A stumbling block

For the LORD spoke thus to me with his strong hand upon me, and warned me not to walk in the way of this people, saying: "Do not call conspiracy all that this people calls conspiracy, and do not fear what they fear, nor be in dread. But the LORD of hosts, him you shall honor as holy. Let him be your fear, and let him be your dread. And he will become a sanctuary and a stone of offense and a rock of stumbling to both houses of Israel, a trap and a snare to the inhabitants of Jerusalem. And many shall stumble on it. They shall fall and be broken; they shall be snared and taken."

Bind up the testimony; seal the teaching among my disciples. I will wait for the LORD, who is hiding his face from the house of Jacob, and I will hope in him.

One of my favorite posts I’ve written came from reading one of my least favorite books I’ve ever read. After suffering through painful pages of Austen I pondered whether the stereotypical format of an Austen novel might follow the story of Grace: everything gets worse and worse throughout the whole story, finally climaxing with the Unspeakable Tragedy, which to everyone’s shock puts all the pieces together with remarkable speed and completeness. Grace trumps all. Evil gets consumed by reverse entropy, the force at work in the world that puts everything together. Death is swallowed up in Victory. It becomes part of the very gears of redemption.

But in the tragedies of this year, reverse entropy does not sound as comforting as it did when I first wrote the term. This spring marks the first time in my twenty-six years as a Christian that I have been scandalized by the message of the cross, “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles.” I like the notion of everything getting consumed by the great snowball of Grace and Redemption, until I realize what is getting consumed in it. Evil becomes part of the wheels of redemption? Murder, rape, child abuse... these become instruments of good? It sounds victorious when it is an abstract idea; it sounds downright scandalous when it is a real-life situation. I don’t know if I like that kind of redemption.

Evil becomes part of the wheels of redemption? The Cross... it becomes an instrument of good? Humiliation, torture, the suffering of the innocent... are part of the gears of redemption? Until this spring, I never realized what a scandalous, offensive, shocking redemption that is.

A Catholic friend of mine enthusiastically told me the other day, “We ask for bread, and he gives us Eucharist.” Maybe it is a good thing we don’t know what we’re praying for sometimes. Who would ever pray for Daily Bread, not to mention the redemption of Jerusalem or of ourselves, if we knew at what cost it would come?

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem!

“Do you believe that?” my Muslim friend asked me after my brief abstract explanation of one of my Christian friend’s theology of redemption. I was struck by the question that had an obvious right answer, and struck by the fact that I didn’t know if I could give it.

It was an Evangelical Christian’s dream come true: my friend was in a terrible time of personal crisis, and the Christian notion of a God who was involved in the muck of our lives transforming it into something beautiful was both directly applicable and entirely foreign to her. All I had to do was give the right answer that I knew almost as early as I could say the word “yes.”

But it was not a good Evangelical she had with her that night... it was a girl whose faith was defined by the changing ways she railed at God over the years, and at that moment the rail had to do with this particular friend’s hell that God had seemed absent from. I wished I was any other Christian in that moment.

“I don’t know...” I stammered honestly. “I want to believe it. I try to believe it. Sometimes I think I do, and then things like last week happen...”

It has been a hard Lent for me. The world feels so much more unredeemable when one is swamped in an unredeemable situation. My brother quoted to me an Orthodox priest who said, “If one where to solve the problems of Jerusalem, he would have solved the problems of the world.” Sometimes I feel like if God could redeem even one of these broken lives I enter, he will have redeemed the world.

But that thought, the comparison of my friend’s hell to the grand picture of redeeming humanity, became a challenge for me in the next week. Over and over, I was struck by these small glimpses of redemption. They don’t look like redemption because they are so comparatively weak in comparison to the evil that happened; but they are like small glimmers of sunlight in a dark forest that let you know something greater is behind it. And I began to wonder if slowly, imperceptibly, God was indeed redeeming my Jerusalem.

Maybe he is. In the mean time, he can’t get upset at me for weeping about it all... he did indeed weep over Jerusalem, after all.

Trading my Sorrows

A few years ago, I flew across the country on an emergency trip to be with a childhood friend at the lowest point she had ever experienced (which, if you knew her history, says a lot). I arrived as soon as I could, and my friend was alternatively numb and delirious with grief and despair.

Her fiancée had O-Ded and left her with nothing but a suicide note that ended by saying “Hate me if you need to,” a little bit of debt, a small stash of “charity weed,” and a baby in her womb. My friend had nothing to hold onto but his ashes for which she fought the man’s ex-wife and two other daughters, and her enduring insistence that his death had somehow not been a suicide.

Somewhere in the darkness of the weekend, she decided to go to church with her parents. Her experience of faith throughout our lives had been colorful, to put it kindly, but there is nothing like death to make a person willing to give a discarded faith another try.

We walked into the large auditorium of the Evangelical mega-church after the worship had already begun. As we found some seats toward the back, the band was bouncing and hopping to the peppy strains of:

I’m trading my sorrows
I’m trading my shame
I’m laying them down
For the joy of the Lord

I’m trading my sickness
I’m trading my pain
I’m laying them down
For the joy of the Lord.

I have not been able to stomach that song since that day.

It was painfully clear that the smiles on the faces of the singers and the up-beat words they sang made no connection to my friend’s brokenness. I am not sure what the Gospel says to people in the midst of real sorrow, what kind of hope it gives to people in rubble of sin—both the sins we’ve done and those done against us—but I know it is not so simple as turning in our sorrow and receiving joy in its place (whatever that means). If Christ and the apostles did not get out of sorrow and pain, I do not understand why we would suppose we can. It is downright cruel to suggest to the sorrowful that they could.

There may be hope for people like my broken friend, for people like me as I hurt beside her, but it is through the suffering, not around it.

I don’t know about the rest of you out there in cyberspace, but I’m about ready for some Easter.

We believe...

“We also believe in Jesus,” my Muslim friend’s father explained to me as we let our cheesecake settle into our full stomachs from the comfort of his daughter’s couch.

“Do you?” I asked in genuine interest, having a vague idea of that fact but not of what it actually meant.

“Yes. We believe in his virgin birth, and that Mary is the most blessed of women. We believe in his miracles and his teachings. We believe that he is the promised Messiah. We believe in his resurrection and in his second coming.”

I certainly had not realized all that.

“It seems to me,” he went on, “we are much closer to Christianity than the Jews are. They do not believe in Jesus at all. We often wonder why Christians feel so much affinity for Jews and so much animosity toward Muslims.”

It was a good point. I saw no reason to point out that Christendom’s kindness toward Jews is a historically recent development. The thrust of his point was theological, not historical, and it was valid. Besides, I was more interested in what he had to say than in my own fumbling answers.

“So then, what are some of the important differences between Christianity and Islam?”

“Well,” he answered, evidently staying on the topic of Jesus, “we don’t believe in the crucifixion.”

I had not been ready for that answer. “You don’t? But you do believe in the resurrection?”

“Yes. We believe that Jesus died a natural death, and God raised him from the dead. We believe that they crucified another man, and that God disguised his face. God would not let his great prophet suffer such humiliation.”

It is a completely different distinction than I am accustomed to hearing, but it strikes me as profound. Indeed, I’ve grown up knowing that the holy men and women of God are up for grabs when the suffering is doled out; if anything, they seem to get an extra serving of it. Christ’s passion seems to guarantee that suffering is part of the journey, and his resurrection (somehow) sanctifies it (I think), weaving it into a story that ends in triumph and redemption.

Lent came in full force this year like never before for me, not as a contemplative time of repentance and reflection, but a time of walking beside friends through some abnormally severe suffering. Sometimes I cannot connect with a hope that their pain has an end. Let me at least believe that Christ’s passion sanctifies it.

Though Grace shown to the wicked...

Once I knew a girl a Muslim girl who had been horrendously taken advantage of by an American authority-figure. The situation was despicable, and I was justifiably incensed.

Later, her father came to visit from the mid-East and learned about the situation. Those who knew about it were ready to deal with the wrath of an offended Arab father; we were seething on his daughter’s behalf, after all.

With a firm resolve, he sadly thanked the offender for the good he had done in times past, expressed regret for the situation, and forbade him from seeing his daughter again. That was all.

The American in me could have been enraged about Muslim dismissals of women. The Christian in me could have been indignant about the godless dismissal of justice. After all, if there is any situation to which I could apply our ambiguous theology of “righteous anger,” it would certainly be this one.

But instead, I was humbled. A Muslim man with every right to be angry (with responsibility to be angry, actually) had just shown me up with grace and forgiveness, and I found myself trembling the next time the words “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” came out of my mouth.

“But God,” I wanted to argue, “we are supposed to be angry when the powerful take advantage of the helpless, right?” Maybe. Maybe we must become enraged since we (and the Muslims) serve a God of justice. And that is why Grace is offensive, why it is unfair and may even seem evil from our limited perspective. Grace does not just apply to me; if it really is Grace, it applies to those who hurt those I love.

I pray I rarely need to muster up the magnanimity of grace my friend’s father demonstrated. But if the need arises, I pray I can find it.

Notes from the Underground

Last year during Lent I posted about sin, brokenness, and finitude. But a few weeks ago as I sat in a coffee shop pondering the approach of Lent, I began to wonder if all three of those are the same word. If sin is the twisted goodness of creation, then whether I did the twisting or was twisted from the outside or was born twisted may not be so different.

There is grace in that for me, grace in looking at my sin the way I look at a speech impediment or an injured knee. The repentance that this season focuses on may be little more than an invitation to God to come untwist me.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Mmm Mmm Good

In the beginning was the Welch’s farm.

As far back as my memory reaches, this farm runs across the planes of my childhood, weathered by the slow decay of time, but weathered in the way that produces rich, black, moist, Midwestern dirt, pregnant with goodness. I loved each visit through the jungle of cornfields and soybeans, atop the mountain of itchy bails in the hayloft, inside the pealing walls of the white farmhouse, up the creaky wooden stairs, around the simple table where the same meal awaited every day.

Mrs. Welch is the silent, steady line that runs through all these memories and binds them together with a fixity strong enough for me to taste the Welch’s farm in every loaf of whole wheat bread I’ve ever eaten in 25 years: her low, soft voice; her sharp, cackling laughter; her handmade posters that covered the walls with rotating Bible verses the family would memorize with “In Jesus Name” written on the top of all of them; her long skirts dirty from the black soil of the gardens and chicken coop; her stories at bedtime. In my mind, Welch’s Grape Juice got its name from my Mrs. Welch; it was her wholesomeness that gave it its nourishment.

Most of all, I remember Mrs. Welch for her prayers. Mrs. Welch was always praying, not in a pious way that drew attention to itself, but in a practical way that made the dirt under her fingernails seem holy. Though Mr. Welch led the family prayers at meals, is was Mrs. Welch who went to each child’s bed (including mine, when I was visiting) and prayed with him and her after the collective bedtime story. It was also Mrs. Welch who led the family aloud, open-eyed, collectively, in gathering the names of those whose salvation they prayed for every night before the bedtime story.

The Welch’s grandmother was always listed in these evening prayers. Every night, they prayed for her salvation as part of the steady rhythm of the day. Just like breakfast, lunch and dinner were cemented into the framework of each day, so was prayer for Grandma Welch.

Over the weekend, on Valentine’s Day, the 27th birthday of the second of the Welch children, Grandma Welch died. Days earlier, the family’s constant prayers for her reconciliation with God had been answered. I read on my childhood friend’s facebook wall, “Grandma Welch went to heaven on my birthday—Valentine's Day. She got to see Jesus and feel His love on the day that celebrates love.”

God is good like the black Midwestern soil, the soil that dirtied Mrs. Welch’s fingers for all those decades and produced a crop, the soil that Mrs. Welch’s prayers went into like corn seeds that expected a harvest, the soil that produced Mrs. Welch herself. Her consistent prayers called on the richness of his goodness, but it was the richness of his goodness that spouted her very prayers.

I sometimes wonder if God answers prayers directly or if he has just manufactured the world to crumble into redemption like the Welch’s farm. One way or another, we pray because he is “Mmm Mmm Good,” and our prayers remove the scales from our eyes to see that goodness.

How to Become a Saint

One of the mentors of one of my mentors wrote a posthumously published book titled How to Become a Saint, a title that is out of place in Protestant circles where we either emphasize that we are all sinners or that we are all saints.

I thought about that title yesterday as I fingered the manuscript of (Saint) Thomas More’s prayer that he wrote in the Tower of London while awaiting execution (yes, I really did get to touch the manuscript!). It’s a long, thin, scroll-like parchment with a lengthy, rambling prayer of adoration and devotion written mostly in English. Then at the end, before the closing prayer, there is a poem.*

It’s interesting to read what a doomed saint writes as he waits to die. It is not polemical, though More certainly demonstrated his skill for polemical literature many times before his imprisonment. It is not even particularly heroic, though he was preparing himself to die in defense of the Church. It may be pious, but it is an odd piety: a piety of extreme feeling (sighing, suffering, lowness, wrath, weeping), and a piety of extreme love (“loue,” by Renaissance spelling).

Rede distinctely
pray deuoutly
syghe depely
suffer pacyently
meke youe lowly
giue no sentenc hastely
speke but rathe and that truly
preuent youre spech discretely
do all your dedes in charytye
temtacyon resyst strongly
breke his heade shortly
wepe bytterly
haue compassion tenderly
do good workes busyly
loue perseuerently
loue hertely
loue faythfully
loue god all only
and all other for hym charitably
loue in aduersytye
loue in prosperyty
thinke alway of loue for loue ys non other but god hymselfe. Thus to loue bringeth the louer to loue without ende.

It strikes me as an odd exhortation from a martyred man—not to endure, not to fight, not to have courage, not to have peace, not to proclaim the truth, not even (though it is included, I suppose) to forgive. Over and over, at the end of his prayers in the days he awaited execution, this particular saint exhorted himself to love. Just to love.

Like most saints, More did not consider himself to be one—in a letter to Erasmus in which he discussed a literary scuffle the Englishman was having with a French poet, he suggested he deserved some grace “while I still dwell in this mortal abode, and have certainly not yet been entered in the number of saints (let me laugh at a laughable notion!).” But maybe he had unknowingly stumbled on the key factor in sainthood.

How do you become a saint? Love.


*For the record, this is not actually a poem that he wrote, but does come from the prayer scroll he used in the tower, so it is a poem he was repeating while he awaited execution.

Lines on a Red-Eye

You shut my eyes like airplane wine along
The red-eye flight from San Francisco, though
I wouldn’t mind foregoing the Merlot
To get a softer bed. And you’re the song
That plays in airline headphones; rarely do
I see you as a gift because you cost
Me far too much. Like February frost
That’s only rain in California, you
Can touch the ground and call it good when I
Would call it muddy. Never mind. May-
Be I am getting old enough to say
I like the plastic cup, and though I try
To call you every insult (growing thinner),
Never could I call you late for dinner.

Good-good-good-good

I just got back from San Francisco on a red-eye flight yesterday morning. I was there to visit my dear friend and former housemate Paul I wrote about last year. The trip was amazing for many reasons, some of which I may articulate in future posts if I can make them coherent enough to follow without too much background. For now, since this is a listening-blog, I'll just summarize the highlights.

Paul was making a formal vow of celibacy, and 120 people from around the country gathered to celebrate the goodness of God's gift to Paul in a calling to be "love in the heart of the church," in the words of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, and God's goodness to the Church in giving it Paul to love it. But it's an odd goodness, an odd gift; it's not a gift Paul would have chosen anymore than the rest of us would, and not a goodness in the way the Evangelical version of the heath-and-wealth gospel tends to think of it. It's a calling in the way Roger Mehl uses it in his book Love and Society:

The most reliable callings are born from reflecting on a situation that is more or less imposed on us. A vocation is nearly always a way of accepting a situation that was first of all considered a limitation.

Paul, who has lived as a celibate man in intentional Christian community sharing in the life (and death) of individuals and families for the past eighteen years, is proclaiming his unwanted calling as a gift nonetheless, aspiring one day to be a content 86-year-old man. Toward that end, Paul vows to give himself fully to the Church, to love her, comfort her, honor and keep her, in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others be faithful only unto her, so long as he shall live. Paul's limitations have allowed him to experience love in the context of the Church body in a way that challenges our cultural idolatry of romantic love. Thus God's gift is "good" like Wendell Berry uses the word in Jayber Crow, Paul's favorite book, which we read at the ceremony:

I am a man who has hoped, in time, that his life, when poured out at the end, would say, "Good-good-good-good-good!" like a gallon jug of the prime local spirit. I am a man of losses, regrets, and griefs. I am an old man full of love.

So 120 people whose lives have been touched by this 43-year-old man who has tried to embody love to the church gathered to celebrate this past weekend in San Francisco, an odd place to celebrate celibacy (not that such a "celibation" would not be odd elsewhere). The guys had a bachelor party (I hear rumors that chastity belts were involved, but I was not there). There was a reception with a slide-show of pictures, wonderful pasta, plenty of wine, and exhausting dancing. After the festivities, Paul left yesterday for his week-long honeymoon at a monastery near the coast. It was quite a party.

I may mention this again from time to time as my thoughts process, but for now the main thing I heard is that God is indeed good, even if his "calling" is often just the unideal life that was set before us through our series of frustrating circumstances. God is good to Paul, and through Paul's love for the Church he is challenging me in my love for the people we call our "brothers and sisters" even if the familial relationship is rarely realized. May we learn to lay down our lives for each other.