So here’s the full story about my aunt Betty. Days ago, she had a heart attack and her unstoppable car careened off of a cliff where she died. I found out days later. She was already lost and, though I had not seen her at anything but a funeral, our family’s favorite gathering place of late, in years – though her presence in my life had been lost and lost to my full knowledge for years – though her interaction in my life in any nurturing way years ago when she moved to Arizona – and I mourned that, I dealt with it and filed it under a long list of pain titled “that’s life,” my numbness to her existence was still rooted in her living. Then she dies, and I am already alienated and removed from her so that her death is almost a sarcastic fact I have already assumed and assimilated into my life. I have so integrated her death into my life that the fact of her death is incapable of touching me.
Days later, I encounter my mom, who is holding a piece of information, an event, she wants to communicate with me. It is my mom, not someone who has left and disappointed me (well, okay, she has done that many times, but for the purposes of this entry, I’ll let that slide). I come to her soft, weary eyes with a soft, weary heart and let the sarcastic monologue, filled with protective, pre-emptive cynicism and void of the dangerous possibilities of hope – my armor – relax and fall away. Then, she stings me with what is assimilated and assumed but unfelt: Aunt Betty died.
This is what happened for me this weekend in class at Mars Hill. I found out – my heart found out – that the church – or at least its modern contemporary forms – has died. Speeding out of control and beyond her capacity and even calling, the church induced cardio pulmonary arrest. Unconscious, she careened off a cliff and crashed.
Meanwhile, inexpressibly hurt and abandoned – alienated – by the church, I had already assumed and assimilated her death. I filed our interaction under a title bathed in sarcasm, hopelessness, and self-preservation – “that’s life in the church.” The days that the church had spent nurturing me were long since over – if they ever even existed. Then the church dies and I have already assumed and assimilated that into my life. I have so integrated her death into my life that the fact of her death is incapable of touching me.
Only, there is no agent like my mother to toss my guard out and enable encounter with the weight of the death – or is there?
As I encounter and begin to assimilated Heschel’s statement “the higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments.” I open myself to encounter whatever truth the divine other brings to me as we, together, face destructively sacred moments.
I come to God’s soft and restorative eyes with a soft and weary heart and surrender to this divine other my armor. God gently but painfully – like a bandaid – removes the armor and does nothing to prepare me so that I can fully experience the death my intellect has acknowledged and my mouth proclaimed but my heart has sheltered and hedged itself from. God stings me with what is assimilated and assumed but unfelt: “What you have known as church died.”
And for the first time I feel it and fight with every power in me against tears. Publicly, I only slightly lose that battle – with two or three tears running in Chariots of Fire style slow motion down a cheek prepared for a flood – almost longing for the flood that’s held back by the levy of my emotional fortitude. Privately though, I enter that death with death of my own. I stop. The pain is so great I go into shock.
The question becomes, can I sit in the shit of that moment and encounter the fact that it is shit – total lifeless, repugnant, disease spreading shit and allow that the shit can exist in a place that is filled with God. God brings grace. Can I and will I sit still in this sacred moment and feel the depth not only of the colossal fall I have taken, not only the fact that what I’ve fallen into is shit, but also in the depth of grace – a depth I have been unwilling to experience.
The one who has been forgiven much loves much.
How great the potential for a church emerging from contemporary, modern life to love. It is there, hidden in the shit that grace is felt in the depths of the heart and there in the ambivalent pain and ecstacy of grace that hope is found in the faith that we are free to fall
In
Love.
Faith, hope, and love – the fruit that grow when the seed of divine love, which is grace, is incarnationally, sacrificially, intentionally and undeservedly planted in the fertile manure of the shit we produce and fall into.
