Chinglican Christianity: Christ Our Brother

Tags

agency, Churl, Douglas Todd, Hans Urs von Balthasar, hiatus, James Wellman, Jesus, kenosis, Mike Chase, silence, sovereignty, St. Peter's Fireside, suffering, theodicy

I deeply appreciate how the conversation among Douglas Todd, the St. Peter’s Fireside staff, and I have been shaping each other’s discourse. As I said in yesterday’s post, these posts are not only for the theological entertainment of a niche group of readers. They are public deliberations, put on the public record, in a public sphere that has one of its major items of debate what the place and privilege of Christians is in our society. That we can model public theological conversation and debate is a joy that we should not take lightly. For all we know, it could reposition the monolithic image of a Christian Right nefariously trying to take over a secular public sphere into a diffuse kaleidoscope of moderate Christians working out in very public ways the ways that they disagree yet remain in loving communion.

It’s in that spirit that I want to remark on how remarkable Mike Chase must be as a pastor. The post that he has delivered as a response to Douglas Todd on how ‘classical Christians’ understand divine sovereignty and human suffering is classically pastoral in the sense as it provides guidance for the people of God in Jesus Christ to develop a fuller life participating in his life. Here’s what Todd said:

When bad things happen, atheists sometimes turn to Christians and rhetorically demand: “So where is your God now?” The question hinges on the incorrect assumption that progressive Christians believe God controls everything, like a supernatural dictator. Liberal Christians tend to believe life is a combination of chance and divine purpose. Given they have free will, humans can engage in moral evil, whether they’re Hitler, members of Boko Haram or wanton polluters. In a creativity-filled universe, chance also makes it possible for bad things to happen in nature, like a destructive avalanche. Liberal Christians believe that, out of suffering, God works to bring new order and healing.

What’s interesting about Todd’s account of liberal Christianity is that it has plenty of room for a ‘classical’ Christian understanding of divine sovereignty and human agency, as it should, particularly because ‘liberalism’ in one sense shouldn’t mean much more than the development of an overlapping consensus among disparate socio-theological imaginaries. Chase correctly sees his ‘in,’ pointing out that his view and Todd’s overlap quite a bit, both in an understanding of God’s sovereignty and human suffering. Disavowing the ‘Calvinism stricter than Calvin’ that plagues contemporary theological discourse among evangelicals in which some have emphasized divine sovereignty at the complete expense of human agency, Chase observes that a ‘classically Christian’ understanding of God’s relationship to the world has a lot of room for human response and responsibility (although I really wish that, as in the previous post on race, Chase would add a bit of a qualifier in his quote from St. Augustine about Jewish-Christian relations). While some may read Chase’s insistence that ‘God controls everything’ as a mere assertion without argument, it sounds to me like Chase is sufficiently aware of Yale theologian Kathryn Tanner’s God and Creation in Christian Theology because Chase chalks up the disconnection between divine sovereignty and human agency to a modern metaphysics. For Tanner — and thus, for Chase — there were different metaphysical rules governing the ‘classical’ conceptions of divine sovereignty, especially in the quotes Chase selects from St. Clement of Rome, and while a nominalist account of God’s sovereignty that argues that God can basically do whatever he wants has presented modern theologians with an ‘either/or’ of divine sovereignty or creaturely agency, the older Christian ‘grammar’ of God as a divine agent working in the world sees no need for this dichotomy.

In turn, Chase argues that this means that there is no need to engage in debates about God’s sovereignty when it comes to human suffering. Instead, a pastoral response would be that human suffering, like the example of St. John Paul II slowly deteriorating and showing the world how a Christian dies well, is a participation in the crucified suffering of Christ. In this way, classical Christians don’t engage in intellectual gymnastics when they encounter human suffering. They enter into the ‘suffering of the other and point them to Christ,’ suggesting that, plainly speaking, we’re all in this together.

Chase’s pastoral response reminds me of some time that I spent with some priests associated with the Congregation of Holy Cross. I had gone through a very difficult season of ministry — yes, before this academic thing and indeed, before even this Thing, I was discerning a call to pastoral ministry — and had gone to live with the priests to refuel. Much of it was spent with good food — candied kielbasa, slow-cooked chicken thighs, Sunday night pizza and movie — and great table conversation in which the priests often exchanged collegial jabs at each other to hilarious effect. One moment that I will never forget, though, was during one of the daily morning masses. The celebrating priest that morning had to preach from the Gospel passage where Jesus tells off the Sadducees for their hypothetical situation about the woman marrying seven brothers and being confused about her real husband at the resurrection. Going beyond criticizing the Temple establishment for not believing in the resurrection, this priest argued that the real problem was that they didn’t understand that God had come close to them and was living and working among them in powerful ways. He then ended the homily with a prayer to ‘Christ Our Brother.’

Christ Our Brother. I understood that theologically; after all, St. Paul has himself written of Christ as the firstborn of all who share in the risen life and of Christians as ‘co-heirs with Christ.’ But this priest actually believed it. I remember asking him about it later, and he just said matter-of-factly, ‘You know, I think a lot of Christians want to think of God as very distant from them. But I’m afraid that’s not Christianity. As a Christian, you don’t believe that God is distant. God is close to us, and we’re afraid of that.’

Years ago, this same priest had introduced me to the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar, and when he heard that I was still interested, he asked, ‘Have you read Mysterium Paschale? It’s Balthasar’s most accessible work.’

I’m sure that Mysterium Paschale is hyped up to be ‘accessible,’ but that book took me a whole year to read. That’s because von Balthasar completely messed with me. Most will talk about von Balthasar’s development of the ‘hiatus’ on Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter where God is really dead. But what struck me was a formulation in the first chapter where von Balthasar contextualizes his understanding of that pause with the kenosis, the self-emptying of God in Jesus Christ. For von Balthasar, God’s action in emptying himself in Jesus Christ is the supremely sovereign act that shows that divine sovereignty is fully expressed in being completely helpless as a human being who is completely obedient to the Father, freely accepting even death, death on a cross. To put it in all of its radical glory, God exercises his sovereignty by falling into the hiatus of Holy Saturday.

In this sense, there is really no need for Chase to separate the two parts of his post between the ‘theological’ and the ‘pastoral.’ If God’s expression of sovereignty is not that God can do whatever he wants (as the nominalists assert) but to love us so much as to fall into the abyss with us, then a ‘classically Christian’ theology is that Christ our brother suffers with us — that is simply who God is as a divine agent. In turn, it is an unclassical thing — indeed, a modern nominalist thing — to start with ‘God’ as an empty, characterless category with a terrifying, arbitrary sovereignty who can do whatever he wants and does nothing to stop the evil in the world, which means that it’s also an unclassically Christian thing to assume that God’s real job in exercising his sovereignty is to stop the evil in the world. No, in this sense, both Todd and Chase would affirm a suffering God, one who acts by coming close to us, even down to hell, to bring us back to life.

That’s why our resident expert on suffering here on A Christian Thing, Churl, writes so publicly about his mental illness and his recent conversion to Roman Catholicism. When I read Churl’s posts, the raw honesty always stuns me into silence. I suppose that’s the point. See, Churl is also a scholar who knows Job and Ecclesiastes like the back of his hand. When he is that honest in public, it’s like he’s putting up a finger, warning us that even ‘pointing to Christ’ cheapens his suffering. Don’t be Job’s comforters, he is saying, just don’t say anything. Or, in the words of James Wellman, a ‘liberal’ Christian who says too many ‘classically Christian’ things, ‘grief is underrated,‘ a feeling that he knows intimately in the wake of his wife’s death and his very public mourning over the loss of his ‘home’ with her. If God himself can fall into the silence of the abyss, we should, to take Ecclesiastes’s Qoholet out of context, let our words be few. If we really believe that God is near and that Jesus is present as a brother to the suffering, then there’s no need for us to say anything. The ‘classical Christian’ practice of the ‘theological’ and the ‘pastoral’ in the face of suffering may well be silence. After all, when Christ our brother is present but silent, what right have we speak?

And because that’s a perfect segue into the next post on death and the beyond, I’ll stop here and wait for Roger Revell’s response to Todd’s account of the resurrection.

Terrified

Tags

Catholic, Catholic Church, evil and suffering, Jesus, mental illness, Obsessive–compulsive disorder, OCD, Protestant

It was Good Friday, and I was doing, for the first time really, the stations of the cross. This was my first time, not because as a Protestant I had had any major problems with it, and not even because I was not attracted to it, but simply because, as a Protestant, doing the stations of the cross would have involved making a fuss of the emergent or high-Anglican variety. Anglo-Catholicism was the closest I could get to Rome outside of Rome, but it always seemed to involve a certain kind of hyper-ostentation, distinguished as Anglo-Catholicism is by such loudness. It is thank God possible to be quietly and anonymously Catholic (in humility rather than shame), but, as an Anglo-Catholic, one needs to be very loud about how Catholic one is, perhaps with a shrillness designed to convince oneself of something about which one has doubts.

In any case, it was Good Friday, the day before my reception into the Church, and I was doing the stations of the cross with my RCIA group. I was kind of hoping to slide into the Church – quietly, and without much fuss – and I knew my relationship with God well enough to know that I needn’t expect anything of the mystical or experiential variety – my relationship with Him was and remains enough, and it was sufficient for me to take this step He called me to without much ballyhoo or other diversion of the experiential, spiritual, or social variety. As is typical of my experience of God, he disappointed my expectations.

To contextualize this, I will need to backtrack a bit regarding the ongoing saga of my struggles to understand matters of faith, suffering, and death. As someone with a longtime history of depression and OCD (in the official fancy language my condition would cheerfully be termed “comorbid”), and further with various family members and friends suffering from such things, the question of the place of suffering in faith has always been much less easy for me to ignore than it seems to be for some Christians. Add to this the death of a close friend three years ago, deep alienation from Christian community (too Catholic for Protestants, too Protestant for Catholics, and deeply wounded by the effects of some nasty church and parachurch politics), and a tendency to always put my worst foot forward when it comes to interviews or applications in the area of my vocation, and it is fair to say that frustration is not likely to be something I can forget anytime soon. A fever pitch of suffering would be a bad way to describe it – that happened in the much more volatile period of our younger romance – and now Suffering and I had settled into the familiar routine of destroying each other even while relying on each other for stability like an addictive drug when the exotics and passion are gone, and all that is left is bathetic routine. Not only did I know Suffering, but I made myself an expert in all her ways – I would be the prophet proclaiming her existence to a stubborn and obstinate church. I could, quite literally, say what most could only say figuratively – I really did do a Doctorate on suffering.

But I return to the stations of the cross and Good Friday, with a caveat, which is this. When I describe what follows, I do not necessarily mean that all this hit me on the head at once, or that I immediately came to this realization. I’m pretty sure that every moment we mark of deep significance in our lives is preceded by so many other important moments we don’t notice, and, furthermore, may not even be initially understood – the post-experience reflection on the experience is as much a part of the experience as the temporal moment when one first marks it. What follows is the totality of my impression – thus far – of what happened on Good Friday.

What happened was that, at some point while we were doing the stations, I realized that I had met my match when it came to the understanding of suffering – in this church, in this place, I was becoming part of a people that knew suffering in her bones. Not in the sense that the Church has necessarily suffered more than other groups – indeed, in her imperfection here on earth, she has on a number of occasions been the cause of suffering – but rather in the sense that here, in Christ’s body, a body I could taste, touch, and smell in the sacraments and in my fellow Christians – here, in this body, suffering was understood, in the deepest and most mysterious sense of the word. Yes, other churches I had been part of had the crucifixion narrative as well – but the crosses were bare. In contrast, here was a devotional practice that was not trying to be radical or prophetic or sexy or relevant or any of those other things – it was not screaming for attention, as was my own “prophetic” bent concerning suffering – rather, it simply was. It was not some radical thing (except in the most literal etymological sense) that would strike like lightning and change my life fifty different ways to Sunday. No, it was a basic and humble grammar of suffering. And I, the expert, the self-proclaimed seer, with the Doctorate on Job, stopped my mouth, and was silent. No longer could I say, “But you don’t know what it’s like” – because She did. The Church did.

I don’t recall too precisely the exact moment this all came upon me, but I do feel it had something to do with the third time Christ stumbles in the stations. I knew enough of them prior to know that this is the part I most valued, the part where Christ looks at us, after having stumbled twice before already, and we have no clue what to do. Is it about us? Are we selfish enough to be glad for Christ’s suffering because we suffer too? On the other hand, when he looks into our eyes like that, the cross breaking his back, is there anywhere we can flee to evade that look that says it has everything to do with us? Is it an example? An act of empathy? The suffering servant? The broken beast of burden? Christ is physically naked, but it is we who are ashamed – he has looked into our souls. To stumble once might be a token example – even the best stumble. To stumble twice is a little more, but perhaps just another token – we can draw on his forgiveness if we happen to fall a few times, so long as we are generally consistent. But a third time. That is the clincher. He means it. He will really be there. Every time. Seventy times seven times, and more, if necessary. Every time. The face full of sorrow that is also mercy and grace. Eye to eye, and heart to heart.

That is a broken description of the glimpse I had into the Church – the place where suffering is uniquely understood – and the place where I covered my mouth. At that same moment, I felt a kind of release. It is a heavy burden to think of oneself as a prophet on behalf of all suffering everywhere, and suddenly I saw – Christ’s body, the Church, was carrying this burden. It was not mine to carry. I could help or participate or pray or not – I could understand or not – but whatever I did, God had suffering and death taken care of. And it was then I realized the most terrifying thing, that I was free, free to explore that thing far more frightening and unpredictable to me than any kind of pain or suffering: joy. I still have very little idea what this means – particularly as I am accustomed to associate the word “joy” with the facile glossing and painting of pain. And I don’t like joy, because it comes at all the wrong times, and doesn’t come to everybody equally. But it is a treasure, of Christ and His Church, and having retired from the position of self-proclaimed prophet of suffering and pain (though I make no promises concerning relapses), I am at liberty to explore it – joy – the greatest problem that we face as humans. I am terrified.

Chinglican Christianity: Practicing Jesus-style Decolonization

Tags

Alastair Sterne, Anglican, Chinglican, decolonization, Douglas Todd, fundamentalism, Jesus, Julia Nicole Sterne, liberal, Roger Revell, social gospel, social justice, St. Peter's Fireside, Vancouver

My hat’s off to Roger Revell for his third installment in the St. Peter’s Fireside ‘classical Christianity’ responses to Douglas Todd’s liberal Christianity primer. Whereas the series started out more combative than was necessary, Revell has managed to strike an ecumenically conciliatory tone, finding common ground between Todd’s liberal Christianity and his own classical Christianity in the practice of social justice. Although this ecumenism is precisely what I’ve advocated in my previous responses (see here for the first and the second), I won’t try to take credit here. As Johann Sebastian Bach used to write at the end of his compositions, SDG, i.e. Soli Deo Gloria.

My post will attempt to draw out the implications of Revell’s post for Christian practice in Vancouver. Once again, Revell is responding to Todd, who wrote:

Jesus was not status quo. He turned the established order upside down, de-emphasizing hierarchy. Instead of promoting “family values,” he asked followers to leave behind their parents. Progressive Christians note how he befriended outcasts, the poor, women, children and tax collectors. He advocated simple, equal, communal living. He also pressed for social and economic justice, for which he paid the ultimate price, execution. Many liberal Christians believe Jesus embodied the divine power of creative transformation.

As Revell suggests, practice is what matters. Noting that the practices of saints as diverse as St. John Chrysostom and John Calvin focused on the poor, as did a spectrum of Roman Catholic, evangelical, ‘creedal,’ Anabaptist, and liberal Protestant practitioners, Revell finds that liberal Protestantism does not have ‘the market cornered’ for putting Jesus’ ‘transformative values’ to work. He’s right, of course. As Benedict XVI put it in Spe Salvi, faith is performative, that is, what you do demonstrates what you actually believe.

Another way of putting this, of course, is that talk is cheap. Revell lists example after example of good works done by the historic Christian church as well as a diversity of ecclesial communities. But he also makes a jab at modern Protestant fundamentalism that I think is well worth revisiting:

If one pays attention only to certain “fundamentalist” Christian groups from the 20th century, this point can be missed. Fundamentalism, especially the American variety, sometimes boasts a poor track record on issues of social justice. In some such groups—as I know from personal experience—the term “social justice” is highly suspect. However, when this peculiar movement is situated in the broader context of church history, its muted concern for Jesus’ social vision can be seen for all its oddness.

In other words, while classical Christians have a long track record of social justice activism, fundamentalists are odd because they do not. One question to ask is why not? But because the answer has already been adequately provided in places like George Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture, there’s little need for me to delve into an in-depth history here, except to say that it was the fundamentalist movement’s battle with modernist mainline Protestants that made them withdraw so much into their private congregations in the 1920s that it became embarrassing – so embarrassing that Carl Henry, an evangelical theologian who was no friend of liberals, had to write a book titled The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, castigating fundamentalists for not caring about important issues in the 1940s, like, say, worldwide military conflict, the ecological crisis, and the nuclear arms race. For all of that, you can do your homework and read that abundant literature, starting with Marsden and going to, say, Mark Noll’s Scandal of the Evangelical Mind and Molly Worthen’s Apostles of Reason. Revell seems to be aware of all this work too, and so should all of our readers.

The more interesting question to ask, though, given that talk is cheap, is: what implications does Revell’s understanding of classical Christian practices of social justice have for churches in Vancouver? My answer to this question will suggest that St. Peter’s Fireside is pretty much standing on the shoulders of giants.

In 2007-8, for example, one of Douglas Todd’s big stories concerned Tenth Avenue Alliance Church, now known as Tenth Church Vancouver (and not to be confused with this story). At that time, Tenth’s attempt to renovate their building came under contestation from the municipal government because of their feed-the-hungry program and shelter. Although their social service plans had originally been helped by another department in the government, they were required by the city to get a social services permit. This produced an outcry among various religious communities from various traditions across Vancouver, and it led to the formation of an interfaith coalition called Faith Communities Committed to Solidarity with the Poor (FCCSP). FCCSP held neighbourhood meetings and press conferences for a year demanding that the city back down from their requirement for theological reasons — indeed, the same reasons that Revell discusses in his post. In a document titled ‘The Social Vocation of the Church’ posted on the website of Streams of Justice (another organization we’re about to talk about), FCCSP laid out what Revell would call a ‘classical Christian’ argument that within orthodox streams of Christianity, as well as most other religious traditions, serving the poor was a central element of faith practice that could not be separated from worship. If the city was requiring Tenth to get a permit, it meant that the city was doing theology and colonizing Tenth’s religious practice. After a year of FCCSP’s work, the city backed down – pretty much because of FCCSP’s classically Christian argument. In turn, since FCCSP, Tenth has itself also been articulating to its congregation the importance of the classically Christian spiritual disciplines, including the practice of social justice, so much so that its senior pastor, Ken Shigematsu, has written a whole bestselling book on the topic, God in My Everything.

And yet, to bring up Streams of Justice suggests that what ‘social justice’ means is beyond even Revell’s conception. For Revell, contemporary examples like World Vision, the Mennonite Central Committee, and evangelical relief agencies are adequate illustrations for the practice of justice. But for Streams of Justice, that only scratches the surface. Founded in large part by Hebrew Scripture scholar Dave Diewert, Streams of Justice takes a biblically (read: classically) prophetic stance against colonization in Vancouver. In technical political language, this means that Streams of Justice doesn’t just participate in social services, but in the politics of decolonization. With the buzz in Vancouver’s Christian circles around the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, one might think that this means that churches have to own up to their historical record of participating in the injustices of Canada’s residential schools to ‘kill the Indian within.’

Yes and no.

The politics of decolonization would say, yes, of course, churches have to own up to their historical wrongs. But no, that’s not all there is to it because there are also contemporary colonial policies to be contested, not least of which is the recently federally approved Northern Gateway oil pipeline through British Columbia that is being contested by several First Nations. Chinese Christians in Action’s Bill Chu has also recently been working with First Nations against a resort being built on their traditional lands. Streams of Justice chalks up Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside policies to be colonizing as well, often leading to community fragmentation in the name of scattering a skid row population when in fact it takes away informal networks of support for people who depend on it. For these classical Christians, social justice is not just a matter of service – it’s a matter of looking at the whole structure of cities, economies, and political formations and contesting the powers of colonization.

In Vancouver, this also hits close to home with the property market. True to form, St. Peter’s Fireside’s clergy have been inadvertently rolled into these politics. On June 10, Alastair Sterne’s wife, Julia Nicole Sterne, blogged about how to deal with disappointment, using her own frustration with Vancouver’s high-priced, hyper-competitive property market as an example:

Alastair and I have been in the market for a new home for almost a year. Almost. A. Whole. Entire. Year. We have never been in want, but we are now in a season of wanting; wanting a permanent home, wanting a place for Ansley and any other babies to grow up, wanting some stability and financial responsibility and to make something our own. In this past year we have made multiple offers with nothing secured.

This provoked a cranky response from Garth Turner, an investment advisor who was a Member of Parliament for nine years who took care of a lot of economic policy. Aside from highly misogynistic remarks about Julia — which, by the way, all classical Christians should contest — the post chalks up Julia’s disappointment to just another day at the market, where rational investors look at the ‘free money’ to be had in Vancouver’s property market and rationally capitalize on it. For geographer Nick Blomley, though, this kind of thing isn’t just market rationality — it’s colonialism that displaces those who can’t afford the increasingly unaffordable housing in Vancouver and that — mirroring Streams of Justice’s decolonization politics — fragments the social networks of the Downtown Eastside. For St. Peter’s Fireside, this is becoming a personal experience of colonization. The question is, what solidarities will these ‘classical Christians’ discover in their practice of social justice? What will it have to do with their engagement in issues of affordable housing as a human right? racial politics? indigenous sovereignties? ecological justice? Exciting times.

In other words, Revell has given Vancouver’s public sphere an excellent rundown of how what he calls ‘classical Christianity’ — a longstanding orthodox tradition that ranges from the early church to Chrysostom to Calvin to Wilberforce to the present — converges with ‘liberal Christianity’ in its practice of social justice. What I’ve attempted to do in this post is to bring Revell’s insights home. Don’t be surprised, then, if you see St. Peter’s Fireside exploring the politics of decolonization in Vancouver. It would be very much part of classical Christianity to do so.

I’m looking forward to Revell’s next post on evolution, which I am sure will be just as insightful as his thoughts on social justice.

Gnosticism, Materialism, and the Cruciform Realism of Grace

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Christ, Christianity, church, cross, emergent, evil and suffering, Gnosticism, God, hipster, Irenaeus, Jesus, Mark Noll, materialism

If you are from my generation and from a particular kind of Protestant background, you will probably have had, at one point or another, the “aha” moment when you realize your tradition has gnostic tendencies, and that this might be a problem. As for many of my peers, this for me happened probably around the time I read Mark Noll’s Scandal of the Evanglical Mind, which took the movement to task for being too gnostic. Such gnosticism can be defined in many ways, but at bottom the definition I will be using for this reflection is one which defines gnosticism as a denial of God’s Genesis assertion that His creation is good, paired with an assertion of spirituality that will save us from, rather than redeem, creation.

This realization – that Protestant gnostic tendencies are in fact heterodox lies about reality – is, I believe, absolutely necessary for everyone from such a background. However, this realization has (at least as far as I can tell) become in many emergent and hipster Evangelical circles as common as were once the Sinner’s Prayer, the four spiritual laws, and altar calls. It has in some places become a conversation stopper – if I don’t like what you are doing and think you should loosen up and have a little more fun, be a little more worldly, I can tell you to stop being so gnostic (without defining that or examining my motivations or rhetoric), and that will suffice for an answer – if you don’t listen it is just because you are an uptight Protestant. In sounding this harsh, I am, I hope, not just pointing fingers at others, but mostly at myself – when I become excited about something and its liberating quality I can also become very graceless about it, and such gracelessness is nothing other than sin.

Reflecting a little more on this, I have become concerned that gnosticism comes naturally to those in a suffering world, and that unless we fight it as Christians rather than mere comfortable materialists, we are just replacing one problem with another. Let me put it another way. It is not at all difficult for an affluent, white, middle-class person to appreciate the goodness of creation, which such a person interprets as the goodness of their own material success. And it is easy to turn around and preach this version of a prosperity gospel to others. But what if one’s material life is not perfect? What if one lives in the downtown Eastside of Vancouver, or the North end of Winnipeg? What if sheer existence – material life – is deeply painful? What about those who suffer chronic pain? What about those whose everyday lives in a material world have brought them to such a point that they spend every waking moment wishing to escape? Yes, this is still gnosticism, and condemnable on Christian grounds. But it is in many ways at least more natural and noble than a materialism that criticizes the poor because they don’t have the material circumstances to be triumphalist about their corner of creation.

This, I think, is why it is the centrality of the cross that distinguishes Christian opposition to gnosticism from a more materialist kind. The centrality of the cross in such opposition is found in many places, but the following quote from Irenaeus’s Against Heresies (in which he describes the gnostic beliefs he opposes) is particularly telling:

“Wherefore he [Christ] did not himself suffer death, but Simon, a certain man of Cyrene, being compelled, bore the cross in his stead; so that this latter being transfigured by him, that he might be thought to be Jesus, was crucified, through ignorance and error, while Jesus himself received the form of Simon, and, standing by, laughed at them. For since he was an incorporeal power, and the Nous (mind) of the unborn father, he transfigured himself as he pleased, and thus ascended to him who had sent him, deriding them, inasmuch as he could not be laid hold of, and was invisible to all.”

As this quote suggests, the real heart of Christian disagreement with gnosticism is not a vague and benevolent warm-hearted embrace of creation (though it may on occasion include this); no, it is a position that states that we can look upon the very worst suffering of creation, the very worst contortion, and still concur that this creation is good, good enough in fact that God can be incarnate in such a body even in the midst of its brokenness. This is a costly rejection of gnosticism – it hurts. In fact, our very survival instincts advise us that it would be easier to be rid of the whole material world. It would be easier to side with the gnostic Christ who lets another suffer in his place and stands by chuckling at the very folly of material. It would be easier to be callous. And though we may look at ourselves and say we are not those who would turn away and laugh at a dying man, the gospel suggests we are. It may not appear to us as blatantly as the callousness of the gnostic Christ. But we do buffer ourselves with material, with prosperity, and then we call our appreciation of this prosperity an appreciation of incarnation. But when we do this, we, no less than the gnostic Christ described above, deny the fullness of creation and incarnation, for we disdain to look upon – and I mean, fully look upon – the one, the ones, we have pierced. In a strange way the materialist’s alleged rejection of gnosticism begins to look in its escapist and selective read on creation much like the escapist spirituality of gnosticism itself – the only difference is that, for the materialist, the site of triumphalism is a selectively culled hoard of matter, while, for the gnostic, the triumphalism is in the realm of spirit.

So what does this mean? It means that the most important – and the most difficult – task of the Church is to go against our almost instinctual impulse to become escapists when we encounter crosses, in the poor, the oppressed, the weak, in our own private pains. It is a Herculean task, for our propensity in the face of such is either to become gnostic – deny the goodness of materiality altogether – or selectively cull reality until the horrible pain of it is no longer in our sight. In the face of this, the Church lives to direct our gaze – fully and directly –  toward what we would not see: the Crucified Body. More cruelly – or more miraculously – She teaches us to say as we look, “It is good.” This is the horror of the Christian redemption of all creation, the horror that is also love – the cruciform realism that is the beginning of our salvation.

Of Sacrament and Scandal: For My Beloved Wife on our Seventh Anniversary

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Adam, Anniversary, beauty, Christ, Divine grace, Eve, God, Jesus, marriage, Wife

It is often hardest to write in a straightforward way about the things and people most central in our lives.  That, perhaps, is why I always seem to write around theology whenever I approach it – it would not feel right to simply reach out my hand and steady an apparently wobbling ark.

But theology today is not my topic, or at least not directly; rather, I want to say something to M, my wife, on this day marking the seventh anniversary of our marriage. And where do I begin? I suppose I could begin – in that time honored and now largely lost tradition – with describing your beauty. Yes, by this I mean your physical beauty, that still causes me to thrill when I see you, because you are breathtaking. And if anyone should protest that I am incorrect in claiming we no longer begin here – with physical beauty – I would counter otherwise. Modern society has trained us to be either materialists or idealists, either those who chase after a shallow and disensouled sexiness, or those who do not see the body at all – we are too polite, too sophisticated for that, too in control of ourselves to find ourselves viscerally attracted to beauty. But there you are, your body. And I hold my breath, and hold my tongue; the way I want to describe you is better done privately. And I look at you, and know what God meant at first creation when he looked at his work – when Adam first looked at Eve – and said with awe, “She is good.”

But this of course is just the beginning of who you are and what you mean to me – it is just the surface of the deeper beauty and love you keep deep within you.  I know even as I say this what your reaction will be – how you will roll your eyes at me in sarcastic disbelief.  But I have been married to you for seven years – and in a relationship with you for nine – and this is something I know; despite your attempts to make light of it, there is in you a very deep love and loyalty, so intense and firm that you are often reluctant to even acknowledge it in yourself sometimes. I am blessed to experience this love, a deep beauty you often go out of your way to hide, lest you become the centre of attention. You can try to hide under a bushel, but I will proclaim your beauty – and my love for you – to the world.

And then there is the fact that you put up with me, which I imagine takes some doing. You have to be a special kind of person to appreciate having Ecclesiastes 12 read at your wedding, or to appreciate a memento mori as a Christmas gift. You are that person, and I love you for it. And it also takes someone like you to appreciate that what is not easy may still be good – that amidst all the various happenstances of suffering and trial, we can still sit down and share a picnic beside the still waters in the valley of the shadow of death.

What’s more, you are generous, and willing to share these picnics with others. We came together through a mutual sense of woundedness and a desire to be something – a community – that could be helpful to others in their own pain. Yes, we were idealistic, and as always there are things we couldn’t have accounted for; just how deeply pain and suffering permeate the world is something that I realize now I cannot measure – the only measure of this can be Christ’s cross, and to think we can understand it – beat it on our own – is foolish.

But we can be a community gathered around this cross; together we are a sacrament, that is to say, together, beyond our particularities and problems and sufferings; or, perhaps better, despite ourselves and through these things; the grace of God visits earth. And I am thankful for this – for you – for us – daily. I am thankful for seven years of grace.

And I am thankful for the scandal of it, for in a society such as ours, bent as it is against radical loyalty, it is a scandal. And yet perhaps the scandal of such a thing is not as modern as we might think, for the disciples too seem to have found Christ’s words on marital faithfulness disconcerting (Matthew 19:10).  Mere common interests or friendship or desire is not enough to hold us together – it is by the grace of Christ, experienced inside and outside His church, that we are bound.  This grace is for us to whom Christ refers as “those to whom it has been given.”  It is our vocation – this riddle given by God to the world – the wonder of us together.

And so I am thankful: for you, for your love, for the past seven years, for the blessing of being one flesh with you. And it is with such thankfulness – a thankfulness and gratefulness that I often express only abysmally, as I do here – that I wish you, my wife, a happy anniversary. Thank you for the miracle of seven years together.

On Suicide, Part 1: A Response to Question 2 of the Patheos Conversation on Mental Illness and Health

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Christ, Christian, Christianity, church, Epistle to the Romans, Faith, God, Jesus, Mental health, mental illness, Paul, suicide

Question 2 of the Patheos Conversation on Mental Health

Research suggests that religious faith protects against suicide. Why do you think that is in light of how your community responds to suicide? How can we tread the fine line of discouraging suicide while not making the grief of family members worse?

The devil took me up on a high mountain and showed me all the kingdoms of the world. And he gave me a research statistic. With this, he said, you will conquer the kingdoms of the world for you faith. Under this sign you will conquer.

As the prior creative bit might suggest, I think a statistic like this must first of all for Christians and others of faith included in the research be a great source of temptation. It is tempting to use it in a triumphalistic way. After all, in a culture of death (as the late John Paul II described it) it is no surprise that suicide is prevalent, and it is no surprise that faith is a deterrent in such a culture. If we would turn back to God, have a revival, become a Christian nation again, we would answer the problem of suicide. As usual, God has the answer all along, and we are just ignorant of it. Of course science supports us.

Before interrogating this attitude, I would like to say a bit about the research itself. From my own experience, it rings true. It is always difficult to play the “what if” game, but, as someone who is often depressed, and for whom suicide seems at times the least unattractive option, I do think it is possible I am alive because of the habits of hope that are part of Christianity. I say habits because I am not good a feeling hope, but there is something in the Christian insistence that one must get up again after falling, and being steeped enough in the church has instilled that in me, to my benefit. But then, I also wonder what kind of study produced this information. What if it is statistically true but only because those who do end up killing themselves are alienated in church and leave long before they actually do it. What if it is just because the church does not have a place for those so troubled they are on the verge of suicide?

But to return to the prior point, suicide is complicated, and a church that merely rests on its scientific ability to discourage suicide (and implicitly or explicitly blames secular culture alone) will be marvellously ill equipped to deal with depressed people, particularly as such churches are modelled on a culture that presumes there are “normal” people and then those ill people who want to kill themselves. For a moment I want to turn this on its head. We presume that the reasonable thing is to not want to commit suicide, and that people in their natural state are and should be happy, wanting to live life. But I actually wonder if this is the case.

I wonder because for very sane people throughout history, suicide, far from being a categorical sign of madness, has in fact been a deep philosophical puzzle – we need only think of Donne’s Biothanatos or Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus to see that suicide is not only taken seriously by “crazy” people – it is perhaps also taken seriously by people who can actually see the groaning world around them. And I would suggest that at least some of the attitude that distinguishes the modern division between “normal people” and “suicides” is the result of a great modern whitewashing of the world via a media that acts as an opiate of the masses. We do not consider suicide reasonable because we have swept under the carpet all the ugly bits that might in fact drive us to it. Modern society is a culture of death. But it is a culture of the kind of death that wants eternal life, and suicide is a chink in its armour. We do not appreciate the suggestion that the world might be so bad we might not want to live in it, and we appreciate it less for the nagging bit of our soul left that reminds us there might be parts of this critique that are true. (For further clarification here, please see Addendum)

As long as Christians do not see the compelling nature of suicide and simply think of it as a madness that their own sane faith can cure, they will not be helpful. And I hope to demonstrate this via Romans 7 and 8. Read Romans 7. But omit verse 25. I suggest that the picture painted here, minus the turn to God, leaves little option but suicide. Yes, this chapter is talking about a particular kind of despair pertaining to our inability to perform the law. But I think there are lots of ways one can take this. Biblically speaking, all such frustration is the result of original sin; for instance, though the degree of my culpability is something only God can know, I feel exactly like Paul here when I look after my son, knowing how many stimulating, encouraging, and beneficial things I could do with him, but sitting there paralyzed by fear and sadness while he watches TV. The good I want to do I cannot do, or so it feels.

But now I want to pars Romans 8. On a surface read, one might feel this is saying exactly the kind of thing I caricatured before. Everything is despair, but when we turn to Christ it will all be hunky dory. But I am not quite sure this is what Paul means, and I think the distinction hangs on what is meant by Christians having “the first fruits of the Spirit” (23) and the rest of creation groaning in expectation. The problem from a very practical perspective is of course this – there are very much some kinds of help that one can get for such despair outside the church, and I do believe that in the best instances these constitute real help. At the same time, there are those in the church who are very much being not helped – where is the glorious freedom we seem to be talking about?

What I want to say is that, though what is primarily talked about here are the “first fruits” of Christ, that is, his personal adoption of us, there is in this passage an implicit sense of second and third and fourth fruits. Though Paul describes what is probably the highest form of Christian interaction with Christ, we can imagine the Spirit (who hovered over the water) at work in so very many aspects of the creation we don’t understand or can’t trace, even as he is at work in so many prayers beyond the groans of our understanding. My point is that, if every good and perfect gift is from above, the business of us who have what Paul calls the first-fruits is not simply an act of entrenchment against everything else happening in the world, but rather an act of looking for places where the Spirit is working in the world – the flesh here does not in fact mean created material but rather the improper use and orientation of it. It is a Christian’s business to look for and applaud places in society and the world where God’s Spirit is working in and with material, even as it is the Christian’s business to ensure that those within the church can benefit from such material work (e. g. medicine, psychology, etc.). The church is the place where God’s first fruits have been endowed, and is thus the instrument capable of naming most fully such blessings. But the blessings themselves, like rain, fall on the righteous and unrighteous alike, the hardened atheist clinician and the habited nun, and the church’s business is not so much to have a corner on this grace as to recognize and name it when they see it.

Hence, Romans 8 answers the suicidal impulse, not by suggesting the Christians have a corner on the kind of grace, hope, and discovery that helps fight it, but rather by highlighting the first origin of all these secondary graces in Christ, as well as the Christian ability to name them and recognize them in their fullness. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the rocks cry out, and it is I think not untrue to say that the infinitely more odd things of God’s creation – psychologists, medications, treatment etc. – also glorify God in their way too.

This being said, the effect is not immediate. Paul still speaks of suffering (v. 18). The full redemption of creation is a long time coming. And so sometimes we need to wait with each other. There is no good excuse for sitting amidst suffering that can be avoided or helped in a healthy way, and many churches are culpable in this area. But when created matter has not caught up with our spirits, when (as with the experience of only partially treatable OCD), the tic in our brains has not yet caught up to the deeper spiritual knowledge of a graced world, we must wait with each other, weeping and laughing by turns. For this, I think, is what it means to be the church amidst a world still realizing the freedom Christ has bought and its extent into the deepest reaches of some of the very darkest corners of creation.

Addendum: I want to here clarify that I do not here mean to imply that depression is always due to societal problem that are ignored or not redressed. Indeed, depression in its most biochemically potent form will cause depression even in what is ostensibly the most perfect of external situations and environments. Of course, it is often the very fact of such an experience that many in the church implicitly or explicitly deny, for things that do not fit formulae trouble us, and when not confronted by them directly, we find it more comfortable to pretend they don’t exist.

Evangelical Conversion Narrative and the Elder of the Prodigal Brothers

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Age of Enlightenment, Christianity, Conversion, Evangelical, Evangelicalism, Flannery O'Connor, God, Jesus, Joss Whedon, Parable of the Prodigal Son, Postmodern, Romanticism, Testimony

In this post I want to talk about the Evangelical conversion moment.  By this I mean the experience that has generally been a staple of Evangelical narrative since the beginning of the movement’s history. This is usually a moment of crisis, of turning 180 degrees from one’s own way to God’s – often it is accompanied by an emotional experience, something like what Wesley described as a strange warming of the heart.

To begin, I would like to give this moment and its importance in this narrative more due than it gets in some circles. In these circles, this experience gets dismissed as more or less an individualistic after effect of the Enlightenment; in this spirit, Archbishop Schori of the Episcopal church described personal salvation as part of the “great Western heresy” of individualism (for a balanced description of the exchange between Schori and Evangelical Anglicans, see this article, particularly the portion that quotes Radner). But Western though it may be (and even that is questionable), her assertion ludicrously puts all of Christendom under censure from St. Paul onward. Though she is not out of line in critiquing the individualistic bent of Evangelicalism, I would suggest the problem is the other way round; our faith in fact is not personal enough, insofar as we in modern Western society have lost a sense of the breadth and depth of meaning once attributed to personhood.

However, this is in fact not what I want to talk about, but rather it is a prefatory caveat to differentiate the following critique from those of Schori et al.  And there is need for a critique recognizing that while experiential conversion crises are not a mere recent innovation, they have in Evangelical circles come to eclipse other models of conversion that have been equally important in the history of Christianity, models that in fact may be necessary to speak powerfully into the current postmodern moment.

Indeed, the particular model I have in mind can be seen if we think about the genre of testimony in Evangelical circles, that is, the relation of one’s initial conversion experience. I think in prior generations, these might have seemed particularly compelling, precisely because these generations were shaped by an Enlightenment view of historical progress complete with watershed moments of change, and a romantic imagination shaped by the idea that something actually happens when one encounters the sublime. Conceiving of faith in these terms thus made sense to a generation that believed in change and progress; the problem now though is that in a postmodern generation that has largely abandoned the Enlightenment and Romanticism, these stories do not feel very compelling. By this I do not mean that there is nothing worth keeping in them, even as I do not mean there is nothing worth keeping in Enlightenment and Romantic thought – surely there is.  But in a society continually bombarded by language of change, innovation, and revolution, such things become tiresome and even those instances that do have substance beyond the shallow rhetoric get lost in the mix – our lives will be changed during worship in the evening service, and then changed again by the heart-smart cereal we eat for breakfast, and then changed again by the speed of our wireless internet.  Innovation becomes mundane routine, and with it the faith grounded in innovative experiences.  So how is one to think about such testimonies in light of this general cultural inoculation against them?  I suggest that part of the response must involve realizing the importance of some of the other ways of narrating faith that were eclipsed at the advent of the Enlightenment/Romanticism.

For myself, I know what resonates most powerfully are not those stories of dramatic life changes, but the often more quiet (if equally engaging for those with ears) stories of those who have stayed, particularly those who have stayed Christians even in the midst of feeling the effects of ecclesial frustration and politics.  This, I think, is the really radical testimony, for the mark of postmodern society is an inability to stay loyal or faithful for long.  To be sure, there is a deep hunger for such loyalty, as evidenced in the enduring popularity of Joss Whedon’s shows, which almost always have such loyalty as their core. But if this loyalty is the thing we fantasize about, it appears equally fantastic to us in our inability to enact it – increasingly, our response to personal suffering, discomfort, pain, and evil is to run away regardless of the other goods we might abandon in the process; many of my friends have walked away from their faith entirely, and I imagine they must think me a fool for staying, a partner in a relationship that justifies abuse under the guise of loyalty.  But this I think is why my conversion story can say something to these friends that I think the more traditional testimony form might not be able to. I’ll bet I could match them point for point in frustrations with God and His church – in fact, I think in some cases I could frame these complaints in even more compelling ways. But I have stayed, with eyes wide open, and this because I have known a love stronger than death.  Not a love that depends on warming of hearts or sentimental experiences or instantaneous changes, but the kind of love that Job experiences with God, that looks harsh and reprimanding and thankless on the outside to those who have not known the paradoxical tenderness of the whirlwind. Put another way, I feel that I know a little about why Job would have died for God both before and after a divine response that makes so little sense in modern terms.

But the way I know this is not via a dramatic conversion moment, but because I stayed – where others grew up in the church and walked away thinking God and faith were dead, I stuck around to see if there would be resurrection – and I found that there was. Indeed, I like to think of my story in terms of the prodigal son – but not the one you might think.

What I am about to say here is something that probably makes me a bad Christian, but I think it is not in fact counter to scripture because what we are talking about is a parable, a divine riddle: I have never felt a lot of kinship with the prodigal son.  I mean, who spends their inheritance on whores and wild living when there are books one might buy (or probably in his case manuscripts)?  And parties are noisy affairs at best, even with a fatted calf – I share Flannery O’Conner’s sentiment that her primary function at parties was covering the stain on her mother’s sofa. In some ways, I am not in fact sure that when the elder son takes issue with the profligate’s party it is because he would actually enjoy one himself – rather, it is the unfairness of seeing a brother with a devil-may-care attitude have everything come to him while one constantly wracked by anxiety and responsibility can never let his guard down and feels as if he is barely surviving with little recognition or fruit.

But there is a caveat in the story, and that is that we don’t in fact know what became of this son (in fact, we don’t know what became of either son); what we do know is that he is given something far more precious than a party: his Father tells him, “You are always with me and everything I have is yours,” and if this is not the very thing we long for God to tell us as Christians, I’m not sure what is.  What if in fact it is not the prodigal who is given the greatest gift at the end of the story, but the elder son?  This would not be to say that the elder son is less sinful or less in need of grace than the younger – it is a very dull imagination indeed that could imagine that his stability on his Father’s property somehow exempts him from this. But the reminder that he is with his father and is his father’s heir is in fact the grace applied to his sin in this situation.

The story never says what happens to this son, but if in fact he embraces what his father says, his “testimony” will be very different from that of the prodigal. His will not be a story of running away and then radically turning to discover the grace of God; rather, it will be a story of still discovering this grace miraculously in spite of his close proximity to it, a proximity that would be easy enough to take for granted. It is a story of someone who stayed, perhaps (like us all) from imperfect motivation and not always with a clear understanding of why, but nonetheless stayed.  It is a story of discovering, whether slowly or quickly,  that God’s grace is deep enough to love not only the archetypal prodigal, but also those who did not leave. The miracle is not only that He goes off to rescue the one sheep that wanders from the herd; it is also that He stays and rescues the ninety-nine left on the hillside.

Some Boethian Musings on Lent

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Boethius, Christ, Consolation of Philosophy, Desert Fathers, evil and suffering, God, Gospel, Jesus, Lent

I am in a particularly difficult situation right now – looking for jobs in a very tough job market and overall trying to figure out my vocation – and I often hear from people that “God has something out there for me, so just keep going.” This by the way is perfectly good theology – I cannot fault it – and I also cannot fault those who wish to give me comfort in this way, well meaning as they usually are. However, whenever I hear it I can’t help wondering about the bigger question of the nature of the “something” out there for me. Implied in the statement is that this something will be something I want, something that people can immediately recognize as a blessing. And when I think of this, I think of Boethius.

For those who are not familiar with Boethius, he was a medieval philosopher and politician in the late fifth and early sixth centuries. He was accused of conspiring against his emperor, Theodoric, and was imprisoned. His most famous work, The Consolation of Philosophy, opens with the imprisoned Boethius’s lament. Very soon, however, he receives a visit from Lady Philosophy, who takes him to task for his fruitless and immature self-pity, and undertakes a dialogue with him, leading him through a gauntlet of questions and answers that cut to the philosophical heart of his problem, often leaving behind exactly the kinds of question we most care about in the twenty first century, which is how we deal with suffering and loss emotionally. In fact, there is a sense in which Boethius is speaking of something that I think we have nearly lost the cultural capacity to imagine, an inexorable reality that is both good and does not cater to each and every of our whims [rather, people in general seem to believe in an inexorable reality that is by and large evil and destructive, and a progress fighting against this reality and for our whims – the idea that a) the cosmos might be good and b) that it provides a pattern to conform to rather than an imperfection to be perfected is very alien to a modern way of thinking]

In any case, I think of Boethius at times like these because Philosophy will not let him remain under the delusion that the “something” out there for him must necessarily be something he will like or something most people would consider a blessing. It includes both the top and the bottom of the wheel of fortune, and some brutal facts about the way things work. Boethius, for instance, must realize that though he was in his own way seeking to do something he considered good through politics –to “change the world,” so to speak – this change is not ultimately in his hands – from Boethius’s perspective, he left behind a corrupt government. Moreover, the end of Boethius’s own personal story is something of a case study in what he was trying to show in The Consolation – Boethius was eventually executed for his alleged crimes rather than reinstated.

Despite its name, The Consolation is hard reading. It is hard because all those things we want, such as emotional comfort, reassurance, and diversion are not there. In fact, the first few times I read it, I, coming out a good emotive Evangelical background, kept wondering: “Where is personal experience? Where is the incarnational Christ that meets us where we are at? Isn’t it He whom we turn to for consolation?” This sense was in fact so pressing for me that I gave a paper approximately oriented around it to a society of Boethian scholars, and scandalized them by suggesting that there is no consolation at the end. For a while I wondered if Boethius in fact had not been a little too influenced by Greek philosophy and not enough influenced by Christ. What I did not recognize but hopefully recognize now is that, whether or not there was consolation, there was certainly truth, and it is a truth that we need to hear particularly around the season of Lent.

While it is nice to come up with a comfortable juxtaposition wherein we have the cold, unfeeling God of the philosophers on one side and the personable buddy Jesus on the other, I can’t help seeing the point Boethius was driving at at the very heart of the Gospels – part of faith means recognizing that God’s blessing and salvation are not the same as personal or national success. At one point, Christ is talking about the crucifixion and Peter, being a good Evangelical, stops him and says, “Don’t go talking about crosses and suffering. God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. And surely it cannot be that.” Christ’s response is to address Peter as Satan. And we see it elsewhere in reverse: when asked whether a man went blind on account of his own or his parents sin, Jesus says it is neither – it is so God can be glorified. And those who died when the tower of Siloam fell on them were not worse people than those who did not. The God revealed in Christ is the same God who speaks out of the whirlwind in Job.

Like Boethius and Christ in the Gospels, I often wonder about those who are not blessed. I have heard from various Christians stories about how God has brought about a particular set of circumstances to bless them in a particular way; moreover, I have no doubt that God is behind these things – every good and perfect gift is from above. But I sometimes can’t help wondering about the flip-side of these stories. What about the other people who were killed because they did not leave the country at just the right moment when the tsunami hit? What about the people who were not protected from the stray bullet by the Bible in their pocket? I can’t help thinking that, for every person who experiences miraculous healing through prayer, there are many others who die with prayers no less fervent. Once in fact I heard someone listing the things they were thankful for. They were in the hospital for something at least treatable, and one of the things they were thankful for was that they were not like so and so in the next bed who was dying of such and such a disease etc. Apparently, God is praiseworthy because he did not give me that illness, and we can move on without dealing with the fact that someone – anyone – suffers from it.

Lent looks these problems square in the face. With Christ we set our faces like flint toward Jerusalem. I imagine that none of the Desert Fathers went into the desert because they could not find one – deserts were plentiful and barren in the minds and hearts and cultures of the affluent societies around them. Rather they sought a physical environment that in fact reflects the way God’s world really works, at least in this time between times. People are parched and hungry in the desert. Yes, people die. And in faith we say that, yes, God made this world and it is good with all its mysteries and tragedies, though that does not keep us from asking once or twice now and then if this cup cannot be taken from us. Some like Pilate think truth is illusory, a vapour that does not really exist. Others seem to think of it as an objectively solid club to beat people over the head with. I suggest that it is a nail that pierces our hands and feet, and penetrates even to dividing joint and marrow. And there will not be resurrection until we have tasted it in our blood.

Back when I was part of Evangelical circles, there was not much talk of Lent. I have a theory that this is because there was a popular theology asserting that Christ not only died to take away our sins but also our suffering. If you take away suffering – the long, slow purgatorial path of painful penance – you can do away with Lent. From the perspective of such theology, Christ celebrated Lent once for all, and it is finished.

I and the liturgical calendar would like to submit otherwise. The blessing is not that Christ takes away our suffering, but rather that our suffering in a way as miraculous as transubstantiation can become part of the suffering of His body, the church. Pain and suffering will not go away this side of the apocalypse, and there are always people, Christian and otherwise, who will suffer. In Lent, we as the church do not come to fix this, though goodness knows we will do as much as we can. Rather, we witness to an alternative way of suffering, a way that shatters the illusions and vexations that we take comfort in, a way that exposes us to the searing whirlwind of truth in the desert of repentance. And the deepest secret of all is that there is a strange tenderness, even in the heart of the whirlwind.