Comma Dot Comma

Back in February I posted a little thingy on what it feels like, on a day-to-day basis, to be one, which ended up being quite full of warm fuzzies. So now it’s time for Part II: The Not So Fuzzies.

1. The moral ambiguity.

One of the most attractive aspects of the Way of Jesus is also its biggest, gnarliest root in the trail: everything is imbued with meaning. The trees, the skyline, the conversation, the body. It is hard to remember that “meaning” means “value” and not “answers.” The Bible, as precious as it is, is not EVEN CLOSE to Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth, though many days I dream of a how-to manual for living life. How easy it would be. You would just check the index: “annoying coworkers” and there would be three or four bullet points about how to treat them, right on page 615. Instead we have a motley and lovely collection of stories, poems, aphorisms, and letters. I bet, for any of the 10 Commandments, I could find an example somewhere in the Bible where God or Jesus advocates breaking it. Instead of being given a list of rules and consequences we are asked to think bigger, to apply the ideals of human and divine relationships to individual choices and interactions. It’s kind of hard.

2. The existential ambiguity.

Not only are there no rule books, there are no hard-and-fast moral reasons for why things happen. If there are, it is not usually our place to know them, as the book of Job attests. This would be easier to take if Christianity didn’t also offer meaning and a sense of connection; it shore seems like the reasons should be part of the package, don’t it? Jesus once said that a man was born blind so that “the work of God might be displayed in his life,” a reason that could be applied to every life circumstance, and yet the desire to apply moral lessons to life events is so strong that it often creeps into the advice Christians give to those they love. I’m sure I’ve doled out my fair share over the years. “Once you learn to (be content, have more faith, get rid of your pride), I believe that God will give you a (job, child, spouse, healing, calling).” We speak as if the only reason a person is not perfectly fulfilled in the here and now is because he or she somehow resists and denies the creator. I wish I could use experience as evidence of God’s blessing or lack thereof; it would be a simple way to stay on track, and to know exactly where everyone stands in the eyes of God. Instead I’ve got the much stranger and more lovely idea that what happens, happens so that the “work of God might be displayed.”

3. Other Christians

Everybody who wants in is invited in. It’s not like the rest of American society, where if you don’t like something about a certain group, you just leave and start your own group of more like-minded souls (ok maybe sometimes it ends up that way). I read one time that among the first disciples were Simon the Zealot (a radical nationalist/terrorist type) and Matthew the Tax Collector (a get rich off my own oppressed people type). Pre-Jesus, Simon might have killed Matthew, or at least spit on him. Post-Jesus, they ate, travelled and slept together every day. That’s the standard of unity in Christ. I worship cheek by jowl with people with terrible politics, misguided theology, weird personal quirks, and elaborate end times theories; people who constantly ask for help, who condescend to others, who have B.O., who ask for way more than I want to give, who are too touchy-feely; people who hurt my feelings sometimes, or whom I alienate. We are all in this together, and we are family. We don’t get to run away, and that’s where the real stuff happens.

4. Globalization

The thing about Christianity is that it is a very interpersonal religion. The stories and advice you get from the Bible are about fairly small groups of people, whereas what we got in this day and age is powers and principalities. That is, our small individual choices affect the enviroment, the world economy, the balance of power, these huge machineries operating at a scale far beyond the human and uncontrolled by any human or group. At any given time I could list the sufferings of people in ten different countries. How responsible am I for them, if at all? Does knowledge equal responsibility? Jesus kept things personal; when people tried to draw him into questions of economy and government he said, “Give to Caesar’s what is Caesar’s; give to God what is God’s.” The wealth of knowledge is overwhelming, the resources with which to decide how to act quite small.

5. Being Connected to Everyone

Being a Christian partly means going around as God’s agent. There is a quote on Tara’s blog from Gilead that sums up the experience pretty well. You always have to keep an eye out for what God wants. So if, on my way to the light rail stop, I pass a man shuffling along with twisted feet and knees, clinging to every light post and nearly falling as he wobbles between light posts, I must ask myself: “what is my connection with this person? How is God speaking/acting here? Am I to pray silently for this man and smile as I walk by? Engage in conversation and find out if he needs a walker? Pray for healing aloud right there on the street? Allow him his dignity and keep going?” It’s a risky and tricky business, I tell you. (And if you’re wondering, that time I went with Option 1, my usual choice and in this case a potential cop-out.)

6. Self-Discipline and Self-Denial

This one is hard but usually fruitful. I don’t think I even need to go into it. I’m tired and I don’t feel like it.

Lent started Wednesday. On the count of three, let’s all consider our messy naked births, our impending deaths, the wimpy carbon-based construction of our bodies. The hapless species we belong to: getting some things right by great effort, and others by accident, at our wits end about the rest. How hard we try: let’s put all our big ideas and talents and efforts into this sack over here, and look for a minute at what’s left over. Let’s let Jesus take a look at it too; he will be kind.

This strikes me as a good Lenten song. Neilson Hubbard, from his most recent album Sing Into Me. Here’s his website: http://www.neilsonhubbard.com/

And here’s the song, which should work with Windows Media Player:Nothing Without You

One, Two, Three, Go!

Before I get to the long-winded part of this post, Liz led me to this Sacred Spaces ten-minute interactive prayer site. I’ve gone through it a few times (it changes every day) and have found it lovely. Those Jesuits! Gotta love em.

Sometimes people ask me what it feels like to be a Christian. If they ask at lunchtime I am inclined to say “Hungry,” especially if they are eating some deliciousness containing avocado and bacon, and I am eating the one un-mushed corner of a peanut butter and honey sandwich that got mangled in the bottom of my purse. Then I eye their deliciousness and sigh heavily.

Other times I say “Mork from Ork.” He looks like a regular human apart from the bad fashion, and most of the time in casual interactions nobody notices anything different about him. Even if he tells someone straight out that he’s a citizen of another planet, they laugh and let it pass because they assume it’s not so, or that he’s being metaphorical. Anyone who spends enough time with Mork, though, learns that he can drink through his finger and sit comfortably on his head and communicate with his boss via telepathy: “Mork calling Orson, come in Orson.” He spends a lot of time feeling out of place and unsure of why people do what they do. He’s doubly an outsider: not human, yet banned from Ork for due to his human-like qualities.

Though I can’t drink through my finger, I have got bad fashion and enjoy sitting upside down on occasion, especially with some light reading, say the funny anecdote section of a Reader’s Digest. Most people don’t care whether I am a Christian, so long as I don’t take up more than my share of space on public transportation and wash my hands before leaving a restroom. Even if I announce it, they are likely to pat me on the shoulder and say, “Isn’t that nice.” (It seems that most people in this country are Christians of one stripe or another, though, strangely, in my current set-up, almost nobody I see regularly identifies themselves as such. )

The two ways I really identify with Mork are his outsiderness and his special powers. As I move through my ordinary day I am aware that there is another presence in me and in the world around me. I want to describe it as another layer, but that wouldn’t be right, because Jesus is all mixed up in it. I feel warmth or an ache in my chest when Jesus wants me to pay special attention to something. I start praying and looking around, really noticing. (I am really happy when Jesus wants me to notice chocolate candies in the break room.) Sometimes I will feel an almost physical nudge– to speak to this person, pray for that situation, give something or act in some way. Sometimes an overpowering sensation of love will sweep over me and I will have to stop what I am doing and start crying. Those swept away times are rare.

I can sometimes go days or weeks without that warmth or nudge. Mostly what I get on a daily basis is mental nudging. When I start complaining about a boss or some nasty cookies, there’s a gentle nudge reminding me to shut up. Or if I don’t shut up, I get nudged later reminding me to apologize or in some other way rectify the situation. When my thoughts start down certain paths, I get nudged out of them most of the time.

All this warmth and love and nudging doesn’t make me an obviously better person than those around me, but I think it does make me better than I would be without it. I love saying “Mork calling Orson, come in Orson” when bad or good or puzzling things happen; my automatic response is to turn to Jesus with it, whether to yell or complain or ask for help or collapse. Jesus and his pop don’t mind having Orson for a nickname I don’t think. They answer to it, which is a good enough sign for me.

So on the one hand I got the SECRET POWERS to change myself and the world. Which is pretty fun most days (except I don’t like getting nudged out of bed on work days). On the other hand, it gets a little loney because the other peeps don’t got the secret powers yet. I get a little too Morky for my non-Morky friends at times, and too non-Morky for my church people at other times; but this whole dang planet is just not Morky enough for me! When’s it gonna Mork out, I ask you? We should all be rescuing raw eggs and sleeping in the closets!

It’s taken me awhile to get back to the story of the Raven I mentioned last week, but here we are. The author makes use of the story as part of an essay on individual paths to faith — intuition, tradition, and revelation. He builds on an idea I first encountered as a teenager, in the writings of C.S. Lewis. In addition to nature, the thinking goes, some of God’s truth is encoded in the stories and beliefs of every culture. Then, when a people encounters the gospel, they have been prepared by their own long-codified search for meaning. Hence the suffering raven who takes the form of a human and eventually brings light to the whole earth resembles Jesus enough that the Messiah story makes sense to the native Alaskans.

I, too, am an “all truth is God’s truth” type, and I find it fun to search for God’s unveiling everywhere. And yet, one of the reasons I take such pleasure in these old stories is that they are essentially amoral. Sure, the old guy is hiding the light. But there’s no benevolence in Raven’s curiosity– he just wants to get that light, by golly. You read a story like that, and you’re not sure who to root for, and the ending has as much to do with the capriciousness of fate (the eagle swooping down) as it does with any grand plans of any of the characters. The topsy-turvy back and forth in the fight for hidden treasure is both empty and charming.

Compare this with the stories of the New Testament, in which the good guys, the bad guys, the stakes, and the ultimate outcomes are quite clear. The “whys” are as important as the “hows.”

In real life I get tired out, trying to assign moral significance to experience. I have been trained to do it by the stories that shape my faith. But is there is more of God’s truth in Raven than a simple prefiguring of the gospel? What about the freeing playfulness of the story? I sense an invitation in the way it makes me relax and let the gods fight it out, trusting that it will work out okay in the end.

In real life this attitude might translate to something like the freedom to simply exist, living with faith that all-powerful goodness has invaded my sphere and is doing its good work. Allowing the Holy Spirit and the prophets to assign meaning as they see fit. Doing the tasks that come to hand, and letting the struggle go on around me without needing to worry or categorize or wave the banner of any cause. Recognizing Jesus everywhere.

First, there hasn’t been a pic up here in awhile. I strongly believe that the first time you put a picture of yourself up on the web, it should be extremely flattering. You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression! That’s why I picked this one of me and my youngest brother at the beach on Christmas Eve.

Second, I have been alerted to the presence of a new online journal related to Christianity and Culture: This Land. The only thing I’ve read so far is this cool retelling of the story of Raven stealing light from where it is kept in a box: Tradition, Intuition, Epiphany. It was written by my friend Nate, who posits that this myth prefigures the coming of Jesus. It’s interesting to think about. More on this later.

For some reason the people at my church have seen fit to let me teach the 3rd/4th grade Sunday school class. They must not be aware how much I revel in silliness.

Strictness and silliness are necessities in a class with two kids who speak mostly Russian and two more who don’t read yet (plus assorted others). We can’t just sit quietly on our folding chairs and read the Bible. Anyway the Bible is boring in lots of places.

Yesterday’s lesson was on the angels visiting the shepherds when Jesus was born. We were kind of acting it out as we went along. We were all grouchy tax collectors, hugely pregnant women, and sleepy shepherds. I mentioned that the sheep probably knew something weird was going on before the shepherds did. The kids milled around and nudged each other and went “BAAAA” a lot.

It was one of those moments. Ten children in my charge bearing an uncanny resemblance to sheep. How did I get such a funny life?

So then we got to the part where the shepherds are really scared of the angels, and I asked the students why they were scared. Suddenly I was trapped in a conversation about what angels look like.

“Girls with blond hair and wings!”
“No, they’re guys! Guys in dresses!” (snicker snicker)
“They are really bright, like the sun, that’s scary!”
“Maybe they have weapons!”
“Yeah, they have masks and ninja weapons!”
“They are ghosts, scary ghosts!”

“You’re all correct,” I said. “Angels are shiny, blond-haired, cross-dressing ninja ghosts.”*

Every week as we put away our props and crafts and pencils I wonder what they tell their parents about class. “What’d you learn today, honey?” “I learned how to be a nervous sheep!” They demonstrate by body-slamming their siblings and saying “Baaaaa” as loudly and plaintively as possible. That little game will last the whole car ride home.

*Just kidding.

My favorite fake-Christian-News monthly is out. This article in particular makes me laugh:
Pastor Named Most Relevant

(It looks like the link is temporarily broken, so I changed it to the larknews homepage.)