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!