Like a Child

It seems I am commonly discovering brilliant maxims only to find they have all been discovered before. But I am slow to learn in this way: I do not understand a proverb, be it the most painfully obvious one in the world, until I have lived it.

One of my all-time favorite episodes of television is a particular Community episode entitled “Messianic Myths and Ancient Peoples.” It is hilarious and actually quite beautiful. I could rave about it for pages, but I won’t, I’ll just set the scene for you:

Shirley—baker, mother, Christian—decides she wants help making a YouTube video with a Christian message because “there’s no light there for the kids.” So she asks Abed—an aspiring film-maker who is implied to have Asperger’s—to help her make one. At first he declines: “As a Muslim, I’d be happy to. As a filmmaker? No way. I’m a storyteller, not a preacher.”

But later he comes back, looking very excited, and says he’ll do it. Why? He just read the whole New Testament in one night. I should remind you that this is a completely, 100% secular show, so it would be understandable to expect a swift lampooning of Christianity via cheap parody, and nothing more. But this is also a clever show, so it does better than that. Abed states that “Being raised on TV and movies I always thought that Jesus just walked on water and told people not to have abortions, but it’s so much cooler than that. He was like ET, Edward Scissorhands and Marty McFly combined!”

This episode is SO GOOD.

He could just as easily have said Neo or Batman in the Dark Knight or a hundred other characters, but that’s beside the point. What’s fascinating here is that Abed is seeing the story of Jesus for the first time. All he knows is a cultural caricature, but when he reads the original, it is fresh, new, bizarre, and enticing to him. Like when the book is better than the badly interpreted movie, or when you have heard about someone, but you finally meet them face-to-face and you are far more impressed with the truth than the rumor.

Abed, as a storyteller, decides that the story of Jesus is worth his artistic eye. He decides this as someone outside of and indifferent to the Christian faith.

I confess to feeling a faint, weird jealousy at this perspective. Abed, in this context, sees the gospel with the wide, hungry eyes of someone reading a thrilling novel. Never mind chapter and verse references, concordance checks, etc…Abed sees a story about an unlikely hero who speaks in riddles and whom everyone is trying to kill all the time because he threatens to upset the status quo. Meanwhile, he’s secretly a king who dies for his cause.

See, I always thought “become like little children” meant having childlike faith—believing easily and wholeheartedly—which I suppose it does. But now I am thinking there is a whole other facet to that. ‘Like a child’ means “encountering something for the very first time.” Fresh eyes. Curiosity. A willingness to be awed. A quieting of the mind and a heightening of enjoyment.

I experience this in small ways when reading a book of the Bible that I haven’t gotten to in a very long time. I’m surprised by something I didn’t remember or simply wasn’t paying attention to last go ‘round. But imagine not ever having heard the gospel, not ever having read the Bible, or—taking it a step further from Abed—not even having gleaned atmospheric or memetic ‘Christianity’ from the culture. What would that be like?

Also kids don’t just see things with fresh eyes. When they find something they love, they cannot get enough of it. My nieces and nephews would watch the same new movie a dozen times in two days (the rental period, obviously) if their parents let them. When I was a kid I could read the same beloved book over and over and over. Now my mind is jumpity, distractible, and a little skeptical. To my great shame, I find that I would often rather read a clever, critical, or sarcastic debunking of a book than give the book a chance to speak for itself, with fresh eyes and no preconceived notions. I’m especially prone to do this if I already suspect the book is full of things I don’t like/disagree with.

And this is what our society has done towards Christianity and the Bible. Delicious mockery and deft debunking, without really sitting down and viewing the source material with a clear and neutral eye. In Western society in particular, there are no neutral eyes towards the Bible. Everyone is approaching the faith neither as a child, with new wonder, nor as an adult, with mature and distant insight, but (forgive me, O youth) as teenagers, with bucking and rebellion against that which is familiar but not well understood.

In this way, those who approach Christianity and the Bible as wholly foreign objects are far likelier to see them for what they really are than disaffected evangelicals, shrugging agnostics, or those who really like the idea of having a faith, but keep walking a little further and further away from it for the sake of their comfort and preference, too afraid to let it go, too afraid to embrace the faith in all its holy fire. Lukewarm. They want to keep it in the corner of their eye while they inch away from it, because it makes them feel better. They daren’t walk far enough to see it from—shall we say—a non-reactionary distance. Indeed, steeped in Western culture, I don't think you can get that distance. Wherever we run, it will always be reactionary.

G.K. Chesterton puts it best in this (slightly condensed) quote from the intro to The Everlasting Man:

“There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place…the next best thing to being really inside Christendom is to be really outside it. And a particular point of it is that the popular critics of Christianity are not really outside it. They are on a debatable ground, in every sense of the term. They are doubtful in their very doubts.”

“It is well with the boy when he lives on his father's land; and well with him again when he is far enough from it to look back on it and see it as a whole. But these people have got into an intermediate state, have fallen into an intervening valley from which they can see neither the heights beyond them nor the heights behind. They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians and they can not leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith.”

“Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian.”

Chesterton

This is what troubles me with the current cultural milieu. So many of us are neither close enough to love, nor far away enough not to hate. So we end up with many people attempting to remodel Christianity, gutting it like a house not built quite to their taste, because they are under both the shadow of the faith (losing the light) and the shadow of secular disdain for the faith. This naturally comes with the territory of a piecemeal, yo-yo-ing journey away from faith. Those who depart try to make the faith into something that looks right in their own eyes from that doubtful middle distance, distorting it in many ways.

Then there are those who completely abandon the faith but are still like teenagers reacting against their parents in the way that they talk about God, the Bible, and Faith. Anger, frustration, and contempt.

And we have a culture that thinks that it knows what Christianity is, but doesn’t. They think they know who Jesus is, but most really don’t. That is something that takes daily effort, and all you have, and a willingness to give up anything that stands in the way of you going home again.

I do not think Chesterton was advising anyone to give up the faith and walk as far away as you can, just to come back around…but it may be better than sidestepping to that intervening valley he spoke of and losing the truth by inches—death by a thousand cuts—so that you don’t even notice it has happened, and you don’t even know where you are anymore, and you don’t even know how to get back because you have distorted the very meaning of home in your own mind.

Best that we stay home in Christ, but that we pray for the eyes of a child. To see him afresh as savior and King, story-teller and revolutionary, hero and martyr, truth and way, bread and wine, flesh and blood, light and fire, resurrection and life. A blazing, thrilling story, and an unconquerable fact.

I want to become like a little child, for my heart to be circumcised, and to be made new, so that I can rest in Christ, but still have the of giddy wonder of seeing every fiery truth for the very first time.

Already Dead

A good long while ago, my husband and I were watching the Band of Brothers series, a dramatization of the wartime actions of Easy Company in the 101st Airborne Division, during WWII. I had never seen it, but I love history, particularly WWII history, so I was enjoying it immensely.

During the first few episodes we discussed the various characters—who are all drawn, however dramatically, from real men who really lived and really had these experiences—and how and why such and such a man would act such and such a way, etc. My husband told me that his favorite character wasn’t actually the calm, serious, eminently moral Lieutenant Winters—the ostensible series protagonist—but the almost silent, hard-bitten, rumored-to-be-ruthless Lieutenant Speirs.

Throughout a portion of the series, most of the soldiers hold this Lieutenant as a mystery, and tell semi-mythic stories about his brutal wartime actions. He is not the classic protagonist, but he is tough and enigmatic, and it is one of his lines that struck me as the most powerful.

In one scene, there is a soldier who is paralyzed by fear. He is hiding in a foxhole when he should be taking action. He is ashamed of himself, but he can’t seem to break out of the fear strait-jacket.

Lieutenant Speirs walks up to him, crouches at the foxhole and tells him the ultimate paradox: “The only hope you have is to accept the fact that you’re already dead. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you’ll be able to function as a soldier is supposed to function.” The reason that soldier had become useless is because he was unwilling to give up his life…to give himself wholly over to the task at hand.

Lieutenant Speirs, on the other hand, figured he was as good as dead already, and for this he was able to be courageous, decisive, and capable in the midst of a horrible and life-threatening situation.

This is the classic Christian paradox shown true in an entirely secular context: the harder you try to cling to your life, the more useless that life is to you. It becomes a waste. You become paralyzed—“dead” in effect, as far as anything meaningful or purposeful is concerned. Try to save your life, you lose it. Give your life up and you might survive, and save many other lives along the way.

True in battle, true in life.

More recently, I watched some films and TV shows in which characters—who were not the heroes—sacrificed themselves for the sake of the greater goal. They got no glory. In some cases they scarcely had names or faces. In others, they were the convenient scapegoat which enabled the Hero or Heroine to live. This culminated in my watching Mockingjay Part 1; I was struck by two scenes in which nameless characters took coordinated action against the oppressive government and, in so doing, ensured their own deaths. It was very moving to me, but I found myself resistant to this idea. Perhaps a few survived, but most of the people in those uprisings had to know that they were going to die. They were cannon fodder for the sake of the higher goal of defeating the Capitol. If they didn’t believe in their cause with all their heart, soul, and body, one might say they had just been used and discarded in a heartless and utilitarian manner. But they had to want to fight, badly, to do that. It had to mean something to them.

It bothered me. It had me wondering if I would ever, for the right reasons, have the courage to be like that: to run into the cannon’s mouth without having any hope of survival, or any hint of fame or glory, just so that someone else can get past the cannon to do something greater. To die quietly so someone else can live loudly. Would I ever be willing to be the nameless not-hero who enables the victory without anyone ever noticing or caring?

I realized that I always want to be ‘the main character.’ Because not only is the main character the hero, but they usually survive, albeit with a few cuts and bruises. It’s those unnamed characters in the gray background that die in spades so that the protagonist can scrape through at the last second and see what all that fighting and dying earned. Because if you die without seeing the end, how do you know that it was really worth it? How do you know you weren’t being duped?

I find this mentality—mine—a problem. Not only are we “already dead,” as Lieutenant Speirs put it, but if we’re obsessed with being the hero—the name of renown—we aren’t going to get anything done either. Our role may be small. It may not be flashy. There may be a hundred other people doing the exact same small thing. But if it serves the higher goal, does it matter if no one ever sees us or knows our name?

Besides, if you’re not willing to sacrifice something—or yourself—because you can’t prove right now that it will have been worth it, you would never sacrifice yourself for anything. It takes faith—in a cause or in person. In God.

It reminds me of Brother Lawrence, a monk whose duties were very low and mundane; he worked in the kitchen, and it was tedious. No glory. No grandness. No heroism. Just simple work that has to be redone every day (like the dishes, which are the most depressing and endless of chores). But he took “do everything as unto the Lord” to heart. He did scrubbing as unto the Lord. How was he able to do this? How could he be so humble and patient in his heart with such dull work?

Because he had already died to himself. He yielded his goals and dreams and preferences to the Lord. The result? His words and advices, written hundreds of years ago, are still read today and influence many. His small work was a seed and it grew great. I don’t know that he ever lived to see it do so either. He couldn’t guess that, in the 2000’s, a young man would read his words and decide to volunteer in a kitchen at a summer camp in order to learn how to honor God in that simple work. He couldn’t know that I would remind myself of Brother Lawrence at times when I am tempted to be angry that my work or my life seem mundane, or lack the glory and adventure that I crave. When I try to cling to my idea of my life, instead of embracing the actual circumstances, I lose. I am paralyzed.

How can we be effective—in war, or in life, or especially in the Kingdom of God? By remembering that we’re dead already, and glad of it despite the way it sounds. Dead to things that chain us down, tether us to our selfish selves, and our foolish plans. We’re free to risk everything, free to be fearless, free to do things small or great with all our hearts, free from the need to be validated by others, free from the need to prove ourselves or measure ourselves against the achievements of others. Because we’re not clutching to our life (or our reputation, or our popularity, or our fame, or our accolades) like a security blanket. And, unlike Speirs, we haven’t given up our lives to become hard or nihilistic. We’ve given them into good hands. God’s. And, if we trust him, we will not regret letting go.

“The best way to live above all fear of death is to die every morning before you leave your bedroom.”

-Charles Spurgeon

When Music doesn't 'Resolve'

I don’t know much about musical theory and have never had much musical talent. So, a while back, when I read a description of a band (called Thrice) which was described as having “mathy time signatures,” I had no idea what that meant. So I asked my husband, who is a bit more musically educated than me, and he explained the time signatures as having to do with how many beats there are in a measure, and also has to do with how many beats it takes for the main melody to resolve, and a “mathy” one would be particularly complex. He waited until a song played that had such a time signature, and I was at least able to recognize that the difference he was talking about. (That song, by the way, was by Amit Erez, and is called “Cinnamon Scattered Along Your Shoulders.”)

It was still a little confusing for me at the time, but I liked the idea of how music has to resolve, which was something I never really understood before. Indeed, it’s part of the reason why Jazz is so hit or miss for many people—it’s not hugely into resolution, it’s into exploration. That can be really enjoyable, or really frustrating.

Most of the time, however, in order for the melody to be powerful and effective—however complexly it goes about it—it eventually has to resolve.

The idea has, shall we say, some striking metaphysical resonance. People who are especially musically talented can hear where a tune “ought to have gone” or where a melody “missed an opportunity” or where an important nuance was missing, or something was overdone. I do not have this skill, but my brother does and it fascinates me, because the implication is that music is not just a chaotic free-for-all, where anything goes, even though it may seem like it: it’s going somewhere. It’s saying something. The notes have purpose.

So what’s the point of all this mild-mannered musical theory from someone who knows far too little about the subject?

Well, a while back a friend recommended a song to me. I listened to it and liked it and sought out more of the artist’s work, because I detected some spiritual themes that intrigued me. Very quickly into my research, my shoulders fell because—as it turned out—themes were all there was to be found. Or, more accurately, spiritual imagery and cultural references with too little blood pumping through the veins to keep it alive.

I almost felt tricked. Don’t get me wrong, the music was still very good and the lyrics had real substance. But what I had thought was something truer and deeper was only an aesthetic—like incense, stained glass, or a gilded menorah when I had come through the door hoping for prayer, worship, and light.

And I realized what bothered me. It wasn’t that the music didn’t line up with my spiritual values—though that was a factor—because I listen to all kinds of music that doesn’t do that. It was that the song didn’t resolve. Oh, musically, it did. But thematically? Not at all.

I found myself feeling frustrated and weary. I don’t expect every artist who uses religious imagery to actually put forth something of spiritual depth and merit. Religion will be used by culture just like every other product. But when I get that hint of real truth-seeking and find that it was just a artistic flirtation with fact and faith? It’s getting old. Real old.

The imagery of faith is beautiful. I get it. It even resonates in an era and a culture that has little respect or understanding for the foundation beneath that imagery. But weirdly, it almost resonates like a fairytale—something dangerous and adventurous that pulls at their soul, but which they won’t really dare to believe. Something you like to muse about with quick-beating heart that is hiding just beyond the corner of your eye, but which ultimately has no effect on your daily choices and beliefs.

Artists use this spiritual imagery because it is evocative. They use it in a similar way that we have used the imagery of ancient myth: of Greek gods and fairies and elves and imps and sprites. Symbolically. Half-believed, but never lived.

But this is different. If I were to say something poignant about Athena because I was going into war, this wouldn’t come off as grand. At best it might be considered poetic, at worst extremely silly. It has little cultural resonance because we do not believe in Athena, nor does anyone we know, most likely. Athena is not a name tossed about at the center of most philosophy, religion, and even current political debates.

So this habit (particularly among musicians that I tend to love) is more than just evoking religious grandeur. This is tip-toeing on the edge of belief, recognizing with an artist’s eye that this is the greatest, most poetic battle on earth: it is life or death. Forget the trope of “Unresolved Sexual Tension” in every YA novel, cop procedural, and sit-com. The real stuff is to be had in the “Unresolved Spiritual Tension.” That’s where the true thrill is. The battle over souls, not sex.

So just as we desperately want to see the main couple in the cop show get together, but then we’re often bored once they do, it’s as though we—as a culture—are conditioned to demand that everyone wrestle with God, with Truth, with Faith, with Purpose, with Meaning, but then we cannot stand it when someone has reached a conclusion. It’s everything but the marriage, the smell of food without eating it, all of the preparation but none of the action, all the intellectual posturing but no final choice.

So here’s what I think regarding both types of unresolved tension: We fail to see that the reason we’re ‘bored’ when the couple in the TV show gets together is not because satisfied and growing love is boring, but because it’s beyond us and can no longer include us in the way that the lead-in can. We can join in the build-up, like we can attend a wedding. But then the married couple has to live it. And that is greater, and more complex. It’s not mere story arch anymore. It’s a road. The tension may be reduced, but the richness is increased and it is too subtle for easy caricature. Deep wholeness is harder to depict than mysterious fragment.

So too with faith. It isn’t always Jacob wrestling by the river (though I’m wont to feel that it is in my life). Sometimes it’s Abraham waiting years upon years for a promised to be fulfilled. Steadily—sometimes failing and falling—but doing so for years on end often without the flash and snap of doubt and tension.

The theme of Unresolved Spiritual Tension is powerful because we all must wrestle. Even when we believe, we still must wrestle—working out our faith with fear and trembling.

But it’s also heartbreaking because everyone seems to think that mere wrestling is enough. Even I am wont to think that more often than not, and I’m sitting here saying I know better. It would be like in a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu match, if I were to wrestle and wrestle but never attempt a triangle choke or an armbar because I thought the heart of it was just in the act of rolling around on the floor and exerting well-trained effort.

And that’s just not true. At some point you have to make a decision, find your opening, and go for the choke. Then you find out if you were right or wrong. If you don’t act, you will get choked in the end. To refrain from making a choice regarding belief is to make a choice against it. Eventually, even if it’s just because the time runs out, there will be a resolution.

We, both in and out of the church, are often trying to have all the trappings of spiritual depth without having to actually engage in the occupation…the leaves and fruit without the trunk and the roots. We like the resonance, but not always what that sound calls us to. So many wish to employ the beauty and power of things they are not quite willing to believe in.

Oh and they are beautiful and powerful. But if everything becomes divorced—the image from the meaning, the question from the answer, the wrestling from the conclusion—then the power either dies horribly, or becomes perverted in a way that something less meaningful never could have.

Why do artists do this? Why do we do this? Why do I want to be satisfied with the mere fight, never mind the victory (God’s, not mine)?

Because people think that imagery and a feeling of comfy antiquity is all Christianity has to offer? Or because we want to be able to yell at God without answering to him?

I think it’s both, but today I am discussing the latter. Our spiritual selves are drawn to throw our anger, our pain, our struggle, or hate, our longing towards him. Our baser selves cannot stand the thought of having to face a real, live response that requires something of us. Or, rather, everything. We’re afraid of resolution the way some people are afraid of marriage. It’s so permanent. What if I get bored? What if I change my mind? What if I’m wrong?

We want to rant, not to debate. We want to be heard, not to listen. We want to angst, not to resolve. I say this because this is my strong tendency.

Or, suppose, some of us do want a resolution, but we just can’t swallow the idea of one that requires us to give up all we have and are—our hate, our anger, our revenge, our bitterness, our preferences, our desires, our meandering…ourselves. Resolution means shearing off certain paths. Utterly and forever.

This is not to belittle the search and the struggle.  I enjoy these artists because their work resonates deeply with me—with my own spiritual struggles—and because there are powerful questions being asked. But no answers being struck.

And that last bit infuriates me.

I’ll tell you what, though: In the Bible the same person who said “My God, my God, has thou forsaken me” said “I will yet praise you.”

The same person who said “Why did I not perish at birth, and die as I came from the womb? and “I have no peace, no quietness; I have no rest, but only turmoil” and “Though he slay me, yet I will hope in him; I will surely defend my ways to his face” at the final hour said “my ear had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you.”

But for some reason, not all are willing to both ask the question, and then with a cry of “I believe, Help my unbelief” point to the answer because of its imposing permanence. We’re really not supposed to worry the same bone forever. We’re not supposed to wrestle over that one piece of ground endlessly.

What good is it to “have a form of godliness” but deny its power, or to be “always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth” (2 Timothy 3: 5 and 7)?

Strange as it may seem, answers are simultaneously wild and complex as they are concrete and simple. In any case, they are real.

“We have looked for questions in the darkest corners and on the wildest peaks. We have found all the questions that can be found. It is time we gave up looking for questions and started looking for answers”

-GK Chesterton

So, further up and further in. There is power in the music when it has the courage to resolve.