Christianity has a heavy presence in the United States. You can feel the weight of it like a quilted cloak draped over the people, bending their heads forward and pressing on their shoulders. The air is thick with Christian words. Bible phrases fill our literature and are baptized into our culture, peppering our speech with feeble reminders of a lost faith.

- She’s the salt of the earth.

- He has the patience of Job.

- It’s only a drop in the bucket.

The Christian Church in America is so symbiotically enmeshed with our culture that their hearts beat as one, and some people hardly know the difference between the two. The words of faith and religion have burrowed deep into the flesh of our language. They rise to the surface like shards of glass from a festering wound, reborn as oaths, obscenities, and vulgar expressions.

- Jesus Christ!

- God damn it!

- Oh my God!

Are the people who say these things praying?

When your holy names are born again into the rarified order of words used to express rage and anger, you know you’re deep into the culture. Down in the cultural unconscious, right on the edge of the place where myths are born. And these quasi-religious phrases may well outlast the American Church. Words and phrases are notoriously long-lived, surviving for generations after all remembrance of their original meaning is gone.

And that would be fitting, since words will likely be our undoing. Much of American Christianity is all about words. Hollow words of theology that have all the depth and meaning of political slogans. Words delivered with a smile by ministers who dance behind their pulpits. Words that create false gods of hope and fear. Words that build up straw men and beat them down, while gently excusing the listeners from anything that remotely resembles radical living. Christianity has become a word factory, churning out half-baked ideas and spewing them across the bobbing heads of people who are looking for easy answers. The Church is Constantine reborn in our time. She mouths words of salvation and shakes her baptismal waters over the people who are marched beneath her arched weapons.

But good words must have good living beneath and behind them, or they will ultimately come to nothing. Words without living are just marketing, which has its place if you’re selling hamburgers or shoes, but not if you’re seeking the meaning of life.

I know about the danger of words, for I am a word man myself. I am a writer and a preacher, which means my words end up on paper and in the air, which means they hardly exist at all. Remember: even if my words touch your heart, having said them or written them gives me no special credits in heaven. My life is what matters, as is yours.

It should not have been this way, my brothers and sisters of nature, science, and the world. Christianity should have soared like a bird on the winds of real living. Christianity should have been a heavenly choice, a chosen path, the way of a pilgrim. You should have been warned of the difficulty of the Christian journey perhaps, but never lied to and never coerced. Those who seek to follow in the way of Christ should have taken up a rule of living like monks of old and never laid that rule on the shoulders of anyone who did not freely ask for it. Instead of demanding respect and threatening with fires of hell, we should have been the humble servants of all who crossed our paths.

I speak these words of criticism as a committed insider in the American Church. I speak them with love, but more importantly with great hope, for I always have been a dreamer. When it comes to the Church, you have to be able to see what she might have been and might still become. And strangely enough, you have to see this and believe in it, though you know the Church will never live up to it.

I have been discouraged by the Church many times. And I have even wondered if being a minister was the right choice for me. Thankfully, the Church as a whole is not my responsibility. I am a part of one small community, meeting in a little stone building in San Antonio. We have words to say, of course, various affirmations of faith and statements that we write. But our lives will either speak for us or not. And that is a bit scary, considering how imperfect we are. We try to represent the spirit of Christ. We try and often fail. Sometimes we love the people who come to us seeking solace, and sometimes we have failed to love them as well as we should. We stand before a fireplace on Sunday mornings, singing and speaking, sometimes making a mess of the words, not to mention the living that should stand behind them.

We are waiting to be redeemed. We are waiting for the gift of redemption. And while we are waiting we stand ready to bring whatever goodness we have into the world, as if we might prime some heavenly pump that might start some larger process and things might begin to become what they ought to have been.

rlp

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The Mission Trip: Part Two

Read part one

The mission trip plan was not complicated. Five of us would be dropped off at the University of Wisconsin, where we would walk around and tell people about Jesus, hopefully leading some of them to accept Jesus as their personal savior. The other five would go to a local community college and do the same thing. The following day we would swap campuses.

I was very uncomfortable about the whole thing. The idea of walking around striking up conversations about Jesus with strangers was frightening, so I was feeling high levels of anxiety. However, I had no way to think about that anxiety other than to consider it a personal weakness. If I loved God, certainly I would love these people enough to want to tell them the good news about Jesus. Of course I would. Otherwise they might go to hell. I felt that if I was a good Christian, I would be excited and happy about the task ahead. That I was instead plagued with a stomach full of butterflies was something that I would simply have to overcome. And I was determined to do so.

And so it was that on a March morning in 1982, a van rolled to a stop somewhere on the campus of the University of Wisconsin and dropped off five idealistic college students. The van drove away, and we were left to our work. We would be picked up late that afternoon.

It had not occurred to anyone to do any cultural research to see if the folks from Wisconsin might have some customs or social expectations that differed from ours. In most parts of Texas, strangers can and do greet each other. It doesn’t happen all the time, but sometimes a total stranger will ask you how your day is going. A friendly response is expected. Usually that’s all that happens, but you can strike up a conversation if you’re of a mind to do that.

In the North and Northeastern parts of our country, people are more hesitant to start conversations with strangers. This doesn’t mean people are less friendly there. It simply means the social morays and boundaries are a little different. In crowded urban areas, personal space might be the only space you have. As it turned out, walking around the campus of the University of Wisconsin trying to start conversations with total strangers was not the thing to do.

I think we were all a bit hesitant and unsure of how to get started. People were everywhere, walking quickly to class. I did the only thing I knew to do, something that might work on the campus at Baylor. I walked up to people, introduced myself, and tried to get them to talk to me.

"Hi, how’r ya’ll doin? My name’s Gordon Atkinson. I’m up from Texas, just visiting the campus. Say, have you heard about Jesus?"

I did not get the response I was hoping for. A good number of people just ignored me completely, walking by without any sign that they had heard me. Others flinched and drew back, somewhat alarmed. They walked away looking back over their shoulders or whispering to their friends. “Who the fuck is that guy?”

We tried. God knows we tried, but no one would listen to us. Soon it was apparent that a handful of religious zealots were walking around campus, and people began to actively avoid us. I hated every minute of it. But still I felt that this was the right thing to do, so I forced myself to engage people, only to get the same response every time.

I particularly remember opening a door for a young woman. I held it open with my right hand and and motioned her through with my left. I had a big smile on my face. I thought she might talk to me after that. She froze in front of the open door and looked at me with obvious suspicion. She moved away and left the building through a different door, walking away quickly which her books clutched to her chest.

That’s pretty much how the day went. We were ignored or stared at. A few folks got verbal and told us to fuck off.

By noon, I was done. I was emotionally shredded. I couldn’t make myself talk to even one more person. I went into the cafeteria and hid there drinking milkshakes for the rest of the afternoon. As the day progressed I felt more and more miserable. I knew that Jesus must be disappointed in a pitiful disciple like me. The apostle Paul endured a stoning and beatings to tell people about Jesus. But I couldn’t bring myself to talk to college students because I was embarrassed.

The guilt and shame were horrible. I tried to drown my feelings of sorrow by slurping down several milkshakes. It helped a little - a good milkshake always does - but not much.

That evening the van returned and we wearily climbed aboard. In the whole day only three people had managed to have even a single meaningful conversation. And that was with one guy who was intrigued by our accents. He kept asking the girls to say “ya’ll.” He was mostly just curious about why we would do something this boring and awful during our Spring Break.

We got back to where we were staying to find the other group jubilant and celebrating. When we arrived they rushed over and told us with great joy that five people had accepted Christ that day at the community college.

I took the news rather hard, though I knew I should have been happy that five souls were saved. Their success only served to accentuate my own disappointment in myself. Maybe they were more persistent and focused on their task. Or perhaps they had faith enough to keep them trying. I was pretty sure no one on the community college team had spent two or three hours in the cafeteria drinking milk shakes.

I wanted to be happy for their success, so I shoved my own feelings aside, forced a smile on my face, and joined in a time of prayer and thanksgiving for what the Lord had done that day. By the time we were done praying, I felt better. What did it matter how the Lord’s work got done? We had brought the gospel to five people. The whole trip was worth that, wasn’t it?

The next day the other team went to the University and we went to the community college. The other team had set up tables with literature in the cafeteria and had done a puppet show the day before. I know that sounds lame, but it was actually pretty funny. They had expensive muppets, like the ones on Sesame Street, which they made sing and play instruments. I had seen them do it before. I liked the idea of sitting at a table so we could engage people who were curious instead of trying to hunt them down all over campus. I sat down and a few minutes later, two mentally-challenged young men in aprons came over, asking about the puppets. I told them the puppets wouldn’t be there that day. They were visibly disappointed.

Their names were Philip and Roger. The community college had a program to teach food service skills to mentally-challenged people. I assumed these two guys were in that program. They were extremely friendly, so I chatted with them for a few minutes.

Suddenly Philip said, “I’m not going hell. I’m going to heaven. Did you know that?”

I looked at him, quizzically. Then Roger spoke up.

“Me neither. I’m not going to hell. I’m going heaven with him.” He pointed at Philip. They were both beaming with happiness over this.

I got a very bad feeling inside. I didn’t want to believe what I was suspecting. I asked them a couple of questions.

“Philip, how do you know that you’re going to heaven?”

“The puppet lady told me. She said that if I said the prayer, I wouldn’t go to hell and would go to heaven. And I did.”

“Me too,” said Roger.

I spoke carefully and seriously. “Philip, do you remember the prayer you said?”

“No.”

“Do you remember even one word of it? Do you remember just one word from the prayer?”

His face went slack as he thought for a moment.

“No,”

Then he smiled and said, “I’m going to heaven.”

“Me too,” said Roger.

I forced a smile. “Yes, I know you are.”

I turned away from them and whispered softly to myself. My lips were barely moving.

“Please, tell me we didn’t do this.”

I asked Roger if anyone else had said the prayer. He pointed out three others, all of them mentally-challenged people who were in the food service education program.

I was so angry. Someone on the other team had manipulated these vulnerable people into saying a prayer, just so they could claim to have led people to the Lord. I had felt so guilty and ashamed that I hadn’t had their faith and persistence. I had worked so hard to put those feelings aside so that I could celebrate with them. But it was all a lie.

When the team gathered that evening I said nothing. I was the only one who knew what had happened. It probably would have been good to bring it up and talk about it, but I didn’t.

I was starting to feel a deep kind of sadness. A sadness that had little panicky undertones to it. It was the feeling of having your foundation shaken a little bit. It’s the feeling you get when something you’ve always accepted might not be true. It had never occurred to me that when the Church puts such high stock in converting people, things like this are bound to happen.

And it got me thinking about some other numbers I had heard reported over the years.

-----“35 saved last night at the revival. Praise the Lord.”

-----“14 souls saved at Vacation Bible School last week. Thank you, Jesus.”

-----"Our church baptized 150 people last year.”

It’s a question of numbers and time. If becoming a Christian is a thing that can happen in a single instant in time - in one prayer - then you have something that can be counted. And if something can be counted, we will count it. Because we like numbers.

Numbers look good on the church’s year-end report, though one wonders why a church would want or need such a report. But numbers are not good in any way that really matters.

For me this trip marked the beginning of some new ways of thinking. It wasn’t the last mission trip I went on. And there was a lot of deconstruction still ahead for me in the years to come. It was painful, but it was the beginning of my spiritual journey to find the place where authenticity and faith exist in harmony.

It is, I think, a journey with no end.

rlp

The Mission Trip: Part One

In March of 1982 I was a sophomore at Baylor University. I was a religion major, which meant that I was following a track of study designed to lead me nicely into seminary. I was getting my first taste of serious biblical study and theology. In addition I was beginning other studies common to liberal arts degrees - philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and the like. It was a mind-opening time for me.

I was also very involved with an organization called The Baptist Student Union, also known as the BSU. Some people said, “Don’t let the BSU BS You,” which I’ve always thought was pretty funny.

BSU was a Christian organization on campus that had Bible studies and worship services. We also did various ministries of one sort or another. We were a spiritual community of college students who were sincerely trying to be faithful and serious Christians. The community was very important to me, and I still treasure many memories from those days. I especially remember one of the BSU directors, Shawn Shannon, who was smart and funny and engaged with life. I had a profound respect for Shawn, both for her intelligence and her commitment to Christ. She was very helpful to me when I began to struggle with various doubts and concerns about Christianity.

Most of us in the BSU had been brought up in the world of evangelical Christianity. We were taught that everyone should become a Christian. This was what God wanted. We had a number of phrases that we used to describe the moment of conversion. You made a “profession of faith,” or “accepted Jesus as your personal savior,” or “asked Jesus to come into your heart.” These days I avoid that kind of language because it doesn’t communicate very well, but in that time and place, those phrases worked for us. We understood them to mean that you believed Jesus had died for your sins, and you were seeking to live as a disciple of Christ - a follower of his teachings.

We were also taught that if a person did not become a Christian during his or her lifetime, that person would go to hell. Hell itself was highly debated, at least in my circles. There were those who felt hell was literally a fiery place where poor, unrepentant sinners roasted for all eternity. Yes - devils, pitchforks, lakes of fire, that sort of thing. Many Christians I knew couldn’t stomach the idea of God burning people, particularly those nice Buddhists who had never even heard of Jesus. Some of these Christians believed hell was some kind of separation from the presence of God, a kind of a gloomy existence in the hereafter that no one could explain or define.

But whatever hell was, fire or gloom, it was a not a place you wanted to be. Particularly if you considered you could go to heaven instead. The exact details of heaven were never clearly laid out for us, but it was supposed to a pretty sweet place. In order to go to heaven, you had only to say a simple prayer, confessing your sins and proclaiming your belief that Jesus died for you.

Various religious leaders - pastors, Sunday school teachers, Bible study leaders, and others made no bones about this fact: It was our sacred duty to tell people that they needed to become Christians. We called it “witnessing,” and it was a thing we were all supposed to be doing. All the time. Wherever you were, at any time or place, if the opportunity arose, you should tell people about Jesus. There were even training classes you could take to learn how to get a Jesus conversation started, if you were a shy person and needed help with things like that. It was serious business and the implications were obvious. If you don’t tell people about Jesus, they might end up in hell. And you would be at partly to blame for that.

Leading someone to Christ was kind of the holy grail of Southern, evangelical Christianity. That’s when you told someone that Jesus died for their sins, and they believed it and prayed to God confessing their sins and proclaiming that belief. If you led someone to the Lord it was such a wonderful thing because that person was now going to heaven and was also going to enjoy the benefits of living as a Christian here on earth.

This is what my people told me. And they were good people. They were people from the churches I grew up attending. They were the people who knew my name and gave me hugs and were truly happy to hear about my life. They were the gentle adults who were warm and present and demonstrative with their love. This was my world and the only way I knew to think about life.

Consider what this kind of thing would mean to a sensitive, well-meaning young man who truly wants to do the right thing in life. He wants to make God and Jesus happy, certainly. And he wants to please the authority figures in his life by being a good Christian. Consider also how impossible the task is. No matter how hard you try, you will always be leaving streams of hell-bound people in your wake as you travel through life. It’s easy to see how that could be a lot for a person to carry around. I’m just saying.

Okay, so going back to March of 1982. A Spring Break mission trip to Milwaukee was organized by the BSU. I don’t know why Milwaukee was chosen, but we were told that “up north,” a lot of people didn’t go to church at all and weren’t Christians.

Clearly these people needed our help. So ten BSU students and one BSU director bought plane tickets and headed for Wisconsin.

Yours truly was among them.

rlp

To be continued...

Note: There is an audio file of this essay below it.

I recently watched “Roving Mars,” a documentary film about Spirit and Opportunity, the two rovers sent by NASA to explore the surface of Mars. NASA’s main mission was to find evidence that water once existed on the Red Planet. The evidence for that seems clear now. Mars once had enough water to make a significant mark on its geological landscape.

NASA’s greater goal is to find out if life exists outside of the earth. The only life-model we have is our own, and water seems to be the essential ingredient. To that end, scientists are seeking to find water on celestial bodies that are close enough for our analysis. One of Jupiter’s moons, Europa, seems another likely candidate for study. Primitive life may be found in the waters below the ice cap of Europa. If so, it would be the most important scientific discovery in the history of humankind. For if life occurs twice in the same solar system, then you can assume the universe is teeming with life forms of unimaginable diversity.

While watching the film I was moved almost to tears by the commitment of the science team to their twin rovers and to the small step they are taking in the history of human knowledge. They love Spirit & Opportunity, and many on the team are convinced that the rovers have distinct personalities. Opportunity seems more reliable, while Spirit seems to be rather impish and prone to trouble.

The rovers were designed to be operational for about 90 days. That they have continued to work for four years is miraculous. But the day is coming when their exhausted batteries will finally expend the last of their energy. The rover wheels will creak forward one final inch and then freeze in place, never to move again. Spirit and Opportunity will then sit perfectly still while time passes, and they are slowly coated with the red dust that covers that planet.

Will we send more rovers to Mars? Will humans one day land there and perhaps bring one of the rovers home? At this point we cannot say what will happen to Spirit and Opportunity because no one knows how much more of our resources will be put into the exploration of our solar system and the universe beyond it.

There are several natural barriers for any species that hopes to explore the Cosmos. Gravity and technology are among them. And the speed of light presents its own set of difficulties. The first two we have conquered, and the third is perhaps for another age of humanity to solve.

But there is one barrier that is making it hard for us to even get started.

Economics.

It is very expensive to explore the Cosmos. The resources it takes to explore even our own solar system are staggering. The United States is the wealthiest nation on earth, if we are talking about technology and the ability to use it. And yet it takes all that we can muster, economically, to put a couple of rovers on the planet that is closest to us. It cost 820 million dollars to put Spirit and Opportunity on Mars. It costs about 3 million dollars a month to keep them running and to analyze the information they send back. Imagine how much it would cost to put a couple of people on Mars.

Currently we have spent nearly a trillion dollars on the war in Iraq*. No one really knows how much we will end up spending because there are so many hidden costs.

It is not my purpose to make a case for whether or not we should be at war. I happen to think we should not, but that’s not the point here. I simply observe that as long as we are at war, we will never have the resources to learn very much about the Universe. Because of this war, things that might have been known in our lifetime will go unknown for decades, perhaps longer if this war leads to other wars, as they often do. That’s too bad. I’d really like to be alive when we get our first peek into the waters of Europa. But that may not happen in my lifetime.

The question is: How do we want to spend our money? Do we want to explore the heavens or do we want to fight amongst ourselves? Amazing, isn’t it, how global politics begins to sound like something from an elementary school playground?

It’s easy for ordinary people to feel that we have little or no control over how the government spends our money. It seems that there is nothing we can do about it. But if the scientists who sent Spirit and Opportunity to Mars can find joy in giving their lives to that one small step of knowledge, perhaps you and I could find joy in taking one small step of our own toward peace.

And that first step might mean using our imagination. It might mean being willing to have a dream. Change often begins when people have a dream. Martin Luther King Jr. certainly taught us that. So you and I have to dream. We have to imagine a different kind of future for ourselves and our children. And we have to want that future badly enough to shout and march and demonstrate and do whatever it takes to move humanity in another direction.

Imagine what the world would be like if we humans could cooperate and work together across national boundaries, using more and more of our global resources to help others live well enough to share in our common, human thirst for knowledge. Can you imagine that world? You want to send a probe to Europa? No problem. You want to explore other planets? Can do. You want to make sure that every child has food to eat and medical care? Absolutely.

Okay now stop. Stop for a moment. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it’s a nice dream, but it’s never going to happen. You’re thinking I’m a starry-eyed dreamer with some beautiful but impossible ideas. Well, I am a starry-eyed dreamer; I admit that. But I’m also a thoughtful man who considers things carefully and is aware of the limitations of humanity.

I’m very aware of what human history has shown us about our nature and our capacity for evil.

You see, my own spiritual tradition contains the idea that something is broken in our hearts. Our selfishness and our need for money and power and pleasure is not going to be overcome solely by wishing and dreaming, though that is the first step. In the Christian tradition, the climax of our central story has a lot to say about how deeply evil is rooted in the world and how costly and difficult it is to set things right.

Most spiritual traditions teach that we need to be changed, and that change is imagined as a kind of spiritual transformation.

It happens when an alcoholic finds a power greater than herself and is changed so that she finds sobriety.

It happens when you see a powerful movie or documentary, and your eyes are opened to some issue or truth.

It happens when fiercely independent people reach the end of their resources and cry out for help.

Something snaps or breaks in your soul and you are never the same. That’s what I’m talking about when I say a spiritual transformation.

It breaks my heart to know that the various spiritual traditions of humankind have not shown others a clear vision of global peace. While the world fights over land and resources and ideology, we have fought over ridiculous minutia, theological language, and over which of our religions is the right one.

That’s got to stop.

I’ve had a vision, you see. I’m a little embarrassed to say so because I’m not really a vision sort of guy, but I keep having this crazy idea that maybe the age of exclusivity is passing away. It’s passing away slowly, like racism and nationalism and indifference to the health of our environment, but it IS passing away. Religious exclusivism had its day, but the sun it setting and a new dawn awaits. There are now people in every spiritual tradition who are willing to admit that theirs is not the only way. These people will admit that the intelligence behind creation seems to work with different people in different ways and with a cultural language that fits them.

Imagine if the spiritual people, the dream keepers of the sacred, archetypal stories that arise from our collective unconscious, were to embrace one another and celebrate the ancient beauty of our various traditions. Imagine if we spiritual people held hands across the world and called for peace instead of causing religious wars, which is what we are doing right now.

If that were to happen, the people of our world might see us differently. They might see the beauty and necessity of caring for our myths and traditions. Even brother and sister scientist would celebrate our ancient stories which are, after all, our earliest attempts to understand the world around us.

Peace would be our hallmark, and we would preach that it is the birthright of everyone born on this planet. And we would be set free to pursue truth in all of its wondrous forms.

Wouldn’t that be amazing?

And maybe there would be energy and money enough to take a peek at what lies below the ice on Europa. What we find there might show us that life is bigger and broader than we ever imagined.

Sigh.

It’s crazy talk, I know. And maybe it won’t happen.

But I can’t stop thinking about it.

rlp

http://marsrovers.nasa.gov

*Cost of War - Washington Post