Learn to See
Dear Eugene,
"Is it me? Please be honest and tell me, because I really cannot identify it!" For the longest time that's how I've been pleading to my wife.
I just couldn't figure out what it is about churches that suffocated me, time and again nipped my already-small flame in its bud. I wanted to get along with people, move along the production line of God's Kingdom business, ride along the high tide of spirituality to reach high heaven. But all I got was a bad case of sinusitis that lasted all seasons.
"Could it be because it's a Chinese church?" I didn't expect my wife to give me deep insight and sure enough she didn't.
Later I came to realize, Yes, it might have something to do with culture, but, really, it goes much deeper and pervasive than that. I am not a stranger to my culture's patriarchal, ham-fisted ways, but just because manhandling is carried out by another culture with more outward democracy, debonair finesse doesn't make it any more palatable or less heartless.
The churches I've been to all did a mighty fine job running programs. Some aimed for greatness and broke wave in many fronts; the failing ones still failed not to know what they are aspired to. However, when it comes to heart matters, "stuffs" that are barely beyond the tangible, churches big and small are often equally at a loss to come up with a language to speak of them, let alone dwelling in their irony, ambiguity, contradiction--mystery.
We are very good at securing our ideological propositions, buttressing our agenda and schedule with doctrinal soundbites, varnishing a glistening layer on ourselves and our things. But often all it takes is no more than one little act of transgression, a relationship fallout to bring the whole thing down. Shame on us for talking about (other people's) sin all the time; we don't even want to touch the leprosy on our own kids. House on sand.
Rolling in the mud, wailing like a mad baby, what the Psalmists found natural to do are too boorish, too un-enlightened, too sentimental for our taste. We know better to come up with a neat laundry list to politely present to God and are already thinking about a doctrinal position to explain things away if we don't get what we want.
Former Archbishop of Wales Rowan Williams once said , "When religious commitment is seen first as the acceptance of propositions which determine acceptable behaviour – the kind of religiousness we tend now to call fundamentalist – something has happened to religious identity. It has ceased to give priority to the sense that God’s seeing of the world and the self is very strictly incommensurable with any specific human perspective and is in danger of evacuating religious language of the pressure to take time to learn its meanings."
Do we "take time" to cultivate a strange, born-again tongue to speak of the unspeakable, to look beyond our very limited perspective of programmatic scheme and managerial concern, and enter what can only be called a sacred ground of "seeing"? We sing "I once was blind but now I see," but what do we really see? It has a lot to do with how we see.
You once said, "Reading a novel is among the more serious activities available to a pastor. Pastors who neglect to read novels lack seriousness, or at least one aspect of it." Did this truth go down well with your colleagues? I can always tell when a pastor reads no novel; and most don't. Why does one want to be a pastor if he/she has no interest to navigate in the nooks and crannies of the human heart? And what is a church that has no ear for people's story, yet purports to engage the entire world in God's Story?
"Why it is possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light-years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you've been stuck with yourself all your life?" Walker Percy once asked.
Isn't it a shame that we Christians are doing no better in knowing and seeing than the world does? Is this what "being saved" tastes like? Is this what being "truly alive" feels like? What kind of "faith," what sort of "belief," what nature of "doctrine" would allow or even encourage such widespread and persistent superficiality?
I read in the news just now that Trudeau named David Adams Richards to the Senate. I praise God for giving Canadians a chance to learn to see, from one of the great writers in this or any country, in this or any century. I placed his novels right beside my Bibles.
Pray to see, Alex
"Is it me? Please be honest and tell me, because I really cannot identify it!" For the longest time that's how I've been pleading to my wife.
I just couldn't figure out what it is about churches that suffocated me, time and again nipped my already-small flame in its bud. I wanted to get along with people, move along the production line of God's Kingdom business, ride along the high tide of spirituality to reach high heaven. But all I got was a bad case of sinusitis that lasted all seasons.
"Could it be because it's a Chinese church?" I didn't expect my wife to give me deep insight and sure enough she didn't.
Later I came to realize, Yes, it might have something to do with culture, but, really, it goes much deeper and pervasive than that. I am not a stranger to my culture's patriarchal, ham-fisted ways, but just because manhandling is carried out by another culture with more outward democracy, debonair finesse doesn't make it any more palatable or less heartless.
The churches I've been to all did a mighty fine job running programs. Some aimed for greatness and broke wave in many fronts; the failing ones still failed not to know what they are aspired to. However, when it comes to heart matters, "stuffs" that are barely beyond the tangible, churches big and small are often equally at a loss to come up with a language to speak of them, let alone dwelling in their irony, ambiguity, contradiction--mystery.
We are very good at securing our ideological propositions, buttressing our agenda and schedule with doctrinal soundbites, varnishing a glistening layer on ourselves and our things. But often all it takes is no more than one little act of transgression, a relationship fallout to bring the whole thing down. Shame on us for talking about (other people's) sin all the time; we don't even want to touch the leprosy on our own kids. House on sand.
Rolling in the mud, wailing like a mad baby, what the Psalmists found natural to do are too boorish, too un-enlightened, too sentimental for our taste. We know better to come up with a neat laundry list to politely present to God and are already thinking about a doctrinal position to explain things away if we don't get what we want.
Former Archbishop of Wales Rowan Williams once said , "When religious commitment is seen first as the acceptance of propositions which determine acceptable behaviour – the kind of religiousness we tend now to call fundamentalist – something has happened to religious identity. It has ceased to give priority to the sense that God’s seeing of the world and the self is very strictly incommensurable with any specific human perspective and is in danger of evacuating religious language of the pressure to take time to learn its meanings."
Do we "take time" to cultivate a strange, born-again tongue to speak of the unspeakable, to look beyond our very limited perspective of programmatic scheme and managerial concern, and enter what can only be called a sacred ground of "seeing"? We sing "I once was blind but now I see," but what do we really see? It has a lot to do with how we see.
You once said, "Reading a novel is among the more serious activities available to a pastor. Pastors who neglect to read novels lack seriousness, or at least one aspect of it." Did this truth go down well with your colleagues? I can always tell when a pastor reads no novel; and most don't. Why does one want to be a pastor if he/she has no interest to navigate in the nooks and crannies of the human heart? And what is a church that has no ear for people's story, yet purports to engage the entire world in God's Story?
"Why it is possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light-years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you've been stuck with yourself all your life?" Walker Percy once asked.
Isn't it a shame that we Christians are doing no better in knowing and seeing than the world does? Is this what "being saved" tastes like? Is this what being "truly alive" feels like? What kind of "faith," what sort of "belief," what nature of "doctrine" would allow or even encourage such widespread and persistent superficiality?
I read in the news just now that Trudeau named David Adams Richards to the Senate. I praise God for giving Canadians a chance to learn to see, from one of the great writers in this or any country, in this or any century. I placed his novels right beside my Bibles.
Pray to see, Alex
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