It's been a long vacation. I'd like to blame a lot of things. I was genuinely depressed after the election. I wrote a few things I'd been working on before Nov 8th and put them up, maybe a few reflections (garbled and incoherent as they may be) and then largely left it alone. I'm not so much upset by the ideas or the party than won - there are always things that go poorly, even if the best candidate comes out on top. Too much has been written about such things and I find no real reason to pile upon them - but let's say the best metaphor I've found to describe me feelings is that it's as if our country elected Bill Cosby President. Whatever his public words or opinions happen to be are entirely besides the point. That's what's so depressing.
I can't blame the lack of writing on the election, though - not entirely. I was certainly uninspired to write for a while (although you'll see there's an Advent reflection and a book review posted in the interim) and I'm not sure that inspiration is back yet. It's hard to tell, you see, because I have, in fact, been doing quite a bit of writing. During the basketball season, for those unaware, I am the Lead Columnist for d3hoops.com and you can find several thousands of words I've written in the last few weeks there.
I know I shouldn't be depressed about the prolonged absence. I missed one post over Thanksgiving and then two before Christmas, but you've not heard from me since December 22, which is the longest absence I've had here in years. I don't think I should be upset with myself or apologetic for being busier. But the truth is, even if I couldn't have made all my normally scheduled (self-imposed) deadlines, I could have made some of them. I've gotten a bit lazy.
So, there is it. The election - a happy reminder that I was a bit too tied up in things I've worked really hard not to be tied up in; the basketball season - a really awesome (paying) outlet for my writing bug; and plain old laziness - a monkey I can't ever seem to get off my back.
Will I return in this new year? Perhaps. I'd sure like to. There are a lot of "drafts" sitting in the blog hopper. I'd like to keep up and maybe even back fill the space to mask my laziness for future generations (although this post may certainly reveal the truth).
I've got a few things to say - some reviews to make. I might even get around to the Grammy Best Album nominees as has been my tradition (although the thought of that is dreadful right now). We'll see.
I'm writing, at least - and that is a start.
Toodle-oo.
As regular readers of the blog (and my Facebook friends) will know, I've been reading a lot of Peter Rollins lately (I've been taking an online course he offers to work through his latest book, The Divine Magician). One of the more interesting things to me has been the way he talks about the importance of unbelief, specifically in communities with a fundamental belief.
He calls these communities Fundamentalist, but not really in the same sense we might - he simply means there's a core belief held to be fundamental to faith. His examples are: if we have enough faith, God will heal us and we don't need doctors; we are better off in the next life than this one; and any of our loved ones who don't clearly express a belief in Jesus are destined for a fiery burning hell.
His point is simply that these communities rely on unbelief to survive. Most people in them, you'll find, do consult doctors if someone breaks a leg, aren;t shooting their children to spare them the horrors of this world, and don't constantly hound their un-professed loved ones into Christian faith.
Now, this is overgeneralization, for sure, and I'd like to avoid debating the specifics on these points. It's overall idea that rings true to me - without some measure of lived doubt, these beliefs become absurd. In fact, Rollins argues the most dangerous members of these groups are the people who really do believe - their sort of irrational behavior in living out these beliefs completely show the underlying fundamental to be hollow if not horrific.
The interesting part for me, in thinking about the Church of the Nazarene, is how this doubt manifests itself in community. He talks about people on the margins feeling the doubt and trusting people closer to the center of the organization - meaning, they assume, people closer to the center of the group don't have the doubt or have less, so they're more comfortable with their own.
The problem arises as people move closer to the center - think a parishioner enters the course of study and becomes a minister, or a minister is elected DS or to some other leadership position, and so on. What they then realize is that no level of commitment to the idea can remove the doubts they have about the idea itself, and it creates a crisis.
I'll quote him here:
Unfortunately, its often the case that by the time someone takes his beliefs absolutely seriously and discovers their impotence, it's too difficult for him to leave. This is most obvious among religious leaders who have jobs within their institutions. For often they find the limits of their beliefs only when they are wholly dependent on their church for material support. Hence it becomes harder to leave at the very point they are most disillusioned.
This is why we often find it true that the closer we get to the inner circle of the church the more we find cynicism, hypocrisy, and repression. A layperson can avoid a confrontation with the impotence of her beliefs by imagining that if only she were more involved, things would be better. But those who are most involved often have no fantasy left to sustain them. They've been to the center and discovered the center is no better than the edges. But now they rely on the center for support, so they give themselves to support it.
Now, it should be noted that Rollins large project is to posit that religious conviction cannot fill the void in our hearts, in fact nothing can fill the void in our hearts and that it's the very attempt to fill such a void that Jesus can to free us from, so this should be read in that light - it's not that a particular belief or way of life is impotent, simply that these are impotent to make us feel completely satisfied.
Just in light of all the mess that's been (and continues) going on at the center of our denomination, this really struck home. While we might not be fundamentalists, our conception of sanctification certainly holds that place pragmatically in our structure and belief. We theologically nuance things, but at the core is this notion that once we're sanctified we shouldn't be going back to old ways of doing things - sanctified people can be trusted implicitly, our leaders are people of integrity at all times, etc.
I won't argue against holiness; I believe it strongly, but there is a sense of unbelief buried deep that allows us to live with it in our everyday lives. We're learning to express it more and more, but it's going to be tough to do so honestly at the very core of our structure.
I think it's certainly healthy for us to be able to say "yes, we believe in sanctification, but the way it ends up being worked out in real life is more than a little messy." Lots of us are more comfortable doing so these days, but we don't have a structure that can support such statements and perhaps it's taking a real toll on the people we put in the middle of that structure.
I won't say any of our leaders are going through this kind of existential crisis, but in reading the Rollins quote above, it sure brought to mind the events of the last couple years (and maybe longer).
It's a trying time.
We were having one of those moments at lunch or dinner or something the other day - it was just the two of us. She was taking bites of food that I had to feed to her (even though she's been using silverware for 18 months already), a food she likes, but refuses to eat. Then she was holding those bites of food in her mouth for 90 seconds or more, just chewing and turning it in to terrible mush, before my begging her to eat again. You know, typical three-year-old dinner.
It was frustrating. What should have taken twelve minutes was approaching an hour. I was running out of patience, but I had enough piece of mind not to say what I was thinking. Instead, I decided to use the moment as a lesson and set the stage in an appropriate, mature way for what I wanted to say off the cuff.
I asked her if people ever did things she didn't like or made her do things she didn't want to do. We talked about getting hurt or frustrated and how we might respond to people. We talked about how it wasn't right to hit people. People are valuable and deserve love and hitting isn't the way to get your way. But we still want to do it sometimes. We talked about how it's ok to be angry and frustrated. Those emotions are good things, but we have to be careful how we use them.
I told her I would not ever hit her. We talked about how hitting is bad and hitting someone who hits is even worse. I made abundantly clear how anger and violence works and how important it is to have self-control and care for people. After all, dinner was taking forever, so we had the time.
It was one of the first times I really felt like we had a conversation she understood all the way through.
When we were finally done and she'd eaten enough and it was clear she wasn't going to eat anymore, I told her she could get down, but not before telling her.
"I love you. I would never hurt you. I would never hit you. But you're being incredibly stubborn and rude right now and I very much want to smack you in the face."
She said, very seriously, and with a straight face, "I don't want you to smack me."
And I said, "I won't. I promise. I would never hit you, but I want to. I really want to, and you should know that."
Then she got down and went to play.
A lot of times I hate being a parent and a lot of times I feel like I'm doing it all wrong. I imagine there will be people horrified by that story (likely one of them is my wife - who knows already - she's not learning about it here), but I know my daughter and I think it went well.
It was not an evening I'd want to play over again, but I think we both got out of it what we needed to get. She's two and a half. She'll probably never remember it, but I don't think it would be a bad first memory. "I would never, ever hit you... but sometimes I want to."
That seems to sum up parenting pretty well, at least as I've seen it so far.
I've read a lot of Donald Miller's books. I read Blue Like Jazz when it got popular, along with every other Christian College student at the time. I needed to read it. It met me where I was. It was really helpful. Miller is a wonderful writer, supremely talented. He's witty and funny and, as he says in Scary Close, he works incredibly hard to make his prose seem casual and effortless. I went back to read Blue Like Jazz a year or so ago. It's not where I am anymore. It doesn't resonate with me the same way it did, but it's still damn good writing. I read To Own a Dragon, his book on growing up without a father. I have a father - a pretty good one - Miller's book was still fantastic. I have never laughed harder or more often reading a book (and that's a good thing, despite the subject matter).
So when the BookLook program offered Miller's new book, I was pretty happy.* I was less happy when I saw it was only available for review as an ebook. I've never had an ebook before. I had to download a program on my laptop even to read one. I like his writing enough and wanted to read this book enough, I did all of that. I read the whole thing on my computer today. It was ok. What wasn't ok was that thirty pages in I wanted to share it with my wife and my therapist and a million other people who all struggle or walk with people through troubles in relationships and intimacy... but I couldn't, because it's an ebook.
Scary Close is real. It's honest on a level that one wouldn't expect from another human being - even one, like Miller, known for being honest. He uses personal stories from friends (semi-famous friends) and uses their real names (presumably with permission). In its very honesty, it is a scary challenge for the reader to embrace honesty.
It's a beautiful book. The writing is superb, as always, and, as the book discusses, it doesn't feel like Miller is writing "in character" or with the mask that subtly seems to fuel his other work. Halfway through I had to stop and look up "behind the scenes" info on Miller - since this book is so blatantly up front about life. I ran across this short interview that helps as a companion to the reader.
It's tough to say this book is "life changing" since I only finished reading it 27 minutes ago, but I saw enough of myself here - scratch that, I saw myself on nearly every page, in such honest and loving and difficult ways, I'm not sure there's any response but to use it in my life. I, and hopefully everyone reading this, am always desirous to improve my relationships. I've been married ten years now and it's often tough. Even when it's good and right and awesome it's tough. I think there are a lot of tools, stories, ideas, honesty, whatever, in Scary Close, to help anyone along that journey towards health and growth and wholeness (or as close as we're ever going to get to those things).
I found myself saying, "yeah, but" to a lot of stuff and Miller certainly does come off a little bit as the "Self-help" character the interview I liked to above halfheartedly claims him to be - at the same time, the familiarity I see and feel between the words on the page and the reality of my life rings far more true than the reputation of Donald Miller could ever hope to present. It's easy to resonate with something because it's presented well and comes from a familiar source; I found a deeper resonance here.
This may be largely emotion talking and I'll be more sane and less gushing in the morning. Who knows? I hope not. I do think it's a well written book with a courageous amount of honesty that could really help all of us think through the important relationships in our lives. I won't say "everyone should read it," because that comes off less than genuine. I do think, however, that absolutely everyone could benefit from reading it. Do with that what you will.
I'll even let you borrow it... oh wait, it's an ebook.
*I didn't put my typical disclaimer on this post mostly because it doesn't feel like a typical post. Yes, I was given this book in exchange for a review. No, the publisher did not influence my review in any way. At the same time it doesn't feel like every other review I've done. This was a profound and personal experience and one I didn't want to cheapen with the standard disclaimer.
If I think about a decision (and, boy do I think - it's taken me 18 months to replace a pair of shoes, and that is not at all an exaggeration), really mull it over and choose what I think it best, then I'm ok with failure. I might replay it over and over for a while to try and learn from the mistake for the future, but I'm generally ok. If I make the wrong choice without having spent time considering it, I will dwell on it for days - even something very simple.
There's a lot of guilt in my life. Mentally, intellectually, I completely understand it's unearned. I recognize people make mistakes and no one's perfect, and all that stuff. It just doesn't feel that way in the moment. I tend to respond with self-loathing or abject rage, at the very least a strong sense of embarrassment.
I've been seeing a counselor lately, to try and weed through these various threads connecting my past and my actions and my thoughts and emotions. It's been helpful. Of course this process also brings with it a fair bit of introspection. I've always spent a lot of time thinking about why I do things. Now I spend even more.
This week I've been thinking about the tension that exists growing up in the Church of the Nazarene and our particular ways of speaking about holiness. (For those who don't know, holiness is, pretty much, the reason our denomination exists.) My upbringing was pretty typical of an evangelical holiness tradition. We were taught people should be saved, basically intellectual assent to the idea of Jesus as God and savior of the world. Beyond that, though, there's also this thing called sanctification, a miracle working of God's Holy Spirit that cleanses one of a propensity to sin - not that you become perfect, but given a choice, you're capable of choosing good. This new life is called holiness.
There are a lot of intricacies that go into the explanation of this process for our tribe - something I have no desire or time to go into here - but this was the basic outline of my understanding of life and faith. This sanctification part was always kind of mysterious to me. I got that it didn't make you sinless or perfect, but that there was some real change wrought supernaturally in a person. Something noticeable and real.
I'm not sure I ever really bought into that kind of thing until it happened to me. Shortly after college I was pretty directionless. I'd never planned for my life after college and I felt pretty purposeless. I was listening to a band rehearsing some worship music and was simply struck by a feeling of hopelessness - an emotional/spiritual rock-bottom, as if my attempt to run my own life had finally and completely run its course. I spent close to an hour just weeping and admitting to myself and God that I could not do life on my own. I needed someone else to make the decisions. When the night was over, I felt different. I was changed. A lot of things changed. Parts of my personality were forever altered. I was different. I believe that.
But it wasn't the kind of different I expected from my upbringing. It was a different different.
Part of that experience, or shortly thereafter, was a calling to preach. Within 18 months, I'd gotten married and we'd moved to Kansas City where I was attending seminary. This was a great experience and a real chance to explore exactly what all of this meant. I got to reading scripture more closely. I got to read John Wesley (the guy from whom all of this particular take on holiness descends). I made a lot of discoveries.
Most importantly, I saw how John Wesley described "entire sanctification." It wasn't all that different from how I'd been taught. I found, however, that Wesley never claimed sanctification for himself; beyond that he guessed perhaps no more than a handful of people in all of England (where he lived) had ever been entirely sanctified, and, if so, they only maintained it for a few weeks. This was quite different from what I'd been taught. In fact, the Manual of the Church of the Nazarene, to this day, requires a testimony of entire sanctification even for service on a local congregational governing board.
Throughout the process of my schooling and training I underwent annual interviews for a minister's license and, ultimately, for ordination. I think there were eight interviews total. Holiness came up in a lot of them. I don't think I ever claimed to be sanctified (although early on I may have checked the box out of habit). I relayed pretty much everything I've included here and those boards were satisfied I met the requirement.
The more I look at it though, the more it seems my experience lines up much more with what Wesley called salvation. He was a long-time priest before he had what he called a salvation experience. Intellectual assent was not enough for him. This moment of transformation, when your heart and will are turned away from self-interest and towards God, Wesley called that becoming a Christian. That's pretty similar to the way it was described in my seminary theology classes, too. Dr. Tom Noble, one of the greatest and smartest men I've ever known, told us that if one's will is not aligned with God's, then you're probably not yet saved.
Dr. Nobel is also the only person I've met who was actually able to describe what a second work, beyond that salvation experience might look like. He knows what he believes about sanctification and how it differs from salvation. I'll be honest, I believe he knows what he's talking about, but I was never able to understand it - and I've spent a lot of time trying.
I've had that experience I was always taught I needed, but it certainly didn't feel like what they said. Oh, sure, there have been times, sometimes quite extended periods, where I've felt like I was supposed to - like I could make the right decision, even if it was difficult and succeed at doing it over and over again. But that hasn't been my experience at all times.
I'll admit it. Sometimes I know the good I ought to do and I don't do it. That's sin (almost word for word from the Bible).
While I'm fairly certain a few people can exist on that plane of holiness, the way I was taught, I'm fairly confident that most of the people in our denomination required to testify to that experience probably aren't - at least not all the time.
Don't get me wrong. I believe in holiness. I believe God can and does change us, as we allow, over time into people more like Christ, people who think less about themselves and more towards the needs of others, people who love unconditionally and are willing to suffer with those who suffer. It's part of this crisis/process debate we Nazarenes have been having for some time. It's not difficult to see the process and it's not difficult to see the crisis, but it's awfully difficult to see how this works out practically.
This standard of holiness is sort of used and not used when it's convenient. As adults we sort of understand the practical nature of grace and responsibility. Life is messy and things aren't always cut and dry. It makes sense rationally. But that rational part of my brain is having a hard time dealing with the part of my brain raised with the notion of perfection as the goal. We Nazarenes do a good job of clarifying our terminology - sin doesn't quite mean what most people take it to mean, and neither does perfection. I get that, too. But I didn't always get it. Those early lessons are hard to overcome.
Now I'm not blaming my psychological issues solely on theology - there is a lot of other personal stuff that goes along with it - at the same time, it sure doesn't help. If a person believes perfection is the expectation, then they are never good enough and always a failure. It seems as though people feel that way enough on their own, without (even unintentional) religious practice reinforcing it. The gospel really tells people the opposite: we are all good enough; we are all loved and valuable and important; even if we fail and fall short we are still loved.
That doesn't absolve us of responsibility or exempt us from facing the consequences of our actions, but it does speak to our fundamental value as people.
I'm not sure my tribe has done a very good job of forming ourselves around that idea. The very holiness we talk about so much is really only possible once we get over the notion that we can get it all right. We've always been very good about making that clear for people... until they're sanctified, then there's an expectation that those days are over. Like I said, it may very well work that way for some people - it hasn't for me, and I'm guessing I'm not alone.
It's strange that I've felt nervous writing this whole time. It's not a big deal to admit I'm not perfect, or at least it shouldn't be - but, as an ordained elder in the Church of the Nazarene, it sort of feels like it is. Even by that definition which exempts unintentional mistakes from perfection, I'm still not perfect. I choose selfishly all the time, to the detriment of my family and friends. I do so willingly, sometimes even knowing it's wrong when I do it.
I recognize how that fits theologically and I can put it within the framework outlines above. I know how it works within notions of holiness - I am definitely more Christ-like now than I was last week or last year, let alone a decade ago. I'm just not as good as I always believed I should be. I don't think I'm as good as the Manual of my denomination expects me to be.
I know we're often a gracious people. I've experienced it time and again. We're certainly better at dealing with people honestly than we've been in the past. But what we say, in writing, and what we do, in practice, don't really line up that well with each other. It's harmed me in the past. I know it's harmed others. I suspect this implied expectation of perfection has been behind a lot of trouble our denomination has had in recent years. We're just not able to cut each other slack because we've always held this notion of perfection up as right to rule - the most holy people are the ones in charge, so the ones in charge must, at least, appear holier than everyone else.
I know that's not who we are at our core, but it's sure who we appear to be.
I'm not sure if or how long it might take to get over these mental blocks in my head constantly telling me I need to be perfect, that preventable mistakes are wrong and make me less valuable. I doubt I'm alone in battling these lies. But perhaps it's time to just admit we're human.
When I tell people what exactly we mean by holiness, I often say we believe that we can live the kind of life God intends for us to live right here and right now - we don't have to wait for heaven. I believe that. I'm just less and less convinced that life looks like one without error. I suspect it's more likely a life in which love and grace can be expected at all times.
I know we don't live in a world where that's true, but perhaps we should be able to be part of a Church where it is.
