From Hell's Heart I Stab At Me

I guess by definition I am a masochist, a glutton for punishment. I love pain because it has defined me, motivated me, and has cultivated some very good mechanisms which have helped me to survive. There is a fear of allowing anything into my life that ceases the pain. Why? Because pain has become my friend. One of the most eccentric 16 year olds I have ever met has articulated this far better than I ever could. Listening to his friend pleading with him to give the totality of his life to Jesus (that is all of his wounds and hurts and grief and pain and guilt and shame and on and on…) for more than an hour and a half, this young man paused, took a deep breath and gave his response:

“I don’t want to give my pain to Jesus. It is my pain that helps me relate to others. It is my pain that allows me to understand what people around me are going through.” 

This resonated with me far more than the words of his beloved friend. If Jesus is the great physician who came, not for the healthy but the sick, than this is how I would describe our relationship:

Sticking out of my chest is a barbed dagger placed squarely in the center of my heart. Jesus stands before me, beckoning me to allow him to remove it. There are no words he uses to explain why he is there, I know why he’s there. But I have words for him:

“Don’t touch it… DO. NOT. TOUCH. IT!” 

Again, no words. He knows why I feel this way. As soon as I allow him to remove this dagger and heal this self inflicted wound a number of things will happen. I will have to stop hurting myself as a means of coping. I will have to relinquish the illusion of control. I will have to face the very things I worked so diligently to repress. I will have to forgive. I will have to love. I will have to be merciful…

 I will have to approach this Jesus not as a self made man, not as a man who has picked himself up by his bootstraps, but as a small boy. I am but a child who quivers in the darkness; a child who weeps when he is alone. I am a child who fears what he is. I am child who stands in hatred of his reflection. I am a child who cannot believe that this perfect carpenter would love him. 

I do not physically harm myself, but an image that sticks in my head when I fall asleep (during periods of my darkest depression), is that of me stabbing away at my heart in hatred (hence, the dagger analogy). One night, while being unable to sleep because of this lingering thought, my mind’s eye saw an image of Jesus, nailed to a cross, with thorns for a crown. It was dark, unlike the baroque style paintings in which Jesus is illuminated. I approached him, and our eyes met. Once again, he communicated so much in his face, but he said nothing. Taking the dagger, I placed it in his heart instead of mine. In that dagger is the totality of my hatred, the totality of my wrath generated by my pain. In this act this Jesus does something I could not do for myself, he bears the burden that I cannot carry. He forgives the debt that I cannot pay. He pardons my sin, and not only mine but also the sins perpetrated against me.

I don’t know if any of this is helpful to anyone. I don’t know if this is blasphemous or inducing of adoration. I simply do not know. It is helpful to me as I write these words. But here is something that I do know, something that causes me to weep every time I think on it: 

My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought!
My sin, not in part but the whole,
Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more,
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!

My dad can kick your dads...

When theories compete, it seems that the dialogue between two “intelligent” people becomes little more than that argument you had with the neighbor kid about who’s dad could kick who’s dad’s ass. Does anyone remember getting into that fight or was it just me? We have constructs through which we think, ways that we shape the world around us, and ways that we think through those parameters in order to draw conclusions. The problem that I find, as is the plight of myself and many others, is that my parameters simply are not big enough to encapsulate the totality of any given subject. So when someone in a conversation starts challenging my construct, I have to get defensive because they’re attacking the very thing that will help me win the argument. 

We come to discover in these moments that many of the things that we have embraced as widely excepted truths are at times indefensible assumptions, not facts. So back to our fathers… when someone attacks our ideas they are attacking in essence the very same thing that has 1. Created us, and 2. Has the power to define us. The irony is that more often than not, while the neighbor kids are engaged in this heated debate, the two fathers are out back cooking on the grill and drinking a beer together.

The debate that I have in mind is the assumed polarity between evolution and my faith. I don’t know how well I can fully express what I want to say without having people from either arena have an aneurism while they read this, but here we go. 

In my construct, I assume a few things as a Christian. First, I assume that the bible is the “word of God”. Seems harmless enough (at least to my fellow Christian friends), but of course, this statement cannot possibly encapsulate the complexity of what the bible contains (human authors, authorial/contextual considerations for inspiration proof texts, etc.).  That statement is an assumption that embraces several other subdivisions which serve as a cyclical justification for the initial proposition. The Bible is God’s word, therefore it is inerrant, infallible, it is historically accurate, and so on. If we only embrace the easy compilation of ideas into dogma, our construct will quickly collapse under the critique of those who observe our faith with much more depth and objectivity than we do. These terms do very little to extrapolate the multifaceted complexities of God and the diversity and plurality of the testimony of biblical history. We think that because we are able to reduce the complex teachings (which need contextual and literary consideration) of the bible to a few theological concepts, we are masters of it.

So with my simple construct in place, I must now defend some very unusual outcomes created by the posture I have taken (I would like to give some examples, but time does not permit and I fear that if I give any examples that just might be the aneurism inducer). 

So… this is where the neighbor kid challenges your daddy by saying, “I believe in evolution.” We can’t really have a discussion about what evolution is. Why not? Because no matter what the other person says, no matter how articulate or informed they are, our parameters cannot permit for competition. Our pre-committed loyalty to our doctrine does not allow us to consider whether or not that doctrine might just need to be expanded.  Therefore, we try to make our construct do battle in ways it was never intended to. Genesis 1-11 was not written to address “Origin of Species.” I really, REALLY want to get into a discourse about evolution and faith, but I think for now I’ve expressed my point. Constructs are helpful, but they have their limitations. We have to be willing and fearless about having them challenged. We can only be affirmed in our faith if we continue to grow in our search for answers.

Why GPS will kill us all

Amanda and I recently purchased a 2008, Toyota Prius. I drove to seminary with two of my commuting buddies, Bob and Michael. As we were leaving class, I went through this long discourse explaining how the diagram on the touch screen was showing us where the car was drawing power, whether it be from the electric motor, the gas motor, or the giant battery… or all three. When I got done explaining all of this, I believe it was Bob who pointed out that the entire time I was talking I didn’t look at the road once. After this observation Michael mused, “ I wonder how many people wreck their cars while looking at their GPS?” and there it was, and we all knew it as soon as Michael said it. This was a statement that spoke to all of us at our core, because it was a lot deeper than GPS’ and car crashes. 

GPS is an image of what is real. It shows us where we are, it tells us where we are going, but it remains just an image. If we spend too much of our time looking at where we want to go, it won’t be long before we steer the vehicle off of a cliff. It reminds me of C.S. Lewis talking about how theology is like a map: a map of the Pacific Ocean is not the Pacific Ocean. It cannot capture the vastness, the awesomeness, the beauty of the Pacific Ocean. The map is only a representation, a small image of the very real thing behind it.

GPS is a moving map, and while looking at where we want to be we’ll rarely see the red light set in place to stop us from a major collision.  

I want to be at my destination. I want to reside in a place where pain does not exist, and wounds from the past are healed and do not leave scars as reminders. I want to shave a few minutes off of my estimated time of arrival by driving recklessly and rapidly. I refuse to see the obstacles set before me (or behind me). I refuse to see the stop sign, the red light, the cross walk, the railroad crossing, the school bus, or the speed limit sign. To stop and look up is to acknowledge what has been, and to cease striving toward what will never be. 

To stop is grief

To stop is pain

To stop is death

Grief… of what cannot be

Pain… of what once was

Death…  because there is no life in the destination

I will stop and look. One day I will turn and face the things that have haunted me. And on that day I will grieve and weep and mourn. But today is not that day, and tomorrow is not looking too promising either. My heart is just too hard to weep for myself. My heart is just too proud for tears. My soul is too angry to feel the sadness it works diligently to hide. I will fix my gaze upon the image of the destination and I will drive as fast as I can. And one day I will stop; whether I run out of gas or blindly drive off of a cliff, I will stop. And oh what a day that will be! That will be the day that I start living. Today I will refuse comfort, today repression reigns supreme. But someday I will give heed to this command:

“Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”

I cannot divert my eyes from you forever. I cannot refuse your comfort much longer.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.  

"Won't you be my neighbor?"

Avenged Sevenfold’s “Nightmare” couldn’t capture what I experienced early Saturday morning. Perhaps it was the high quantity of beer, rum, and Dagwood sandwich from the Dispensing company in my stomach at the same time that created such horror, but Saturday morning consisted of several short apparitions of some of the most disturbing nightmares I think my mind was capable of creating. Having awoken from my slumber, I woozily made my way down the three flights of stairs and onto the uncomfortable couch in our living room. I turned on the television to distract my mind from the panic inducing hell-sleep. What did I find at 5:00 am on a Saturday morning?

“Won’t you be, please won’t you be, my neighbor?”

 I sat and watched with a mixture of emotions that were difficult to handle. I got this strange sense that Mr. Rogers had a great facade.  He seemed like a man weary of the world outside, but laboring with all his energy to create a safe place that fostered innocence, kindness, and goodness. I felt like I could trust Mr. Rogers for a brief moment, but then I felt the crushing weight of reality telling me that this world was not real. His intentions were noble, and I felt the warmth of a lost moment in my childhood revisit me, but there was something disturbing or maybe agitating to me in the request:

“Won’t you be, please won’t you be, my neighbor?”

There on the couch, cold and alone, I sang along with Mr. Rogers, and it felt like the response was a resounding “no”.

The weight of where I am going with this makes it really difficult to express:

Perhaps I only want to be a neighbor to those who are like me. Those who, in a sense I respect and want approval from. If I can be a neighbor to those people, then perhaps I have achieved some sort of value. Inevitably what happens is the lack of reciprocation, or the discovery that receiving acceptance from my desired “neighbors” rings so hollow and empty that I’m left shallower then when I began. Complicating this further is the fact that my insecurities run so deep that I want everyone to be my neighbor in this sense, regardless of how unhealthy or unable they might be to appreciate my efforts. Every person I meet, I am asking the question “do you think I am a good person?” “Do you like me?” “Am I worth liking?” "Won't you be my neighbor?"

I know I’m not alone in this, the people who find my condition to be shallow are usually the same people who say “I don’t care what people think of me” in an adamant sentiment. People who really do not care about the perceptions of others do not waste their time declaring their apathy for others opinions. Seeking to marginalize the opinion with “I don’t care” only gives the validity to the fact that we do. 

I guess that’s the beauty of Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan. It was a rare, unselfish act on his part. What did it prosper him to help the battered man? What did it prosper him to take the man to an Inn, and to pay for his expenses? If Jesus told that story about me, it would consist of me being so occupied with making friends with the priest and the Levite, that I wouldn’t have seen the man on the side of the road.The Samaritan man wasn't occupied with achieving the approval of the religious leaders, he was concerned about the well being of another man in need.

The question that brings despair is “won’t you be my neighbor?” That’s like the painful question Tevye asks his wife in “Fiddler on the roof.” “Do you love me”. Certainly we can ask that question of our spouses, but when our wounds run so deep that we ask whether or not we are loveable from everyone around us we create alienation for ourselves. We are all asking this question. We are all alienated, we are all separated from each other, we are all surrounded by many, yet very alone, and the only thread that seems to bind us is our loneliness. “Americans are among the loneliest people in the world” – George Gallup Jr.

I still believe by faith that my faith holds the answer to this question. I feel obligated in some fashion to give the easy answer to what I have defined for myself. I feel a great tension concerning being honest and being reverent.  I don’t want to speak to resolve the pain because the pain remains, even though I apply the prescribed solution. So I will not fully articulate it just yet, but I affirm that I hold on by faith that my brokenness can be mended, that my wounds can heal, that my disparity can be resolved, that my anxiety can be alleviated, and my pain comforted.

I just hope that I am not wrong.