Author: winncollier

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Listen to the Words

Last evening, bedtimes were late. The boys were hungry. Miska was (rightfully) stressing about oral surgery she would have today (all is well, thanks for asking). I sprawled on the couch, surrendering for just a few clicks to a deep weariness. This fatigue has lurked around our house for a while; though Miska has carried it further, we’ve traded it back and forth.

I waved Seth over, and he crawled onto the couch with me. I stroked his hair and squeezed him tight, this boy adding sinew and muscle and inches by the day. Since it was bedtime and, truth told, I didn’t feel like walking up the stairs to his room, I said we would commence our nightly ritual right there, prayer and blessing as the two of us lay like twin-pops across our leather sofa.

Seth buried his head in my shoulder, and I began:

God, thank you for my son Seth. Thank you for his strength and his courage and his good heart. Thank you for the joy he brings me. Help him know you are real. Help him know you love him – and that I love him. Amen. Without a pause, I raised my thumb to his forehead, made the sign of the cross. Bless you, my son.

Seth looked up, beaming. “I want that on my ipod.”

Don’t we all? Aren’t we all craving for someone to see us, to notice what is good and true in us? Aren’t we taken aback on those far too rare occasions when someone speaks a word that zings right past the trivial and pierces our hidden question, our smothered neurosis, our muted desperation?

And we need to hear these true words like an echo, an echo stuck on “repeat.” For some sad reason, we cling to the violent, wicked and demeaning words. Yet the words that bring life, the words that prompt tears, the words that catch our breath or make us nervous or hint that a rich vein has been struck — those words we let loose. We don’t receive them. We know a million reasons to cast them askance: perhaps the one speaking is biased or doesn’t know us well or is simply playing nice. Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps is a joy-killer. Beauty can’t sprout where it isn’t welcome.

We need to hear these true words. We need to speak these true words. Listen for them. These words are life.

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Easter Light

We have stepped into the bright land of Resurrection. Whether we feel it or not, Resurrection has come. Easter is not our annual occasion for turning a naive eye away from the truth, all the while humming and smiling and refusing to stare reality in the face. Easter is the season where we yield to the Story that begins to make sense of all this madness, all this glory, all these dreams and disappointments that are forever colliding, forever giving us existential whiplash.

Easter doesn’t deny death or ruin. Easter says that death is so powerful, such an enemy, that God entered the fray. God still enters the fray. Easter tells us there is reason for joy. Easter reminds us that while we certainly have reasons for tears, we also have much reason for laughter. Easter insists that we refuse despair, we kick cynicism to the curb, we pick up our saggy bones and dance.

With Easter, we have an invitation to come out into the bright light, to believe that the God who raised Jesus from the dead can (and will) raise every kind of thing from the dead.

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The Saturday Between

On this day of stone-silence,
We sit fixed in the Saturday between.
Between tears and joy.
Between poverty and plenty.
Between ruin and triumph.
Between despair and delight.
Between forgotten and welcomed.
Between fearful and joyful.
Between war and war no more.
Between dark and light.
Between gloom and glory.
Between tears and laughter.
Between death. And life.
We sit fixed, riveted, in this Saturday between.

And this moment
Casts a pale, hallow light
Over the Long Saturday,
The many days
Where the world waits. Between.

But between is not the end, never is.
It is only between.

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Evil and Religion

First, this is post #250. If someone would please blow-up a balloon or send out a little woot! woot! right there in front of your screen, I’d appreciate it. I’m curious if any of you have been reading along from the beginning. If so, (1) May God grant you mercy for the words you’ve endured, and (2) A very sincere thanks. A writer has a rough time if there’s no place for his words to land. I’m glad, every now and then, some of them land here.

Second, I have a piece over at CSLewis.com on Lent, Dickens, Temptation and, of course, Lewis.

…

Last week, I was privileged to enjoy my second year as an author at the Virginia Festival of the Book (which, by the way, provides three days of absolute joy for any book lover – you’ll have to visit). This year’s event, Speaking of God, cast five authors writing from various vantage points. Reading the bios and book blurbs ahead of time, I knew the conversation would be spicy. I had no idea…

At one end of the table sat two smart and highly credentialed authors proposing that their work surveyed the most recent research in neuroscience, proving (in 144 pages, which I thought quite a feat) that God is merely a construct of the human mind and suggesting that the world would be a far better place if religion simply evaporated. Seated next to them, in the worst possible position if we wanted any chance at an evening of peace and harmony, was a philosopher whose spanking new Oxford Press book argues that a theistic worldview best explains the moral truths most of us say we believe. Meanwhile the two authors remaining (myself and another fellow) sat on the far end, which turned out to be a good vantage, out of the line of fire but close enough to watch the steam blow.

Needless to say, at some point the conversation ceased to be about the books.

I was struck, however, by the dogmatic, unequivocal claim that the world would be a kindler, gentler place if we simply abandoned our naive religious commitments and recognized science for the Almighty that it is. By this view, the evil in our world is fueled by religion, and science is the savior.

I’m hearing this claim as I’m immersed in Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, penned before the SS hung him by a thin wire in the grey courtyard of a Nazi concentration camp. Hitler did not heat up the smoke stacks because he was compelled by religious fervor. Hitler, madman that he was, was driven by a worldview he found compatible with the social science of his day. I’m not suggesting it was good science (it was bad science. Good science and good religion are friends not foes – neither have anything to fear if what we’re aiming for is the truth). I’m not suggesting that science gave us Hitler. I’m simply noting that if you were forced to choose between religion and science to find blame for the Third Reich, it would be science, hands down.

Six million Jews herded to the gas chambers had religious faith. Bonhoeffer had religious faith. Hitler had another kind of faith altogether.

I’m quick to admit, sadly and with horror, that much evil has been done in the name of Christianity (and other faiths too). This is to our great shame. However, in such moments, we stand judged – and rightly so – by the claims of our faith. It is precisely the view of God as a God of justice that allows someone to (rightly) name our actions evil. If God is simply something we dream up, then religion’s vision of evil is also something we conjure. And I’ve yet to hear a compelling, coherent response as to how, yanking that foundation, we reconstruct any meaningful case for the evils most of us instinctively acknowledge.

When someone names these evil moments evil (at least evil in any ontological sense), they affirm the fact that some reality in the universe has named certain actions just and certain actions diabolical. You can’t insist religion a farce while using religions’ criteria for what is right and what is wrong. Good science wouldn’t allow that double standard.

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A Stump

Be rooted like a tree / Planted by the stream  
                                                 {Brendan Jamieson}

Clyde Kilby, an English professor I wish I had known, crafted a catalog of 11 Resolutions (and I love that it was 11, not 10). This was his personal creed, his this I believe and this is how I will live. His sixth resolution is my favorite:

I shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are, but simply be glad that they are. I shall joyfully allow them the mystery of what Lewis calls their “divine, magical, terrifying, and ecstatic” existence.

I’ve borrowed this practice; and on most days after I run, I’ll stroll a few minutes extra. I breathe deeply and try to pay attention to my world. I’ll look around for some physical object, something on which to gaze. It may be the billows of white clouds or moss covering a portion of rock. A leaf tossed by the wind. A fence. A blade of grass. I take in the sight. I ponder the sheer fact that it exists. I notice that I had nothing to do with making it exist; and after I walk away I have no impact on whether or not it continues to exist.

Sometimes it’s good to remember that, valuable as I may be, I do not hold the world together.

Today, the object was a stump. Not a tree. Not a sapling full of possibility. Just a stump. A gnarled, cracked stump. A piece of creation that’s already had it’s day. It isn’t good for much. Other than a dog hiking a leg it’s direction every now and then, I bet no one pays this stump any attention. Yet there it sits. It sat there yesterday. It will be sitting there tomorrow. The rain will thrash. The sun will bake. The winds will flurry. But the stump merely sits, nestled in its little spot, its roots dug deep into the soil that will not let it loose.

Amid a world of noise, a world insisting we have something good to say, something smart to say …  amid a culture where we are jostling for position, spreading our branches so to speak, it’s balm to my weary soul to watch a stout old stump and know that sitting there, out of the way – sturdy and solid but unbothered and at rest –  can be enough.

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Bonhoeffer: Against Abstraction

[Jesus Christ’s] word is not an abstract doctrine, but the re-creation of the whole life of man. {Dietrich Bonhoeffer}

I’m taking a course at the University of Virginia on “Peace and Resistance: Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King, Jr.” So, of course, I’ve been reading a good bit of Dietrich Bonhoeffer lately.

As you know, Dietrich was a German pastor and theologian instrumental in the German Resistance during World War II. Dietrich was imprisoned for subversive activity, and (though complicated by the fact that he was a principled pacifist) later charges were added for his association with the infamous July 20 Plot to assassinate the Führer (the oft popularized story of the plot was the center-piece of Tom Cruise’s 2008 film Valkyrie).

As the SS grew more suspicious of Bonhoeffer’s entrenchment in the Resistance, they passed Bonhoeffer from prison to prison until he finally landed at Flossenburg concentration camp. This was his final stop. He was hung (asphyxiated actually) by a thin steel wire on April 9th, 1945 – only 14 days before the camp was liberated. Bonhoeffer was 39.

Bonhoeffer opposed not only the Nazi regime but the religious movement that swept through Germany, the “German Christian” movement. Attempting to re-frame Christian witness so it could harmonize with the Third Reich, the “German Christian” movement ultimately viewed their first allegiance to the State and their second allegiance to God. One bishop fielded a question: “What is one first — a Christian or a national socialist?” The bishop replied, “A National Socialist.” In public worship, they would go so far as to sing hymns to Hitler.

Against this moment, Bonhoeffer wrote his most challenging and enduring work, The Cost of Discpleship. His plain assertion was this: To be a disciple of Jesus Christ is to say that God rules over everything. As such, you can not be a disciple of Jesus if you are unwilling to obey Jesus above every other person, claim or passion. You can imagine how that landed in 1944 Germany.

Dietrich believed that the proclamation of Jesus as Lord was always enfleshed in (and evidenced by) the lived realities of our life, the choices we make, the allegiances we declare, the principles and ideas that we obey (or disobey). Christianity is concrete, not abstract.

To be a Christian was not merely to affirm religious facts but to be gripped by the reality that Jesus Christ has come to resurrect us to an entirely new kind of life – a lived life. Equating Christian faith with any particular political movement is idolatry (and this is a lesson we best learn). However, being Christian will always have political (public, lived) implications. Obeying the way of Jesus means saying yes to some things and saying no to others.

The work of the Christian is not to redress faith so that it can be squeezed within another ideology but rather to live Christianly amid, within, over or against every other competing claim. If Jesus is Lord, then this assertion defines reality. Everything else must fix itself to that bare truth.

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First Stories First

The Bible is about God.

Perhaps it seems frivolous to clarify this, but I believe it’s a truth we’re on the verge of losing. These days, everyone caters to us because everyone wants something from us. The game is to find out what we want – and then beat the other guy in promising how fast they can get it to us. It matters little the trade, most everyone’s in on the racket — our corporations schmucking for brand loyalty, our politicians grabbing for votes, our pastors and priests (and of course, I wrestle with these demons) clamoring for affirmation and dollars. It’s easy to see why we might get the idea that everything really is about me. But this me that everything seems to be about isn’t the true me. None of these shucksters really know me, nor do they care to.

When the Bible enters this milieu, we assume that Scripture (or God) does the same. The Bible dashes after our questions. God rushes, like a zealous car salesman, to push a model than meets our every whim. But though we may drive off the lot with all the bells and whistles, are we any better for the transaction? Are we any more joyful? Any more alive? Any more human?

We may finagle a god who makes us comfortable or endorses the life we are set toward (with minimal adjustments as a nod to the Almighty). We may sigh contentedly if we locate a god who delivers quick pithy lines to our struggles, the immediate relief we demand. But if we settle for this god we think we want, we will never engage the true God who rules over the Earth, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of Mary and Peter and Paul, the God who raised Jesus from the dead. If we are committed to the God we think we want, we will never know that the questions we are asking aren’t the right questions at all.

God is God, and we are not God. And the Bible is the book that tells us both of these things.

If I you will allow me to indulge in a moment of ridiculous oversimplification: some of our most vitriolic theological battles of the last two centuries seem to pivot on this question: Is theology fundamentally humanity’s story or God’s story. I have no desire whatsoever to enter the slugfest, but between these two choices, I opt for the latter.

But – it’s no better to go the other extreme and say that God (and God’s book) is so otherly, so divine, that we ought not expect it to engage the complexities and harsh realities and the wild joys of being human. By this way of thinking, you go to the Bible to discover whether or not it is okay to kill, but you have to go to a shrink to talk about why your heart feels like it may break in two. In other words, you go to the Bible to hear God’s story, but you have to go everywhere else to learn your own story.

The Scriptures – and our wisest voices over the centuries – have refused this dichotomy. They have taught us that the Bible is about God, first – but that it is about us second. And it must be in this order because the way we most truly know ourselves is to know God. As Augustine said, we know ourselves better in God than in ourselves. Our stories matter because God has made the remarkable (and at times seemingly foolish) move to intertwine our story within God’s story. God does God’s will, but God doesn’t rush past us. God wills that humanity be more than a blip on the celestial radar. Quite the opposite – in Jesus, God vested God’s full self in the human condition. Jesus was not a lab experiment. Jesus is the revelation that God is not distant. God goes local. God knows, as Hebrews tells us, all our human travail and weakness.

God knows these dark spaces intimately because God has suffered them, with us. Our pain matters – not because we are the center of the story – but because the God of the Universe endures our pain with us and longs for our pain to be no more. Our joy matters – not because the Universe will melt if we are not sated (our burden is heavy, but not that heavy) – but rather our joy matters because Jesus defeated everything opposed to joy and invites us into God’s kingdom where joy is evermore.

And every place where sin and death prevail and every place where joy is thwarted, every place in our story where we encounter injustice or loneliness or longing for freedom or a place of belonging – those are the places where Jesus wants to make our stories new.

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Courage of Being You

I did not intend to be ‘Stanley Hauerwas.’ I am aware, however, that there is someone out there who bears that name.

So begins the memoir penned by, of course, Stanley Hauerwas. One of the things I believe Hauerwas eludes to is his recognition that the person he has become is not the well-crafted result of a life wrested toward this end.

I believe it one of the grandest illusions of modern humanity, this notion that we can make ourselves to be whoever it is we want to be. I don’t tell my sons that they can do whatever they put their mind to. They have many options, and there are years ahead to discover what is in their heart and how they are to give what is in their heart away to their world. However, there are some things that simply are not meant for them.

The problem is not lack of will or tenacity. The problem (which really is no problem at all – but a gift) is that we are particular beings, with particular bents and unique treasures. Our narrative is uniquely ours, and this narrative is made up of all kinds of intricate details. What we love, what we hate, what we see and how we see it, what makes us cry, what makes us want to gouge our eyes out. All these things make who we are.

I am not made to be anything. I am certainly not made to be everything. I believe each of us are created to be someone particular, to offer something particular. No matter how hard I try, I will never be an Olympic marathoner or at the helm of a Fortune 500 behemoth, thank God. I’m free from that bland and crushing expectation.

However, I also think Hauerwas’ wry line hints at his belief that who he truly is may not be who everyone has imagined him to be. The name and the image have taken on a life all their own. Most of us spend far too much of our time attempting to be a good version of ourselves, an acceptable version, a moderate version, a version that lives up to the billing. Too often, I am too aware of other’s reactions to me, gaging whether or not I should put on the brake, tone down the language, give someone an easy exit.

But if I do any of those, if I become who I’m expected to be rather than who I actually am, I silence the distinct and remarkable gift God intends to offer the world through me. And the same is true for you. It is an act of holy rebellion to refuse the safe path of meeting other’s expectations. It is courageous to listen to God’s voice, to hear God tell you who you are and what you are to be in this world. It is courageous to hear that – and then to live that.

And, let me tell you, our world needs courageous people. We need you.

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Joy

There’s much to lament in this world. Every day offers a hundred reasons to cry. But, I also believe every day offers at least a hundred reasons to laugh or sing or make love or give an extra big tip or do something that costs you much – but brings a revelry all its own because you feel the pleasure of having done right, done well.

If it is the easy thing for us to slap a cheery word on top of misery, then we need to connect with the reality of sorrow. But if it is the easy thing for us to wallow in dismay, then we need to jump heavy into joy.

For many of us, joy is the harder effort, certainly is for me. I’m not sure why. Perhaps we have been disappointed too often. Perhaps we are comfortable in the gloom. Perhaps we don’t have eyes to see or ears to hear what the Apostle John calls the “river of joy overflowing.”

The good news is you can find joy just about anywhere. For instance, this week I found joy in my seven-year-old:

Seth: Par Fat? Par Fat?? Mom, this is going to make me fat?!?

Miska: No, Seth, that’s Parfait. Parfait.

Joy can surprise you at any turn. Watch for it. I’ll bet you find it.

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The Undertaker

Tonight I told the boys I had a new book to pick up at the library for our evening reading. A friend recommended Ferrol Sams and his tales of Porter Osborn, Jr., a boy growing up on a Georgia farm during the depression.

Wyatt was eager. But Seth needed one detail clarified: “Does anyone die in this story?”

Last Friday, we watched Where the Red Fern Grows, the new version with Dave Matthews looking right at home in those baggy overalls. During the infamous scene that shall not be named, Seth was mortified. He cried out and jumped up on the couch with Miska and me and buried his head in the covers in a futile attempt to erase the horrors he had just seen. “This is a bad, bad movie,” he said, gulping down the tears. “Why would anyone watch this???”

Now you understand why, when he heard that a story was coming about a boy and a farm, Seth wanted to know whether anyone or anything would be meeting their maker. He’s no fan of death.

Fair enough, neither am I.

Still, we’re all heading there. The line about death and taxes may be tired, but it’s true. And I wonder why we don’t talk about it more, why we don’t plan for it more, why we don’t ponder if how we are living will help us be the people we hope to have been when the time for living’s done?

On the bookshelf next to me, I have a book by poet Thomas Lynch who also happens to have a day job as an undertaker. The title alone deserves a read: The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade. Lynch’s first page begins: Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople.

Every year, come rain or shine. And it’s the same in every town and hamlet and village world ’round. There’s nothing much more common than dying, you’d think we’d be good at it. But we aren’t, least not most of us. A couple days ago, one of my friends mentioned that he’s thinking about reading an obituary every day during Lent, the spiritual discipline of remembering who was here, who lived and who isn’t living anymore. The idea isn’t to be morbid, but to remember, to “count your days” as the Psalms instruct. The point really isn’t death at all — but life.

Eugene Peterson once said that the pastor’s job is to prepare people for a good death. When you do that, you’re preparing them for a good life. On this month when we are thinking about beginnings, let’s also ponder endings. And then let’s live well toward that.

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