Journey Inward, Journey Outward

The last week has been an object lesson in my fourth characteristic of Christian maturity. Because I have four (yes, four, it's ridiculous) chronic health conditions, I am classed as clinically vulnerable to Covid-19. One of those conditions was caused by a genetic inheritence which I have passed on to at least one of my children, although advances in medicine meant that it was diagnosed very early in their life and corrected through surgery. Another has been caused by my own choices and then exacerbated by other circumstances. Another was quite possibly triggered by a period of intense stress. And then another just arrived like the icing on the cake. I mention all this not because I'm inviting either empathy or disapproval, but because it highlights the undoubted link between the body and the rest of life. And I have Covid-19 so my body has been talking to me a lot week; in fact, it's been hard to hear anything else.

I don't mean to suggest that the link between the body and our minds, upbringing and lifestyle is simple; quite the contrary. As someone who is part of the chronic fatigue universe, I can tell you that nothing rankles quite as much as a Facebook friend offering a simple solution, whether that be daily mindfulness or a kale enema. Sorry Facebook friend, I don't like kale, wherever you're putting it! Saying that there is a link between what is happening in the mind and what is happening in the body is not the same as showing direct causation either way. How does stress affect the way our immune system works? How does debilitating illness affect our mental health? We have some pointers, but no answers.

So it is with the inner life and the outer, public life. Jesus says, 'The mouth speaks what the heart is full of,' (Matthew 12:34, Luke 6:45) as if to point out the inevitability of the link: what is really going on inside is going to come out one way or another. Yet I have found that in Christians, there are at least two ways in which we sometimes work to disconnect the inner and outer lives.

One way of trying to break the link between the inner life and outer life is an approach to faith still being worked out as the New Testament is being written. This approach (in its extreme form it's called antinomianism) says that if we are right with God our behaviour doesn't really matter that much. For some Christians that might mean that we prioritise getting the right doctrine. For others it might be about having the right political beliefs. Ot perhaps even that we have a soul that is being saved so it doesn't really matter what we do with our body. There is a sense that being right (on the inside) is more important than living right. Whatever faith is, it's not something that necessarily has a lot to do with how you actually live.

The letter of James dismisses this view quite comprehensively. Early in his letter, James says it's impossible for a Christian to say either, 'I'm an activist, I leave the faith stuff to others,' or, 'I'm a believer, that's all that matters.' James says both positions are untenable: 'You get to see my faith by my actions' (Jas 2:18), the implication being that the two are inextricably linked.

James says that our lives will tell the truth about what we are like on the inside. If we really believe and trust in the way of Jesus, that will have a noticeable effect on the way we live. If we are just giving rational assent to a set of beliefs, maybe less so. The key is this: our lives will teach us what we really believe too, not just those that are watching.

The other way that Christians can suffer from purposefully trying to disconnect their interior and exterior lives is when they find themselves in a situation in which they have to carry on performing the public activities of faith when that faith is crumbling - or completely absent - on the inside. This is a common problem in believing communities of all kinds, but Jesus has a particular problem with performative faith. (Maybe he would have called out some virtue signalling in our culture, but not for the reason the right does today: I think he would want people to go further, to be more radical, to do more than post to social media.)

The insult that Jesus uses most (Yes, Jesus insulted people) is hypocrite: the person whose behaviour is not the (whole) truth of who they really are. At first look, this sounds like terrible news for the Christian hiding their brokenness and doubt - great, I get condemnation for being a hypocrite on top of everything! Yet when Jesus talks about the kind of person we should be, he offer us genuine good news through honesty. It's not the person who is perfect inside and out that Jesus promotes to us as a role model of authenticity, but rather the person who comes to God wretched and broken, in need of love and forgiveness. 'Everyone who exalts themselves with be humbled, and the one who humbles themselves will be exalted.' (Luke 18:9-14)

I love this; I'm so grateful. Jesus loves the real us, being real. He would rather I come to God in all my mess than pretend to be OK. As communities of faith we need to honour people's confession of questioning, sin and brokenness as part of genuine maturity and not of backsliding. (Of course these can all be signs of immaturity, but in those cases they are rarely brought before God and God's family.) In my experience, great harm is done to God's people by the requirement that Christians perform happy, successful faith all the time.

A mature faith goes beyond a simple authenticity of the inner life and outer life, although this in itself is a noble life goal. I believe that God calls us each of us to partnership, a partnership with God, others and creation that is universal in the sense of being for all of us, but also unique in being a call to us, in our lives and bodies, in our contexts and with our gifts, abilities, passions and relationships. James Fowler puts it like this, using the word vocation (being called):

Vocation is the response a person makes with their total self to the address of God and the to calling to partnership. The shaping of vocation as a total response of the self to the address of God involves the orchestration of our leisure, our relationships, our work, our private life, our public life, and the resources we steward, so as to put it all at the disposal of God's purposes in the services of God and neighbour.

(from Becoming Adult, Becoming Christian)

The Christian community that I know that has most embodied this miracles of living authentically, investing deeply in the secret life of the inner person and the life of world-changing praxis, is Church of the Saviour in Washington DC. One of the church's seminal books is called Journey Inward, Journey Outward by Elizabeth O'Connor. It always brings to mind the strangeness of the labyrinth, that one must go right to the centre before coming out the way you came in. I hate walks like that! Yet the labyrinth teaches you that after you spend time in the inner place, the journey out is like looking at the same place from a completely different angle: everything is changed if you care to look! Read it at your own peril.

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Photo of Grace Cathedral labyrinth by Wally Gobertz on Flickr

All You Need

I come to write this blog post after reading an article in the New Statesman about the decline of 'The West'. The article suggests that before China or the Middle East, we will see this decline most pertinently in the Balkans, as Russia's proxy Serbia stokes the fires of ethno-nationalism and the EU does nothing.

'Doing nothing' means not sending an army. On the scale of international relations, having a big stick is still the first move. I wonder how things seem on a cosmic scale? My guess is that our petty border disputes are laughable: we have a habitable planet - what are the chances of that? - and we expend our energies killing it and each other. From a cosmic scale, eradicating humans seems like an excellent idea. Yet it is the testimony of the book of Genesis that God has promised not to do this. Could that be because God is love? God's response to our self-destructive estrangement from God, from each other and from the planet is ... for Jesus to die for us. And according to Paul this death is the ultimate demonstration of God's love (Romans 5:9).

On the human scale, love makes slightly more sense, although not always. In another of his letters, to the believers in Corinth, Paul extols love not only as the ultimate quality of God, but also the ultimate quality of humanity. His hymn to love is in the middle of a lengthy debate about worship (so we can only assume that the church's arguments about worship are not as novel as we might think), but it is worth noting the things that Paul explicitly says are worthless without love:

Spiritual experience
Prophetic insight
Knowledge and wisdom
Miraculous faith
Sacrificial living
Martyrdom

At different times and in different places, these things have all been lauded as the most important thing. In my charismatic-evangelical heritage, I have seen prophets, preachers, theologians and miracle-workers given a free pass despite hateful behaviour, because their greatness supposedly covered their lack of love. Paul says nope.

'This is how people will know that you are my disciples: if you love one another.' (John 13:35)

I must admit that one of the motivations for my current study has been the bad behaviour of people who have attended church all their life. I recognise that trauma can misshape a person and that some forms of neurodiversity can make one less aware of one's impact on the world, but seriously, I am lost for words at the way that some Christians behave.

We have sidelined 1 Corinthians 13 to the realm of romantic love and turned the fruit of the spirit in Galatians 5 into a children's song. It's very handy if you want to avoid becoming more like Jesus.

Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

That is something to live towards. When our spiritual ancestors speak about the imitation of Christ, this is surely at the heart of it.

I have written and then deleted a long paragraph about how certain politicians popular with many Christians don't seem to be living up to this image of a mature human. You don't need to read it. What is needed is for us to live towards a notion of Christlikeness based on the witness to Jesus throughout the New Testament. That's my third characteristic, and it's a really simple one.

I'm aware that some of my readers might encounter a more 'muscular' interpretation of Jesus than the one offered by the gospels. That interpretation relies heavily on the image of Jesus returning to earth like Captain Marvel and laying waste to all his enemies. In this view, Jesus was a badass all along, and the whole loving people and dying for them was ... some kind of bait and switch? Honestly, I don't get it.

Anyway, when I read about the Balkans and I thought of true heroism I thought not of a soldier but of an unknown Chinese protestor in Tianmen Square. The superhero Jesus types probably think he was a loser, but I doubt they would ever have the courage to do what he did. Love is so much more than being nice. After all, it's what God is.

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Image credit: Homage to the Unknown Rebel by Francesco Mariani on Flickr

Dangerous Minds

 

Some statistics seem to come out of nowhere, but then when you think about them they just make sense. For example, people who have lived in many different places were much more likely to vote to remain in the EU than people who had lived in one area their whole lives. Theresa May's famous Conservative Party Conference speech in which she attacked 'citizens of nowhere' may have been a bit of dogwhistle politics, but it encapsulated a real difference in how life is lived.

Similarly, it might initially surprise you to know that a strong predictor of violence is black and white thinking. There are obvious examples: a couple of weeks ago a church leader who had been sacked for bullying made a bold claim that everything in the Bible is black and white. This example might lead us to see violence associated with particular belief systems and hope to convert people to our more liberal worldview. However, every worldview is susceptible to black and white thinking. The scientist and atheist campaigner Richard Dawkins once described a British Airways employee sacked for wearing a cross as having 'The stupidest face', a patently false statement that betrays the demonising of the other which is a hallmark of black and white thinking.

The opposite of black and white thinking isn't a particular 'enlightened' philosophy, it's a different way of thinking. Academics have coined the phrase 'integrative complexity' to describe the ability to understand that one's views exist in a vast panoply of believing. Not just understanding though, but the ability to still hold one's views and not be overwhelmed by the vastness of the pluralism we inhabit.

As a youth minister I was very keen to make what we did in church as 'worldly' as possible, because I feared that a cosseted young person would get to university and have a faith crisis caused by the shock of reality. Either they would drop their faith as irrelevant or hide in the ghetto of the Christian Union. At 18, it's very difficult to live in the tension of having personal convictions while accepting their contingency, but it's possible. Integrative complexity can apparently be learned. A few years ago Cafe Theologique ran a joint event with Cafe Psychologique in which we invited Dr Sara Savage to present on these ideas. You can find out more about her work at https://icthinking.org/about. 

Why would I take up the lion's share of my post telling you about integrative complexity? My answer is this: I think it goes a long way towards describing what I think mature believing looks like, which is the second of my five markers of maturity. In Ephesians 4:14, Paul doesn't list the correct doctrines that a mature believer should have, but he does say that they should be resistant to changing their mind on a whim, or according to fashion. I don't want to push my argument too far, but the image of a person holding firm to what they believe while the storm is raging around them is one that makes sense to me. Eugene Petersen called it A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, in the book of that name. Not that we refuse to change our minds (I've changed mine plenty), but that we find a way to commit to what we believe, while at the same time acknowledging that 'we know in part and prophesy in part' (1Cor 13:9). According to Sara Savage, this kind of humble yet serious faith makes the best kind of peacemakers.

In my PhD I'm going to work really hard to avoid a kind of schema in which Stage A is inevitably followed by Stage B and so on, because life is clearly not that simple. HOWEVER, it is clear that young faith often has a black and white quality about it. The moment of decision feels like crossing a line, and that leads to a person defining everyone by which side of the line they are on.

To be blunt, this is why most suicide bombers are young and/or new converts. Sometimes I see older Christians getting quite wistfully nostalgic for the passion and certainty of their younger believing selves. I understand the allure of that time, but know that God calls you to maturity, in which certainty and uncertainty live together. One thing that the life and ministry of Jesus teaches us is that we are always wrong about where the lines are, if there are any at all.

Even as I write that last sentence, I realise that it sounds like a recipe for apathy: 'We can't really know anything, so why bother? Why get het up about anything?' I hope that those reading this that know me, know that I do indeed get het up about a bunch of stuff. Again, while resisting the temptation to turn life into a simple progression towards enlightenment, I want to assure you that there are cool new winds on the other side of the doldrums of disillusionment. Who said growing up would be easy?

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Image by mohamed_hassan on Pixabay