Letter #31: Sleepless Nights

The hungry sheep look up. Are they fed?

Dad,

I thought this week we might talk a little about church. Last week we ended up saying that Agape love is like hurling yourself off a cliff: you throw all thought of yourself to the winds, and get lost in doing what’s good. I feel so sure this must be right that I’ve been a little haunted all weekend, wondering how close this practice we’re talking about is or is not to what we’re often encouraged to think about in church. 

Worrying about this subject puts me in decent company: Søren Kierkegaard, undeterred by having a very goofy name, wrote profoundly about how hard it is to take faith seriously once it gains official approval. “Countless generations knew by rote, word for word, the story of Abraham. How many were made sleepless by it?” 

I’m a little less gloomy than Kierkegaard, and a lot less Danish. But I see his point. Much of what goes on in church ends up being simultaneously too complicated, and too easy. Too complicated because it wraps us back up in the kind of bean counting that gets us focused on ourselves again—the what-must-I-do-to-be-saved sort of anxieties that end you up turning faith into a checklist.

And whether the checklist contains the nice but mostly catastrophic liberal policies you must support, or the stern though mostly edifying conservative disciplines you must adopt, it all becomes, in a weird way, too easy. Because if you’re obsessing over filling out your preferred checklist, you don’t have to strain night and day, moment by moment, to abandon yourself and your preoccupations in favor of the ever-varied humans and ever-new situations presented to us daily by the ever-living God. That’s a more unruly and unpredictable business. 

I feel the need to tread lightly here, because sniffing at other people’s worship habits is just another way of feeling superior and thus not doing love. But people need God, myself included, and notoriously they’re seeking him less and less at church—and more and more in fanatical cults of politics or technology, where more dangerous gods are menacingly eager to be found.

And with this crisis going on, it feels a little self-indulgent to fiddle about with questions whose Biblical answer might actually be, “don’t think about it too much.” Questions like “who shall rise” or “who gets to sit closer to Jesus on the last day?” Maybe even those questions are the sorts we’re supposed to let go of.

After all, in Jesus’ parables, the saved discover at the final trumpet that their finest hour came when they weren’t paying that much attention to “getting into” heaven so much as living by its logic on earth. “When did we feed you?” They were so consumed in the hungry human face across from theirs that they didn’t even realize it was also God’s. That’s a pretty wild, even a fearsome kind of love. Seems worth losing sleep over (though I know you never sleep anyway).

Love,
Spencer