The Demand to Go Further

This post contains both a struggle and a hope.  It is a meditation without answers.

As Christians we seek in some way to serve Jesus.  It looks different for each of us according to our gifts and callings.

But are we doing enough?

We do not have the luxury of a selfish savior.  The Jesus of the gospels, of our faith, and of everlasting reality, who walked with his feet in the earth and is the image of the Most High, gave everything.  Every last thing, even his own life.  And he demands that we follow in his footsteps.

Right now I’m reading a volume of collected writings by Dorothy Day.  Day took very seriously when Jesus said,

When the Son of Man [he commonly referred to himself this way] comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne.  Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.  And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left.  Then the King will say to those on his right, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.  For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.”  Then the righteous will answer him, saying, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink?  And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you?  And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?” And the King will answer them, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me.”

Then he will say to those on his left, “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.  For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.”  Then they also will answer, saying, “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?”  Then he will answer them, saying, “Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.”  And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life. (Matthew 25:31-46)

Day saw Jesus in every person, no matter how poor, dirty, or destitute they might be.  She and the other members of her Catholic Worker Movement lived in poverty themselves so that they could give every last thing they had to sustain others during the height of the Great Depression and afterward. How many of us would go into debt to feed others?  How many of us would live in such a way that every room in our homes was open to those who have none?

I don’t think I can live like that.  That way of living seems utterly incompatible with mine.  

As I said earlier, we all have our own gifts and callings (1 Corinthians 12). I’m a depressed introvert, and I would so much rather study and write than interact with others.  But that excuse only goes so far.  I cannot change the world only from my couch or a coffee shop, I have to step outside my comfort zone to do other work as well. At the very least, as civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis puts it, I ought to go get into some “good trouble”.

I have a son who’s almost a year old now.  We’re donating his old bassinet, swing, and clothes to a needy mother. But don’t applaud!  Our closets are still full of what we don’t wear, we throw away food we let go bad, we buy what we don’t need, and there are a million more ways we could be contributing to the wellbeing of others but don’t. Maybe really it is enough.  After all, maybe we need to look after our own wellbeing too.

Perhaps my guilt is misplaced, but the challenge to do more is holy.

I’ve referenced the following quote from St Basil the Great in this blog a couple of times now:

Is not the person who strips another of clothing called a thief?  And those who do not clothe the naked when they have the power to do so, should they not be called the same?  The bread you are holding back is for the hungry, the clothes you keep put away are for the naked, the shoes that are rotting away with disuse are for those who have none, the silver you keep buried in the earth is for the needy.  You are thus guilty of injustice toward as many as you might have aided, and did not.

While I generally apply this to society as a whole, that together we have enough to take care of one another especially using the government as a tool, and while I think that if we all contribute together the individual sacrifice will be relatively small (welfare-state liberal here), I can’t quote him without at least a small amount of personal hypocrisy.  Do I model the thing I want for us all?  I vote for and speak out about broad solutions, but what of my personal life? If we all won’t do something, will I?

I am thoroughly attached to my things, to the very idea of “mine”.  What is rightfully “mine”?  Is “mine” even a morally acceptable category?  I don’t mean for people in general, I mean for a follower of Christ.  If that’s not you, these demands may not be for you.  I don’t know what you should do.

This is certainly no missive on how you should live or description of how I do it.  If this is the moral standard to which we are subject, then I am an utter and abject failure.

But there is grace, and the heart of the calling is love.  We are not expected to perfectly give everything up at once, but to be continuously led further and deeper into a life of love for God and others.  Both the end and the path are joy and growth, not guilt.

After I write this, maybe little will change.  Maybe I won’t answer the radical call quite yet, but I hope that I will be slowly but surely transformed into one who loves deeper than the world around him, deeper than he would otherwise be inclined.  Dorothy Day had that idea, the idea that changing the world was something that happened little by little, bit by bit, through small everyday acts of kindness.  I think maybe I can do that.

The Damage Done and Why I Left Conservative Evangelicalism

I can only assume that the Evangelical leaders who brought my generation up in the faith did so the best they knew how, but they did damage greater than they could realize.  In many ways, we were set up to fail as young adults and continued to be harmed along the way by a system hubristically sure of its answers and woefully short on critical self-reflection. 

I’ve struggled with depression my entire life, but my college years were some dark, dark days.

In high school and even college, I was taught that I knew better than scientists who spent their careers trying to understand the development of life on earth. My young-earth creationism withered under the weight of one intellectual battle at a time, constantly trying to hang on some shred of what I had believed, because I was taught that a particular theory of human origins was crucial to the faith I held dear and that without it, my faith would fall apart.  The years of unnecessary doubt and struggling scarred me.

I was encouraged in high school to think critically about my faith, but what it really meant was to learn ways to support predetermined conclusions.  My intellectual quest to understand and support my faith led me to eventually deny most of what I had been taught to defend. The struggle to hang on to the faith I loved fueled years of doubt and depression that nearly broke me as a human being before I realized that conservative Evangelicalism was only an interpretation of Christianity, not the thing itself.

In his 1994 book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Evangelical scholar Mark Noll concluded that, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there isn’t much of one.”  I can’t find the reference, but it has certainly been suggested that not much has changed. I have some pretty smart Evangelical friends who don’t fit that mold, but anti-intellectualism (unless someone smart seems to prove what people already believed) always has seemed to be the order of the day.

Too often, the spiritual environment was undernourished as well.  With the occasional exception of Augustine and possibly Thomas Aquinas, Christian history for most of the Evangelicals I knew may as well have not existed between the writing of the New Testament and the Reformation.  I got far more church history as part of my music degree than I actually did in church. After the Apostolic Period, Christianity didn’t seem to really exist in a meaningful way outside of western half or so of Europe until Westerners brought it there – no riches of Eastern Orthodox theology, no (relatively) quick spread of Christianity to Persia, India, Ethiopia, and China.  That’s not to say that people who took the right classes or signed up for the right majors or went to seminary didn’t find out about some of these things, but you’d never know.  The popular myopia was and is astounding.

Much of the spiritual variety I was actually exposed to was the theology of a deterministic Calvinist God I was unprepared for, who created people only to force many of them to sin, reject salvation, and be damned forever.  My Calvinist friends seemed to have scriptural backing, and I was thrown into yet more doubt and a deep depression that continued long after I rejected their theology, as I continued to struggle with doubt about God’s very existence and much of what I had been taught about him.

Let me tell you, conservative Evangelicalism is a terrible place to be when you’re depressed.  Too often, Evangelicals equate spiritual health with positive emotion.  A peer from the Southern Baptist college ministry I attended who’s now a campus minister himself actually posted on Facebook, “If you are truly being faithful you will be consistently joyful.”  What a horrible thing to say to those who are hurting. As the title of a good book on depression puts it, faithful or not, sometimes “Darkness Is My Only Companion”. Give me the savior who suffers with me, not some kind of abusive emotional prosperity gospel bullshit.  

And reading the Bible is not the solution to everything either.  I got so sick of that.  No matter what the problem happened to be, reading the Bible was almost invariably the prescription.  No, reading the Bible didn’t make me feel less depressed, and it sure didn’t clear up the doubts I had about the text itself.

Beyond all that, I was taught, both implicitly and explicitly, a theology that confused the gospel with the Republican Party platform.  The more I thought about Jesus’s words, the less I saw the gospel in the politics that were expected of me.  Where were small government and free markets in the Bible? Why didn’t conservative Evangelical politics seem concerned with the welfare of the poor or with racism or social justice?  Many Evangelicals didn’t even seem that concerned about poverty on a personal level, instead the focus was on “sharing the gospel” and “making disciples,” as if those things could be separated from the social justice of God’s kingdom.  My politics changed more and more as I read Jesus’s words about “loving your neighbor as yourself” and trying to figure out what it meant to put them into practice.

As I became more politically liberal, I joked to one youth leader I knew, “I defected, but I’m not defective.”  She responded with something along the lines of “I don’t know about that.”  While such a response might have been funny delivered in a certain way, it sounded pretty serious when she said it.  For whatever reason, I certainly got unfriended on Facebook.

In 2006, in the midst of Israel’s war against Hezbollah, my church held something of a praise and worship open mic night.  Before I sang and played my guitar, I prayed for the innocents caught in the crossfire of a brutal bombing campaign across Lebanon.  I even had friends on the ground in Beirut when the bombs were coming down.  Even if they didn’t care about Lebanese Muslims, my fellow Christians could have at least cared about the large number of their Arab brothers and sisters in the faith living in the most Christian country in the region.  Instead, I got chewed out by a member of the congregation for daring to pray for the people of Lebanon.  It wouldn’t have been such a big deal if it was just one cranky guy, but I had seen similar, Anti-Arab and Islamophobic attitudes all around me for years.  How could I remain in such an environment?

Even if I wanted to stay, there was no place for me in conservative Evangelicalism. I was a stranger in what had been my spiritual home.

Who am I now?  I’m deeply scarred and still trying to heal, but I’m finding my footing on firmer ground than ever before, and my faith has gradually but steadily gained strength over the course of years.  Chronic depression makes it hard, but I think I’m starting to find some degree of peace. I’ve discovered a God of love instead of vengeance, gotten a firmer grasp of what the Bible is and isn’t, and found a wealth of Christian thought and spirituality I never knew existed.  My faith, that though not free from doubt and filled with unknowing, contains a wellspring of life and rests on a firmer foundation than the sand upon which what I began with had been built.