for clarification's sake

So a good while back my friend Kristin sent me this article on 'de-toxing from church'. I think it was for people making the switch to home churches, talking about abstaining from megachurches and "Christian" culture in general as a means to break ones addiction to consumer Christianity. On some level I took this to heart. I think consumer Christianity is an addiction. We get addicted to 'attendance based spirituality', which demands nothing of us at our core. We become passive; people who's greatest spiritual deed is listening to a sermon and complimenting the preacher afterward for presenting well a message that we never intend to act upon. This is all well in good within the system so long as our money hits the collection plate, and the corporatized structure of the church is enabled to compete with all the other churches out there. God may be worshipped, but Commerce has taken over the reigns. Still it's easy to drop back into the attendance rut. The article I read talked about it being beneficial to 'forsake the assembly' (at least that TYPE of assembly) in order to relearn that God is at work far beyond buildings, and numbers are not what pleases him, but instead service which is conducive to the re-establishment of his Kingdom. It's really pretty close to impossible to discern this clearly when attending a building that lives as though Jesus is Lord and Commerce is his manager.

A lot of my patients these days (not to mention the nurses I work with) are on this new drug called Chantix. It's an anti-smoking drug. In addition to suppressing the urge to smoke, it also has the fortunate effect of making the patient nauseated when they smoke. Most will try to smoke out of habit, but barely finish half a cigarette before putting it out in disgust. That's what I feel now when I go to church. Perhaps philosphy and philosophic theology are the drugs teaching me to be offended. I still go quite often to average services in stale buildings mostly because in the Bible belt it is rather hard to meet other people outside of settings which tend to include excessive drinking. Church is the easiest way to meet decently good people, so I still go. Only now, I don't commit, and even where I make plans to commit, I can't due to the nausea that arrises from witnessing Commerce run the show. I get mildly entertained, possibly even receiving that ever so rare spiritual high I've craved since college devos ceased to do the trick, but still the emptiness I feel walking away is haunting enough to deter me from returning with frequency.

It's funny now I feel very akin to "the world". Most of the youth-group morality I had held to for so long has lost its importance to me. I don't cringe at cuss words anymore, and they have sufficiently worked their way back into my vocabulary. I don't uphold sexual asceticism as a virtue anymore. I basically don't like anything that uses "Christian" as an adjective (i.e. Christian music, Christian movies . . .) and don't feel bad about that. I now get offended, ever so slightly, at terms like "lost", or "unbeliever" when they are used to refer to other people.

Basically I let go of everything I had been told was "Christian", but the most amazing thing is the way God didn't let go of me in all of this. I've searched for God, and though I haven't "found" him by searching, I feel at least I have come to a vagueness of definition worthy of the Presence which we attribute to him, and the all-pervading transcendence we claim him to be. I think this sort of slow epiphany has given me hope of a relationship to him that is real. Perhaps it is that God has guided me through this valley of doubt so that I could see his greatness. There are all kinds of ideas about God. I had a professor that said the difference of Christian faith is that we believe God is personal, but I've come to disagree. God is not personal or impersonal, he is greater than "person", and transcends it. We call God 'Father' as a means of describing to OURSELVES our relationship to him. But, God is not male or female. God is all the characteristics of both and more. He transcends sex, race, person, religion, and certainly denomination.

The weird thing that happened in realizing all this is a great sense of despair. I felt overwhelmed by the fact that this left all human efforts to experience him vain. Perhaps that's what I've been wrestling for months now. What good is it to worship if all worship somehow becomes a limitation of God? Why say God is good when, good is so pathetically short of what he is? I seem to find that everything is gray (I don't trust much of anything that is presented as black and white), so how can I offer all of these mixed offerings to God? This is the hopelessness that I imagine many people outside of petty Christian dogmas struggle with.



Last week I realized two things as I went into work. I always feel guilt for not thanking God for every little thing. It seems that all too commonly in my prayers I find myself saying "I'm sorry for not thanking you for . . ." Then sometimes I felt stupid for telling God thanks for a good parking spot, or a green light. Then I realized that God likely doesn't care for the individual thankyous or the lack thereof, only the overall spirit of thankfulness. Genocide is going on in Darfur, so no, I don't really believe God is thoroughly concerned with the number of green lights I or anyone else gets driving home. Nor do I think he is heartbroken by my ungratefulness as I find a quarter on the ground. He does care though that I become a grateful person. He is pleased when I say thankyou for stupid things. Whatever his role in the mundane I really find moot, it is more a matter of our own transformation that makes the mundane matter.

I think of God as Reality. That's the easiest idea for me which doesn't seem to automatically to reduce him to something less than he is. Yet, often reality sucks. This has made it difficult for me to pray. I really haven't been a pray-er for years now. I gave up on it honestly. It seemed mostly a way for me to feel good about telling myself what I wanted and using God's name to do it. Yet, in recently I've realized a truth that seems so ancient that it became real to me. Men have prayed for millenia not out of psychological need, but because they've felt that "Reality" is in some weird way communicating with them. This is so redundant a concept, yet, so profound to a non-religious mind. When I "pray", I pray to a God who is far off, and sits angrily on a throne enshrouded by clouds and the boredom of being omnipotent. The god I "pray" to is a figment of my imagination. Yet, then one day the Reality I exist in eerily seems to interact with me.

I'm learning how horrible I am at communication through this. I am seeing that it is not a matter of learning to pray, but rather learning to communicate with God who is Real. Again to a religious person this is sure to sound like a complicated way of stating a simple concept. Yet, to my mind simple concepts are petty, confining, and most importantly unreal. I'm finding that if I pay close attention to all the things which strike me as real and true, I notice the faint possibility that they are pointing me towards something. If God is thus saying something to me, something too great to be reduced to some cheap phrasing, then perhaps it's time I began communicating back, imperfect as my means to do so may be. . . .

No, I'm not discovering anything new in my quest, only that in detoxing from church-ese I'm finding the concepts behind that language are beautiful and strange, familiar, unlimited, and all too Real!

last breaths

One minute I'm administering IV antibiotics to a patient with severe cardiac arrythmias who is suffering from total liver failure. The truth is I have little clue what I'm doing. I know this little plastic bag is full of some chemical concoction. This concoction was discovered by some scientist in a lab who found it to be useful to kill bacteria. He applied drops to a slide and watched little asymmetrical figures die. A doctor read his report, listened to some pharmeceutical salesman convince him that this particular molecular arrangement was best to rid people of small organisms which are identified by long Latin names that exclude the world at large from knowing what doctors are talking about. I read his order. I hang the bag, and make sure the tube flowing into the patient's arm doesn't have air bubbles in it.

I hate to admit it, but it's true: I typically spend more time staring at equipment than the person in the bed in front of me. This is why I felt like an idiot when the minutes which succeeded the minute when I infused this liquid involved witnessing my first patient die.

I had seen dead patients in school, but they weren't "mine". Now, I was there with my first dead patient and I hadn't even seen it coming. I could blame it on any number of things, but the truth is it shocked me because it was work. I'm not really all that different from the average person. I show up at a building that "contains" the activities which compose my job. I slide a card through a little red box on the wall, it beeps, I ride the elevator to whatever floor I'm supposed to work on. I do the same activities over and over again night after night. To the people in the rooms these are vitally important activities. I agree, only once you've hung hundreds of IV bags and passed so many of the same pills to so many different patients, these vitally important activities become routine.

Then a patient's breaths slow down, and there I am checking tubing for air bubbles.

After the patient breaths one last time, and the family grieves for a few minutes, we go to care for the body. For minute my routine became meaningless. When you stand in front of a body that's been part of this gestalt presence we call a soul, you can't help but realize whatever look is on your face must appear quite stupid. There's not much to say at that moment. You stare at what had been a "life" for 70+ years, and now you have nothing but a bunch of questions. In church we speak of all these grand ideas like heaven and hell, God, 'the spiritual realm', and at least for me it always seemed like a fairy tale. We talk about the spiritual realm in church, but its all nothing compared to standing in the presence of that eerie moment we call death.

Nursing is all about doing menial activities that preserve life. Then respirations stop and all the questions I go through life avoiding are right there in front of me. The little things I get paid to preoccupy myself with all fade away for a minute, and suddenly faith comes to center stage and waits for a judgment on my part. What do I think happens when the breaths quit coming?

It's difficult for me to say what it was in the room that night. Is it my subconscious suddenly being disquieted? The room felt different. I feel like any interpretation I would try to give that feeling would be a blasphemy of the moment. It was more than just the stirring of man's ultimate questions within me, but it was not something I would ever feel comfortable reducing to 'churchy' language. Orthodoxy in the face of a dead person becomes a form of lunacy.

I feel as though I left that room feeling more certain about God, but ultimately knowing less about him. Maybe it was just that the things I've never understood about him resonated more loudly. I was now deprived of the ability to ignore what had proved thus far to be to difficult to think about. I wanted to cry. I felt bad for the family that now lost the presence of one whom had loved them. This person that had been a source of memory and meaning was now gone.

I'm almost 25 now. One third the age of that patient. I thought last night of how many different phases my life has been through. I thought of how distant those phases seem from each other, almost like they were divided up into different scenes whose backdrops were totally disconnected, and I played a different character in each. What if I lived to be 900 years old like the mythical men of the Old Testament? Would life have any sense of continuity? Would I die as one person or as a hundred different people? I think every age has longed for something that is continuous, we all want an absolute whether we believe in one or not. When the mundane is interupted by temporality, I with all my youth find myself haunted by the stillness of the question of God. In every routine, religious or secular, we busy ourselves with activities that numb us to wondering what is Real. We drive to work. Mow the grass. Cook meals. We do everything we know we are supposed to do to aid the next breath in coming. Then the breaths stop, and I am dumbfounded by the inquiry whether there is the breath of a Creator that continues to inspire my life after atmospheric exchange has ceased.

I'm not saying I don't have faith, only that the cliche faith statements we all too casually make are quite incomplete when another person dies. I'm saying that my faith wants more than the doctrinal myths and cheap dogmatisms we employ describing the God beyond, his character, and his desires.

Relevance

Blogs are more fun as a conversational tool. So, i've come to realize. My friend Kristin just posted about the Christian use of 'relevance' as a buzz word. Here are my thoughts on it.

I agree that relevance like so much of contemporary pop Christianity has become a cliche. Now Christians seek media attention for being relevant to the world. Here is what strikes me about the topic of relevance: it is contingent on 'Christian' being its own category. It seems to me that the discussion is sparked by the fact that for a while now we have had a separate category in all aspects of life for secular and Christian. There are Christian book stores, Christian music, Christian movies, Christian night clubs (i'm not kidding), Christian movies . . . on and on. The use of the word relevance has grown in importance I think mostly because all these categorizations of things as "Christian" were characteristic for a style of cheap, inauthentic, shallow substitutes for what the rest of our culture appreciated. Like I've said in multiple blogs before this, tacking "Christian" on as an adjective, is often characteristic of music, movies, etc that's only selling point is that they are supposedly Christian . . .whatever that means. Lacking any artistic value in of themselves that would be noticable to "worldly" culture, the category of being Christian has become socially irrelevant. ding!

Most of the talk in Christian circles about being relevant (including Relevant magazine) is generally referring to an attempt by Christianity to return to authenticity on some level, and therefore become relevant to our culture. I think a lot of it stems from missional ideas that have increasingly been implemented by churches to reach American culture that has for a long time now been drifting away from inauthentic pseudo-Christian facades, and apathetically adopted a secular/pagan mindset - quite unapologetically I might add.

I think in this context, it is quite true that relevance is very necessary for Christianity to survive, and much more so for it to gain back any of the ground that it has lost. But, I think the larger problem is not relevance. It seems to me as I have been saying, the larger problem is inauthenicity. There are countless Christians I see now who appear relevant. They listen to the right music. They know all the movies. They are fluent in the language and thought of the larger culture. They have every reason to be culturally acceptable, yet, it appears they aren't doing much more to reach the culture. They have related fully to American people, but in being relevant they have found that they have nothing relevant to say, or maybe that they never had anything to say in the first place . . . in short, their faith is not authentic, not real.

This is where I think I agree with what Kristin said. She talked about not being relevant to the world, but rather relevant to the Kingdom. I agree with this in that the Kingdom is a reality that one can live in or not live in. One can live as though God's power and presence exist in the world or not. If one believes that God is present and has the power to act, then that is a belief in a certain perception of reality. If one believes in such a reality then their actions should seek relevance to it. If we claim to believe in God's Kingdom but our actions deny him then we are irrelevant to the very Kingdom Reality we put faith in. Simply put, failing to live out what we claim faith in proves that we don't matter and are irrelevant in the context of how we say things really are. If our words and our actions don't match up then we are being inauthentic, which makes us irrelevant to our faith and our culture.

I think a frightening number of Christians are guilty of both irrelevance and inauthenticity. Not only do we live in opposition of the Reality we put our faith in, but we also fail miserably at 'feeling' what our culture feels. I believe it's good to be both, but absolutely necessary to be authentic if nothing else. Weird Christians are ok, so long as they are confident in the Reality of God and therefore have set roots in a source of true identity. I commonly meet Christians that I can admire for their genuineness even if they are clueless to the actual state of American culture. I told a friend the other day that I hated going to most of the churches in my town, but still did occasionally just because I liked being around people who love God, even if they are blissfully ignorant about anything going on in the world around them.

Genuineness is definitely the priority in my opinion, but I also believe that relevance is a very good thing. I think that the majority of our society, no matter how attracted to authentic relational faith, would never be able to fully deny the secular culture they come from. For this, I believe relevance to the world is not optional. Jesus lived a fully Jewish life so as to let his Kingdom-centered authenticity challenge what it meant to be Jewish. Had Jesus fully rejected Jewish social practices and culture he would never have found the opportunity to present authentic living as a tension to what was commonly understood as how to live a 'holy' life.

I think so much of our culture now is devoid of hope. We have been robbed of our dreams for a future by the jaded eyes of history that point to the immense failures of all religion and ideology. If one takes the time and keeps an open mind it is possible to listen to our culture and hear the pain of people who have lost hope. It is not the cry of ignorant pagans, we cannot revert to some preconceived notion of the glorious days of Christian mission to re-convert our society. They've heard the Christian message. It has been dismissed on grounds of gross irrelevance, and now as we make it relevant, we realize that we ourselves don't really want to live out the Kingdom Reality.

"It is not that Christianity has been tried and found wanting, but found difficult and left untried."

Only now we are forced to listen to a secular society that points out that it is Christians who have not attempted to follow Jesus. I think that before we as Christians speak we have no option but to seek out a true authenticity, the Western world has heard the gospel, and they will quickly let us know how well we are living it out. We should listen. Yet, beyond that, our culture is screaming out to be heard. Our music, our movies, the books we read are loaded with a great ocean of emotions that is waiting for Kingdom people to address with an honesty that bears the most persuesive testimony to the relevance of the Kingdom we claim.