On Lessons Learned from Shred Syllabi

A year ago to the week I wrote this post (the one about abandoning my Christian faith as I’d always known it).

While I haven’t had much interest in it the past few months, it engendered an enormous amount of attention from friends close and far flung at the time. I’ve since come to know for a fact that a few of those are on similar journeys as this one.

So I decided that I’d toss up two thoughts concerning my journey of the past year.

1) Here’s a quote from a book I’m currently reading for school whose title I’ll spare you the distraction of sharing. Not sure what I could add to this one, besides how many times I’ve nudged against similar ideas in my life and found them equally meaningful. My hunch is that this is one of those lifelong lessons that I’ll keep bumping into.

As you may know, a lot has gone on for me in the last seven days, and I still haven’t sorted it all out. I’m not sure when, if ever, I will, but I’m grateful for you, and I’m grateful for the confusion. Faith is an action verb, right? If I say I’m a believer and I feel some turmoil around my beliefs, it means that my faith is alive, and I need to take a closer look at what’s not working for me.

2) A big part of me regaining a faith that seemed real has been me making faith, God, Christianity, whatever something special (i.e., removing the wallpaper feel of the Christian life or constant background noise of God Talk). I know that the ecclesiology of that discussion is pretty minefield-laden, but then again, I no longer fancy myself some ardent defender of the faith of a Jesus SEAL enforcing theological purity. My hunch is that I’ve got about a year left of washing out the desensitizing taste of half a lifetime in ubiquitous evangelicalism until I regain a sense of God, the Bible, and praise and worship tunes being sacred again.

I’m purposefully keeping this one very brief, for maximum digestability. As always, I’ve got plenty more to say, but it seems like stopping right here at these two lessons would prove grist for an entire lifetime’s worth of reflection.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all.

Bookends Where There Shouldn’t Be

My position on the importance of simple, fundamental hope I think is clear and consistent.

For me, one of the strongest channels through which that lifeline parts thickening clouds of despair is music.

Three songs about hope come to mind to which I cling with the most passion, and as I think of those songs what each seem to have in common is that the journey will ultimately end well.

Beyond things “working out,” you won’t find guarantees on the details.

And perhaps that’s why I like those three songs.

Where I go with this is the conviction that, with a very broad and wide-angle perspective, we religious people damage our faiths the more loose ends we try and tie up.

One of the tunes I had in mind from above, the John Mayer bootleg “This Will All Make Perfect Sense Someday,” seems to bring this into clearest focus. The title basically tells you everything the song covers, and it still remains one of my very favorite Mayer tunes period.

But no answer anyone could drop on me for why Dad died this past summer will make that loss “make sense.”

That one’s just a dead end, a stump.

The relationship I had in college that broke my heart and shattered my faith, how the 9/11 attacks managed to succeed as well as they did, your Aunt Gertrude’s fatal breast cancer-

I suspect that the sorts of “here’s why that happened…” answers that bubble up to surfaces work for a while-or even an entire lifetime, for plenty of people-but for me, how much my faith can bear seems to have shurnk a little more in the aftermath of one of those answers splintering under an overload of reality.

Something I’ve learned from studying folks’ reactions to full on crisis has been that the one trying to help really has to stay on top of not overpromising, i.e., “We can definitely get your  job back,” “The doctors are totally going to pull your son through this one,” “There’s no chance the cops won’t catch this guy,” etc.

Because not only do even freaking out people have some capacity for spotting bullshit when they see it, they also tend to remember such things after the fact.

And their hope proves misplaced.

And they end up a little less able to hope the next time around.

So I will argue for the importance of the same guiding principle for people of faith who’ve found themselves in a vulnerable place, being forced to take gingerly glances at the Mom’s Fine China innards that undergird the fundamental beliefs they hold about God and the world.

Don’t commit God to things you just assume He’ll cover, and don’t assume your tidy fiats can outlast organic, unpredictable doubt.

Instead, sow your peace in things not making perfect sense someday.

“You’re a little too wound up, Bob.”

This week has really been rough for me, busyness wise. Not much sadness or anything like that, and nothing heavy has gone down.

Just very, very scattered and tired (but also very, very anxious and convinced I need to knock out lots of things at once).

Something people have said to me often after I’ve told them about losing Dad this summer has been “wow, I can’t imagine how that must feel.”

I always appreciate that, humbly agree that they in fact can’t but work hard to not puff myself up into thinking I’m more special than I ought.

One recent conversation with a new pastor friend stands out as sort of encapsulating one of my biggest anxieties about life without a dad, the life I’ve got ahead of me from here on out; what I shared with Jarad was quite simple:

there’s now nobody in my life to tell me that I’ve become an asshole.

I’ve got a very clear memory of Dad having one time told me, when I was home for a very precisely choreographed weekend I’d managed to break him off, “you’re a little too wound up, Bob” (“Bob” being a nickname that only my most intimate family members call me for reasons I’d prefer to keep special). His way of life was very slow, relaxed, and anti-urgent; mine then (and this week) is very impatient, anti-relaxed and ruthlessly anti-inefficiency.

He was right then and he’d be right now.

Fast forward that scene a year, five years, ten years from now, except that I’m 100% on my own to have found people who’ve cultivated gentle ways to slice through the fog of me being so wound up with Busy and Important Things that I don’t have time for the most cherished in my life to love me in their own way.

Call this one an absence whose presence is still a work in progress.

On God as Space Invader

Looking back, the summits of religion proving most problematic on the topography of my life have been those times when I was trying to make room for God.

Say, “get Jesus to fill me up so that I won’t look at women in bikinis too much,” or “ask God to be with me tomorrow, because I know it’s going to be a really stressful day at work.”

Or cowering in a car before a promising first date, calling in the God reinforcements (the whole crew: Son and Holy Ghost included) to help me calm down enough to make polite conversation with some girl who’d probably just been having the same conversation with God.

A seminary professor was I believe the first to poke the hole in that dike; a hole that in fact brought the whole edifice crashing down.

[Cue advertisement here for the sort of life change that throwaway comments like that from teachers can have in students' lives.]

I believe his casual point was something to the effect of, “when we pray, why do we ask, or invite, God to be present amongst us? Is God someone we visit, or someone we allow in (any more than He already is)?”.

Not really sure what more I could add to that.

I dare you to take a day or a month or so to ponder the ramifications of God already being involved in and present at your lovely picnic, your time of grief, or your football game.

I think it a lovely and beautiful thing to take a moment during such events to offer up thanks, but it seems to me that tucking God into your backpack and unfurling Him right after the napkins and snacks (I mean, before anything else; gotta break God off His due first) is far more problematic than getting into the mindset that He was, is, and always is early to such gatherings.

I didn’t pray once in the first few weeks after Dad dying. In fact, I remember very deliberately keeping my eyes open and not bowing during the prayer at my dad’s funeral service.

Yet I somehow, looking back on it now, see God’s presence as a sad umbrella enveloping that entire sad scene.

As God wasn’t invading the space of these mourning people breathless from the sucker punch of sudden loss, but instead He was simply there.

Some presences are better left unannounced.

And some are left better assumed.

“It’s Not About You, Jesus.”

One artistic hallmark of my growing up was the Christian knockoff of otherwise popular songs. I heard it most recently in some truly feculant rendering of Sting’s immortal “If I Ever Lose My Faith in You.” (Granted, that’s a phenomenal pop song sung by a phenomenally gifted vocalist-but still. It struck me as just about as limp and unsatisfying as an evening of preseason NFL action.)

The basic gimmick on rehashes like that is that some Christian artist will secure the rights to a wise or noble “secular” song and, in plenty of cases, not change even a single word of it, and make a number one CCM hit of it.

Sting song, sung by Sting, playing on CCM radio?

No chance.

Sting song, sung by someone demonstrably “safe,” playing on Positive and Encouraging, Safe for the Whole Family(tm) KLOVE?

Let it rip.

The second most recent example of which I’m aware of this happening went down circa-2007, with a Christian rehashing of Mike+the Mechanics’ “The Living Years.” Same exact deal, as far as I know.

If you really want to stretch the nostalgia muscle, try and remember the kerfuffule of Amy Grant’s forray into the non-CCM game in the early 90s with her entirely innocent and peppy songs like “Every Heartbeat.” Not enough Jesus for that one to be a Christian Song (even if I’m sure plenty of dates turned into marriages which begat families, based on the good and pure sentiments of sappy tunes like Amy Grant’s).

And it does in fact work the other way around too; any guesses as to why they play MercyMe’s “I Can Only Imagine” on Today’s Soft Rock Classics here in Memphis? Sure doesn’t seem to fit in amongst their typical mix of Celine Dion and The Tony Rich Project!

Anyway, what prompted this screed was hearing this gorgeous Don Henley tune and thinking of how meaningful I’ve grown to find the chorus in the 10 or so years since I’d heard it last. (Thank you, Spotify.)

The chorus, which reads, “this love/is like nothing I have ever known/this love/is like nothing I have ever known/take my hand now/I’m taking you home.”

It’s not about God.

Don Henley himself has said, explicitly, that the song was about bringing his first child home from the hospital.

“This love… is like nothing I have ever known.”

It’s not about God.

It’s about a baby, and Henley’s glad to be “taking him home.”

And that’s like nothing he has ever known.

And that’s not about God.

If we Christian folk are so terrified of beauty for which someone isn’t footnoting precisely where God gets the explicit credit, then we’re as terrified and confused about our world as that bundle Henley’s singing about bringing home.

The song is about beauty that all parents (including this hopefully-eventual one) can relate to-a beauty that unites all humans.

Now that’s about God.

It Breaks When You Force It

Today marks 15 years since I became a person of faith.

Met the Lord, got saved, converted, “made the only good decision I’ve ever made in my life” (as I remember phrasing it at some point, probably with tears).

I know it’s one of the cheesier milestones around, yes indeed I do.

I can remember one (2000ish) when I endeavored to commemorate that day by fasting the entire day. (If I recall, I failed, due to the very real issue of my spending that day under the northern Louisiana sun with some iteration of my former youth group.)

I can remember other ones when I simply didn’t think about it at all. (I’m honestly surprised that I remembered it today; if I could only control the random things that bubbled to the surface of my mind!)

I’m doing a bit of journaling this afternoon, and I’ve been reminded of something my friend Kim and I were discussing last(?) week, with regard to faith.

The gist of the conversation was that, as Kim understands it, whatever a person’s faith “is” sort of manifests automatically; in theological jargon, we’d probably muddy that beautiful sentiment with some jangled train of multi-syllabic circumlocution  like “the outer manifestation of the inner work of God’s Holy Spirit is good works.”

But the fact of what she was saying struck a very deep chord within me (think needle screeching across record player, and my recollection of the conversation stopping precisely there), and that’s been the locus of most all my Dixon-specific God thinking since then.

As I was journaling, I sort of had one of those Plinko moments, wherein everything I was typing, sort of stream-of-thought like, seemed to lead inextricably to the old trope,

it breaks when you force it.

There’s plenty I could suss out of that, philosophically, but how it seems to apply to faith, my faith, is that I’ve spent years now-heck, every single one, probably, of the past fifteen-consciously tinkering with my religious faith, trying to make it “better,” or more “active,” or more well, whatever.

Less Dixon-interested.

More thankful.

Less concerned with beautiful women.

More accepting of others’ taking advantage of me.

It’s always been something of which I’ve been so consciously aware (or tried to be!), but when talking to Kim, it just hit me that I need to just let the consc ious, deliberate outworking of my faith sort of fade into the background.

Just be natural.

Good or bad, hands on or not.

That’d be about as off the charts contrary to how I started on this journey of faith and how I’ve spent the majority of it so far as I could get, I must say.

But hey-now’s as good a milestone as any, right?

All joking aside, as I was journaling just now, I literally typed out that the only way I could see myself caring about this particular calendar date fifteen (or even five) times more would be in my beginning to do just that: letting faith fade into the background, turning into an automatic thing, and seeing  the new places that where I’ve already been might take me.

Because it’s broken otherwise.

God in the the Socks

I’m growing increasingly hostile to religion.

There, I said it.

I can’t sugarcoat it or pretend otherwise.

My undergrad degree was in Religion and Philosophy (note-the phenomenon of religion in general, not just Christianity), so it comes very naturally to me to think/talk/write about generic “religion” and have it apply to that which bin Laden, _____ Kardashian, or that on which anyone’s gun toting Texan uncle might lean for meaning.

Anyway, I read the below in an article recently and it’s largely been my meditation of late for whatever it is that I’m hoping my faith, once it settles, does not look like.

-beliefs that build barriers between people

-weaken self-esteem, personal freedom and responsibility, and relatedness to the universe

-do not help people forgive and be less guilty

-make life less enjoyable

-repress feelings

-interfere with the constructive expression of sexual and aggressive vital energies, and the handling of existential anxiety

-disresprect reality, intellectual honesty, and doubts, and

-emphasize fear over love.

Notice that none of those are spotlighting anything uniquely Christian; that means that Muslims, Sikhs, or Scientologists could be ugly to one another in any of those ways regardless of which Deity’s ears they think they’re rubbing behind.

The “so what?” of my faith is the feedback loop where I live these days; what God, in actual fact, would look like in Dixon’s socks, holding the job I hold, living in the house in which I do, working the job I work, right here in 38018.

And that’s not a new self-consciousness on my end. I have very early recollections of embarrassing things I said or did to others about how any and all Christians, myself included, ought act in certain situations I’d not yet experienced (say, how I would relate to my wife, once I had her, or how I would handle my personal finances, once I had some).

Anyway, the list above resonates with me in very deep places, both given my personal history as well as my wannabe-counselor status.

And I’ve confidence that I could give you a story and a picture (not just my own!) of separate individuals in whom I’ve seen such weirdness over the years to flesh out each and every one of those points above.

Beliefs that build barriers between people? See, ‘those neighbors can’t babysit our kids, because they don’t know God.’

Repress feelings? See, ‘God thinks I’m overreacting to getting fired and wants me to move on.’

Disrespect reality? See, ‘The earth can’t possibly be getting warmer, based on our reading of Gen. xx:xxb; looks like science whiffed on that one! Woops!’

Those three were all silly and not terribly well-considered. And I’m sure you can conjour far better ones.

But I fully believe that there is a faithful and reverent expression of historic Christian faith out there that manages to weave itself amongst those eight high points.

I believe that with all my heart, really I do.

Because Jesus’ yoke is easy and his burden is light.

Because God doesn’t want to destroy (y)our life.

And because God doesn’t cram feet into gloves, lead people to live barefoot, or require that those who yearn to live for Him learn to do so one-legged.

Folks historically don’t leave many comments on my posts, but this one would sure benefit from lots of perspectives. So, do you mind?

When I Say I’ll Pray

I had an email exchange with a friend this morning who’s got some difficult things on her mind (success in a desperately-longed for job interview being the very least of them).

Anyway, I told her in all solemnity that I’d pray for her, and I meant it and I have.

As I reflected on whatever baggage I hold that informs me saying I’ll pray for someone, this (iTunes link) Sarah McLachlan tune came to mind.

The entire song doesn’t fit entirely, but here’s the basic gist of it: the singer has gotten word that her lover/partner is about to die, and she (the singer) is coming to terms with that impending loss. (Some of this I read in an interview with Sarah M.; some of it I glean from the song.)

The part you care about comes toward the very end (3:45). The singer prays,

Oh God

If you’re out there won’t you hear me

I know that we’ve never talked before

Oh God

The man I love is leaving

Will you take him

When he comes to your door

With 100% transparency (and sincerity) I share with you that that’s the sort of timidity that marked my prayers this morning and any other time I’ve prayed the past year or so.

“God, we don’t talk often, and I don’t know how You’ll take this… but would You help me by helping my hurting friend? Okay; thanks. I’ll leave You alone now. Thanks for helping my friend.”

Here’s the video; I’d love for you to give it a look. I’d forgotten how truly powerful and gorgeous a tune it was.