An exceedingly busy week, and the inevitable sermon deconstruction
As slice-of-life journal entries go, this one is actually a fairly poor example, because this week has (thankfully) been a bit more extreme than the usual.
I was hired to provide an abbreviated version of my social-skills curriculum during the two-week June summer school of my local district. One child was so enamored of a particular activity that he taught it to his family and they played it together the next day, specifically as a way of dealing with a stressful event that had recently happened to the family. Since one of the hidden purposes of the activity in question is precisely to help deal with stressful events, I call that a phenomenal success: the kid understood the point to the activity well enough to generalize it, and recalled the rules well enough to teach it to others. Rah!
The next day another kid broke his ankle running full-tilt into a wall. It should be noted that I repeated the, "Walk, don't run," rule so often that when a third kid (who happens to be hard of hearing) spontaneously decided to write down the rules of the game as part of a journal assignment later on, he included that exact phrase within his description. When the child with the audiological impairment has heard the message, I feel pretty confident that I communicated that message clearly. Still, there's an unavoidable layer of guilt that a kid did manage to break his ankle on my watch.
The sister of a very good friend of mine (he and I go back to about 1989) died on Monday. She'd been slowly recovering from a variety of liver and kidney conditions, and then her lungs unexpectedly filled with fluid. This same friend is expecting the birth of his first child in about two weeks. He and his wife have been trying to sustain a pregnancy for the last six years.
My wife will be going back to professional work this Fall. The emergency fund is now frighteningly anemic, being around our two little hellions all day every day has worn her out, and the older of the aforementioned hellions is in desperate need of more structured social interactions with peers his own age than we can readily provide. So he needs a daycare, and she needs a change in job (both for her own sanity, and to pay for the daycare). Sadly, this also means that the littler hellion also must be daycarified, which we are a lot less happy about. But we did find a place that looks promising, and it's on the way to our schools, and it only charges one of her expected paychecks every month to take both the kids. Painful, but a net positive for us on several levels.
Finally, my maternal grandmother might, at long last, be approaching her death as well. She's been fading painfully slowly for the last couple of years and is now reduced to shallow sleeping throughout the day. This is still brutally hard on my parents, who are taking care of her, especially because she lacks the strength to move herself and lacks the tissue density to sustain her weight in any one position for long. Thus, they have to roll her (carefully) to new positions often. On the other hand, the sleeping-through-the-day bit means that at least the more unpleasant aspects of the dementia (eg. the screaming rage and incomprehensible but desperate requests) have faded. Hopefully, she won't have to suffer much longer.
Preacher-man was talking about the two iterations of the Parable of the Lost Sheep (as told by Matthew and Luke, respectively), and spun the story in several interesting ways. In Matthew, he noted that Jesus is speaking to his disciples, and explicitly frames the 'lost sheep' as a new believer losing his (or presumably her) way. In Luke, Jesus is speaking to a larger audience, and the sheep represent those who have never had a way to lose at all. God is presented in both scenarios as a missionary, and the preacher's point was that we should act in a similar way. Now there's two ways one can approach missionary activity, and I personally feel that Christianity almost inevitably plumps for the wrong one. Obviously, I'm biased on this point, and it should be noted that the next paragraph is not what the preacher described -- but it is, I think, the dangerous and all-to-easy corruption of what the preacher described. This is Christianity as cancer.
We go out and we preach to (or, more often, we preach at) the heathens. We go to people who are lost and we tell them what they should do to get un-lost, and we explain in graphic detail the horrible things that will happen if they don't do what we've told them they should, and in equally graphic detail the wonderful things they'll experience when they are as un-lost as we are. It's our duty, as those who are Right, to seek out and educate those poor souls who are Wrong. Not that we think ill of them, ignorant wretches that they are; after all, we can all remember when we were like that, too. Fortunately, we've changed, and we're better than we were (and, by extension, better than those who are like what we were), and so we feel a noble and generous responsibility to show these people their mistakes, knowing that any indication that they have failed to appreciate our efforts on their behalf simply mean that we should try again, until the glorious day when everyone believes what we believe.
Needless to say, I have some problems with this; and whether needless or not, I'm about to say them because, frankly, it's my journal and there are only about half a dozen people who ever read this stuff anyway. There's the erroneous notion that any set of human beliefs can ever be completely Right. There's the even more mistaken idea that any two humans will ever have precisely the same set of beliefs, and the cripplingly limited thought that a world of only one set of beliefs would somehow be an improvement over the world we have. There's the fundamentally horrifying concept that the totality of a new convert's pre-conversion identity can be summed up in the word 'lost,' as if nothing they were before had any value or merit; there's the basic lack of self-reflection that leads us to label our actions as 'noble' and 'generous' without any consideration of the possible shadow-motivations behind our supposed virtue; and there's the pragmatic truth that this approach to missionary activity comes across as condescending, quite reasonably pushes people away, and therefore is counterproductive to its stated goal (which, by the way, suggests that it's stated goal might not be entirely the real one). But let's set all of that aside for the moment, because the real problem here is that this understanding of missionary work simply fails to address a rudimentary question: Who are the lost?
According to Jesus, the Lost (as described in this parable, in its two iterations) are composed of two groups -- believers who have wandered from the right beliefs, and people who have never held the right beliefs in the first place. In other words, us. He's not instructing us to go preach to the heathen in the far off places, or even to the heathen in the next house over. He's talking about us, what goes on in our hearts, all the time. It's significant to me that the immediately preceding chapter of Matthew is the one in which Jesus warns against poking at the splinter in our neighbor's eye until after we've dealt with the log in our own. It's significant to me that the Pharisees -- those who were so sure they were Right -- are consistently cast throughout the gospels not merely as wrong, but as fundamentally worse off than those who recognize their own spiritual needs and failures. The real missionary work, like the real jihad, is internal to each of us; and all of us are always at least a little bit lost.
And there's a reason for that. It's a good thing, to be lost -- if we can admit that lost is what we are. Being lost keeps us humble. Being lost keeps us open. Being lost keeps us alert for the signs of the coming shepherd who searches for us constantly through the wilderness of our hearts. Being honestly lost is to be part of the kingdom of God on a deeper level than the self-satisfied and complacent can possibly experience -- because the doorway to the kingdom is Love, and love requires honesty far more than righteousness.
In the eyes of God, to be Lost and to be Loved are the same.
There's another way to look at this as well. If we were really walking with God, we'd be Lost, because we wouldn't be watching where we were going. We would be attending fully to Her, and trusting Her to set our feet correctly. And yet, I still think there's value in missionary activity. To reiterate my favorite quote from St. Francis, "It is of no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching." The real missionary work is for each of us to go out each day and love everyone we meet (including ourselves), as deeply and vulnerably as we can, in the certain knowledge that everyone we meet (including ourselves) is Lost, and that everyone we meet (including ourselves) is Loved. If we can focus ourselves fully on Love, then we will, in fact, be walking with God.
Ironically, this also means that there is value in moving out of our comfort zones, possibly even to a foreign land. If we intend to walk the religious path with honesty, there's no avoiding the commandment to leave our safe places. Get out of the boat. Let go of control. Get lost. When you know you're lost, seek God; when you're feeling found, seek being lost. By all means, let's go and talk to the heathen -- and then let's listen, and let ourselves be lost, so that God has the chance to continue Her work of changing us.
One of the things the preacher said that really struck me was how hugely disorienting it can be to suddenly go from blind to sighted. He described the first wave of successful European cataract surgeries in the 1600s, and how people were overwhelmed and horrified by the abrupt onset of a vision they could not interpret or understand. He drew an elegant parallel to the spiritual life -- as our vision clears, we are changed. We become uncomfortable, and then we have a choice: to open or to deny. To blink and cry and strive to understand, or to put on a blindfold and pretend that the world isn't so much larger than we thought. The irony is that both choices lead back to an experience of being Lost, and that neither choice changes our fundamental identity as Loved. But if we can let ourselves be shaped by the sacred surgeon, if we can let Her cut away those things that keep us in darkness, then our lives become our witness -- and then the change can spread. The way to spread the good news about the surgeon is to keep stepping under the knife.
I was hired to provide an abbreviated version of my social-skills curriculum during the two-week June summer school of my local district. One child was so enamored of a particular activity that he taught it to his family and they played it together the next day, specifically as a way of dealing with a stressful event that had recently happened to the family. Since one of the hidden purposes of the activity in question is precisely to help deal with stressful events, I call that a phenomenal success: the kid understood the point to the activity well enough to generalize it, and recalled the rules well enough to teach it to others. Rah!
The next day another kid broke his ankle running full-tilt into a wall. It should be noted that I repeated the, "Walk, don't run," rule so often that when a third kid (who happens to be hard of hearing) spontaneously decided to write down the rules of the game as part of a journal assignment later on, he included that exact phrase within his description. When the child with the audiological impairment has heard the message, I feel pretty confident that I communicated that message clearly. Still, there's an unavoidable layer of guilt that a kid did manage to break his ankle on my watch.
The sister of a very good friend of mine (he and I go back to about 1989) died on Monday. She'd been slowly recovering from a variety of liver and kidney conditions, and then her lungs unexpectedly filled with fluid. This same friend is expecting the birth of his first child in about two weeks. He and his wife have been trying to sustain a pregnancy for the last six years.
My wife will be going back to professional work this Fall. The emergency fund is now frighteningly anemic, being around our two little hellions all day every day has worn her out, and the older of the aforementioned hellions is in desperate need of more structured social interactions with peers his own age than we can readily provide. So he needs a daycare, and she needs a change in job (both for her own sanity, and to pay for the daycare). Sadly, this also means that the littler hellion also must be daycarified, which we are a lot less happy about. But we did find a place that looks promising, and it's on the way to our schools, and it only charges one of her expected paychecks every month to take both the kids. Painful, but a net positive for us on several levels.
Finally, my maternal grandmother might, at long last, be approaching her death as well. She's been fading painfully slowly for the last couple of years and is now reduced to shallow sleeping throughout the day. This is still brutally hard on my parents, who are taking care of her, especially because she lacks the strength to move herself and lacks the tissue density to sustain her weight in any one position for long. Thus, they have to roll her (carefully) to new positions often. On the other hand, the sleeping-through-the-day bit means that at least the more unpleasant aspects of the dementia (eg. the screaming rage and incomprehensible but desperate requests) have faded. Hopefully, she won't have to suffer much longer.
Preacher-man was talking about the two iterations of the Parable of the Lost Sheep (as told by Matthew and Luke, respectively), and spun the story in several interesting ways. In Matthew, he noted that Jesus is speaking to his disciples, and explicitly frames the 'lost sheep' as a new believer losing his (or presumably her) way. In Luke, Jesus is speaking to a larger audience, and the sheep represent those who have never had a way to lose at all. God is presented in both scenarios as a missionary, and the preacher's point was that we should act in a similar way. Now there's two ways one can approach missionary activity, and I personally feel that Christianity almost inevitably plumps for the wrong one. Obviously, I'm biased on this point, and it should be noted that the next paragraph is not what the preacher described -- but it is, I think, the dangerous and all-to-easy corruption of what the preacher described. This is Christianity as cancer.
We go out and we preach to (or, more often, we preach at) the heathens. We go to people who are lost and we tell them what they should do to get un-lost, and we explain in graphic detail the horrible things that will happen if they don't do what we've told them they should, and in equally graphic detail the wonderful things they'll experience when they are as un-lost as we are. It's our duty, as those who are Right, to seek out and educate those poor souls who are Wrong. Not that we think ill of them, ignorant wretches that they are; after all, we can all remember when we were like that, too. Fortunately, we've changed, and we're better than we were (and, by extension, better than those who are like what we were), and so we feel a noble and generous responsibility to show these people their mistakes, knowing that any indication that they have failed to appreciate our efforts on their behalf simply mean that we should try again, until the glorious day when everyone believes what we believe.
Needless to say, I have some problems with this; and whether needless or not, I'm about to say them because, frankly, it's my journal and there are only about half a dozen people who ever read this stuff anyway. There's the erroneous notion that any set of human beliefs can ever be completely Right. There's the even more mistaken idea that any two humans will ever have precisely the same set of beliefs, and the cripplingly limited thought that a world of only one set of beliefs would somehow be an improvement over the world we have. There's the fundamentally horrifying concept that the totality of a new convert's pre-conversion identity can be summed up in the word 'lost,' as if nothing they were before had any value or merit; there's the basic lack of self-reflection that leads us to label our actions as 'noble' and 'generous' without any consideration of the possible shadow-motivations behind our supposed virtue; and there's the pragmatic truth that this approach to missionary activity comes across as condescending, quite reasonably pushes people away, and therefore is counterproductive to its stated goal (which, by the way, suggests that it's stated goal might not be entirely the real one). But let's set all of that aside for the moment, because the real problem here is that this understanding of missionary work simply fails to address a rudimentary question: Who are the lost?
According to Jesus, the Lost (as described in this parable, in its two iterations) are composed of two groups -- believers who have wandered from the right beliefs, and people who have never held the right beliefs in the first place. In other words, us. He's not instructing us to go preach to the heathen in the far off places, or even to the heathen in the next house over. He's talking about us, what goes on in our hearts, all the time. It's significant to me that the immediately preceding chapter of Matthew is the one in which Jesus warns against poking at the splinter in our neighbor's eye until after we've dealt with the log in our own. It's significant to me that the Pharisees -- those who were so sure they were Right -- are consistently cast throughout the gospels not merely as wrong, but as fundamentally worse off than those who recognize their own spiritual needs and failures. The real missionary work, like the real jihad, is internal to each of us; and all of us are always at least a little bit lost.
And there's a reason for that. It's a good thing, to be lost -- if we can admit that lost is what we are. Being lost keeps us humble. Being lost keeps us open. Being lost keeps us alert for the signs of the coming shepherd who searches for us constantly through the wilderness of our hearts. Being honestly lost is to be part of the kingdom of God on a deeper level than the self-satisfied and complacent can possibly experience -- because the doorway to the kingdom is Love, and love requires honesty far more than righteousness.
In the eyes of God, to be Lost and to be Loved are the same.
There's another way to look at this as well. If we were really walking with God, we'd be Lost, because we wouldn't be watching where we were going. We would be attending fully to Her, and trusting Her to set our feet correctly. And yet, I still think there's value in missionary activity. To reiterate my favorite quote from St. Francis, "It is of no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching." The real missionary work is for each of us to go out each day and love everyone we meet (including ourselves), as deeply and vulnerably as we can, in the certain knowledge that everyone we meet (including ourselves) is Lost, and that everyone we meet (including ourselves) is Loved. If we can focus ourselves fully on Love, then we will, in fact, be walking with God.
Ironically, this also means that there is value in moving out of our comfort zones, possibly even to a foreign land. If we intend to walk the religious path with honesty, there's no avoiding the commandment to leave our safe places. Get out of the boat. Let go of control. Get lost. When you know you're lost, seek God; when you're feeling found, seek being lost. By all means, let's go and talk to the heathen -- and then let's listen, and let ourselves be lost, so that God has the chance to continue Her work of changing us.
One of the things the preacher said that really struck me was how hugely disorienting it can be to suddenly go from blind to sighted. He described the first wave of successful European cataract surgeries in the 1600s, and how people were overwhelmed and horrified by the abrupt onset of a vision they could not interpret or understand. He drew an elegant parallel to the spiritual life -- as our vision clears, we are changed. We become uncomfortable, and then we have a choice: to open or to deny. To blink and cry and strive to understand, or to put on a blindfold and pretend that the world isn't so much larger than we thought. The irony is that both choices lead back to an experience of being Lost, and that neither choice changes our fundamental identity as Loved. But if we can let ourselves be shaped by the sacred surgeon, if we can let Her cut away those things that keep us in darkness, then our lives become our witness -- and then the change can spread. The way to spread the good news about the surgeon is to keep stepping under the knife.