of our own creation will bring us greater happiness than the perceived inferiority of the self we were created to be. The latter self seems to us boring, hardly exotic by anyone’s standards—not especially beautiful, intelligent, gregarious, strong, fill in your favorite flavor. We are like teenagers in the house of God. And thus we seek to “be cool” by indulging in pleasures and diversions rather than doing the hardest work of all which is living life one ordinary moment at a time in very ordinary shells in very ordinary ways until the ordinariness of it all threatens to stifle us: “There must be more to life than this!” But what if the “more to life” is not about doing anything differently at all, but is rather about learning to see differently? What if it is about learning to die to those things we identify with our self-worth and our identity and for the first time in a long time really, truly being free? I did not say faultless; I did not even say never again burdened. But I did say free. We do have to be willing, however, to check the baggage at the gate, and that for many of us is a surprisingly difficult task. That, for many of us, will keep us from ever finding, much less passing through, the Narrow Gate where beyond lies the runway that would allow us to take flight like the birds of the air who neither sow nor reap. But the only way to find abiding peace in this life is to take no extra baggage for the journey—no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, and no extra tunic—and follow the Christ. Put plainly, we are speaking not of bread, money, clothing, or a staff for walking—we are not even speaking of an entire collection of staves carved of luxurious woods and framed in gold and burgundy—but of “the difference between the self of our own creation and the self we were created to be.” Our lesson, then, can be summed in three words: “No extra baggage.”
God bless,
Eric
“For you were formerly darkness, but now you are Light in the Lord; walk as children of Light (for the fruit of the Light consists in all goodness and righteousness and truth), trying to learn what is pleasing to the Lord.”
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