The heart of the matter -

This is my latest response in the newspaper dialog between me and Rev. Dean Lueking. It’s in the online Wednesday Journal already. I’m not sure whether it’s in the print edition today or not, since some submissions go online before they have room to run them in print.

In his most recent response to me [What shall we do with this cross? Viewpoints, March 27], fittingly published in the run-up to Easter, Rev. Dean Lueking shares what is special to him about the story of Jesus dying on the cross and rising again.

Dean, as I read your thoughts, beautifully articulated as always, I became dissatisfied with my own part in this conversation. I had the feeling “there’s something I’m forgetting to tell Dean.” I sensed it was important – in fact it’s the heart of the matter for me.

I lived in England in the countryside until I was 22. A perfect summer’s day there is sunny and pleasantly warm, the sky a beautiful deep blue. Usually the frequent wet days in between ensure a profusion of color and growth everywhere around. An amazing variety of wildflowers compete for space on unmanaged fields and every small grass verge.

I loved to be outside on those perfect summer days. School was out and my time was my own. I was connected with the world around me in a beautifully simple way. I drank it in and felt happy and free.

There was a simplicity and joy and freedom I had then which I lost along the way as I walked deeper and deeper into institutionalized Christianity. I didn’t realize it was gone until I started to walk away and rediscovered it again.

I have so much freedom I didn’t have 10 years ago. I’m free to be outside and stay there, fully connected and appreciative. Ten years ago I felt I had to turn inwards continually to thank Jesus or ask him for advice. I didn’t realize how distracting and disconnecting that was until I gave myself permission not to do it anymore.

I’m free to enjoy my relationships with other people to the full extent. I can appreciate their uniqueness without value judging them. As we interact, I’m free to follow the conversation wherever it may lead. I can explore what connects with them and abandon what doesn’t. I have no agenda, no essential message I have to pass on, regardless of whether it resonates with them.

I’m free, not to be self-centered but to fully live out my values in the hope of being the best human being I can be. I’ve always wanted to make a positive difference in the world I live in. All that has changed is, I’ve let go of a framework which told me what that looked like and asked me to wear an outfit which often didn’t fit me very well. It was uncomfortably constraining, but I wore it because I thought I had no choice.

The heart of the matter is, I’ve found a joy and freedom and simplicity I love. I’m free to live life to the full. My former outfit still hangs in my closet, and I could wear it again, but why would I, now I know I don’t have to? That would be madness.

Mark

July 20, 2007 at 6:19 pm

Helen,

In one of your recent posts at Conversations At The Edge, you referenced a conversation that I have begun to have on my web site with Siamang and others. That conversation has been thoroughly enjoyable and enlightening to me, and it has led me into various strands of this massive web of the blogging world as I look for similar dialog. In that search I’ve come across your writings at Conversations, as well as the latest discussion on the MyChurch web site, which I worked my way through this afternoon.

I didn’t feel that I necessarily was prepared to add anything to that particular set of posts/comments, but I did find myself quite interested in pursuing a conversation with you as a result because I sensed something in your words and ideas that resonated with me. So I searched out your blog, and I found in this particular post what I think is a place to initiate that conversation, if you are willing.

This particular paragraph of yours leaps out at me:

“There was a simplicity and joy and freedom I had then which I lost along the way as I walked deeper and deeper into institutionalized Christianity. I didn’t realize it was gone until I started to walk away and rediscovered it again.”

I have been an “evangelical” Christian for 34 years now, but, despite heavy involvement in all manner of church activity during those years, I always felt myself holding the church at arm’s length, always just a bit uncomfortable with what I found there, never quite ready to buy into the whole thing. I found myself ill at ease with its ways of thinking, with theological argument, with its general view of the world.

Nevertheless, I also found that I could not escape certain core beliefs about the existence of God, about the nature of Christ and of his life, death, and resurrection. Every time I would try, every time I would throw up my hands in frustration at what I saw in the church and in my own life and world, and tell myself that I just wanted to leave it all behind, I found that I could not. It was, as my wife and I have often said to one another, as though the core of this faith, the essence of a relationship, was written into my spiritual DNA and I could no sooner get rid of it than I could change the color of my eyes or alter my metabolism to become a naturally skinny man. And that is still the case today; even as a 51-year-old man, I still feel compelled to dump it all sometimes, but I can’t.

So this is why your words above jump out at me. I have believed since college days that those core and essential theological truths, stripped of all the nonsense that church and Christians have heaped on top of them and weighed them down with, are meant to give us the kind of “simplicity and joy and freedom” you say that you found (or rather, rediscovered) only when you walked away from the institutionalized church, not to lead us away from those things. The problem, I think, is with the institutionalized church, not with the essence of Biblical truth and the God who is revealed there.

I have been pursuing for decades a course of discovering how that works.

A simple blog comment like this is hardly a good way to examine these ideas in depth, but I’d like to point quickly to two things that have kept me going in this pursuit.

The first is the apostle Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 11:3, which express an idea that I come back to all the time. He says, “But I am afraid lest, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds should be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.” That idea of a simple and pure devotion to Christ simply defies the kind of complex and convoluted sorts of arrangements that we have grown accustomed to thinking are a part of being a Christian. I have been on a mission of sorts to discover how to live in that simplicity and purity.

The second thing that has kept me going is the thought and imagination of C.S. Lewis. I find that he has, over and over again, whether in his children’s stories, his adult fiction, or his theological non-fiction, captured the essence of the idea that a relationship with Christ is to be one of boundless joy and freedom.

When I started my blog, the software I use for it (maybe all blogging software does this, I don’t know) gave opportunity to insert both a “slogan” and a “mission”. After much thought, I settled on the phrase “Synthesizing real life and real faith” as the slogan. What I am getting at there is this idea of understanding how to bring those core truths down into the real, nitty gritty stuff of life, unburdened by the unnecessary and distracting stuff we have heaped on them. When I write, that is what I am trying to do. Indeed, I find that it is what I am trying to do pretty much every hour of every day.

This has been too long. Let me close with three quick things.

First, I live in the country, on ten acres of field and woods in northern Minnesota, in part because I need what you said you had growing up in England. I have loons that live on lakes all around me that I hear almost every summer morning, and bald eagles that frequently soar over my house. I can appreciate your appreciation for such things.

Second, I would love to have you stop by web site and join in the conversation there. It has been most enlightening to me, and another voice would add flavor.

And third, I would just urge you to consider that it is possible to have what Paul feared the Corinthians would lose: a simple and pure devotion to Christ. I don’t have answers yet for how to live that life, but both my wife and I are darn sure trying to figure it out, and we would love to have some more honest, intelligent company on that search.

Sorry, way too long. Hope to hear back from you.

Mark

3 thoughts on “The heart of the matter”

Mark
July 20, 2007 at 6:19 pm

Helen,

In one of your recent posts at Conversations At The Edge, you referenced a conversation that I have begun to have on my web site with Siamang and others. That conversation has been thoroughly enjoyable and enlightening to me, and it has led me into various strands of this massive web of the blogging world as I look for similar dialog. In that search I’ve come across your writings at Conversations, as well as the latest discussion on the MyChurch web site, which I worked my way through this afternoon.

I didn’t feel that I necessarily was prepared to add anything to that particular set of posts/comments, but I did find myself quite interested in pursuing a conversation with you as a result because I sensed something in your words and ideas that resonated with me. So I searched out your blog, and I found in this particular post what I think is a place to initiate that conversation, if you are willing.

This particular paragraph of yours leaps out at me:

“There was a simplicity and joy and freedom I had then which I lost along the way as I walked deeper and deeper into institutionalized Christianity. I didn’t realize it was gone until I started to walk away and rediscovered it again.”

I have been an “evangelical” Christian for 34 years now, but, despite heavy involvement in all manner of church activity during those years, I always felt myself holding the church at arm’s length, always just a bit uncomfortable with what I found there, never quite ready to buy into the whole thing. I found myself ill at ease with its ways of thinking, with theological argument, with its general view of the world.

Nevertheless, I also found that I could not escape certain core beliefs about the existence of God, about the nature of Christ and of his life, death, and resurrection. Every time I would try, every time I would throw up my hands in frustration at what I saw in the church and in my own life and world, and tell myself that I just wanted to leave it all behind, I found that I could not. It was, as my wife and I have often said to one another, as though the core of this faith, the essence of a relationship, was written into my spiritual DNA and I could no sooner get rid of it than I could change the color of my eyes or alter my metabolism to become a naturally skinny man. And that is still the case today; even as a 51-year-old man, I still feel compelled to dump it all sometimes, but I can’t.

So this is why your words above jump out at me. I have believed since college days that those core and essential theological truths, stripped of all the nonsense that church and Christians have heaped on top of them and weighed them down with, are meant to give us the kind of “simplicity and joy and freedom” you say that you found (or rather, rediscovered) only when you walked away from the institutionalized church, not to lead us away from those things. The problem, I think, is with the institutionalized church, not with the essence of Biblical truth and the God who is revealed there.

I have been pursuing for decades a course of discovering how that works.

A simple blog comment like this is hardly a good way to examine these ideas in depth, but I’d like to point quickly to two things that have kept me going in this pursuit.

The first is the apostle Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 11:3, which express an idea that I come back to all the time. He says, “But I am afraid lest, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds should be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.” That idea of a simple and pure devotion to Christ simply defies the kind of complex and convoluted sorts of arrangements that we have grown accustomed to thinking are a part of being a Christian. I have been on a mission of sorts to discover how to live in that simplicity and purity.

The second thing that has kept me going is the thought and imagination of C.S. Lewis. I find that he has, over and over again, whether in his children’s stories, his adult fiction, or his theological non-fiction, captured the essence of the idea that a relationship with Christ is to be one of boundless joy and freedom.

When I started my blog, the software I use for it (maybe all blogging software does this, I don’t know) gave opportunity to insert both a “slogan” and a “mission”. After much thought, I settled on the phrase “Synthesizing real life and real faith” as the slogan. What I am getting at there is this idea of understanding how to bring those core truths down into the real, nitty gritty stuff of life, unburdened by the unnecessary and distracting stuff we have heaped on them. When I write, that is what I am trying to do. Indeed, I find that it is what I am trying to do pretty much every hour of every day.

This has been too long. Let me close with three quick things.

First, I live in the country, on ten acres of field and woods in northern Minnesota, in part because I need what you said you had growing up in England. I have loons that live on lakes all around me that I hear almost every summer morning, and bald eagles that frequently soar over my house. I can appreciate your appreciation for such things.

Second, I would love to have you stop by web site and join in the conversation there. It has been most enlightening to me, and another voice would add flavor.

And third, I would just urge you to consider that it is possible to have what Paul feared the Corinthians would lose: a simple and pure devotion to Christ. I don’t have answers yet for how to live that life, but both my wife and I are darn sure trying to figure it out, and we would love to have some more honest, intelligent company on that search.

Sorry, way too long. Hope to hear back from you.

Mark
Helen
July 21, 2007 at 9:59 am

Hi Mark,

I think my position is – if I have simplicity, joy and freedom without faith, why do I need to add faith?

Thanks for the invite to conversation on your blog. Time is always an issue…I can’t guarantee I’ll have time. You’re welcome to join us at Conversation at the Edge if you like. I’m going to be there since I host it!
Mark
July 21, 2007 at 10:29 am

I appreciate the time issue, for sure, so I completely understand that you can’t get to my blog. I will keep checking at Conversations, but if I don’t get too involved myself, the reason is the same.

I think my position is – if I have simplicity, joy and freedom without faith, why do I need to add faith?

It’s a great question. I think the answer has a lot to do with a short post I did yesterday about eating ice cream with fresh raspberries – the purpose of the faith that I know, and the God I believe that faith is oriented around, is to take that simplicity, joy, and freedom and unlock, expand and multiply them exponentially through all eternity. As C.S. Lewis has so eloquently written, we are far too easily pleased, and I’m just not ready to settle for the forms of those things that we can find apart from God. They’re too puny. I really want the whole package, and that’s only available in Christ, I think.

Thanks for getting back to me. Stay cool, and enjoy your day!

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