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
I really was affected by Tozer in grad school. Especially The Pursuit of God. I need to revisit him. As for your larger question, I like to think about what Paul says about the “cloud of witnesses” and the “company of saints.” The tradition is like an enormous fellowship that cheers you on in your journey from across the finish line. But you’re the one making the journey, which is a new experience all its own, not quite like any that came before. That’s why you’re here: to carve out one new path, to reveal one new image of the invisible God.
I was actually just reflecting on something similar on my way home from Mass this morning. I was thinking about how the early Christians lived. That their focus was very "small" so to speak. They knew they had negligible effect on political life and most probably expected their lives to end in some painful and inglorious way, yet they persisted in their BELIEF first followed by small sacrifices and acts of charity. Ultimately God used all these little acts to eventually convert the entire Empire. They had no intention of doing that, it was the result of their cumulative faithfulness. We who live 2000 years later in a post-Christian world have the experience of living in a time where we know things CAN be changed, so we seem to expect them to by our actions more than God's, I think.
Chesterton observed, " The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad." And, these wildly wandering virtues, in his observation, do "more damage." I definitely agree with this. I think there's so much misguided compassion in some areas it actually hurts those it intends to help, and Heaven forbid you point this out because it just shows you somehow to be "unChristian."
I've always thought there is a holy space where God works. It is the space between Him and the person, but He can't work if we fill up the space with ourselves too much. Perhaps if we all tried to live a little more to please God alone, we would free up a little space for Him to actually work in the world in a mysterious but effective way.