This Difficult Sacrament

In the daunting task of understanding the Christian life, most, if not all, of the Desert Fathers would agree that while the goal of life is simple, getting there is certainly not. If there is one truth that the Desert Fathers, the ragtag disciples, grappling clergy, Christian bookstore customers, Benedictine monks, missionaries, and even the Christ himself all recognize, it is that living life can be quite hard.

Why does God make life hard ... or, to stretch the question across more theological perspectives, why does God allow life to be hard?

If someone were to massage my neck or rub my ear, the pleasant feeling would eventually put me to sleep. The sense of a gentle touch is so pleasing, it would not take much to usher me into semi-consciousness and eventually slumber. However, in the same area, if someone were instead to squeeze or pinch, the exact opposite would happen; I would wake up. I would become more alert. My eyelids would open wider rather than become heavier.

When life is hard, we are more apt to realize our need for God. I do not mean to imply that God is codependent and therefore administers hardship in life so that we might place our trust in him. In reality, the identity crisis is ours, not God's. When life seems manageable, we relax in our own good fortune. Then, when struggles come, we have no other course of action but to wallow in our misfortune. If we do call out to God during these times, it is normally for relief, not understanding.

The purpose of the sacraments is to change our perspective, to draw us out of our deep-rooted selfish tendencies and into the honor of God. When someone is baptized, they are putting under the water everything that was their old self, and emerging as one redeemed and cleansed by a holy God. When we partake of the Eucharist, we are taking into our finite selves the selfless sacrifice of our Savior. Perhaps this is why the Catholic church observes seven sacraments instead of the Protestant two. As Frederick Buechner writes, "A sacrament is when something holy happens." Indeed there is a glimpse of the holy and the Holy One when a child is confirmed in the Church, or when a broken sinner scrapes in confession for forgiveness, or when two lovers are joined in mutual devotion to one another in marriage.

Buechner continues, "Church isn't the only place where the holy happens ... If we weren't blind as bats, we might see that life itself is sacramental."

We must learn to live present to the day to day ebb and flow of life; sometimes it is soothing, oftentimes it is churning violently. And through our recognition of the wondrous difficulty of life - the hardships, the worries, the unknowns, the separations - we would take joy that the goal for which we strive is relief and rest.

The end is simple. Getting there is certainly not. But getting there is not devoid of holy glimpses, open windows between high heaven and lowly earth. I have heard it taught that we must learn to live Sunday to Sunday, seamlessly seeking the next moment where we might return to worship our God. While this is a noble strategy, it can cause us to dread the days in between, or at least disregard them.

Live each day. Hear every atom of all that surrounds as they cry out for us to break our allegiance to ourselves and place our allegiance in a wildly loving, passionate God. A God who is unafraid of our frustration, undaunted by our ignorance. A God who will continue to pour himself out like water upon this life, that we might feel the drops through these open windows, this sacramental life. Can you feel it? It is raining even now.



____________________________________

Glimpses of late ...

A Call to Be Quiet

At my church's lectionary breakfast today, choral director Kurt Kaiser analogized the shallowness of many a church-goer's faith with music (a metaphor he is apt to employ with any number of issues). He called them "praise & worship Christians," and by this he was referring to what he views as one of the most significant problems (even dangers) of praise & worship music - it lacks depth. Depth of theology, depth of spirituality, depth of devotion, depth of purpose. Why not? Well, there has not been any significant demand for anything deeper from the majority of the Christian sub-culture. While this lack of depth does not include every praise & worship song or artist, the point is that too many people today sing "I'm coming back to the heart of worship, and it's all about you, it's all about you, Jesus..." when, deep down (or should I write "shallow down"), their hearts are actually singing, "I'm coming back to the heart of worship, and it's all about me, it's all about me, Jesus..."

In truth, I believe more and more Christians lack depth in their walk. I have often heard the assumption that most Christians live in the faith according to their "spiritual age" in the same way humans naturally live this life by their physical age. In other words, if I became a Christian at age eight, I am technically an eighteen year old in my faith. A late teenager, rebellious, yet seeking more depth - perhaps that is the core reason for this post.

There are two problems with this view. First, it plays against the recognition of salvation as continual and ongoing, something John Wesley alluded to as a understanding of "was saved, am being saved, shall be saved," which I believe is a much more healthy way of viewing such a weighty concept as eternal salvation. Secondly, it pigeonholes Christians into one simple, developmental structure, and anyone who pays attention to their growth (or stagnation) in the faith can tell you they don't mature at the same rate or in the same way as everyone else. We are snowflakes marked by Christ.

The truth is, if one were to hold to the age assumption, most Christians might adhere to it for a while, but by spiritual-age fifteen, they would most likely stop changing. Why? Because Christians tend to plateau, to stagnate. When it comes time to go deeper, we clutch the life-preserver and tread water rather than take the plunge. The writer of the first letter to the Corinthians mentioned such a problem when he wrote that the congregation was not ready for the deeper mysteries of the faith, that they were still in need of "spiritual milk."

For a very long time, I was secretly frustrated with the whole pop-Christian game that so many people, I truly believe, are caught up in. It is a lifestyle with a low ceiling, and while it does not discourage growth, it certainly doesn't encourage it either. In place of seeking deeper truth, it cranks the volume of the worship set a few decibels louder. I used to sing and sing for a deeper connection with God. I tried to pray longer and more white-knuckled, squinched-eye prayers to him. I watched people raise their hands freely in worship services, and others fall to their knees seemingly involuntarily, and I thought, If I could just be that free, that open, that unashamed, I would get to that deeper relationship. I was always told the answer was being faithful to the same old "quiet time" day after day. Nothing worked for me. And I became disillusioned, then self-berating, then more disillusioned.

It is only lately, in the past year of life, that I have begun to suspect a better way - perhaps the best way - to journey deeper in the faith. It is in the quiet - the contemplative. The things to which monks, missionaries, and all the Desert Fathers gave themselves. And the greatest truths we have in our rich heritage of devotional history have come not from epiphanies achieved in energetic, deafening worship services with Media Shout flickering and amped guitars squealing, but from mendicants who waited in silence and meditation for God to speak. For many to even begin to understand the mysteries of God, it took years upon years. But he spoke. When they finally quieted themselves, God spoke.



Suddenly, it seems, texts that call for clanging symbols and blaring trumpets become outnumbered by those texts we rarely take as seriously, such as "Be still and know that I am God..." and "In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and confidence is your strength." When Elijah hid in the mountain, Yahweh's presence came not in a resounding crash or blaze, but only in "a sound of sheer silence."

As many evenings as possible this semester, I have been taking time to drive out to the Waco dam, sit on the concrete wall looking west, and enjoy the sunset. It is quiet. It is glorious. And often I am more awed by its forming than anything I read or sing all week.

Contemplation. Quiet. The absence of noise - even harmonious, catchy noise. If you find yourself as unfulfilled as I was, you might give it a try, and join me at this greater depth. I don't often involuntarily raise my hands, but I'm finding my head is bowed much more often.

Silence is a given, quiet a gift. Silence is the absence of sound and quiet the stilling of sound. Silence can't be anything but silent. Quiet chooses to be silent. It holds its breath to listen. It waits and is still. - Frederick Buechner

Life Isn't Fair

When I was a child and would protest to my parents regarding any number of disagreements, I would often receive a simple statement dropped with such finality in tone and definitiveness that it would frustrate me to no end. "Well, Vernon, life isn't fair."

I hated this statement, not just because it held a lot of truth, but because I refused to believe such a sweeping, general statement could be relevant anti-explanation to my every objection, from the largest offense to the most minute. Life had to be kind of fair, didn't it?

In reality, life is quite fair, quite just, despite all the examples we see of injustice ... from wars springing from sordid reasons, criminals acquitted thanks to the power of their money, innocent men and women convicted because of poor defense, misleading politicians, the trampling of the poor, the neglect of the sick and dying ... Despite all of this, life is more fair than we realize. The majority of people still get what they deserve, mainly because this is the way most of humanity functions. Karma reigns in many places throughout Asia, and in the West, our churches close the doors on homosexuals, liberals, homeless, and any poorly dressed people we think made their own bed and should therefore, quite fairly, lie in it.

The past few posts have taken me on a voyage of thought I have never truly felt comfortable with, and that not because I couldn't formulate a clear answer, but because I feared if I did formulate a clear answer it would subsequently contort me into a person who, to some group of people or another, turned a cold shoulder ... in the name of what is "true" and "just."

Today is Ash Wednesday, and the beginning of the season of Lent. Both are marked by repentance, penitence, and supplication. During this time, Christians scrape and strive to make sense of the ramifications of what it took for Christ to achieve atonement for all humanity, past and present. And gradually, I come to realize just how offensive, just how unfair, is the lot of the Savior. A good man - a man who experienced every chief emotion, temptation, and challenge we experience, yet resisted rebellion, remained untouched by the nature of Sin. When we come down to it, we find the most unjust of events taking place to accomplish the justice of God.

But still we make it our place to determine who will be with Christ in Heaven and who will "burn in Hell." Some Christians incorrectly defend their judgmentalness by quoting obscure verses in Scripture about the saints judging the nations. These are the same people who clutch their Bibles like a gavel. However, I think we might be surprised just who are revealed to be the true saints mentioned in Scripture. In a comment on my last post, my friend Meg quoted Richard John Neuhaus: "Jesus is not very fastidious about the company he keeps. A serious question is raised about whether we will be happy with those who are with us in paradise."

I believe that one day all our opinions and biases and misguided loyalties will be swallowed up in the stark image of the unjustly nail-scarred hands of a God who became a baby, who became a prophet, who became a Savior, who became a King. Today I think of a head pierced deep by thorns, blood pouring ... of splintered hands pinned to a tree ... of a ravaged side run through with a spear ... of dusty feet caked with blood.

It seems my parents were indeed right - perhaps more right than even they knew. Life ... true life ... isn't fair.