Free at Last, Free at Last!

One of the most life-affirming, uplifting, joy-returning, burden-lifting things I have done in the last two years is stopping going to church. I also quit my Bible study and stepped down from a fledgling leadership position I had in a faith-based nonprofit, but the most impactful decision, by far, was no longer scheduling worship into my Sundays.

I was positively guilt-wracked the first few Sundays I deliberately slept in, even though I had been attending church out of nothing more than obligation and habit for months. I hated the evening rock band service at my congregational church, but neither did I get much out of the traditional morning service with the long-winded preacher exegeting Hosea five weeks in a row. I hated my friend’s Vineyard church, and Catholic Mass was hollow to me as well since I couldn’t partake of the Eucharist and wasn’t a total fan of their theology anyway. I was definitely a spiritual orphan, and it manifested very concretely in my extreme discomfort and sense of banality at virtually every church I attended.

Still, I felt guilty about no longer going to church. So one week early after I stopped going to church, I tuned in to the public radio broadcast of a local church service (bleah); another week I watched Joel Osteen (he has really white teeth!); yet another week, I tried to read my Bible some, but that felt flat too.

When I realized I wasn’t getting much out of these church surrogates, it hit me that I mainly felt guilty for letting down friends and family who saw me as a “Good” Christian. I realized, like a bolt of lightning one day that I didn’t actually miss God.

And I started to notice that heavy, heavy layers of obligation, legalism, expectation, and duty had settled around my shoulders. Quite physically, too: I carry stress in my shoulders and my back was positively a thicket of knots.

I came to realize that everything about my faith had devolved into being about me cultivating the right beliefs and actions; it never seemed okay to wonder “well when is God going to bend down and carry part of this? What happened to the light burden and easy yoke of Jesus?” The answer always seemed to be: do more in order to get closer to God and hear his still, small voice (which is there, you just have to somehow be in the right frame of mind to hear it). Read your Bible more. Join another Bible study – better, lead a Bible study. Do more service projects. Pray more. Confess your sins. Go to church every Sunday even if you don’t feel like it – faith isn’t about feelings, you know. Do the right thing and the feelings will follow. Jesus will meet you where you are.

I did all the right things, earnestly, sincerely, genuinely, for years. And you know what? The feelings did not follow. God did not stoop down to meet me, to lift me up, to answer my questions. Jesus did not meet me. The two-way “personal relationship” we are to cultivate with Jesus was oh-so-one-way: I was doing all the work. I didn’t hear from Jesus, cosmic hug or otherwise. It was indeed a “one-way mirror”, described so eloquently here on Memoirs of an Ex-Christian’s blog.

Well-meaning Christians make things worse by asking questions like “are you keeping up your end of the relationship?” (Oh. My. God. Are you kidding me? What else am I supposed to do here?) When you are sincerely trying to find God, this line of questioning tends to fuel ever-deepening spirals of self-recrimination, as well as increasingly frantic efforts to “do” the right things so that God will finally respond. It is in this kind of environment that grace loses all meaning.

So I walked away from church, hanging onto the thinnest hope that God’s grace would somehow be bigger than whatever sins I was committing by leaving the fold.

And I have not been so happy or burden-free in years.

I have not become an amoral hedonist; I have become someone unburdened by guilt and obligation. The knots in my back have receded. I am healthier physically and emotionally. I have become someone who is no longer afraid to ask the big questions – the really really big questions – and I am becoming less afraid of the answers.

I do not plan to go back to church on any kind of regular basis. I went on Easter Sunday and realized that I still didn’t miss it. When friends or family invite me to come to church with them, I inevitably shudder. I have come to associate church – any church, any denomination – with the legalism that had me trapped so desperately for so long. I refuse to put myself back into that environment. I have come to believe that whoever God is (if God is), he does not intend for us to live fear-based, guilt-ridden lives of perfunctory service.

I am finally learning to extend grace to myself. Now I simply hope that God does too.

Jesus: "Let's Cuddle!"

“Yes, but do you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ?”

How many times have you heard this, or if you are or were formerly a Christian, uttered it yourself?

In the Christian communities I have been part of, this seems to be the ultimate point of the faith. If you don’t have a personal relationship with Jesus, then you’re just going through the motions. If you don’t have a personal relationship with Jesus, what you have isn’t faith, it’s “religion” (bad!). If you don’t have a personal relationship with Jesus, you are missing out on the abundant life. If you don’t have a personal relationship with Jesus, you are probably not a Christian.

From a historical perspective, when and why and how did the idea of a “personal relationship” with Jesus come to the fore? The phrase itself appears nowhere in the Bible, and I feel pretty certain that Luther & Calvin weren’t tossing it around back in the day. Anybody know?

I must admit that cultivating this personal relationship with Jesus has always, always been a struggle for me. How can you have a personal relationship with an invisible God? Humans in relationship are, first of all, in physical and verbal contact with each other. There is a very clear two-way directionality about it; you say something, and the other person speaks back to you. You have conversations. You make eye contact. Maybe you hug each other. But I can’t cuddle with Jesus. When I have a bad day, or am crying, there’s no Gentle Shepherd waiting at home to make me dinner, talk me through my upset, give me advice, or just listen to me.

When I was a Christian and heard this argument from someone else, I would argue (patiently, perhaps patronizingly) that Jesus does listen to us, does draw close to us. And that he uses other people and circumstances in our lives to provide comfort – friends and family become instruments of Jesus’ love. This sounded beautiful, at the time.

But I now see at least two problems with it. One, in that model, Jesus is using surrogates – substitutes – for himself. It would be like me having a boyfriend but telling him to go to my friend Lydia with his needs, because I’ve set her up to be my eyes, ears, and arms for him. What’s the point of that? If my boyfriend has even half a brain, eventually he’ll dump me and just start dating Lydia.

Two, non-Christians get comfort and succor and love from other people and circumstances all the time, without benefit of a personal relationship with Jesus. For all intents and purposes, what they “get” from these truly human relationships is indistinguishable from what Christians get from their surrogate-Jesus-human relationships. So again, what exactly is Jesus doing that’s special or different?

The idealist in me wants to believe that a mystical, beautiful personal relationship with God-slash-Jesus is possible. That said, I have always thought the idea of being "married to" Christ (a la Song of Solomon) as extremely creepy. Plus, in all the years I've tried to get closer to Jesus, I just haven't sensed him personally coming closer to me. Which is strange given how much Jesus supposedly loves me.

So what am I missing out on by not cultivating a personal relationship with Jesus? Sadly, I’ve come to believe, not much.

Our Gracious Father's Most Amazing Grace In Jesus

My older sister has an old high school friend who has always been "on fire" for Jesus, even way back in the day when we all went to the public high school together. Seriously. The amount of enthusiasm he carried around was unmatched by anyone else I knew at church. He was even more in love with Jesus than my youth pastor. I was never terribly close to "Dave" though I did go to his wedding with my sister some 10 years ago. But he is the kind of person who, if I saw him today, would envelop me in a gigantic bear hug and ask how my spiritual life is going. Perhaps you know similar people.

Somehow, years ago, I got on his mailing list and every month or two I get a kind of "Jesus Pep Talk" email in my inbox. It usually includes an opening anecdote that Dave then ties to some scripture to remind us that Jesus is our All in All. He then invites us to pray with him. This is a typical prayer:

Gracious Father, we are humbled by Your Most Amazing Grace in JESUS that invites & makes it possible for us to be a part of Your Winning Team! Lord, we acknowledge that we often lack the “Winning Attitude” of Your Son. You gave us Your Mighty Holy Spirit to empower us with JESUS’ Winning Attitude that surrenders to You & seeks to glorify You in all things. O Lord, forgive us for not submitting to the Spirit & not trusting in You at times. In 2007, bless each of us with an overriding knowledge & awareness of Your Victory at Calvary. O Lord, You are the Eternal Victor & we are so grateful that You so graciously shared Your Victory with us through JESUS. We submit to Your Purpose & Plan for 2007. Let us not be distracted by the circumstances. Help us to be about abiding in You & being completely Yours! May we be instruments that You can use in any circumstances to glorify Your Son in the Highest!!! It’s in the Name of the One Who is FOREVER VICTORIOUS, JESUS CHRIST, we pray. AMEN.

My sister at some point changed her email address and made it a point not to tell Dave - and made me swear not to give it to him. Now every so often I will forward her Dave's emails and we will share a giggle over it, and she will express relief that she no longer receives them.

But here is the thing: I know this comes from a very heartfelt and sincere place, and I know Dave is just trying to encourage his brothers and sisters in Christ. So why do his missives make me so uncomfortable?

Suffering: Why Them? Why Not Me?

I've mentioned my foray into Catholicism a few times now. As part of that exploration, I decided one summer to take some time off of work and go to India. My boyfriend at the time had some Catholic friends who were going to work in Mother Teresa's homes in Calcutta for a couple of weeks, so I decided to join them.

Now, to be clear, I have traveled a lot. At that point in my life, I had seen poverty in the border towns of Mexico (thanks to high school missions trips); I had backpacked solo in Europe for 6 weeks; I had traveled to Iran for crying out loud. I was no travel virgin; I'd seen a lot of crazy stuff.

Still, I am hard pressed to describe the intensity of my trip to India. Anyone who has been there can probably relate to the sheer overwhelming-ness of the place. Every sense of mine was assaulted from the moment the plane touched down in Calcutta. The stench! Seriously, I have never smelled anything so awful, before or since. It's a horrible combination of human and animal waste, exacerbated by the humidity and constant dampness of typhoon season. The masses! The population density is unbelievable in Calcutta. I've never seen anything like it. The streets! Cars, trucks, buses, rickshaws, motorcycles, pedestrians, and cows all vying for real estate. Only in Iran have I feared for my life on the streets as much as I did in Calcutta - I kept looking the wrong way to cross the street, only to have an angry rickshaw driver shout something at me in Hindi as he barreled past.

Still, all of that paled in comparison to the work I did with poor, sick, and diseased women and orphans. Our first day there we worked at Kalighat, the home for the dying and I believe Mother Teresa's first home/center in Calcutta. The place is separated into a men's wing and a women's wing. In the women's wing, the patients are in two different rows of beds: on the lower row are women who are expected to eventually recover. On the upper row? Women who were dying and for whom there is no hope of a medical cure. Most of Kalighat's residents were found on the street, the dying destitute who were often kicked out of their homes and shunned by their families when it was learned that they had, for example, leprosy.

I can't quite put into words what the experience was like. The Missionaries of Charity nuns were these amazing examples of love. They saw their job as being present to these dying men and women, literally becoming Jesus' hands, demonstrating Jesus' love to people who were denied that love from their own families. The nuns knew they couldn't save many of these men and women, and they didn't try.

I realized later in the day that I couldn't handle working at Kalighat: the other woman in our foursome had assisted the doctor on duty with cleaning a new patient's leg wound, which was filled with maggots; the two men in our foursome had already been pressed into service carrying the bodies of dead men to the crematory. I had gotten off relatively easy, but this was way more than I could handle.

So I decided to work at one of the orphanages also run by the Missionaries of Charity. The particular orphanage I worked at had a "healthy" ward of children and a "sick" ward. The healthy ward was woefully understaffed, and we spent all of our time trying to play with and love toddlers who were in constant need of diaper changes, food, and drink. These poor kids were so starved for attention that if you sat on the floor to play with one child, four more would try to climb in your lap. It was challenging, but nothing like working in the sick ward, where there was this unspoken assumption that these kids would never be adopted and would likely live out their entire lives in the orphanage. Working on this side absolutely broke my heart.

Two kids stand out in my memory on the sick side: one girl who must have been 7 or 8 years old, with spina bifida. Her spine was so crooked that she she was effectively immobile. She laid on her side in a bed near the second floor entrance and followed you with her eyes - the only part of her body she could really move.

Like on the healthy side of the orphanage, the sick ward was understaffed and so this poor girl was often overlooked in favor of the mobile kids who were shouting for attention. When I did sit with her, or feed her some gruel, I felt there wasn't much else I could do to comfort her or show her love. She couldn't understand me, and couldn't speak to me. Apart from such small gestures as feeding her or holding her hand, I felt incredibly helpless and totally heartbroken. Spina bifida is correctible with surgery, but of course it was too late for surgery for her, and given the lack of resources in India and with the Missionaries of Charity, she would likely never benefit from other medical treatments either.

The other child I remember vividly from the sick ward had had some kind of operation - a colonoscopy? - in which she had to have one of those bags attached to her intestines to evacuate her bowels. She must have been 3 or 4 years old. Well. Somehow in her crib the bag had gotten disconnected from her body, and she was positively covered from head to foot in her own waste. I think it was meal time or something, as everyone else was preoccupied. I must have been the first person to notice what had happened to her. If memory serves, I cleaned her up as best I could, and then found a nurse because clearly she needed medical attention.

So much more stuff happened on that trip, but hopefully I've painted enough of a picture to explain why the experience shook me to the core, and led to a debilitating depression that lasted for over a year once I went back home.

While I was thrilled to be back home and able to wash my clothes in a real washing machine, I was also immediately overwhelmed by a sense of guilt. Why did I get to have such luxuries at my fingertips? Why are all of my basic human needs more than adequately met? Why did I have almost no obstacles or barriers to pursuing my life dreams? Why was I was born into an affluent, full-of-opportunity, white family in the United States?

It seemed unfair that I had such an easy life, while the adults and children I worked with in India led such excruciating, painful, lonely, suffering lives. And yet, if I believed what the Bible said, it was actually no accident of fate that I was born into my circumstances and they into theirs. I mean, God has numbered the hairs on my head, and is supposedly in control of everything, right?

So if God is in control of everything, and he has given me so much, then obviously he expects much from me. But what, exactly? Should I sell all my possessions and live like a pauper? Should I become a full-time missionary? Should I move into the inner city and live in solidarity with the poor?

I prayed, and prayed, and prayed for direction. But what I got back wasn't really direction. I started to feel a weight of obligation descend upon me. I couldn't discern whether the obligation was God's leading, or if it was me getting legalistic and thinking I had to make either a radical change or none at all. I started to feel guilty and selfish and, no matter what I decided to do, not good enough. I felt like I would fail God no matter what because I knew I still carried around a lot of selfishness.

I also felt confused at how God could allow such suffering to exist. It was all well and good for the nuns to be Jesus' hands and show Jesus' love to dying people... but I had to wonder: is that all there is? Is that all Jesus can offer these people? The cynic in me wondered why Jesus said that the poor would always be with us: is that because God had already decided not to help them out? That God knows we're going to fail miserably at it too? That, no matter how much we as individual sacrifice of ourselves to try to better someone else's life, that it's still only going to be a drop in the bucket?

During this period someone said to me that what I was going through was actually really good: that I was learning to be heartbroken by the things that broke Jesus' heart. I remember eventually thinking - screw that! I'm heartbroken because I can't actually solve these huge problems. But Jesus can, can't he? So why the hell doesn't he?

Can God Learn?

The Old Testament seems to paint God as very human-like: he gets mad at people, overreacts and wipes them out, regrets it, makes new promises, acts surprised when his people stray again, punishes them again, makes bets with the devil to try to tempt one of his righteous dudes, and can get talked out of following through on his plan by a mere mortal. Oh, and demands total unquestioning obedience and worship. In short, the OT paints a picture of an insecure, manic-depressive, egomaniacal, and definitely not omniscient deity (after all, how could he be surprised or angry if he knew all along that that stuff would happen?).

Painted in that light, God seems to be a deity who, over time, seems to adjust his approach to us...and perhaps finally realizing that he might attract more bees with honey than vinegar, he sends us gentle, humble Jesus, full of love and hope.

This view of God flies in the face of what I learned growing up: which is that God is omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly just, perfectly loving, and most importantly, he never, ever changes (and thus I can trust him!).

But what if God does exist but isn't omniscient/omnipotent/just/loving/unchanging after all? What if he is tempermental? What if he is unpredictable? What if he holds grudges? What if he overreacts at times? What if he is powerless to intervene at times? What if God is on a journey of learning how to relate to us, as much as we are on a journey of learning how to relate to him?

The question that springs to my mind is this: is this a God worth knowing, following, worshiping? What makes a deity worth knowing, following, and worshiping in the first place?

Easter Lies and Old Boyfriends

I told a lie on Easter, of all days. I might as well have poked the risen triumphant Jesus in the eye. I was in a foreign country for work. Friends living there invited me to go to church with them. I am a Christian and therefore of course I wanted to go. It is what Christians do on Easter Sunday: we go to church and we celebrate Jesus. I have been a Christian for almost thirty years. That is saying a lot because I am only 32.

The 100-minute Easter service featured a 30-minute CCM-inspired musical tribute to the passion of Christ, clips from the “Jesus Film” in which our Savior was, naturally, white (did I mention I was in east Asia at the time?), and a 20-minute altar call during which an unfortunately timed movement of my head made the pastor think I had just accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior. I hardly breathed for the rest of the altar call for fear that the pastor would invite me onstage to share my newfound joy in the Lord.

It was when my friend asked what I thought of the white-Jesus Easter service in Asia that the lie spilled across my lips: “I liked it,” I said brightly. “Just like at home.”

Obviously I hated it (and on reflection, she probably knew that). Every pore of my body was screaming to get out of that oversize auditorium with oversize banners and oversize preacher personalities making oversize statements about the boundless joy, everlasting hope, and unquenchable life that Jesus rising from the dead gives us.

It’s not just that this was a supremely cheesy Easter service (though it was). This is the deal: I don't have boundless joy or everlasting hope; I am tired and disappointed and unsure of who the Alpha and Omega is. For me this is a very unsettling thing to say because until about two years ago, I had problems, sure, but God himself was never really in question. And now he/she/it is. And we know God is really in question because I just now went back and added the “slash-she-slash-it” to the pronoun he in that last sentence and I used to be very traditional and comfortable just calling God “he”.

But you can’t really say any of this serious doubting stuff to people, or at least not the people in my church/faith/religion community. If you do, you immediately set off marathon prayer sessions, friends ask if they can lay hands on you, people suggest seeing a Christian counselor (God forbid you should go see a secular counselor) and above all, they gaze at you with concern in their eyes and wonder what you’ve done (read: sin) to create distance between yourself and God. I am reminded here of a joke that goes like this: an old married couple is driving down the road in an old truck with one of those bench seats that extends all the way across the cab. The wife looks at her husband and says: “Earl, how come we sit so far apart in the truck these days? We didn’t used to. We used to cuddle up!” Earl responds: “I don’t know, Edith…but I’m not the one who moved.” This is how most (conservative) Christians view other Christians who are having a hard time with God: it’s always the Christian’s fault because, as we all know, God doesn’t change.

In my younger, more zealous and certain Christian days I prayed fervently that I would never become what I think I am becoming: a doubting, unsure, frustrated, person who is disillusioned with what life handed her and is blaming God for it. Apparently I have changed.

I know I sound like a bad after-school special, or just very cliché. But I have been carrying around a load, a burden, about the size of a house on my back for some time now. I’d like to thank my ex-ex-heartbreaker-boyfriend (not the gay one – a later one) for helping me notice it. We dated for 7 months before he unexpectedly dumped me, and I have finally found the perfect way to describe our relationship: he was like Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility. Willoughby courts Maryann like mad and it’s magical and happy and the chemistry is palpable and nobody sees it coming when Willoughby breaks things off. Maryann almost dies of heartache. In Jane Austin’s story it of course comes to light that Willoughby is a shallow bastard who knocked up some other girl and marries rich in order to pay child support. I am still waiting for confirmation that my ex-ex-boyfriend has done the same thing, but I draw a certain comfort from the otherwise strong parallel to my relationship.

Anyhoo: Heartbreaker helped me notice the house on my back because for a long time after we broke up I prayed that we would get back together. And I swear that God himself was telling me to pray for that, and he was sending all these weird signs to confirm that that’s what he wanted me to pray for. And, duh, we didn’t get back together. The guy never spoke to me again, in fact. So I got all disillusioned with my prayer life, and how I must have only imagined that God wanted me to pray all that stuff, but then I thought that that doesn’t make any sense because it felt exactly like other times when I’ve been convinced God wanted me to pray a certain way (and that the things came to pass afterward that I had prayed for) and so how could I retroactively say that God must not have been leading me in that way, and how could I tell the difference anyway, and what kind of God would be so cruel as to make one of his Children all hopeful and then crush the hope in a big fell swoop? And what’s with this God that had His Old Testament People smite all their enemies, killing women and children and basically committing genocide, when now good Christians say that’s wrong and terrible and we should stop Rwanda and Sudan? Who the crap is this God?

And this is the load I've been carrying around: I've been assuming that, by following the "rules" (oh, but we're not legalistic around here, are we?) and being an exceptional example of the (Accomplished) Good Girl, that God would do his part and give me what I want. Probably, this is very obviously not true to most readers, and it even sounds ridiculous when I say it because theologically of course it's not true, we're not promised anything like that in any version of Conservative Christianity except for the Prosperity Gospel people who have that whole "name it and claim it" idea, which almost everybody else within Conservative Christianity recognizes as a load of hooey.

But there you have it: that idea has been wired into my subconscious for many, many years, and only now am I pulling it out of its dark little place in my brain to turn it around, play with it, figure out how it got there, and decide what to do with it now.