To remind my readers who have never actually met me, I am missing my left arm below the elbow (hence the name of my blog – onehandclapping). When I walked walked into the dressing room this lady immediately saw my arm and started offering to do everything for me. She took all the suits, walked me to the handicapped stall, took everything off the hangers for me, undid all the fastenings, and then offered to help me try on the items. While it was a bit infuriating that she assumed that my disability meant that I could not dress myself, I tried to just appreciate her helpfulness. Then she chose to stand right outside my dressing room and talk to me the entire time I was in there. And this wasn’t just small talk either, she essentially delivered a sermon to me about how Jesus had brought me to her to allow her to help a person in need. She then went on about how God has given me strength and grace to manage in this world with just one arm and how blessed I must feel that I have had such grace bestowed upon me.

By that point, I was feeling rather uncomfortable. I hadn't told her my faith choices, but I did know that the woman who came in before me was Muslim and was having to listen to this sermon. And while I believe that we are all blessed by God, I am not a fan of being pitied because I am “abnormal.” But then this woman started describing a homeless man she had seen on the way in to work. She described how he seemed to have created a home out of a shopping cart and that it was his choice to be living in such misery. She said as she passed him, God told her that she didn’t need to help him because if he chose to he could do something with his life and be blessed too. She then praised me for choosing to live in such a way that I can receive God’s blessing.

I didn’t want to argue with her, so I gave her a quick thanks and walked away as she called out to me to always remember to trust in and praise Jesus. But it was such a strange encounter that it’s been hard to stop thinking about it. I don’t know her and don’t want to so readily judge her as she did me and the homeless man, but I couldn’t help but see her as the perfect example of why so many Christians are reluctant to love their neighbors. We create categories that allow us to help those we can pity and see as helpless but which excuse us from helping those we find difficult or uncomfortable – and we do so in the name of Jesus. We create tribes and in-groups and then rationalize that God only desires for us to love our neighbors within the tribes we have created in our own image. We theologize ourselves out of following the greatest commandments and then praise God.

The tendency these days for Christians to pick and choose who they will love is sadly becoming the defining characteristic of what it means to be a Christian. My awkward dressing room encounter simply reminded me of this trend. I just wonder what it will take for that to change?

A few weeks ago my husband and I arrived home from a rare evening out to see a homeless man camped out in the driveway of the empty house next door. I had seen this man wandering the neighborhood and had taken to referring to him as “the wizard” on account of his pointy beard, the wide-brimmed hat and long duster-coat he wore, and staff he carried with him. My husband went out to offer him some food and ended up having a lengthy conversation with this man who even goes by the very wizardly name Hawkeye. He declined the offer of food and mentioned that he has set himself up as the protector of the neighborhood and had information that the empty house next door needed someone to watch over it that night.

This encounter with Hawkeye served as a reminder that homelessness is not just some abstract issue for which the church needs to develop a response, but that the homeless are real individual people with real stories. Yet all too often in our modern economy it is easy to lose sight of these stories. The message that the culture feeds us is that our highest priority should be pursuing our individual security. We participate in the economy for our own sake, assuming the responsibility of providing for ourselves and protecting that which we manage to obtain. Those that fail to make it are viewed as issues to be dealt with (such as the homeless) and rarely as fellow beings made in the image of God that we are to be in solidarity with. In fact the cultural assertion that we are responsible only unto ourselves has led to our ignoring the stories of others that are suffering often because of our own prosperity.

In contradiction of this cultural trend, the biblical witness and the tradition of the church hold that Christians have a responsibility to care for the needs of all people. This mandate goes beyond simply the giving of alms, but to the ensuring that as people of God the church is expressing righteousness by pursuing justice in all of its relationships. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus in his mission to proclaim the kingdom of God describes his role as one who brings good news to the poor and proclaims release to the captives (Lk 4:18). Earlier in the Gospel Mary described the kingdom of God as a place where the powerful are brought down from their thrones and the lowly lifted up (Lk 1: 52) and John declared that to truly follow God “whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise” (Lk 3:10). Jesus also told Zacchaeus that salvation had come to his house once he repented of his economic exploitation of others. To live in the ways of the kingdom of God as revealed in scripture is to be in right relation economically with others.

In a culture that encourages its members to look after their own needs first, the equality and other-centeredness of the kingdom of God is generally perceived as a threat to the status quo. Instead of developing an awareness of how our economic practices are perhaps contributing to the oppression or defrauding of others, the culture encourages us to assume that economics is a morally neutral area. But without knowing the stories of others and understanding how our economic practices are actually affecting them, it is impossible to be in right relation with others. Our business, our striving to gain security in this world, must concern itself with the others we do in fact interact with as part of that process. Like Zacchaeus who in engaging in the expected role of a tax-collector had defrauded those he did business with, all of us need to be aware of the ways we harm others in our economic transactions.

We as the consumer of a good or as an investor in a business need to know if the workings of that business serve to uplift the lowly or to keep them down. Were the workers mistreated or paid insufficient wages? Were they given a just price for their product that not only covers their production costs but also pays them fairly for their labor? Were they forced to work under inhumane conditions or treated in ways that disrespected their dignity? All these are questions that need to be addressed if one is to live out the equitable norm of the kingdom of God.

But in a culture that encourages individualism, it is far too easy to ignore not only the stories of others but this responsibility to treat them properly as well. The poor, like the homeless, are not just issues to be dealt with but are real people already intimately connected to our everyday economic actions. To live into the norms of the kingdom of God where the lowly are lifted up requires action on the part of the people of God. Those who claim to follow God must accept both relationship with the neighbors with whom we interact with economically and the subsequent responsibilities such relationship entails. As the biblical narrative attests, this may mean repenting of ways we have cheated others, working to bring good news to the poor, and leveling out economic relationships as the mighty are brought down while the lowly are lifted up.

Yet as biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann comments, “amid the limitless prosperity of the U.S. economy (an expectation when not a fact), it is profoundly problematic to hold to a tradition that features sacrifice for the sake of holiness and justice for the sake of neighbor.” Individualism is the antithesis of self-sacrificial actions that care for the needs of others. Individualism ensures that I not only have enough but all I desire without bothering to ensure if others have enough as well or if I am harming others in amassing the things I want.

To undo such harmful effects of individualism that neglects to care for the real stories of others what is needed is a significant mental shift. Treating homelessness, hunger, and poverty just as issues that need solutions imposed upon them instead of relationships we have that demand us to act responsibly fails to live in the ways of the kingdom of God. For Christians to engage in economics as Christians we must not only listen to the stories of Jesus but also the stories of those we interact with economically.

I’ve been intrigued to discover as I study Luke this time that the language in the Magnificat of the mighty being brought down from their thrones and the lowly uplifted is a recurring motif throughout the book. John the Baptist changes the scripture he quotes from Isaiah to talk about every valley being filled and every hill and mountains made low. Jesus always comes down from the mountain to preach on a plain, and Luke even has the Beatitudes delivered on a plain instead of a mount. God is at work making all things level – bringing down those who prosper now and uplifting those who suffer now. A message that we sometimes can accept at Christmas with its reminder that the Savior of the world was laid in a lowly manger. But in Lent it is far more unsettling.

This is a season of penance and sacrifice, but often only of the personal kind. We give up pleasures or habits for the sake of drawing ourselves closer to God. For many the discipline of such sacrifice is simply a means of reorienting their worship and devotion to God so as to strengthen that commitment overall. The discipline prepares one for deeper relationship with God. But as John proclaimed, preparing the way of the Lord involves bringing down and lifting up. And as Mary asserts, one magnifies the Lord because God has and is in the process of continuing to bring down and lift up. But how often do our Lenten practices participate in this sort of leveling out?

Pietism that relies solely on personal sacrifices that affect us and us alone can serve to draw us emotionally closer to God, but our faith is not something that concerns just us. We exist as a body and as members of the body of Christ the disciplines we engage in should always work towards the good of that body. While being personally closer to God might serve the good of the body in some ways, it is rare that Lenten practices are conceived in such a way. The recent popularity if the images included here attest that at least in popular perception Lent has nothing to do with working for the good of others, of righting relationships that are unbalanced, but is instead merely a selfish (and therefore) pointless practice.

What if our acts of repentance and confession instead served to care for the body as a whole? What if we confessed the ways we have uplifted the mighty (ourselves included) and brought down the lowly? What if our penance and sacrifice involved reversing that imbalance and preparing the way of the Lord by leveling out those relationships? Yes, it is far more difficult to sacrifice a position of privilege and power than it is to give up chocolate or coffee for a few weeks, but it seems to far better reflect the ways God has called us to worship and follow after him. Sacrifice just for the sake of ourselves misses the point. The reminder to bring down and uplift pushes us beyond ourselves to acts of love, repentance, and worship that serve the entire body and not just our particular part.

So while Magnificat is not normally a Lenten text, my meditation on it this year is teaching me that perhaps it should be.

“On every world, wherever people are, in the deepest part of the winter, at the exact mid-point, everybody stops and turns and hugs. As if to say, "Well done. Well done, everyone! We're halfway out of the dark." Back on Earth we call this Christmas. Or the Winter Solstice.” – Doctor Who, A Christmas Carol

Christmas. Halfway out of the dark. This is my new favorite definition of Christmas. On one hand it connects the celebration of the birth of Christ to the natural patterns of the world – an affirmation of the physical that mind/body dualistic Christianity has attempted to hide in embarrassment. But it is also an affirmation of the paradoxical space that Advent calls us to live into.

The light shines in the darkness but the darkness does not understand it. In fact even those that claim to follow the light, keep the light at a safe distance as they wrap themselves in darkness. The coming of light into the world, the birth of the incarnate God, is for some simply a reminder of a far off promise. The light will eventually shine someday chasing away all shadows, but for now we must put up with the darkness as we dream about the light. The darkness doesn’t understand that the light has already broken into the world, not simply as a tantalizing glimpse of the future, but as an illuminating hope shining in the now.

I recently heard a women from Cuba share about how waiting for this light, this promised hope someday, is the only thing that people there have to help them make it through the day. Then she added how blessed she felt that the government is now not only allowing Bibles to be distributed and evangelical churches to gather so that people can have access to this comforting hope, but that the Cuban government is funding such things. The communist government knows the power of light. To allow it as an ever-receding hope in the future turns it into the subduing opium that they need. To allow light into the present would be dangerous, for light can’t help but chase away darkness. So of course they pour money into systems that convince people that liberating hope is only something for the sweet by-and-by. It allows the darkness to thrive.

The darkness always resists the light. If it can convince us that all we should do is perform half-hearted incantations to the idea of light while we ourselves shove the advent of light off into the future, then the darkness will have won. We distract ourselves with complaining about a so-called “war on Christmas” while it is our own theology that hides the light under a bushel. We shrug at the poverty, oppression, and injustice of the darkness as we mumble about God imposing his kingdom someday all the while hoping that the darkness continues to hide our involvement in those very injustices.

Someday, yes, the light will shine in its full brightness. The Kingdom will come in full and the darkness will be no more. But the paradox of Advent is that this light has already broken-in; the light might not be fully apparent yet but we are halfway there. The light is not just to come; it has arrived and is there to help us see. So to await the advent of the ultimate illumination means to live in the light in the now. It means having hope that the shadows of injustice and oppression can be chased away. It means not letting ourselves be subdued into reconciling ourselves with the darkness. It means not simply talking about the light or defending an impotent idea of light, but seeking it out, basking in it, and taking it to where illumination is needed. It means remembering that Christmas is situated at the turning of the seasons, at the time when light always returns and the darkness never ultimately triumphs.

Darkness abounds, but light is shining in and we are halfway out of the dark. That is the meaning of Christmas.

“This being caught up into the messianic sufferings of God in Jesus Christ takes a variety of forms in the New Testament. It appears in the call to discipleship, in Jesus’ table-fellowship with sinners… in the healing of the sick, in Jesus’ acceptance of children. The shepherds, like the wise men from the East, stand at the crib, not as ‘converted sinners’, but simply because they are drawn to the crib by the star just as they are… The only thing that is common to all these is their sharing in the suffering of God in Christ. That is their ‘faith.’ There is nothing of religious method here. The religious act’ is always something partial; ‘faith’ is something whole, involving the whole of one’s life. Jesus calls men, not to a new religion, but to life.

I found the passage so intriguing because it challenges the Christian assumption that encountering Jesus is an end in itself. For many in the church, “finding Jesus” is the point of conversion and salvation. This encounter is presumed to result in the involvement in religious activities such as attending church (which does not necessarily imply being part of the community of church), acts of personal piety, and the elimination of certain sins like sexual immorality. This encounter is what guarantees one a place in heaven and is often assumed to also grant one financial and social success in this life as well. In a dualistic sense, one’s souls’ eternal destiny is changed by this encounter, while physical life continues mostly as before (just in perhaps a better way). There is the encounter that in theory changes everything and in practice changes very little. For unless one’s whole life gets caught up in that suffering of Jesus, the encounter just affects the partial religious acts.

While some might say that ensuring one’s entrance into heaven is to have one’s life caught up into Jesus, it is still a partial event since it ignore the pre-converted life and often the entirety of physical life as well. As the God who suffered Jesus was already present though in the lives of all – the sick, the children, the shepherds, the wise men. He didn’t encounter them and change them so they could now be part of his story; his story became their story as they moved as they were towards him. To find Jesus in a moment is to assume that one was without God and then suddenly has God. Discipleship though is a journey where as people created in God’s image we move ever towards the people we were created to be.

The journey is our conversion as it was for the wise men drawn by the star. That shaping and forming of our selves into Christ-likeness is not a momentary wave of the magic Jesus wand, but the ongoing process of coming to reflect the image of the one in which we live and move and have our being. It is an entirely new life, like Bonhoeffer states, not simply a religious act we join into when it is convenient to us. And it by necessity involves being caught up in suffering. The suffering of Jesus frees us to reject the systems of the world that leave no room for the suffering (or are the cause of that very suffering). Instead of concentrating on our momentary encounters with Jesus, we are free instead to journey towards that shalom of all. The discipline of participating in Christ, the suffering of Christ, leads us not toward more acts of religion but toward standing in solidarity with the suffering. That is simply part of our conversion as we participate in ever fuller ways in our creator.

So on the morning of September 11, I arrived at the country club where the retreat was being held and situated myself at the conference table in a room with a panoramic view of the far west Chicago suburbs. We dove right into discussing the submitted articles, but about an hour later when the waitress came in with more coffee and danishes she mentioned that a plane had just flown into the World Trade Center. We all assumed it was another personal plane incident like the one that had flown into the Empire State Building a few years before and continued working. When we broke for lunch the head editors called the office and then quickly left. The rest of us stayed on and even watched a Bibleman episode for possible review, fairly oblivious to the events of the day.

It wasn’t until I left the country club in the late afternoon and turned on the car radio that I began to have an inkling of the magnitude of the day. I rushed home to my tiny basement apartment which had no TV reception and tried futilely to get online but the dial-up lines were all busy for hours. I recall going out to get the special evening edition of the newspaper and crashing the Wheaton College student lounge (with their TV and cable hookup) just to get some idea of what was happening. The next day I was scheduled to host my church’s table at the Wheaton College ministry fair, which meant I spent the day surrounded by not only college students but also representatives of every church and parachurch ministry in the Wheaton area. It was a surreal day as people attempted to process the shock and openly shared the subsequent anger and hatred that had started to develop. That evening my church held a prayer meeting, and I recall praying that this act of terror would not lead to people lashing out against the innocent as a form of revenge. I was informed afterwards that my prayer was inappropriate. Three weeks later I heard back from Christianity Today informing me that they had a hiring freeze and the position I was applying for was eliminated in favor of restructuring the department.

It’s strange to reflect back on the day the world changed. And a bit eerie to recall that I spent the afternoon of September 11 watching the Bibleman episode about how good Christian students need to stop hanging out with their non-Christian peers because they can be a bad influence on their faith and then spent the next day listening to Evangelical leaders responding to their enemy in hate. I couldn’t have know it at the time, but within those first two days after the attack I caught a glimpse of how the events of Sept. 11th would shape the church over the next ten years. The world has irrevocably changed – despite the ongoing attempts to pretend that that the false security and pride of American exceptionalism is still a viable option in a globalized world. Over this past decade this new world has forced me to abandon a naïve faith that cared only for the state of my own soul, and embrace the fact that I am connected to others as a child of God. Who I am is as much dependant on how I honor the image of God in them as it is on any acts of ritual or piety I engage in.

Perhaps it took 9/11 and the response of fear and hatred I found in the church to push me to finally realize that my faith had to be more about God than myself. I don’t know if I will ever know for sure, but it has assuredly been a decade of change from which there is no going back. And sadly, constantly living in a culture of fear has prevented many in the church from wondering what sort of people we are being changed into. But the questions need to be asked. Are we more Christ-like now? Is God’s Kingdom more visible ten years later? Maybe simply asking those questions this Sept. 11th can help us turn a day that could easily kindle new waves of hatred into one that pushes us outside of our all-consuming selves and back to the sort of people Jesus calls us to be.

Austin, Texas – The recent tragedy in Norway, the worst attack the country has experienced since WWII, shocked and pained the world. It has also forced us as a global community to look more closely at religion, identity, and how we see the “other” – as well as ourselves.

In the West, religion is often an uncomfortable topic of discussion, and the recent terror attacks in Norway have forced many of us, especially in the United States and Europe, to re-examine issues of religion and identity.

So, how do we talk about religion after Norway?

In the early responses to terror attacks, blame was quickly assigned to Muslims. Once it was revealed that the perpetrator, Anders Breivik, was actually an anti-Muslim right-wing extremist who self-identified as Christian, the proclivity to blame his actions on religious fundamentalism quickly vanished. It’s easy to point to the hypocrisy – to call people out on their inclination to assume Islam promotes violence while at the same time being quick to wash Christianity’s collective hands of any hint of wrongdoing.

Pointing fingers merely addresses the symptoms and not the actual problem of a worldview that chooses to view the other from a position of fear instead of love. And to address this problem, no matter how uncomfortable, religion must be part of the conversation.

Our religion, or lack thereof, shapes who each of us are and how we function in the world. When we believe in an idea, faith expression, or sacred text, these beliefs form our very identity – influencing everything from our politics to our relationships. For many, these beliefs are what give us hope that a better world is possible – a world where fear does not reign, and where compassion and service drive our actions instead.

Yet religious identity can also influence people to commit acts of violence and hatred. Common to fundamentalists of any religion are fear-based attempts at control. By insisting upon being right at all costs they reject the Christian discipline of trusting in God, or the Muslim call to submit to Him.

But for those who allow themselves to be formed in ways that respond to the other with love instead of fear, religion grants the means to build a better world. Orienting oneself around the needs of others strengthens the common good instead of selfish individual desires. Reclaiming love of neighbour as a religious and not merely a political mandate is therefore a necessary step in addressing the corruption of religion by fundamentalisms.

As a person of faith, I see this “lived out” faith looking like the response of Hege Dalen and her partner, Toril Hansen, to the attacks. When they heard screams and gunshots from their campsite opposite Utöyan Island, they immediately hopped in their boat and dodged bullets in order to save some 40 people. We can’t all be heroes, but choosing a life of helping those in need, no matter who they are, is the basis of any religion that would rather build than destroy. Speaking up about the religious values that motivate us to reach out, and being willing to listen to those who do the same but who come from other traditions can help change the way our cultures view religion.

Talking about religion after Norway means not letting fear define what faith is all about. Examining our own beliefs and living out our faith through selfless acts of love can move the conversation past the toxicity of fear.

Deliberate attempts to understand religion, uncomfortable as it may be, must be part of the path forward. Engage in conversation or read a book by someone who is “other” than yourself. Partner with people of other beliefs on relief or community development projects to understand how our different faiths motivate the same generous actions. And join in honest discussions about our differences to discover what we can learn from each other.

Living in secular societies does not mean ignoring our religion. Instead, we can choose to use that part of our identities to build a better world.

“Blessed are the good-hearted, poets and the dreamers. And all us crazy, holy, hungry ones who still believe in something better.”

I went to the Wild Goose Festival for the community. Meeting for the first time this year in the hills of beautiful North Carolina, Wild Goose was a gathering focused on arts, justice, and faith. I went eager to reunite with old friends and to finally translate a few virtual relationships into reality. Oh, I was excited to hear David Wilcox and Jennifer Knapp and learn from respected Christian leaders, but it was the gathering of friends that drew me and my family to the fest. And while it was the community that brought me there, it was the communal experience of commitment that defined my time there. Those lines posted above from Carrie Newcomer’s song “Where You Been,” sum up perfectly the experience that was the Wild Goose Festival.

If anything, Wild Goose was a gathering of those who dream of a better way. A better way to be human, a better way to be the church. Not in a “we want to be better than you” sort of way, but more of a deep felt recognition that the world is not as it should be. It was that wrestling with trying to live into the lives God created us to live that became the conversation at Wild Goose. As part of that, one theme that kept resurfacing in the talks I heard was that of learning to be open to the full range of human emotions and experiences in the world. The typical Christian impulse in our country is to dwell upon the joyful aspects of life and faith. We put on the mask of pretending all is fine to the world. We hold church services oriented around worship, praise, and the uplifting parts of scripture. While there is nothing wrong with doing those things, they don’t allow the faithful to reflect the fullness of reality. As the great civil rights activist Vincent Harding pointed out in his talk, there is pain and suffering in the church. Institutional and social evils such as racism and the inequalities it produces affect the body of Christ – harming both those who commit and who suffer those sins. To pretend that all is well when all is obviously not well is to pretend at joy – not to experience it in reality. As Harding commented, to ever be able to truly laugh, one must also be allowed to honestly weep for all the pain and suffering. Pretending that all is well or to deny that the suffering exists harms our souls, preventing us from being whole healthy people. In his talk Soong-Chan Rah also called for the need to remember the words of lamentations in our churches. The Western church has exorcised such biblical passages of lament from our services, lectionaries, and prayer books, and we would do well to be reminded from the global church (that knows far more about experiencing suffering) that recognizing and lamenting our sins and pain is part of what it means to follow God.

While the church of course has a long way to go in regards to becoming balanced and healthy in such ways, it was encouraging to get a small taste of what that might look like at the Wild Goose Festival. I can’t speak for everyone there, but from the conversations I was a part of it truly did seem to be a gathering of folks who deeply dreamed of a better way. People who desired for our faith to mean something tangible. People, who, as Richard Rohr said there, don’t want to settle for the easy shallow faith of merely worshiping God – putting God on an idealized but distant pedestal to be admired but not known. They want to follow God in ways that transform their lives and therefore the lives of others as well. People who desire to follow God in ways that bring about justice, that seek to restore broken relationships, that always orient around caring about the needs of others. But also people who don’t trust in their own strength to do such things, who know the world and the church are messy, and that we need time for lament and repentance as part of our experience of following Jesus.

It can be easy to talk about such things, and I know I’ve done my fair share of talking before. But what I appreciated about the Wild Goose festival was that it forced us past the point of posturing to a place of transparent honesty. At most of our church gatherings, conferences, or cohorts we can easily erect a façade of self and allow others to see only what we desire them to see of who we are. We can talk grand ideas, look as pious/hip/committed as we desire, and then escape back into our solitary lives without anyone glimpsing our rough edges. But there is something about camping in close proximity in sweltering weather in fields crawling with ants and ticks, where the nearest water is a spigot several fields away, with your communal shit stinking up the port-a-potties and your children sleep-deprived from the excitement of camping and the loud bands that play into the wee small hours of the night that violently rips away any façade one might have attempted to hide behind. Everyone sees you crawling dishelved out of your tent in the morning desperate to concoct a coffee-like-substance over your tiny camp stove. Everyone hears you yelling at your kids to stop (literally) bouncing off the tent walls and go to sleep. And I’m pretty sure half the people there witnessed my tired, hot, and hungry children having a grand royal meltdown in the food area one day at lunch. It was just a few days, but it was real.

So when we came to worship together and share our passion for following God in transforming ways in this raw state of discomfort and exhaustion, it was more than just talk. We were those crazy, holy, hungry ones who believe in something better. It was a glimpse of the Kingdom of God that went far beyond just friends gathering to have fun together at a festival or to posture at caring for others. It was a gathering of the most committed Christians I know – those who long to follow God wholly. And that gave me great hope for the church. I had to laugh when I read after the festival that some opponents were deriding the festival, questioning our faith and referring to the event as Apostate-palooza (because *obviously* anything to do with art, camping, and justice can’t possibly be Christian). Yet I realized that they were right in a way. This was a gathering of apostates of the church as it has become – a often meaningless and impotent entity beholden to civil structures of culture and politics that cares more about power and privilege and shoring up hollow rituals and traditions than it does about loving others and believing in God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. Wild Goose was a gathering of those crazy folks who are committed to a better way. We are apostates of meaningless religion, ready to strip away the facades and get at the real work of following God.

That was my Wild Goose experience – leaving me raw and tired and strangely full of hope.

I listened incredulous to this conversation (which was loud enough that everyone at the pool couldn’t help but hear) and finally just left because the hate speech was escalating to the point that I would rather not expose my kids to such things. Listening to her rants though made me think of a talk I had just heard about the dangers of acedia. The term is most often associated these days with the sin of sloth (one of the seven deadly sins), but it goes much deeper than mere laziness to describe the state of not caring or being concerned with one’s position or condition in the world. It’s a spiritual apathy that turns one inward instead of outward in a life oriented around loving others. In the talk I heard, it was compared to compassion fatigue – not having the spiritual resources to care anymore. In the talk I heard the advice that was given to combat acedia was to focus on my own relationship with God – which was defined as incorporating rituals of prayer and reflection into my days and disconnecting from the electronic world.

That’s advice I’m hearing a lot in the American church these days. Feeling overwhelmed and far from God? Then do more for yourself – reconnect (or disconnect as needed), get healthy, then you will have something to give back. Another talk I heard recently advised people to never do anything because they think they should. It’s okay not to care about poverty or kids dying in Africa if those aren’t the passions God has given you. God gave us gifts and passions so we should spend our time on only the things that fill us with joy. In other words – my relationship with God is all about me. I as an individual must be happy, healthy, and whole – that is why I was created and that is how I am to live. I must not feel guilty about not serving God or others if such things don’t make me happy, I should only do the things that feel comfortable to me.

I hear this kind of stuff over and over with reminders that the Christian life cannot be just about action and service but must contain contemplation to be balanced. I agree with that, but every time I hear that line I have to ask if there really is such a dire and pressing danger that the church in America is focusing so much on action and service that we are neglecting contemplation? In truth, I see exactly the opposite at work. We are instead so concerned with our own individual spirituality that we rarely if ever engage in serving others. We like hearing talks that tell us to think more about ourselves and not feel guilty about not serving others. At my church recently there even was an audible collective sigh of relief when the pastor explained that while “blessed are the poor” can refer to the physically poor, it also refers to the poor in spirit which includes our own spiritual needs and struggles. It’s far easier to care for ourselves than others.

Maybe most of the church isn’t so caught up in themselves that like the woman I heard at the pool they argue for not helping others at all (although that is a becoming a common response these days), but it seems like the greatest commandments these days are “love myself then love God” instead of “love God, love others.” But in reality, our acedia, our spiritual fatigue, isn’t to blame on us not pampering ourselves with enough quiet times or devotional moments, but on our rampant self-absorption. Constantly hearing that we need to focus more time on ourselves simply adds to the problem. It’s not that I don’t see tremendous value in contemplation or think that we all need to practice self-care, but that perhaps we need to alter the most basic ways we view ourselves in the world. We are not rugged individuals dependant on getting our own relationship with God right; we are members of the body of Christ, existing in relationship with God and others at all times. Our gifts are meant to be shared eucharistically in community. It is a way of living that the philosophy of Ubuntu that Desmond Tutu writes about refers to. It is living not for oneself, but as a member of a community where one is “open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.”

The last thing the American church needs are more messages telling us to focus on ourselves. Guilt trips and shoulds don’t help much either for our “it’s all about me” mentality knows how to resist anything that makes demands on our self. It will take a drastic change in mindset to move us past our “I think therefore I don’t give a crap about anyone but myself” operating system. But I think for the church to not only get over this plague of acedia, but to survive, we must start thinking communally. As Ubuntu thought states, “I am because we are.” We belong to God which means we belong to each other – embracing that relational identity may perhaps be our only hope.

My daughter has had a difficult time understanding Lent this year. She was all about pancakes and beads on Mardi Gras, but was disappointed that Ash Wednesday was more solemn and faith oriented. The lack out an outward expression to grasp hold of was something she had a hard time wrapping her mind around. But it’s hard to explain faith to a kindergartener, for that matter it’s hard to grasp as an adult. We are so conditioned in our modern post-enlightenment world to assume that everything around us must be scientific and objective that we lose sight of the fact that we are subjective creatures that are immersed in mystery at all times.

Take the Bible for instance. For most of Christian history, people didn’t try to place it under a microscope like we do now. That’s a very recent development. So these days we see passages like Lazarus rising from the dead and we either scoff at the supernatural elements or use historical criticism to dismiss any possibility of them ever happening or we insist on biblical literalism and that one must believe in the historicity of the text. But those approaches don’t reflect what true faith is about. The Bible isn’t just a book of facts giving us a snapshot of past events that we have to swallow whole. It’s a story of God that we are invited to enter into and be transformed by. We are narrative creatures living in unfolding time; our lives come from somewhere and are going somewhere. We inhabit the same world as the authors of scripture and so can enter into that narrative and be transformed by it. The text isn’t totalitarian, forcing us to believe scientifically; it is a story that we enter into. We enter this story and are able to embody its eschatological end which is always leading to Jesus. The point is less about if stuff really happened or not, but if we are allowing our story to be overtaken by God’s story and our lives to be overtaken by that grace.

It’s a stance that breaks down the Enlightenment spawned dichotomy of faith versus reason. Those things aren’t pitted against each other, but work together to bring us ever closer to a God that is constantly revealing Godself to us. God created us to be in relationship with him – our purpose is to ever love and praise God. This is part of what it means to enter into the narrative of scripture and become part of the story of the work of Jesus in the world. It’s not about following faith or reason; it is about embracing who we were created to be – which includes both our faith and reason. Treating God or the scriptures like a lab experiment misses the point – such things are not mere pieces in a puzzle that we need to figure out and then statically place in the correct place once we have all the answers. They are transformative glimmers of a story that is given to us as a gift – a story that we have the privilege of living out. It is this story that shapes the community called the church. The church doesn’t exist to tell us dogmatically what to do and believe. It is a place where this story unfolds with a polyphony of voices. This pluralism of voices will necessarily cause conflict, but because we are narrative creatures always moving towards God the point is not to ever impose a false unity on this community. The church, while at times having to take stands, shouldn’t tell people that they are expected to believe in some static way, but instead invite the community with the full humanity of their faith and reason intact to be in constant dialogue as we move forward in this story of following Christ

If we stop pitting reason against faith, the triune God becomes less of a problem to be solved and more of a relationship to experience. Mystery and a relationship grounded in love are not fantasies no matter what our modern world has conditioned us to believe. We cannot put love inside a test tube and objectively declare it to be true, that is not the purpose of love. We love to be transformed, to be part of a story that is greater than ourselves. We were created for love, and to live into that story we need to stop selling ourselves short by forcing ourselves to be people of faith or people of science. Embracing our full humanity changes the lens through which we see the world, encounter the scriptures, and understand how a triune relational God reveals Godself to us. Our faith isn’t a discredited tradition from simpler times; it is a reminder that there is a greater story being told that invites the whole of who we are to step into an eternal drama. We don’t unthinkingly observe Lent or smear ashes on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday because we have to or because someone tells us we must in order to be a good Christian, we do it to remind ourselves of the story we are a part of and the eschatological end we are living towards. My daughter might not see yet the intensity of the invitation to join in on that story – pancakes and beads hold more power in the moment – but to me these ashes are charged with eternal significance that pulls me ever closer in relationship with a dynamic God. And that is what faith is about.