Jeanene and I watched a movie called
“Saved” the night before she had surgery.
This was a serious surgery. Not particularly life threatening, but a significant
incision and a general anesthesia. The movie was a nice distraction for us that
evening.
I don’t know who made this movie or why they
made it. I don’t know if they intended it to be a wild exaggeration of reality,
or if they felt it was a reasonable depiction of the way some people practice
Christianity.
I can tell you this: While I’ve never been
involved with any Christians who manifested all of the forms of insanity in this
movie, I have experienced just about everything you see in “Saved” at one time
or another.
The histrionic worship; the mindless, babbling
prayers crammed full of religious phrases that no one really understands; the
sickly-sweet “Jesus is so awesome” language; the controlling and emotionally
crippled ministers with their grandiosity and closet sexual issues; the bad art;
the scary t-shirts; the Christian label slapped on everything from cars to
calzones in order to increase sales or boost egos. Yes, my friends, I have seen
it all. Been there, done that, laughed at the t-shirt in a cheesy Christian
catalog. These are the sort of things that used to make me fantasize about
leaving Christianity and embracing some other, “less crazy” worldview. Perhaps
some form of scientific empiricism would fit the bill, wherein I wouldn’t claim
absolute belief about anything without solid and repeatable evidence that can be
detected with one of the five senses.
I mean, with empiricism you know you’ll miss
some truth simply because humanity has not experienced it yet, and you know
you'll have to fudge a bit when it comes to the subject of love, but at least you
know where you stand. Christianity, on the other hand, is all over the map. One
minute you’re watching the Discovery Channel and considering the evidence for
global warming, and the next minute you’re standing before a group of people and
telling them that Jesus died for their sins and rose again on the third day.
Who can make sense of a claim like that?
And yet, I have not left Christianity for a
number of personal, emotional, and relational reasons that I have a hard time
sorting out myself, much less explaining to others. I find myself wanting to
say, “You kinda had to be there. And I mean for my whole forty-three year
odyssey.” The truth is, it's hard to know where to begin talking about my
personal reconciliation with matters of faith and the heart.
But I CAN tell you something that happened to
Jeanene and me the morning after we watched “Saved.” It was nothing miraculous or
even out of the ordinary, but it meant a lot to us.
That morning a handful of friends from Covenant
Baptist Church came by the hospital before Jeanene was taken into surgery. These
were not people who had gotten our names from a list of needs at the church
office and were fulfilling some sort of religious obligation. These were old and
well-established friends with whom we have fought many battles and walked
through good times and hard times together.
These were our people, you understand. Our
people. The people with whom Jeanene and I and our three daughters share our
daily lives.
We gathered in a circle around her bed, holding
hands. Jeanene closed her eyes and we prayed quietly for her. The prayers were
not particularly fancy, nor were they filled with a lot of religious phrases. We
were fully aware that our prayers would not guarantee some sort of miraculous
healing or blessing, though we were humble enough not to count out that
possibility. We were also well aware that this little prayer meeting did not
mean that the Creator of the universe was suddenly at our beck and call, waiting
to grant us special dispensations from the bumps, bruises, and grief that come
with human life.
While we prayed, I felt a mysterious sense of
awareness. I felt that something important was going on, something beyond us and
bigger than us. Something, in fact, so big that we have no need or desire to try
to explain it, market it, promise it, or claim any kind of ownership of it. We
were dear friends gathered in love and in the very name of God. It was a quiet
episode and no record of the details exists. Our prayers were not recorded for
sale in some inspirational book. No movie will ever be made about that moment in
time.
And yet, this truth remains. I would do just
about anything, go just about anywhere, and even sell most of my possessions for
a chance to walk through life with these gentle pilgrims. I will own
any label you please. Crackpot, dreamer, shoddy thinker, weak-minded. None of
these matter for I have found the pearl of great price. And the transforming
power of that discovery and of that joy lies at the center of my life.
The power of our shared community, which we
call the Spirit of God, helps me to be faithful even when I am feeling
faithless. It helps me to be trusting even when I am feeling cynical. It helps me
to become like a child even when childhood seems very far away and long ago.
There is a truth here that is hard to put into
words. It is a life truth, a living truth, a truth of sinew and muscle and
shared history and held hands. It is a truth that is utterly beyond us and
somehow within us. It is a truth that makes us feel so small and childlike that
we may have slipped, unnoticed, into the very Kingdom of Heaven.
Something out there is much greater than I. I
am aware of it and in awe of it. This is the beginning and the end of Wisdom.
rlp
NOTE: I'm working on an mp3 audio file of
this essay, but I'm having some trouble with my mixing software. I'm still new
at this. I wanted to post it at the same time that I put the essay online, but
it will probably be later tonight or tomorrow.
