Sins of Omission

I discovered the blessings of Lent in college. Raised in a less liturgical Protestant tradition, I came to understand and appreciate the liturgical calendar more when I began attending a wonderful Episcopal Church during my junior year. I acknowledged Ash Wednesday for the first time my senior year, and participated in several Lenten services and disciplines the church offered. I also "gave something up" for Lent for the first time that year--pork and shellfish, I think it was, channelling a kosher vibe.

Since then, I have given up chocolate, beer, beef, all meats, etc., as many do during this time of year. I practice these omissions with a keen determination not to be doing so for a selfish gain, like losing weight or whatnot, but rather to focus on filling that void with prayer and reflection on God. I have done so with varying degrees of success, and vividly recall the thick prime rib I wolfed down on Easter 2005.

This year, I decided that rather than giving up something, I would give up myself--that is, give of my time and energies for others. I planned to use Cool People Care's "5 Minutes of Caring" to guide my actions. Two weeks later, I hadn't looked at the site since Ash Wednesday. I decided then to start a daily discipline of reading the daily lectionary and setting aside time for prayer. I have also failed in that endeavor, and lament that I am "wasting" this Lent by not using this time of preparation to focus myself on God and my spiritual life.

Obviously, Lent is not the only time one can or should focus on such things, and I have increased my time spent in prayer as I seek God's comfort and guidance though this "limbo stage" in Matt and my careers. However, the lesson that really comes to mind from my "failures" these past few weeks is, once again, how much harder it is to actively do something than to avoid doing something. Many Christians today insist that the keys to living a moral life are not drinking, not smoking, and not having extramarital sex. While avoiding these indulgences may help one to have a healthier body and avoid emotional baggage (benefits God surely wishes us to enjoy), do such omissions really help one be more Christlike? How much more discipline and faith does it require to actively give of one's time and resources for the less fortunate? To practice selflessness and peace? Which would God prefer? What does the Lord require of us, but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God?

I am reminded of a humorous coincidence that is quite relevant here. I have a cousin named John, whose birthday is March 16. Some family members call him "John 3:16" for that reason. When I started dating my now-husband, I thought I'd check out his "birthday verse" since he happens to have a gospel writer's name. Matthew 11:19 is actually quite fitting for Matt: "For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say 'he has a demon.' The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say 'here is a glutton and a drunkard'... but wisdom is proved right by her actions." Some Christians would (and do) criticize my pastor-hubby for his enjoyment of alcohol, but as the verse says, Christ reveals the logos by his actions, not by his temperance. It seems followers of Christ should strive to do the same.

Dust

Approximately four-and-a-half years ago, I discovered the wonder and beauty of high-church worship. Admittedly, this took several months of steady attendance at an Episcopal church, given that I grew up Disciples of Christ, a notoriously anti-credal, anti-liturgical denomination. Once involved in that Episcopal congregation, I observed Lent for the first time, beginning with that most unusual of high holy days, Ash Wednesday. I decided then and there that it was my favorite religious holiday.

"Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return," the priest intoned, marking an ashen cross on my forehead. While most ash impositions I've seen through the years end up looking like a smudgy thumbprint on the forehead, mine was a well-defined Greek cross an inch-and-a-half tall and wide. I wore it proudly, feeling a profound and silent connection with others I saw who had received ashes that day, knowing that they too embraced this ritual too often forgotten in most Protestant traditions.

I find the Ash Wednesday liturgy so meaningful because of those words spoken as the ashes are imposed: "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." Combine that with the overall message of solemnity and repentance preached that day, and one will be reminded of the brevity of life, and the weight one's relationship with God carries, given the fleeting and relatively (to the "great scheme of things") insignificant nature of our earthly existence.

While many may take issue with my assertion that our lives are insignificant, let me explain that I cling to that thought out of horror that the burdens of stress, depression, and feelings of inadequacy may really matter in the long run. Rather, I cling to the hope that those things don't really matter, and that my petty human worries will, at the end of my days, seem like specks of dust in the vast expanse of infinite time and space. The writer of Ecclesiastes seems to understand this line of thinking, asserting "Everything is hevel." "Everything is meaningless," some English translations say it, but a more accurate translation is vapor, vanity, or dust. Everything is vapor. All we are is dust in the wind, as the song says.

I remember a night in college, during the semester I took Astronomy. Having learned just how vast the universe is, and how small even our whole galaxy is in comparison to all of space, I looked up at the sky with a new perspective. Distressed over whatever guy was causing me trouble at the time, I cried out to God, and yet at the same time thought, "why should my problems matter? If the Milky Way is but a speck, how small is Earth, and how much smaller is my own aching heart?" Yet, in the midst of that existential realization, I believed that God still cared, no matter how small I am. It was I who needed to see my problems as but a speck.

As one of my favorite Christian songs says, I am a flower quickly fading, here today and gone tomorrow, a wave tossed in the ocean, a vapor in the wind. Still, You hear me when I'm calling, You catch me when I'm falling, and You told me who I am. I am Yours. That "still" is so poignant there, offering the listener the dual comfort of knowing the difficulties of one's life are fleeting, and yet God still cares.

I, for one, feel lucky to be dust.

Make 'em Wonder

I was listening to Avalon on the way into work this morning. I admit it, I like cheesy Christian music, and while I disagree with the theology expressed in some songs, I find them uplifting, overall. The song "The World Will Wonder Why," was playing, and after choking on the first few lines "I wonder... how some can look so hard and miss the Truth," as if the complex evangelical atonement theory and whatnot is just plain and obvious, we moved on to the main message of the song, that the best method of evangelism is living by example: "If you and I will shine His light...hearts discover life when we decide to let ours go..." Good stuff.

Thinking on what it means to live a Christian life that others will see and want to emulate, I began to wonder what the songwriters meant, what God wants from our outward lives, and how I live my life. My fiance, Matt, likes to tell the story of how Campus Crusade guys in college would tell him not to go to parties because then others will notice they don't go to parties, and wonder what is different about their lives. "No they won't!" Matt explains, "because they already know what's different--they know you're an uptight ass who won't associate with people outside your little faith-group." On the contrary, Matt went to parties, enjoyed his beer (responsibly, most of the time, we hope), talked theology over games of pool, and helped people get back to their own dorms or houses safely at the end of the night. He believes that set a better example of Christ's love than avoiding the situation altogether, and actually did get asked about his faith a few times. I imagine the guy holed up in his dorm with a few Crusade buddies did not.

Obviously, I side with Matt's interpretation of what it means to live one's faith in a visible way, but I ask myself what my own life would say, if someone were watching it for cues about my faith. I struggle with depression and feel very negative about life much of the time. I try not to be a downer in public, but I'm sure my behavior generally does not reflect the "happy all the time" image that would attract attention in today's stress-filled world. Is there another way to show that I have an active relationship with God, and that my life is better with that relationship than it would be without it? I really have no answer to this question. I hope that expressing attitudes of peace and love for all, and trying to avoid the selfish and money-centered ways humans tend to make gods of themselves says something, but who knows? If you listen to many Christians today, drinking, smoking, and sex are the world's greatest evils, which all true Christians will avoid. I admire the ascetic, self-disciplined life, but when you really think about it, doesn't it take a lot more self-control to avoid materialism, self-centeredness, and self-righteousness, than to say "no, thanks" to a glass of beer?

Long Live the Dunkers

"When we were first drawn together as a society, it had pleased God to enlighten our minds so far as to see that some doctrines, which were once esteemed truths, were errors, and that others, which we had esteemed errors, were real truths. From time to time, He has been pleased to afford us farther light, and our principles have been improving, and our errors diminishing. Now, we are not sure that we are arrived at the end of this progression, and at the perfection of spiritual or theological knowledge; and we fear that, if we should feel ourselves as if bound and confined by it, and perhaps be unwilling to receive further improvement, and our successors still more so, as conceiving what we their elders and founders had done to be something sacred, never to be departed from."

This quote, from a man named Michael Welfare, appears in Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, as he describes a discussion he had with Welfare, his good friend. Welfare, a founder of a religious sect called the Dunkers, complained that adherents of more mainstream religious groups were badmouthing the Dunkers, accusing them of outrageous beliefs that they did not actually hold. Franklin advised Welfare that if his group were to document their beliefs in writing, detractors could be more easily disproved. Welfare, however, responded with the above statement, arguing that they would not reify their beliefs by putting them on paper and thus making group members less likely to accept God's subsequent revelation. (The Dunkers were obviously quite attuned to their own potential for cognitive dissonance!) Neil Postman, in whose work, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, I read of Franklin and Welfare's conversation, summarizes Welfare's point like this: "Thou shalt not write down thy principles, lest thou be entrapped by them for all time" (p.31).

I wrote in the margin, "Therein lies the primary problem with bibliolatry." Bibliolatry--idolizing or worshipping the Bible--is a sin to which most Christians would deny their propensity, yet it seems to run rampant in Protestantism today, as many consider the Bible, and not the still-active voice of God, to be the most reliable source of divine revelation. Obviously, there is a Catch-22 at work here, as Christianity may have quickly died out (as did the Dunkers; thus an air of wistfulness should be read into my title) and we wouldn't be having this conversation at all, had there been no Bible to carry the stories of Jesus and Ancient Israel across the centuries. Nonetheless, how much more might we all experience God, how much more might our knowledge of God be "improved" by "farther light," as Welfare says, if we were open to God's ongoing revelation?

The United Church of Christ has embraced this idea in their recent PR campaign, "God is still speaking," symbolized by a giant comma on their billboards, mailings, and TV ads, but of course, we know how much most Christians value the input of this far-left end of Protestantism. In a recent conversation I had regarding Mormonism, and why some Christians regard the LDS church as a cult, rather than a sect of Christianity, my conversation partner said that one of the primary reasons is that Mormons claim to receive new revelations from God beyond what is written in the Bible. While part of the protest may be the content of some of these revelations, I suspect a large part is simply the recent date and nearby location of these revelations. Yes, God spoke thousands of years ago, over in the middle east, but not in the 19th and 20th centuries, and not in New York state! Such proximity seems strange to us, and we tend to doubt its authenticity, just as we doubt murderers who say God told them to do it, and homeless people who ask us to help finance their mission from God.

My senior seminar in college was on Hinduism and Buddhism--definitely not my area of primary interest--and each member of the class was assigned a faith community in the Greenville area to study, interview, and interact with. Mine was the Sathya Sai Baba group, a sect of Hinduism whose primary avatar, or incarnation of God, was a man named Sathya Sai Baba, whom they affectionately call "Swami." Swami was known for performing miracles, healing the sick, blessing the unfortunate, and having his photograph taken. Yes, Swami is a modern day figure, born in 1926, and still alive today. I admit, it was very odd to see photos on altars of this cheery, round-faced man in his orange tunic and foot-wide afro, and know that people believe him to be divine. It did, however, give me a new perspective on how first century Jews must have viewed Jesus. Here's this shabby, impious man, claiming to speak for God and show even the most devout Jews how to better relate to God? How dare people call him the Son of God?! That's crazy! Sure, God spoke to Abraham and Moses...but God doesn't reveal himself anymore! Not here! Not now!

Why are we so averse to the idea that God could be still speaking to us today? The Bible has made us equate divine revelation with booming voices from Heaven, burning bushes, earthquakes, thunder, lightening. What about that still, small voice? Doesn't that count? Doesn't the overwhelming feeling I had that my grandfather--who seemed in perfect health at the moment--would not live until my next trip home, and that I should hug him a bit tighter, count as a divine nudge? Why do we stifle God with the ball-gag of our own fear and arrogance, when we could all stand to know him more? The Dunkers had it right. Let's not bind ourselves so furiously to what we think we know, and be open to knowing more.

"How will they know unless we tell them?" the missionaries say.

And how will we know, unless God tells us?