The Moth

All Fall Down

2006-05-29T14:16:00.000-08:00

We arrive in this world each ruling a kingdom – our hearts enthroned, each in its own vast palace. Then the Usurper comes, trouble-maker, toppler of kings, with the great siege engine of his words:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Down come the jewel-encrusted walls of our treasure rooms. Down come the golden temples we’ve built to proclaim our own spiritual perfectibility.

“Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.”

Down come our circuses and ballrooms, our fire-eaters’ and jugglers’ dens, all the bright rooms where we play in frantically happy denial.

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

Down come all our armouries, our battalions, our catapults and battering rams, all the apparatus of our conquering, crashed to rubble.

“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.”

Down come our kitchens and feast halls, our stuffed larders and pantries, all the places we fill and fill our emptiness in futile gluttony.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.’

He uproots our dungeons, turns over our condemnations, sends our torturers and executioners into exile, throws open every stinking cell and hacks to splinters the axe and the gallows.

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

Down come the draperies of our lush bedchambers, the houses of our concubines, the tapestried couches of all our lovers. He cleans our filthy garments; he scours clean our painted-over eyes.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.”

Down come our bunkers, our board rooms of strategy and machination where all other men and women become pieces on a chessboard under our hand.

“Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Down come our throne rooms, our court halls, the galleries of the lofty and praised, the stages of the lauded and acclaimed – down they come, all their golden accolades turned to dust.

“Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you and say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake.”

Down come the grand courtrooms where we reward the polished and eloquent and punish the naive and awkward. Down come their judges and their scowling juries.

“Rejoice and be exceeding glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.”

Down go the safe, private rooms where we whine about our injuries and curse our enemies in peace, justify our righteous selves and lament our unjust fate, the innermost mirrored room of our palace where every wall shines gloriously with our own likeness.

Like cannonballs through the stone walls of our hearts, the usurper’s words send our private palace tumbling, leave us nothing but heaps of ruin, leave us finally alone in whatever kingdom there can possibly be outside our own – alone with him in the splendour of our nothingness.

The View

2006-05-04T09:52:00.000-08:00

I've been reading a book that a friend loaned me: The Sacrament of the Present Moment (originally Self-Abandonment to Divine Providence). I love this passage:

You are seeking God, dear sister, and he is everywhere. Everything proclaims him to you, everything reveals him to you, everything brings him to you. He is by your side, over you, around and in you. Here is his dwelling and yet you still seek him. Ah! You are searching for God, the idea of God in his essential being. You seek perfection and it lies in everything that happens to you – your suffering, your actions, your impulses are the mysteries under which God reveals himself to you.

Jean-Pierre de Caussade

Well, there’s a nut that could take the rest of our lives to crack. But some days I think I see the order and sense of it, the creeping edges of a sort of light. So one foot falls in front of the other, tentatively.

And yet in the days when that light is obscured, there is actually less deliberation about what to do, isn’t there? He has not left us bereft – in his Word there are a hundred straightforward, honourable things with which to fill our days: love your neighbour, do your work, serve the needy, do the work of the church, all that stuff. If we balk at these routine things (and I do, I do!) and crave merely the flashy, the powerful, the unique, it is our pride at work, not our faith.

God is hiding in buying the groceries, paying the bills, washing the car and doing our taxes (ouch!). More than that, God is hiding in the day gone awry, the marriage in trouble and the diagnosis you prayed you’d never hear. Wrapped in frustration and affliction, God moves at the heart of it all, like Lazarus’ freshly beating heart wrapped in his stinking graveclothes.

The moments, all moments, are jewels on a string. De Caussade says: “We must therefore allow each moment to be the cause of the next; the reason for what precedes being revealed in what follows, so that everything is linked firmly and solidly together in a divine chain of events.”

I rarely see it but, as Madeline L’Engle said once: I have a point of view; God has View.

Feathers

2006-03-22T12:29:00.000-08:00

Looking out into the yard I saw a small brown bird – sparrow, wren, not sure what kind, prettily round and spotted, just big enough to settle its curved breast into your palm – picking its lunch out of our lawn, which is admittedly mostly moss.

It met my gaze and froze. Turned its little head right, left, to regard me with each eye. I froze too, not wanting it to flit away. Then it turned and stretched, hunching its shoulders and rising on its toes before returning to pecking. I had been it deemed, I saw, not enough of a threat.

But that speckly brown bird had had a moment, common for a small bird, I’m sure, of fear for its life. All the minutiae of its days – pecking, flying, nesting, feeding scrawny chicks, pecking some more – may have rushed through its head when it saw me there. How it would all end with a pounce. Its life was immensely important to it then. All its energy became focused on protecting it.

And what does a bird’s life mean? Other than pronouncements about the food chain and the ecosystem, whether a bird lives for two years or two years and two weeks seems of no importance whatever. If I were cat and gobbled it up, no creature on the planet would feel any different for a second. All the grand machinery of human existence, and almost all of animal existence, would grind on.

But Jesus said his Father knows: his eye is on every little brown bird. Every time the beak falls into the moss. Every time the wing breaks, the mate is eaten or the chick falls prey to a hungry crow.

The world is overwhelmingly complicated. Even in my own backyard I see the details of the lives of what we might consider the most unimportant creatures – ants, squirrels, robins, wrens – and am rendered almost speechless by what it takes for them to eat and sleep and reproduce. And every second of it passes like the finest sand through God’s fingers under his never-sleeping, loving eyes, which is the only comprehensible way we can say this: no detail of any being in the universe is hidden at any time from his complete knowledge and perfect love.

So the sparrow and I are on the same team, then, except for the fact that he can’t know it and I can, when by the grace of God I don’t forget. Providence is knitting it all, sickness and confusion and death, all of it, into something amazing that we’ll get a look at later. We’re even, by his love, given flashes of it now in the muck and muddle of our days.

And yet perhaps I assume too much. Why am I so sure that the bird can’t know about God’s care? It would give me hope, somehow, to think that there’s even a little-brown-bird way of being aware of Maker and Sustainer, some flitting knowledge, some avian-cerebral twitch, that signified even to this creature that God is with you.

I’m not asserting anything theological. It would just be...neat. And encouraging. Emily Dickinson was right on the money, I think. Hope is “the thing with feathers”.

Word From the Deathless Land

2006-01-09T13:09:00.000-08:00

So we do not lose heart. Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.
2 Corinthians 4: 16-18 (ESV)

The quality of “done”, the quality of “gone”: both are present in their opposites in this fading, dying world, in our dimming eyes, our slowly closing ears.

The “here” and the “to be”, the present and the beginning, are muddied always by their opposites in this stale world.

All that’s best here, glorious as it is, drips with what it can never be: human love that will never be perfect love; peace that will inevitably shatter; faith that will sputter and go out like a candle. Everything is fading, slowing, dying.

There is a lusciously vital moment that occurs when this comes home to a person all at once, in single souring breath: there it goes, it’s going, it’s gone. Recognition of this truth, as of any really true truth, is satisfying and freeing for a time. We can live on it as food (indeed, no other food will really satisfy), even when it’s bitter. We melt a cube of sugar into the absinthe and swallow it down. It’s wonderful, for a while.

But eventually it loses its savour because it’s only part of the truth. Out hearts have feasted and are hungry again.

How do we live in such a dying world, in our own dying bodies, and still long for anything beyond, outside of, above death, as people have done since anyone ever bothered to write anything down at all? Surely in a universe where everything is subject to death and entropy, any idea of a universe without these things must have come from...well, somewhere outside that universe.

It is as though a very wise fish began to tell his schoolmates about breathing oxygen in a waterless atmosphere. It’s not an idea he likely came up with on his own. He would have no reference point, no way to begin to think of such a thing. Somehow someone from the world-of-no-water reached him and told him about it.

As for us – some information from outside the universe-of-death-and-entropy must have reached us, or we would have no way to believe or even imagine any existence without it.

Because humans as a rule do, we almost always have, imagined and believed in such a world, it must have happened. Word from the deathless land has reached us, has been given us, and unless we are dead inside already we can never forget it. It eats our hearts, our minds; it eats into everyone, from politicians to pop stars, from the latest clique of obscure poets to the creators of the newest TV commercials.

We make no sense, really. Everyone is at once constantly dying and yet constantly hungering for deathlessness, for the full, fulfilled, complete and consummated life that has never occurred in time and space.

Well, except for that one time...

And whether we remember that one time, that one life, with love or with fear, with gratitude or with vague annoyance, we can’t seem to put the knowledge of it out of the human mind. It is the Life outside of entropy; the Word that keeps reaching us from the deathless land.

What pain it is, but what hope it brings! For if even the truth of our slow death can be a brief, delicious meal for our hearts, think what food Real Life will be: real, deathless, irreversible Life.

Words Fly Up

2005-12-13T11:22:00.000-08:00

I‘m feeling exhausted these days, exhausted with life’s worn-out struggle. I barely bother to call it a struggle anymore; it’s a fight that’s softened into capitulation, resignation. An old ache, a war wound that never heals. What’s the point in trying? You know that most of the time I’m not really trying. I am a Claudius of the heart – afraid of the punishment but unwilling to repent the offense: “Bow, stubborn knees!”

But Claudius says “words without thoughts never to heaven go”. Hate to disagree with the Bard, but go they do, words without thoughts, words with thoughts, words muttered in the dark in the obscure fog of drunkenness, words uttered without our consent in dreams, words rising unbidden into our heads that we never speak aloud. Every one of them is known in Heaven, is in God’s mind and is woven somehow into what he allows to transpire in this wheat-and-tares world.

How frightening that all my desperate thoughts, thoughtless remarks, small-souled sarcasms, all my puffed-up pronouncements and glib, indifferent toss-offs are audible there. How certain I am that, at this point, they outweigh by a thousand whatever sweet, comforting or edifying words have ever passed my lips.

Indeed, our thoughtless words ring through heaven like, as Ophelia said, “sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh”. Somehow they echo from one end of eternity to the other and at last, by some miracle, ricochet themselves into praise.

They do this, I suspect, by proclaiming, trumpeting, our contingency, as Thomas Merton said. We give glory to God by our contingency: the very fact that, in and of ourselves, we cannot be wholly good. We can’t be whole at all. This very fact, declared loudly in our every thoughtless word, is deliverance and peace to us if we can accept and receive it in the context of God’s love.

For myself, I think of it as “throwing myself at God”, like a determined baseball pitcher practicing, over and over again, trying to perfect the exit of myself from myself: “I can’t do this right, Lord. Look, I’ve messed it up again. Here – you take it, you have it; I can’t fix it.” And I throw myself at God. Fling myself at Mercy, straight between shoulders and knees, so fast you can’t even see it. And he makes the aim true every time – I land with a dusty, satisfying thump right in the heart of the great Catcher’s mitt -- stee-rike!

We’re not fixed, not perfected, yet (I keep telling my husband: “I’ll be perfect next week”...). But we can aim in the right direction. We can, when we open our mouths and release more idiocy into the atmosphere, turn in God's direction and land our stupid selves in the only place from which it's safe to try again.

A Great Bulldozer

2005-08-15T12:13:00.000-08:00

Beautiful August morning, veil-clouds, papery sunlight. Breakfast of cherries, grapes, toast, cheese, coffee. Black-red cherries in a yellow bowl on the counter.

How beautiful it all was! A day of clear hours ahead, clear work and rest and play, and I put on music, an old friend playing the guitar.

All at once, in a minute, it all crashed in – how beautiful it all is. The green wind-spinner turning silent and slow outside the window. Little blood-coloured roses packed tight on the end of a little branch. The guitar, the construction of its sound piercing: vibration, air sculpted, hands, wood, metal and air making an ephemeral sculpture, right then, in my head.

A cherry bitten in half, bloody-sweet flesh nesting the stony heart.

It was all just too much, in that minute, and my head craned down over my bowl of cherry pits – wine-dark smears on white, beautiful! – and I cried. For a minute I thought I would never stop crying.

While all this beauty – “all this juice and all this joy” -- broke in waves, gathered in sheets of blessed unbroken order and sang over the breakfast table, I knew so many places, my heart not excluded, where pain, fear, broken love and confusion felt as if they threw black paint over this perfect summer morning. Division, death, regret, have their claws in me, and you too if you’ll tell the truth of it.

The beauty was, for a minute, hateful to me in the face of the tangled mess of our torn hearts. For beauty goes on, you see, blossoms and thrives, branches multiform, fractal, in every direction at every moment. It’s air. It’s breath. It’s a great bulldozer. I loved it at the very moment it was about to wipe me right off the earth. It’s awful, I thought, it’s terrible, in the old sense of those words: awe, terror, a smothering, crushing reverence. God must hate us, I thought, I felt. He must really hate us.

But, if we can let it, beauty grows down into us, awful, terrible, inexorable, like millions of roots stabbing down into the earth. We are the soil (are but dust!) that beauty, order, interrupt and displace with their awful searching roots. And it must be so. Without this downthrust, this terrible burrowing love that, because we are earth, feels like hatred, without this love, nothing can grow.

Over, Around and Under: God's Arms

2005-05-06T11:31:00.000-08:00

For about a year and a half now I've been working my way through a great book called Meditation: a Practical Guide to a Spiritual Discipline (McCormick and Fish, Intervarsity Press, 1983). It says on the cover "Quiet Times for Forty Days" but here I am, eighteen months in and still at it. The studies are so thoughtfully structured, and the questions they pose so insightful, that it often takes me two weeks, doing usually two sessions a week, to finish just one of the forty studies.

A recent meditation on the idea of "dwelling" highlighted Deuteronomy 33:27, and got me thinking about God's arms. I dove into a cupboard for the concordance. There are three ways the Bible talks about God's arms, each telling us something about a different aspect of God's nature and relation to us.

In the "arms" verses, the way God is most frequently described is as King and Commander, one of unmatched strength possessing complete authority over his people, other nations, and the universe. Here are just a few examples:

Say therefore to the people of Israel 'I am the LORD, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from their bondage, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and great acts of judgment...' (Exodus 6:6, ESV)

For they are your people and your heritage, whom you brought out by your great power and by your outstretched arm. (Deuteronomy 9:29; the phrase in boldface is used six times in this book.)

...but you shall fear the LORD, who brought you out of the land of Egypt with great power and with an outstretched arm. You shall bow yourselves to him, and to him you shall sacrifice. (2 Kings 17:36)

So strong is God that in these repeated references it's always "arm"; not "arms". He need use only one to be in control of everything: "Have you an arm like God, and can you thunder with a voice like his?" (Job 40:9) The Lord God Almighty can lick his enemies with one hand, as it were, tied behind his back.

This image speaks to me most affectingly when I too am strong in body and mind, when I feel secure, purposeful and ready to join the battle led by God, his arm stretched out over his soldiers in direction and command: "Christ, the royal Master, leads against the foe. Forward into battle see his banners go..."

But God's arms aren't always stretched out in battle. In the Song of Solomon, the metaphor is God as Lover. His arms, both of them now, wrap around his Beloved in embrace:

His left hand is under my head, and his right hand embraces me! (Song of Solomon 2:6 and 8:3; in the New International Version, these verses use the word "arm" instead of "hand".)

It's when I feel alive and passionate in spirit and imagination that this image feeds me most: relating to God as the one who embraces us, delights in us and rejoices over us in holy relationship.

But when I have no strength and am weak in body, mind or spirit - only two or three time an hour, I assure you - then God's arms become those described in Deuteronomy 33:27a:

The eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms...

These arms are not stretched over me as the Commander's arm, or wrapped around me as the Lover's. They are underneath. Whose arms need to be underneath? These must be the arms of one who catches the falling; one who carries the weary and broken; one who cradles the new, small and vulnerable.

And notice the reminding adjective in this verse, so kindly included for the insecure hearts of those who fall into those arms: everlasting.

My Meditation book ends each chapter with a section called Further Study. I haven't done any of those yet - any more probing questions and I'll be in this book until doomsday! Still, the Further Study I would append to my own writing here would be Isaiah 40:10-11:

Behold, the Lord GOD comes with might,
and his arm rules for him; behold, his reward is with him,
and his recompense before him.
He will tend his flock like a shepherd;
he will gather the lambs in his arms; he will carry them in his bosom,
and gently lead those that are with young.

In these two verses we have, laid out wonderfully together, our three images of God: the Strong, the Passionate and the Nurturing; God over, God around, God under. Give them a little meditation.

A Better Bunch of Grapes: Manufactured Fruit

2005-04-19T11:31:00.000-08:00

We live in an insecure and nervous culture, eager to convince itself of its own goodness. Because of this, results count. From childhood to death, I have many ways by which I can demonstrate to a demanding world that my life "works": my report card, my grade point average, my IQ, my salary, my job title, the market value of my house, the number of my possessions, the fatness of my retirement savings plan, and even, when that's donee, the richness of the casket in which they lay me in the ground.

Christianity calls us to reject the nervous demands of our culture and turn to a life based on spiritual, not worldly, values. But be alert.

The Infection of Pragmatism
Even in the Church, in our relationships with other Christians and in our private devotional lives, the standards, the demands, of the North American culture in which we were raised press in on us. One of the imprints the world has made on the church in the last century or so is the clear stamp of utilitarianism: the way of the pragmatist:

"What is pragmatism? Basically it is the philosophy that results determine meaning, truth, and value-what will work becomes a more important question than what is true."
John MacArthur, "What's Inside the Trojan Horse?"
http://www.oneplace.com/ministries/grace_to_you/Article.asp?article_id=466

The kind of spiritual "success" we seek is often infected with a particularly North American kind of pragmatism. We want Good Christian Results: better health, bigger wealth, more fulfilling jobs, well-behaved and believing offspring, bigger and more well-regarded churches. We want
them as soon as possible, because our personal and corporate success are the things, we reason, which effectively attract unbelievers to Christ.

Many people do come to a kind of faith this way. They see Christians with outwardly happy, controlled, successful lives, well-behaved children, material comforts, fulfilling work. They want those things. If Christianity purports to deliver those things, they will become Christian. They are like the seed sown on rocky ground: they have no root (Matthew 13:5-6). They appear to grow like everybody else, but their faith, it turns out, was a sort of down payment made to the Bank of Blessings, to ensure that God brought about certain results. When these results do not occur, their faith withers and dies. Chances are, such peoples focus was not so much the Giver
(if it were, their roots would have grown into the ground, the source of their stability and nutrition), as it was the blessings he was expected to give them as payment for their loyalty and obedience.

To show us the nature of the believer's relationship to God, the Bible turns several times to images of that which grows: plant, tree, vine. It is this agricultural metaphor I've found it valuable to examine as an antidote to the results-driven faith that can so easily infect us here in North America. The passage containing the most detailed metaphor in this vein in John
5:1-10:

I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch of mine that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in me he is thrown away like a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples. As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love.
John 15:1-10 (ESV)

The agricultural model used in this passage stresses God's complete sovereignty. Fruit is designed by the Maker. The branch has no say in what the fruit tastes like, what size or colour it is, or when it ripens and is ready to be harvested. The branch must produce a grape or a banana, an apple or a pineapple, according to the nature, the will of the vine. To live, the branch must submit to the vine - stay attached to it, be nourished by it and let life flow through it to grow the fruit. The Vine is the organic source of the Fruit.

The results model, on the other hand, finds its genesis in mass-market industrial culture, and stresses human desire, human effort and the approval of the world. The product in the factory is designed and made to the customers specification. If defective, it can be sent back for replacement, or another manufacturer can be found who'll do a better job. The manufacturer of objects is bound, as well, by what the market demands: the customer is always right.

Jesus' vine metaphor is explored further by Paul in his letter to the Galatians: "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such thing there is no law." (Galatians 5:22, ESV) These are the qualities God promises to produce in us if we "abide in the Vine".

Each Fruit of the Spirit can be seen to have a corresponding mere Result that apes it, a "manufactured fruit". When pragmatism rules the day, Fruit becomes Results:

Love becomes Attractiveness/Appeal.

Joy becomes Happiness/Good feelings.

Peace becomes Physical Security/Safety.

Patience and Self-control become Technique: "fix-its", shortcuts to virtuous behaviour that we hope will lessen or eliminate process, hence the need for patience or self-control.

Kindness and Goodness become institutional Good Works, programmed charity,
religious ritual and observance.

Faithfulness becomes Membership in, and consistent attendance at, the correct group activities or programs.

Gentleness becomes Denial and repression of anger, sadness and lust.

We can be delighted by the feeling of short-term success that the results of mere human efforts bring us. For a little while we will feel competent, adequate in ourselves. But notice: each Result is completely dependent on favourable circumstances. As soon as we behave in a less-than appealing way, fall into a season of depression, experience disease or injury, weaken in our rock-solid habit of daily Bible-study, are no longer enthusiastic about going to church, tithing or serving, or fall prey to our short temper one more time, our "success" vanishes. It is now our job to reproduce this success, because results-faith is not based on abiding in the Vine, but on
achieving success in the eyes of the world, our peers, ourselves, so that we can successfully market the faith to others.

The way of Results will leave us hag-ridden to perfect our churches, our ministry techniques and ourselves. When we cannot, it will gives us all it has to offer to offer to those who fail: a finger-wagging shame, accompanied no doubt by lists of things we must do to make us properly displayable members of the firm once again.

Results-driven faith will poison our Christian walk unless we intentionally reject it. Jesus' words in John 15 offer us the rich and lasting truth that can serves as the antidote to this particular worldly poison: Abiding.

The passage highlights four characteristics of abiding. These are descriptive, not prescriptive. They are not a recipe for success, but responses to Christ's promise of real love and growth:

Stay still (verse 4): Don't fill your life with a flurry of religious activity in order to make yourself feel/look good or distract you from your problematic self. Stop and come face to face with who you are - and who you are not.

Stay attentive (verse 7): Come face to face with God: study and listen to the Word; pray; meditate on Gods Word; worship.

Stay engaged (verse 10): Praise God for who he is, not just what he can do to bring about your success; carry the Word into action; respond to God in life as well as belief.

Stay in the Way (verse 5): Persevere; endure; be patient; trust in the Vine and the growth process created and sustained by the Vinedresser.

We will cycle alternately and concurrently through these four ways of abiding throughout our whole lives. In different areas of our lives, relationships or ministry or parenting, we will come face to face with a sin or inadequacy. We then come, in our incompetence and contingency, to God himself, lay it before him, while persevering in praise, study, prayer and worship. We then respond to what our heart receives in these times, all undergirded by the graceful love of Jesus Christ.

In all of this, we must become, as Thomas Merton puts it, "detached from the results of our own work".

None of our abiding guarantees what we might call "success" - not in work, family, ministry, parenting, anything - and we must neither demand nor expect them. We go to God to receive his grace. If any success comes, we can be truly thankful for it. It does not "accrue to our account", as it were, because we can take none of the credit. It is nothing of our own doing: it
is the fruit of the Spirit. It is the fruit of abiding in the Vine.

Here there is reality and rest. There is no evasion of or denial of sin, but neither is there the demand that it be outwardly or artificially "fixed". We are not called from worldly failure to worldly success, not from a life that doesn't "work" to a life that can be seen to "work". Instead we are called to turn from separation and sin to Jesus, who opened the way for close relationship with God the Father, as close as the tender relationship of the vinedresser to his beloved grapes.

Just Clark Kent

2005-04-13T09:21:00.000-08:00

A very large amount of human suffering and frustration is caused by the fact that many men and women are not content to be the sort of beings that God has made them, but try to persuade themselves that they are really beings of some different kind.
— Eric Mascall, The Importance of Being Human

Born in 1965, I have been steeped from toddlerhood in the popular culture of "finding yourself", "knowing yourself" and "loving yourself" (remember that song: "Learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all"? Sorry…). It is, for most of us, whether or not we like it, the bottom line of our age: how will this affect me?

It’s absolutely right for the church to denounce this obsession. Where the self and its shifting desires become king – in politics or art, in business or family or sexuality – we must say "No. Our final obligation is not to the Self. It is to the One who made us." However, after I’ve made this brave assertion (even if only in the face of some annoying pop-culture proclamation, perhaps the song quoted above) I still must go home at night and look in my mirror. Whose face do I see? Do I see a shadow, a ghostly figure that reminds me vaguely of my wedding pictures, with the Face of Jesus hovering behind it, a sort of fleshly Shroud of Turin? No. Bummer. I see just myself.

Frankly, I’m quite sick of myself. I used to be an interesting person, you know, when I was younger. I did interesting things; I had interesting friends; I saw interesting movies and read interesting books and could have an interesting conversation with you about them. But that’s all over now. A few years ago, about the time I turned thirty-five, I came to the end of myself.
Well, that’s not quite accurate. I actually have rather a habit of coming to the end of myself.

I have strong opinions about most things and enjoy articulating them, but as time goes by and one learns the multiplicity in the world of mere opinions, and how the strong articulation of them, while necessary, seldom actually changes anything, one becomes tired. In other words: how many people there are in the world! How much we talk, and talk, and talk, and so what? So periodically I would come to the end of myself in relation to a certain issue or relationship, realizing thusly: "God, I am weary of trying and trying to untie this knot. I can’t do it. I cast myself on your mercy! Untie this knot!" Adding, of course, or merely assuming, "Make me a better knot-untier!"

Casting myself on the Lord (I think of it more as throwing myself at God) is good. I do it a lot – I’ve become proficient at tossing up my hands and crying "Yo, God, your move!" It’s what I expect from this process that has tended, over many years, to become unrealistic: that God would transform me, on my schedule, into his Warrior, his Intercessor, his Charger, his Shining Example of Ideal Christian Living. Like Clark Kent slipping into a phone booth and Superman, blue-tighted, leaping out.

Because of course when I look in the mirror at night I don’t see the Shining Example. I see, ever and anon, ad nauseum, only myself. Maybe a little more patient? A little more faithful? A little less proud? I hope so. But so what? I mean, is this the deal? When, all around me, Christians are living the Victorious Life, conquering Sin and Satan, bringing Revival sweeping across the world, or so it appears, and here’s just my stupid bathroom mirror and…me.

That’s the unfortunate glitch in our plans: the person I become, as I live in relationship with Christ, is, for better or worse, me. The true me. The delightful key to the Christian understanding of the self we’re stuck with, however, is that we do not become this "true self" by building it, praying for it, digging obsessively for it in the past, seeking it in the present or planning meticulously for it in the future. I become my true self by turning the eyes of my heart away from myself and turning my heart’s gaze toward God. The watched pot, as they say, never boils; I must forget myself.

As with most Christian principles, there's a tension to be maintained here. I do not, must not, forget or forgo the fact of self. I am me, you are you, and at no point in this life or the next are we going to merge into some sort of collective consciousness or oversoul. God made us to be ourselves in eternity; individual personality is not a curse, but a mysterious and glorious blessing. It is what makes human relationships, human care and charity, social justice and peace, so much a part of our faith. People are inviolable selves created by God to be themselves. To recognize and protect the individuality of every human is therefore a Christian thing to do.

On the other hand, I must never forget or forgo the fact of the Fall. In the Garden, things went horribly awry. In the words of Hawkeye Pierce, the cheese slid off its cracker. Every human being has been inordinately proud of the "self" ever since. The fallen self wants, in the end, to be God over the rest of the selves. Listen to pop radio for half an hour to hear the litany of ways in which we wish to be God. The Lover in the pop song wants to be breath and life, meaning and magic and all-in-all to the Beloved, or somehow the relationship is less than sufficient.

After the Fall, the inviolable, God-created self, wishing to be God, took its gift and ran, like the Prodigal Son fleeing into the city with pockets full of his Dad’s credit cards. If the self is free, it must be admitted that it is free to both bow down and worship God and roll around in pig slop. The doctrine of original sin says that, when left to ourselves, we invariably choose the pig slop.

So we must hold in tension these two truths: the self, as a creation, is good, as all creation is good. The self is also, however, corrupt, as a result of the Fall. A failure to adequately take into account either of these truths lands us in very hot water.

Too much emphasis on the Fall and its corrupting effects, while not common in our day, can happen, with disastrous results. The flesh (the physical body and the thoughts and imaginings of the human mind) is dung, says this view. The self, the individual personality (and the body, as far as it is possible) must be eradicated in favour of some predetermined Ideal Christian. This is the little misstep that's led a lot of people, in days of old, into codependent relationships with their cats o’nine tails. The "humans are dung" school of thought, however, denies the wisdom of God the Creator’s original intention, the physical world he created and himself pronounced "good".

Too much emphasis on the glorious possibilities of the self, however, leads to the narcissism typified by the nineteen-seventies (and movie reviews containing vile phrases like "the triumph of the human spirit"). This emphasis assumes that, given enough time, money, therapy, prayer, education, tantric sex, night-school classes, Bible study, twelve-step meetings, whatever, the self can be taught or transformed into an ideal state. We are, somehow, perfectible. The implication being, of course, that we are, or can become, somehow free of the effects of original sin by our own elbow grease and/or genius.

This is kind of like expecting a cancerous tumour to make a fine incision from the inside and remove itself. Jeremiah chides the false prophets of Israel for this: "They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious." (Jeremiah 6:14, NIV) We end up applying Band-Aids – how-to books and aromatherapy, perhaps – where there ought to be amputation: contrition and repentance.

Every age, every manifestation of the church, has lived out its own distortion of this balance, from extremes of self-mutilation and degradation to opposite extremes of indulgence, hedonism and the deification of human reason and feeling.

At the moment it seems to me that much of the North American church labours under the error of self-perfection. We couch it in jargon, of course, calling it "inner healing", "spiritual victory" or "spiritual empowerment", all of which, in the proper context, are good things. In practice, however, this too often means programs designed to eradicate our falleness by our own efforts. If not our falleness, then at least our individuality.

We create a template: a Christian "lifestyle" that all must adopt or risk being considered "carnal" or a "backslider". In one church this lifestyle may include obligatory attendance at a steady stream of the "right" revival meetings, seminars or conferences; at another church it may require strict adherence to a dress code and abstention from alcohol, movies and card games. It matters little. The point is that our template, our ideal, is an artificial one that produces not godliness of character, but mere homogeneity.

Because of course there was once the Ideal Man, and not many of us are trying to emulate his outward lifestyle. It would involve selling all our possessions, becoming homeless beggars, itinerant preachers, political revolutionaries, religious rebels and eventual martyrs. Our true template is not made up of the outward, cultural details of Jesus’ life, but is his perfect obedience to God the Father. This I can strive and pray toward in all circumstances, regardless of my personality or culture – I can live to be obedient to the Father.

Indeed, God himself is the only one in whose hands I can (and must) safely put my individuality, because he promises neither to erase my personality nor transform me into a cookie-cutter churchgoer. He will cause me, through all my attempts to obey him, to become my true self -- the self I will be for all eternity.

In the end there is no Superman, or not in the mortal ranks, anyway. Our "Superman" lived on earth, was crucified, died and was buried. On the third day he rose again, and sits on the right hand of God the Father. Only this Hero is required.

And we must, while we are pointing our hearts toward God and praying for him to transform us, keep up a small, secondary struggle to resist the subtle social conformity around us and remain relentlessly ourselves. It’s the "me in the mirror" that God made and with whom he wants to be have a relationship, not any church-sanctioned Super-me who is, in the end, a character as fictional as Superman.

I’m still, at the moment, rather sick of myself, but so what? It’s not my job to be an influential, successful, interesting, acceptable person. It’s my job to obey God. The rest is his business, and he promises that the one who loses his life shall save it. I find rest in this promise, and find there freedom to follow him, not as a Billy Graham or a Mother Theresa or even a Clark Kent (I’m claustrophobic about phone booths), but as plain old face-in-the-mirror, myself.

There are miracles, of course. Transformation and growth happen. But they come about, in our God’s wonderful topsy-turvy way, not by condemning the fallible face in the mirror and determining, with gritted teeth or with a sigh of resignation, to make it better. They arrive in the midst of quiet obedience, of patient service and guileless vulnerability, and they arrive not because of this obedience, patience, or vulnerability, but because the One who promised is faithful, and He will do it.