No Third Eye

One of the most important classes I took in my recent degree was an acting class. I learned more in this class than the teacher will ever know. As far as I know she is not a religious person, but unwittingly she taught me a great deal, among other things, about why the approach to personal piety in evangelicalism is less than compelling.

As an actor, she was most strongly influenced by students of Stanislavski, who revolutionized theatre when he acted on his observations about what kind of stage presence provoked his actual interest as an onlooker. The story goes that he was sitting in the dark theatre watching the rehearsal of some star actor. At that time, the style was a highly presentational kind of theatre that emphasized the delivery, complete with gestures and calculated everything: facial expressions, intonation, pauses. Enter a repairman, to work on some mechanical deficiency of the stage, and he dropped his toolbox, tools scattering everywhere! He was mortified to so crudely interrupt the great actor in his work. What Stanislavski realized as he observed the whole encounter has had an enormous effect on the way that acting is taught. Stanislavski was riveted to the repairman in his embarrassed scramble to pick up his tools and retreat to obscurity, and the skilled contortions of the actor went unnoticed as long as the repairman was on the stage. Why should a lowly repairman compel such a fascination? Stanislavski realized that the answer was that he could see the interior life of the repairman clearly. The actor’s interior life was irrelevant, obscured by his rehearsed lines and gestures. The real interior life of the repairman compelled engagement; the rehearsed façade of the actor did not. The exercises she put us through during each three hour class were all about helping us to be present in the moment, helping us rid ourselves of making choices with the awareness of an audience, what she called “the third eye,” and instead to really notice and engage our acting partners’ reactions, attitudes, facial expressions, etc. My favorite thing she said that will go with me forever: “Your partner is more important than your line.”

When I consider the two great commandments, loving God and loving neighbour, the two great Others, my upbringing emphasized my part; I’m learning that I can only fulfill those commandments if I’m completely engaged by the Other. If I am, I’ll be less prone to self-consciously agonize about whether or not I’ve sacrificed enough or done the will of God to the letter. At any given point, I can safely assume I haven’t in fact, but that will not be the point. Someday, those may at long last no longer be the questions I’m asking.

faith is not a meritorious act

I've been thinking about many of your posts, especially Caron's reflections on the pride we can find in being "saved" (cf. Mandy Moore movie). As both an upstanding Christian at my Christian school (which was, in my view, ever slipping closer to complete depravity) and an upstanding Christian at my secular prep school (already totally lost, of course) I felt a great deal of subtle pride in being a good kid. I think it stemmed from a strong life-of-the-mind and self-consciousness of belief.

In "The Pursuit of God," A.W. Tozer says, "Faith is not in itself a meritorious act; the merit is in the One toward whom it is directed. Faith is a redirecting of our sight ... sin has twisted our vision inward and made it self-regarding."

Sin can twist our vision of our own faith inward, so we focus on our faith as fact, as identity, and as an end, rather than actually directing our actions and thoughts to God. At a conference at Georgetown last week, Evangelicals and Muslims came together and had an honest conversation about the nature of faith and witness. The Muslims exhorted us to think about faith as action, not as belief. Without abandoning the creeds, I think there's some truth to that.

The Dangers of Narrative

One of my best friends grew up in Ethiopia where her parents were missionaries. One of her brothers is now a writer and college professor in eastern Canada, her other brother and sister are missionaries in Africa and South America. She has spent her adult life as a farmer’s wife and a mother of three in rural Alberta. She has plenty of friends from boarding school who spiritually and emotionally didn’t survive; she considers herself one of the lucky ones, not in the sense that she has it all figured out, but in the sense that she is at least still trying to sort it out at all. I think she’d say that marrying a farmer, at least marrying her particular farmer, was a gracious gift of God to her: a partner in sorting out life who, although growing up in the church, had his feet solidly on the ground and was not given to grand narratives about his life and work. For all that some of us desired these kinds of narratives, I think my friend had experienced such narratives from the other side, and wanted no part.

I played for their wedding twenty-five years ago. Over the years, they have taught me much about authentic Christianity. Take hospitality for example. This is not something she is primarily inclined to read about, blog about, discuss, or start a program for at church (nothing wrong with any of those things). But if you showed up on her doorstep needing help, she’d invite you in and help you in any way she could. She invites people over plenty, but loves people dropping by unannounced. Whenever I do it seems she was just hoping I’d come, even if she’s in the middle of something. Depending on the time of day, I might get to help her water the flowers, or weed, or pick beans, or run into town to pick up the mail, or make a salad for lunch, or do the dishes, or drink Merlot on her patio, but a refreshing visit I have always found. When I discovered I had to have major surgery two summers ago, I called her. She was prepared to get on a plane if I said the word. At least on the surface, she has a different life to her parents’, but it is no less grounded in understanding the gospel and making the gospel understandable to others. For her that has entailed, among other things, helping her daughter with Down’s Syndrome make a meaningful contribution to the world, supporting other families of children with disabilities, walking alongside friends whose marriages fall apart, praying for her children to understand the gospel in spite of all her inadequacies as a parent, loving her husband and working with him through the ups and downs of agriculture, caring for aging parents, taking meals to the field, making coffee for whoever is around at coffee time, going to funerals and retirement parties, weddings and graduations of neighbors and people in the community… all of this very ordinary activity. I can say without exaggeration that if it wasn’t for her presence in my life, whether I’d still be trying to sort it all out is doubtful. God provided her to teach me, and she isn’t aware of half of what she has done that helped me understand the gospel better. She literally has no idea. It’s not that she doesn’t make intentional choices, like reaching out to a friend who is too stubborn or messed up to initiate. It’s just that she doesn’t consider these actions to be anything but responding in the moment. It is not a grand vision she was aware of before it happened. It’s not a grand vision at all. As deeply as I value her friendship, her life is not a perfect success story, and my telling it as I have, emphasizing that it has made a big difference to me, does not elevate it to the stuff of legend. God uses her beloved flawed ordinariness to do His work. As far as I can tell, that’s as good as it gets. The evangelicalism I grew up with did not appear to understand this. The grand narratives were the only ones worth telling, and given the emphasis of the bible college, many of those narratives were missionary narratives. Even still in alumni communiqués, there are grand narratives about the college's latest endeavor, and then the "family gallery": pictures, statistics about when each person graduated, and some statement of ministry involvements. Suffice it to say I’ve never sent anything in. But Jesus (the gospel) says: “So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.’” As disappointing as it may be to realize I’m merely the hired help, isn’t it something of a relief?

devotional practices

wondering. how were you taught to enact your christian life when you were young?  your piety, as the puritans would have said. what were your early notions of devotional practice, reading the bible, prayer, etc?

did you do daily devotions with devotional books? randomly open the text to receive a special word from the lord?

little prayer methods, like ACTS (adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication)? other ways of prayer?

what do you do now? the same things? different things? what do you make of the language of devotion? "daily devo," "time with the lord," "quiet time,"  etc.

is it important to change that vocabulary? change those practices? keep them the same? re-name them?

no diving

the gospel: i was in need of rescue. i didn't realize, nor could i ask for help, and yet christ rescued me. anything else added to this and it's no longer the gospel (it's "another" gospel, which is no good news at all).

something i've been realizing is that i'm really quite a proud person. most of the tension that i experience comes from this pride that grows as quickly and torturously as a kudzu vine within my being. consider these passages:

"If we are more talented than others, are we ultimately responsible for it? No. Are our parents responsible for it? No. God made us and endowed us with the gifts and abilities that we have. Our talents, our possessions, our intelligence, our personalities, our relationships, and everything else with which we have been blessed are from God." (Humility, Mack)

"A truly humble person gladly serves the Lord regardless of the job, whether leading or following, preaching or taking out the trash, receiving thanks or being completely unnoticed by anyone." (Humility, Mack)

More often than not I think God is wasting my talents. Doesn't he know that I'm good with other people? Isn't he aware that I shine brightly in a city setting? Why in the world does he have me hidden in a 2 bedroom house when I could be center stage? Um, for His glory, of course.

It's ugly--I'm proud. All of the difficulties in my heart & manifested in my life recently stem from this lack of humility and refusal to remember what i really deserve as a trespasser. And when I remember back to my growing up years in a charismatic, evangelical church, I can't say that I was much directed toward inner humility, because that requires a girl to stop and look at her condition. And that requires being quiet and still. It doesn't feel good to soberly look at my daily sins of commission/omission. They remind me that I have no righteousness of my own to bring along. Why doesn't it feel good? Because my natural pride is slain. The focus is turned from me to that rescuer. Remember: i was in need of rescue. i didn't realize, nor could i ask for help, and yet christ rescued me.

But I don't remember that gospel focus from my evangelical days. I was too busy jumping around for the Lord to be still and remember my sin. Then I was too busy clapping for the offering and missed contemplating the rescuer. There was just so much emphasis on external doings and so very little upon the scriptures (THE WORDS OF GOD!!) and focusing on what God has done.

My thoughts are disjointed as cartoons were started half-way through. Perhaps another cup of coffee would do me well. I had to post these proud revelations to you because they've sobered me up. Do I really believes that God ordains the days? And if so, how can I not, like King David, respond:

What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?

carla and michelle's posts made me think about...

thanks, dear friends, for articulating these deeply personal, often painful experiences that have shaped your inner lives and choices. there's a subtext of isolation in both your stories, and in mine, too.

your posts made me think, again, about finding my way back to a peaceful corporate relationship with other christians (i.e., church). when the road is littered with the stumbling blocks you both talked about, it's so scary. risky.

conversations with several of you prompted the reflection that i sometimes feel like an outsider in church, sort of faking along that i like the same books, i vote the same way, i think about the world the same way, i think about gender roles the same way, i practice my faith the same way and so on.

on rare occasions, i "out" myself to trusted church friends. but that kind of honesty, i'm ashamed to say, is hard for me and hardly ever happens.

for me, hiding in the closet is a habit. so until the gospel becomes the thing that really matters, until those extraneous marks of membership fade, the church may stay full of people hiding in closets of various kinds. maybe when the gospel becomes the thing that really matters in my life, i won't be so worried about being truthful either.

Entitlement

I have come to think of entitlement as a major problem in my life not in terms of “God owes me a life of glowingly successful service for His kingdom” but in terms of how I was taught to view myself as a child of God at all. As I see it, the entitlement of my upbringing resulted from the gospel being assumed, but not taught. If you were already a Christian, the gospel was passé. “Preaching the gospel” was strictly an evangelistic tool, seeking to make converts and after that one moved on to the business of learning to be good. The gospel got you “saved,” inducted you into the ranks of those who believe, but was more or less unimportant after that. My evangelical community growing up was much less concerned with the gospel than they were with being good. Breaking the code of conduct prescribed by the college for the entire community, which encompassed both larger issues and far too much minutiae, could result in expulsion from the community. A lifetime in this culture engendered in me a confusion of focus and effectively inoculated me against the truth of the gospel for a long time. How evil I actually was, was masked by expert external adaptation to the good conduct that as far as I could tell was the main thing. Exclusion from the community motivated a lot of activity (daily chapel and regular church attendance, for example) and non-activity (a ridiculously long and arbitrary list of abstinence). The gospel was nowhere to be seen, at least it took me a long time to see it. When I finally glimpsed it, it was clothed in very ordinary non-religious digs.

One of the most helpful resources I’ve encountered recently in continuing to understand this dilemma in myself is Tim Keller’s book The Prodigal God. He helped me recognize myself in different phases of my life as both the elder brother, actually thinking God owed me because of my good behaviour, and as the so-called prodigal, dissatisfied with the perceived restrictions of living in the father’s house and only at last seeing the truth “in a far away country.” The gospel is the thing that is helping me realize who God is and what the big deal is for me to be in relationship with Him at all, and I am endlessly learning what it means to stake my entire life on the gospel and not on my performance, including that which I credit to God’s work in my life. With this has come the startling realization that for all my growing up in a conscientious religious environment, I didn’t learn the gospel. Among other things, this has screwed up my church involvement pretty badly, still the most difficult aspect I’m struggling to figure out. I know I need community because I will not thrive alone, and am committed to cultivating that. But I'm dead afraid of more religious paganism. Recovery is proving a long and winding road. At the same time I feel a freedom in my spirit that has come from the gospel that did not exist before. It’s been a gradual dawning, not a big emotional experience, or I’d have rejected it for sure. I consistently meet friends along the way, some in church and some in other places, some with similar stories and some with radically different stories, but who are all seeking non-religious gospel living with more questions than answers. My suspicion is there are a lot of us out there, spanning a wide age bracket.