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What if you and I could sit across the table from each other tonight, under the stars? What would you say to me? Some people say, “I’ve read a lot of your writing, you know?”

“Yeah?” I say.

There’s not much to say after that. “Thanks” doesn’t seem to work. “That’s cool” sounds arrogant, like it’s somehow cool to have read things that I wrote. Mostly I just hold still until the moment passes.

“Is that weird?” people sometimes ask. “Is it weird to suddenly find out that some stranger knows a lot of personal stuff about you, and you don’t know anything about them?”

This really does happen to me. It happened to me last week, as a matter of fact. A guy named Gary at a coffee shop. Really great guy. English accent. We ended up talking for about two hours.

“No,” I say. “It’s not weird because I don’t think about it. It’s like it’s not happening.”

That’s the truth. It’s as if someone said, “I saw you naked two weeks ago.” Yeah? Well, you’re not seeing me naked now, so I guess it doesn’t bother me too much unless we keep talking about it.

Now if I could ask you something – anything – I would say, “Do you believe in things that we might want to be true, but for which there isn’t a lot of hard evidence, maybe no hard evidence at all?”

I’d be trying to ask if you are a faith person. Any kind of faith person. Maybe you believe in Buddha, or Jesus, or God, or Allah, or any number of other ideas about an eternal being or beings. And if it turned out you were a faith person, I’d like a follow-up question.

What kind of faith do you have?

Is it frightened faith? You need the comfort of believing in the stuff your parents taught you about God, and you’re scared shitless that someone is going to talk you out of it? That’s okay. I've been there myself. I’m just trying to figure you out.

Or is yours that kind of arrogant faith that says, “Everyone else must be a complete idiot not to have faith and believe what I believe.” I hope not, because you seem so nice. Plus, I probably don't believe what you believe, so now I'm stupid and how are we going to have a decent conversation once that's established?

Is it desperate faith? Are you trying to hold onto meaning in a world in which meaning is increasingly hard to find? Yeah, I get that. I feel you.

Is it stubborn faith, like mine? Are you just ornery enough to stare down an empty universe and say, “I DEMAND that there be meaning in these skies.” And then you stare real hard and angry right into the Milky Way. Then you laugh because of how small and silly you are. You laugh at yourself, but you keep staring. You ARE going to stare down the universe.

You know, I’d just kind of like to know what kind of faith is keeping you in the game these days.

Or.

If you’re really not a faith person – at least not so much in the obvious and traditional ways – then I’d be REALLY fascinated and want to know the whole story.

Are you the sort who has always seen the default human position as NOT believing in magic or gods or any of that stuff? In your mind the evidence would have to be pretty strong to push you away from your default position of unbelief. Maybe you’ve never been able to understand why so many see it the opposite way. Like believing in God is the default, and you’d better have a damn good reason for not believing.

See I would get that. I would so get that about you. Because I seem to see just about everything in ways that are the exact opposite of most people. I know what that’s like.

Are you a kind of arrogant, angry, “only idiots believe in God” sort of person? I hope not. Because if you are, then I’m stupid, and how are we going to have a conversation now that my stupidity is out on the table for everyone to see.

Ooh, are you one of those dreamy and courageous scientist types, who has such a rigorous epistemology that you just can’t violate it for mythic reality, no matter how beautiful the myth and no matter how old it is?

Yeah, see I find that to be romantic. I was almost you. Just…almost. Sometimes I fantasize about being you.

So when the conversation dies down and we are both left looking at the stars, wouldn’t it seem like there would be no way we could remain unchanged? For one thing it would be just the two of us sitting at our little table beneath an infinite dome of starry mystery. We’d be talking about all the possibilities of what might be. It seems like there would be no way we could avoid feeling like brothers or brother and sister, right? Two humans, pitting their minds, hearts, and souls against the sky and against the unfolding drama of knowledge and mystery?

It would be sad when we had to part ways, and I would probably say, “But we can still be friends, right?"

rlp

A dear friend of mine is a lawyer in a large city. He and his partner are both serious Christians, and they have built their practice around the values and principles that they believe are central to their faith. They have made conscious business choices that allow them to operate simply, so that their resources may be used in ways that are meaningful to them.

The only time these choices are difficult is when other lawyers come to their office. Some assume that their simple and inexpensive office is a sign that they are not good attorneys. So many people seem to equate décor with success. At these times, my friend must swallow his pride, keep silent, and let the other lawyers think whatever they may think...

Click here to read the rest of this essay at The High Calling.

rlp

So there you are, you’ve made your case, you’ve taken a position, you’ve let it be known that you believe something or have taken some action in response to a belief. Inevitably, someone says, “Yes, but once you say or do this thing, what’s to stop you from saying or doing THAT thing, or, God forbid, even THIS dreadful thing?”

Ah, the “slippery slope” argument. It’s one of my least favorite arguments, I must say. There are times when it is appropriate, times when human freedom is limited or circumstances will not provide the opportunity to examine every case individually, but most of the time I think it is on the same level as using an analogy to prove a point. Analogies make wonderful illustrations, but they are pitiful proofs.

And I’ve noticed that some people tend to use the slippery slope argument frequently. Apparently, once you start using the this kind of argument, it is hard to know when to stop.

Sorry, I couldn't resist saying that.

Let’s take a look at the idea of the slippery slope. It goes something like this: One person makes a case for doing or thinking something we shall call A. Another person, one who is against A for one reason or another, argues that once you allow A, it is either inevitable or likely that you will also allow B, C, D, and E. And since any or all of B through E are wrong or unwise or dangerous, it is best to avoid A as a precaution. It’s basically the story of Pandora’s Box repackaged and offered to the discussion at hand.

The reason that A leads to B and so on is usually not mentioned, which disappoints me. If you use the slippery slope argument, I feel you should also be ready to explain why it is a valid concern in a given situation.

In some cases, human weakness is the culprit. In this scenario, A might not be so bad, but it will make B through E more tempting and harder to resist. Or perhaps A is some sort of logical Rubicon. Once you cross A, there is no logical reason for not crossing B through E. There is even a rather codependent sociological twist to this argument. If you do A, then other people will follow, and they might do B through E. And you, a right and decent person, obviously should take responsibility for those people as well as for yourself.

I have to tell you that I’m not particularly crazy about ANY of those reasons. Back of each of them is the assumption that we will be unable to deal with every situation individually, as it occurs.

Once I told someone that I did not think the events described in the book of Jonah had actually occurred. The story has great spiritual value, which is why it was included in the Bible, but I felt there was no real history behind it.

An alarmed Christian person said, “Yes, but once you say that Jonah didn’t really happen, what’s to stop you from saying any or all of the Bible didn't happen?”

I’ve heard this same argument with regard to scripture a thousand times over the years. Here is the appropriate response:

“Well, let’s see. I believe that Jonah was not swallowed by a great fish and vomited up on the beach. But I believe Abraham was a real person. Further, I believe that David was a real king of a real Israel. And I believe that Jesus was also a real person, one who worked miracles and died on the cross for our sins. See now, that wasn’t so hard, was it?”

One of the joys we have in being human is in exercising our freedom to choose and to take each case as it comes to us. We are not robots who are forced into behaviors by their programming. We see things; we think about things; and we choose our course of action or beliefs appropriately. And as long as that remains true of us, we will live every day of our lives on one slippery slope or another. There is no reason to fear this.

As a matter of fact, all of the really lovely and interesting things that humans think and do exist on slippery slopes. Love, parenting, sexuality, boundaries (both geographic and emotional), spirituality, morality, legality, economy, consumption and production. Really there is no end to this list. In truth, I am at a loss at this moment to think of ANY human endeavor that does not exist on a slippery slope of some kind.

So relax. Keep your eyes and your heart open. Think and believe and act. Changing your mind is always a respectable option. Hopefully your heart will follow in time. Fear not the slippery slope, for we have been slipping and sliding throughout history.

It’s a part of what makes us human.

Now and then I become aware that some child has suffered an unspeakable horror. Most of the time I cannot bear this truth. I quickly turn my mind elsewhere, because I’m too busy or too tired to deal with the reality of evil. My shadow self files this knowledge away in a secret drawer while the conscious part of me sings, “La, la, la, la, la; I can’t hear you.”

But sometimes I allow myself to hold the knowledge of terrible evil in my mind. I can feel the raging, voracious appetite of evil, the consuming black hatred in it. Evil puts its snarling face right before my own, a leather-clad drill sergeant from hell who spews black flecks of spit all over my face. His breath smells like gas bursting from a swollen carcass.

Usually this is as much as I can handle. I can stand before evil for a few moments with my eyes screwed shut and my face turned away. My mind searches frantically for anything else to think about. Anything else. I mumble panicked baby prayers. “Dear Jesus, sweet Jesus, make it go away!”

But evil is also like a deep, sore place inside my tongue. I cannot leave evil alone. Something keeps me gnawing at it, discovering over and over again that yes, this sore spot still hurts like hell.

In these moments of extreme masochism, I manage to push past the drill sergeant and move deeper into the domain of evil. I allow myself to imagine that this horrible thing was done to my middle daughter, my Shelby, my Sharmy, my Sobee, my Tubby Lumpkin. She of the tender heart and loving ways, the one whose brown eyes are as cautious and tender as a woman’s palm.

I can see the fear in Shelby’s eyes and her panicked thrashing. Sometimes I can hear her scream for me. “Daddy,” she cries, but I am not there for her.

This is an infinite evil. Thinking of it is like trying to comprehend the size of the universe. It is beyond the capacity of my mind. My defense mechanisms begin to kick in, and I am numbed. Benumbed to evil. I can only shake my head and wonder at any mind that could comprehend this reality.

I turn and run. I run from evil as fast as I can, but some impish part of me looks back, like Lot’s wife, to see the fire raining down from the sky. In this moment, one final thought makes it through my defenses. And here is that final thought: When any child suffers, it is as tragic and horrible as my own child suffering. And many children suffer in our world. Their screams fill the heavens and surround our planet with a haze of sorrow, a beacon to the universe. “Stay away! This world is broken. These people hurt each other. They always have, and they always will.”

This is all I can do, and this I have done. I have gazed into the gaping maw of the devil and smelled his rancid breath. I will not go closer, unless of course, some other person exercises his terrible gift of freedom and makes me enter therein. But for now, yes, this is all I can do.

If only for this I need God. If only to think that somewhere there is a mind that can comprehend evil and will comprehend it, that can count evil and will count it, that can know evil and will know it for what it is. I want evil to be known, and goodness too. I want someone to bear the awful knowledge of good and evil.

But more than that, I want to believe that no child’s scream goes unheard.

rlp

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Note: Leave comments below if you like. If you wish to engage in an ongoing discussion about any issues that this essay brings to mind, try the forum.

When I was a child, I found repetition comforting. No one taught me this. I discovered it on my own, and it seemed to come naturally to me.

Before I fell asleep each night, I would carefully lower my ear onto my pillow and listen for the mysterious sound of footsteps crunching in the snow. I had to hear this sound every night, though I had no idea where it came from. The mystery behind these strange steps was revealed to me as an adult, when one night I heard them again and realized it was the sound of my own pulsing temple magnified through the material of the pillow...

Click here to read the rest of this essay at The Christian Century online.

Archive of Christian Century Articles by Gordon Atkinson

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.

Audio Files

I've got a number of things planned for this site. Book reviews and a bookstore are coming soon. Christian Century will be launching a blog here, featuring some of their best writers. That's going to be very cool. Many people only know Christianity from television or perhaps from a bad experience or two. Christian Century is a magazine for thinking people. I'm very excited about that.

Six months ago I began wondering about creating audio files and offering them here. I'm really hoping to do a podcast at some time in the future. So I bought an MBox and spent a little time learning to use it. I'm just beginning, but I know how to lay down tracks and mix them. Editing is still hard, but I'm getting there.

So here's my first attempt at an audio production of an essay. I recorded this essay from February of 2004. Remember, this is my FIRST try. After I was done, I realized I slurred the word "through" in one part. But I'm am not good enough yet to go in and fix just one word. Also, the music intro and exit is a little plain and obvious. Oh well, you gotta start somewhere.

When an author reads something he or she wrote, you get to hear the words the way they were imagined. I try to write so that my prose sounds good. I read everything out loud. It's the only way I can keep hearing it fresh. So anyway, this is how I imagined this thing sounding.

The music is from Ben King's CD, "Rio Grande Romeos." Actually I grabbed it to see if I could figure out how to have a musical intro. After I had played with it, I ended up liking the sound so I kept it. I'm pretty sure Ben is okay with this.

Hey Ben, is it okay if I use your music for an audio file? If you don't say anything, I'll take that as a yes.

(Okay seriously, Ben's a friend and he's cool with me doing this.)

The mp3 file is 3.3 megabytes. PC users can right click to download the file (I don't know how Mac people do that), or just click to listen. It isn't a streaming file so you'll have to wait until it loads.

Click here and enjoy!

peace,

rlp

Children living on the edges of time zones are the ones most aware of the arbitrary nature of timekeeping. On the Western edges, they whine about being called indoors on summer evenings when the sun is still shining. On the Eastern edges, they are rightly offended when the winter sun starts to go down at 4:30 in the afternoon.

Even the best of our adult explanations are not good enough for them. They know something is not right...

Click here to read the rest of this essay at The Christian Century online.

Archive of Christian Century Articles by Gordon Atkinson