A Hopeful Heretic

Wind Dancer

It’s funny how I measure life according to where I was at a specific time of year. It’s not that there’s anything all that special about October, it’s just that’s the month when so many important things happened in my life, both good and bad.

October was when I scored a conference record in high school football, pulling down eight interceptions in a single season. October is also the month my mom died, just a few weeks after I left to go to college.

October was when I decided to “give my life to Christ,” a phrase I would be loathe to use anymore because it has been so overused in my experience. It was at a Campus Crusade rally at the University of Illinois when something a speaker said made so much sense to me that my decision was instantaneous and passionate. The guy was an older student with great poise and charisma who seemed to be speaking directly to me when he asked if anyone in the crowd felt like they were wandering. Six weeks into my third year of college without any idea what I was be educated for made me ripe for that kind of contemplation. Two semesters of academic probation and an ultimatum from my father probably helped open my mind as well.

It was in October when I landed my first pastor job working with junior high school kids for a big suburban nondenominational church. It was also in October when the senior pastor of my second church job fired me. I was a poor fit, he told me. Apparently so was he. While I was in graduate school earning a seminary degree I heard that he had resigned amid questions over his extravagant travel expenses at church conferences.

At that graduate school campus amid the bright gold oak leaves I first met Sarah, a brilliant woman with straight blonde hair and deep brown eyes and a mouth full of braces. She was in the MBA program. She came into it after almost twenty years working in accounting and finance positions for some heavy hitter companies. She was the number one student in the MBA program, so skilled and coolly analytical that half the professors were afraid of her. A year later, in October, Sarah became my wife. Six years later, also in October, Sarah died.

Two years and nine days after Sarah’s heart beat for the last time I was standing on the deck of a 65-foot sail cruiser in the Bahamas, preparing for a five-day scuba diving tour. “Welcome aboard the Wind Dancer, folks,” came a southern drawl that seemed out of place for the tropical atmosphere. Make sure that ya'll getchur gear stowed below and then toss your bags back on the dock. We don’t need to take up any extra space with empty bags. In case ya'll hadn’t noticed, this ain’t a luxury cruise ship and that little berth of yours below is all the space ya get for ya'll and your stuff.”

“You really need an adventure,” my boss had told me. I needed something, I thought. There was a lot of emptiness and deadness in me, that I would admit. It showed in work and my boss was patient but not stupid. His suggestion was more of an assignment. “Living on a boat for five days isn’t going to be the least bit comfortable,” I protested, “How’s that supposed to improve my spirit?”

“Adventures aren’t supposed to be comfortable,” he said, “Whatever obstacles you overcome in this experience will translate into an ability to overcome obstacles in your spiritual life as well. I just know it.”

I wasn’t convinced. I was tempted to resign. It’s not like I really needed the job. Sarah had been a great provider in our marriage. Even though that rankled my pride and caused my more than my share of survivor’s guilt the fact was that I could go without a job for a long time without too much concern.

It was even my growing disdain for all things church. After spending most of my adult life working in ministry in one way or another I was losing hope that the church, that any church, could really make any difference in the world. People in our church argued about trivial things like the color of flowers in the lobby and they grumbled about things over which they had no control like the sexual orientation of teacher at the junior high school. The senior pastor of the church boasted about growth and laid out grand plans for more all the while cajoling the people in the seats on Sundays to pray about giving more of their time and money to “God’s great battle.” I was increasingly cynical in private and in public more and more silent, not wanting to offend anyone.

But my boss, the executive pastor, had called it right on the head, it was my relationship with God that showed the greatest strain. Doubts I wouldn’t dare admit to anyone echoed in my head daily. After all the grief counseling and all the prayer and multiple solitude retreats since Sarah’s death I felt nothing of the passionate, visceral awareness of God that had marked my younger years. In fact, I really felt nothing much of anything. If God was real, He wasn’t talking to me.

The Rock

I wish I could get the stories in my head to flow out through a keyboard to become paper without the painful experiences that are required. It has recently occurred to me that a blog might be a good way to force myself to write some fiction because it would impose some artificial deadlines to keep a story moving. I suppose we'll see.

The flat piece of rock and coral where I am building my new home is only a little bigger than a football field. It is stripped bare and pounded flat by three hurricanes in a little over a decade, located at the extreme south end of Bimini in the Bahamas. The relentless sun and unforgiving waves and storm surges of the years have also stripped it of almost all native forms of life other than the seaweed that grows among the rocks and the occasional gulls that land searching in vain for some scrap to eat from my compost pile. I say native life because I can’t count myself or Thomas the old black dog of uncertain parentage who jumped into my boat one day last spring and refused to leave. I suppose that Thomas decided that he’d take a chance on me in much the same manner that I decided to take a chance on the rock.

I am told that the previous occupants of the rock were both very wealthy and very stupid. Wealthy because they, like me, were intrigued by the idea of building a house on their own private island. Stupid because they were completely unprepared for what nature would do with a large pile of bricks and wood sticking up out of the sea in the middle of a hurricane’s path. The remnants of said house, now scattered and submerged off the east side of the rock, have formed the basis for a truly beautiful artificial reef after only ten years. While spear fishing among the debris I occasionally find some piece of kitchen equipment or furniture as a reminder of the challenge I face. I am not smug about avoiding the mistakes that they made because I know that I have made so many of my own.

On some nights I sit out on the flat ground that was to be a tennis court a short walk from the house and watch the crimson sunset fade to indigo and black. Thomas sits with me content to have a steady source of food and some company in his declining years. My ears have become so accustomed to the quiet that I can sometimes hear full conversations on Bimini more than half a mile away. But mostly I sip wine or beer and munch on fresh fruit and crackers with my daily catch while the world slips away and it is only me and memories and stars and waves. And God. He is always there.

That was not always the way it seemed to me. In fact, there were times in my life when I was all but convinced that He was not real or if He was He was distant and unconcerned with His creation, at least my little corner of it. Now, in the peace that comes after the storm, I believe otherwise.

There have also been times in my life when I thought I had Him figured out. Sure, I respected Him, even said that I loved Him. I raised my hands in worship and prayed with flourish and hung on every word of scripture. He was my answer for every question and I was certain that I had all those answers if not on the tip of my tongue then at my fingertips in the massive collection of books that explained to me all that I knew or would know. As I said, after the storm, I believe otherwise.

In those days when certainty was the rule of my life I felt what I thought was God’s presence in much the same way I felt the weight of the atmosphere. I could turn my attention to God and find some sense of Him as much as I could turn my attention to the air around me and sense its smell and color and movement. Now, I’m not sure if I feel Him but I believe that I do. I’m not sure if I am aware of Him but I believe I am and I believe I He is aware of me. After the storm, I believe. Before the storm, I was certain. I suppose that’s a good place to start a story.

We believe...

I have a good friend who is an Episcopal priest. When she and I get together we often have passionate talks about church and theology and all manner of stuff. Last night in the midst of one of those conversations she said something that I think is very helpful so I thought I’d write about it here.

In the course of this conversation the issue of core beliefs came up. You see, the Episcopal church places a very high value on inclusivity. They try very hard not to have anyone turn away on the basis of non-essential beliefs, so hard in fact that they sometimes experience turmoil in their own community. But this begs the question of what are those core beliefs.  Maybe more important, what are the core beliefs (if there are any) that tie us all together as followers of Jesus?

To this question I offered the thought that some emerging-postmodern-reflective Christians seem to be turning back to the ancient creeds of the faith to find a baseline for beliefs.

What are the creeds? In essence they are responses to specific heresies that arose in the early church. According to church historian Justo Gonzalez, what has become known as the Apostle’s creed probably came to be in the mid-second century in response to Gnosticism and Marcionism. The creed was originally presented in the form of three questions asked at baptism to affirm the believer’s affirmation of Trinitarian faith:

1. Do you believe in God the Father almighty?
2. Do you believe in Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who was born of the Holy Ghost and of Mary the virgin, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and died, and rose again at the third day, living from among the dead, and ascended unto heaven and sat at the right hand of the Father, and will come to judge the quick and the dead?
3. Do you believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy church, and the resurrection of the flesh? [1]

The other ancient creed is what arose from the Council of Nicea in 325, the first ecumenical council after the Emperor Constantine made Christianity the religion of the realm. Among many other things, the bishops who gathered at Nicea were tasked with responding to the Arian controversy, again a challenge to Trinitarian faith. Their response was to create another Christian creed:

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only-begotten of the Father, that is, from the substance of the Father, God of God, light of light, true God of true God, begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father, through whom all things were made, both in heaven and on earth, who for us humans and for our salvation descended and became incarnate, becoming human, suffered and rose again on the third day, ascended to the heavens, and will come to judge the living and the dead. And in the Holy Spirit.[2]

Of course, these are translations from ancient languages into English and later tweaking has altered and added some words. However, it seems to me that the essential meaning of the creeds is to affirm the mystery of the human relationship with the divine Trinity, something that few of us can wrap our minds around completely.

Some might argue that the creeds are a later invention, unnecessary for our faith because they are extra-biblical. In my mind, they are meant to point to scripture and shed light on its essentials. I find it interesting that so many churches find it necessary to write out a “statement of faith” as if to modernize these belief statements.

As I noted in my review of Daniel Taylor’s book, The Myth of Certainty, the creeds serve my personal faith because they were created by wiser minds than mine and have been accepted by faithful people for centuries. Of course this does not make them any more “true” than a contemporary church’s statement of faith. For me, however, it makes them stronger sources for commitment.

And this is the crucial observation my friend made, that these statements begin with “believe.” These are not wildly optimistic statements of “fact” or “truth.” They are, in fact, the best we can do to explain a faith we can sometimes scarcely understand. If these essential statements of the Christian faith begin with “believe” then can we not agree that the lesser “beliefs” can be held as loosely too? That’s my hope.

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[1] Gonzalez, Justo L. The Story of Christianity: Volume 1 - The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation (San Francisco, CA: Harper San Francisco, 1984), p. 64.

[2] ibid. p. 165.