First Draft of Chapter 1 of the book I'm writing about finding God

Reaching Out to God: The Beginning

I realize that if I am to be taken seriously and accepted with open arms as someone taking a look at Christian community, and what (if anything) it has to do with reaching out to, and finding God, that I am supposed to start by saying something like:

As a worship team leader and then youth pastor in a loving church environment, and moving on from there to my post-secondary theological educational career including undergraduate, seminary, and doctoral studies, as well as eighteen years as a faculty member of an evangelical seminary, I have been nurtured and formed by evangelical communities and convictions. 

But I won’t.  Because I didn’t do that stuff.  It went more like this:

I was brought out to church (“brought up under the sound of the Word”) from birth.  This meant that before I’d learned to walk, I’d heard many hours of lengthy passages of the bible slowly read in halting 17^th century English.  Before I’d attended kindergarten I’d heard a lot of “discussion of the bible,” worded rather like this:

  When a sheep strays foolishly (our hearts are daily tempted so to stray!) from the flock, that sheep will not be long among us and is headed straight for this world.  Vital for us, beloved, that the straying Eutychus sheep in question be pointed out, and the little lambs and old rams and ewes as well (that blessed ninety and nine) be alike warned of the error and sin that has been seen, inevitably drawing that wretched creature perversely away from the flock where the Lord has set His Name! Vital that a word to the conscience be given not to gaze after or follow that straying sheep, lest the blind lead the blind and all fall into the Jericho ditch together, where we do not walk. 

The church rooms were completely plain, lacking anything on the walls beside some stark, text-only bible verses (in that same 17^th century English) and a clock ticking away the hour while some ceiling fans wobbled throughout, trying to move the deathly still air.  The windows were often frosted so as to let light in, but not enable one to see in or out.  There was no organ or piano, and the singing was always and only done in a slow, sombre a cappella.

Obviously my experience of church when I was little was my first experience of God too.  And the God stuff was slow and quiet, done in hushed voices and awed tones, couched in archaic, solemn language.  There was no running in or out of or even anywhere near the church.  There were no loud sounds.  There was no laughter and precious few smiles.  There were no sudden movements. God was Big.  The Biggest.  He was perfect, He was holy and nothing was good enough for Him.  Everything was imperfect before His eyes.  But He’d sent His Son to fix all of that, because He loved us.  His Son had suffered deeply and long, and it was definitely Our Fault.  If we were willing to reach out to Him in the guise of His Son, He would not send us to Hell for all Eternity.  So we came to sit in that room and remember all of that.

I could sit as still as a rock.  We sang slow, melancholy a cappella hymns with words like:

Jesus, spotless lamb of God,

Thou hast bought me with Thy blood,

I would value naught beside,

Jesus, Jesus crucified.

Or 

When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Prince of glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride.

Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast,
Save in the death of Christ my God!
All the vain things that charm me most,
I sacrifice them to His blood.

See from His head, His hands, His feet,
Sorrow and love flow mingled down!
Did e’er such love and sorrow meet,
Or thorns compose so rich a crown?

Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.

Or

O HEAD once full of bruises,
So full of pain and scorn,
'Mid other sore abuses
Mocked with a crown of thorn;
O Head! e'en now surrounded
With brightest majesty,
In death once bowed and wounded
On the accursed tree.

Thou Countenance transcendent!
Thou life-creating Sun!
To worlds on Thee dependent ---
Yet bruised and spit upon:
O Lord! what Thee tormented
Was our sin's heavy load,
We had the debt augmented
Which Thou didst pay in blood.

We give Thee thanks unfeigned,
O Saviour! Friend in need,
For what Thy soul sustained
When Thou for us didst bleed;
Grant us to lean unshaken
Upon Thy faithfulness;
Until to glory taken,
We see Thee face to face.

The words in these songs generally outlined a clear contrast between, on the one hand, the painful, humiliating ordeal of the Lord Jesus on this wicked earth where evil rules, and on the other hand, shining, radiant honour in heaven, where no good deed goes unrewarded. 

In our church, anyway, our doleful singing emphasized the former and didn’t really convey the latter. For my part, I wallowed inwardly in the former and the latter always rang, by contrast, rather false, or seemed kind of like a distant afternote tacked on.  No doubt this is far from how the songwriter intended the song to work.  But self-abnegation and taking personal responsibility for the sufferings of Christ seemed to be a big part of each and every hymn. The ones we sang, anyway.  Sometimes we sang only the first part of the hymn, to avoid the “happy part” at the end, especially if we weren’t singing at the end of the Sunday morning Breaking of Bread service.  Many of our favourite hymns called us “wretches” and that kind of thing.  When men prayed, they often spoke of us in those terms, at length.

From the beginning, approaching God was about going out to church, and being very, very still, very, very quiet, and terribly sombre.  There were four “meetings” each week for adults, and I was taken to these.  On Sundays, between the midmorning Breaking of Bread service and the evening Gospel meeting, there was also a Sunday School in mid-afternoon for children.  Here is a partial sample of the “for kids” wording of the hymns in the children’s hymn book:

When lo! a storm began to rise,
The wind grew loud and strong;
It blew the clouds across the skies,
It blew the waves along.

And all, but One, were sore afraid
Of sinking in the deep:
His head was on a pillow laid,
And He was fast asleep.

"Master, we perish! -- Master, save!"
They cried, -- their Master heard;
He rose, rebuked the wind and wave,
And stilled them with a word.

When I was three, after hearing over and over again the importance of “asking Jesus to wash away my sins and come into my heart,” I decided one night that I wanted in on this.  My parents were in bed, and I went in and told them what I wanted to do.  I was, after all, the only one in the house besides our black cat Freddy who wasn’t saved yet.  My parents thought it was all very cute and encouraged me to do it. 

I went to my bed and kneeled in the middle of my mattress in a little nest of blankets there.  I started by saying, “My bless’ed Lord Jesus Christ, I ask thee that thou wouldst...” and then I realized I wasn’t sure what exactly the wording had to be in order for the thing to work and for me to avoid hellfire. 

All in all, I took three additional trips to my parents’ room to ask them about the wording, and each time they shied away from telling me exact magic words, because for it to work, it had to be my own words.  So I just asked “please wash away my sins and come into my heart to stay.  Asking it all and thanking Thee in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.” 

I’d heard my father pray those words in the final sentence something like three thousand times, at a conservative estimate, even allowing for the grace said at lunch being handled by my mother on weekdays during the school year.

But I wasn’t fooling around.  I wanted in.  I would do what it took.  I trusted my parents to know about things like hell and sins, and knew very clearly that from birth I had been a sinner, born to sinners, living in a world characterized by sin, completely at enmity with God.  I believed them that this needed to be fixed, by saying this kind of prayer.   So I wanted in.  And it all made sense.

A couple of years later Albert Hayhoe came over and baptised my sister and I in our bathtub. Albert believed that you could baptise infants who didn’t understand what was happening, unlike some Plymouth Brethren people who believed it was something a mature Christian had to request.  The bible verse quoted to decide to go with the “infant baptism” side of the issue was the one in the Acts of the Apostles that Paul said to the man who’d been his jailor:

Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.

It was the “and thy house” part that was deemed relevant.  I wore a blue swimsuit to the occasion, as I recall.  The tub was filled quite high.  Albert Hayhoe just leaned me back and pushed my head under with his wrinkled hand on my forehead, symbolically drowning, then resurrecting me, saying words I couldn’t hear when my head was underwater, nor afterward when bathwater still filled my ears.

And I felt great.  It was one of those very rare occasions when I knew that I’d made a choice, and the System that was my culture, which decided what was “normal” for all of us, was embracing and accepting me. I was doing something it wholly endorsed, and “taking an interest” in what it wished me to “be interested” in.  We were supposed to “take an interest” in asking the Lord to wash away our sins, once and for all, asking to be baptized, and then, finally, “asking for our place at the Lord’s Table” and being granted or denied it by that System.  These were the main rites of passage.  Apart from those, there was only being married to someone from the church, and one’s funeral. 

Because Plymouth Brethren churches don’t have officially trained or accredited or appointed ministers, we generally had to either get a friendly pastor from a church not entirely dissimilar to ours in terms of doctrine to tie the knot for our couples.  You don’t have to have government papers to officiate when it is time to bury people though, so we always handled our own funerals.  Couldn’t marry, but could bury.

We were pros at dealing with death.  A death validated our entire world view and outlook on life.  Some of the warmest, most demonstrative, kindest and outgoing behaviour from Plymouth Brethren people I have seen when I was at the funerals of Brethren-raised folks.  Some of the coldest, most exclusive, hard-hearted elitism and exclusionism has occurred when deciding who to invite to and whom to exclude from weddings.

By the time I’d gotten a driver’s license I’d sang both the serious adult hymns quoted here earlier, and the simpler, more entertaining, kid-friendly, story-based ones many hundreds of times over.  An obvious benefit of this was that while I was learning English, both spoken and written, the scope of my vocabulary covered, from the very beginning, styles and wording from several different centuries, rather than just encompassing how people spoke informally in modern times in my own daily life. 

This meant that from before I went to kindergarten, I understood that “sore” could mean “painful and tender” but also “very.”  I knew that “fast” could refer to speed, or could mean “deeply or completely.”  “Let” could mean “allow” or it could mean “hindrance/to hinder, or to forbid.”  Easy.

Words like “Perish,” “rebuke,” “sovereign,” “wretched,” “billows,” “glory” and “naught” were all terms I’d heard used quite frequently.  I knew how to properly use not only “thee,” “thou,” “thy” and “thine,” but also how to do the archaic verb tenses (“hast,” “doeth,” “didst,” “wouldst,” “sayeth”).  

All this seemed a pretty normal and easy part of each week to me by the time I went off to school.  The first time I saw the “Amok Time” episode of the old Star Trek, with Vulcan matriarch T’Pa taking to Spock, I wondered “Why on [Vulcan] is she saying “thee” when she should be saying “thou?” 

At my church, one never prayed aloud in church and said “You” or “Your.”  It was always “Thee” and “Thou,” and “wouldst” and “didst” and so on.  When people starting modernizing things and wanting to change this practice, it eventually contributed to a church division in which almost all of the modernizers left/were excommunicated.

What all this meant for me, was that God was always about leaving behind laughter and sunshine and eye contact and free talking, leaving one’s regular clothes and behaviour at home, and getting as serious as one could.  From the youngest age, going into a God or church situation meant my face (and all the rest of me) learned to unthinkingly take on a funeral kind of demeanour. It was habit from infancy to carefully shut down everything that made me myself or showed a hint of my personality or emotional inner life.  I wasn’t dressed like myself, I didn’t move or talk or think like myself.  Because that’s what it seemed to be all about.  Not being yourself. 

You also didn’t think your own thoughts or feel your feelings.  If the usual thoughts and feelings relating to Spider-Man or Star Wars or junk food or what books you were reading started to cross your heart and mind, you sent them packing.  There was no smiling.  You sat there unthinking things and unfeeling things while not doing anything at all.  Jesus died to save you, and in gratitude, you sacrificed being you, in any way.  The only appropriate response to a great sacrifice was, obviously, a great sacrifice.  One that you modestly called small, and slapped “it’s the very least we can do” onto it. Only one in a thousand signed up to sacrifice living in his own culture entirely and took the family to Africa or similar.

A lasting result of this is that every time I go to a funeral, or go into any kind of religious situation, even if it’s one with a cheery, peppy RockBand worship team, my face and posture still do that “undertaker” thing, quite without me noticing. I just turn to stone.

Also, for me that’s what “worship” has always meant.  Being silent and still and serious.  And most importantly, being inward and introspective.  Because it wasn’t really collective worship at all, for us.  It was a room full of people meditating, and shutting each other out, imagining no one else was in the room.  My father actually told me, the more all the political infighting happened at church, to just pretend I was alone in that room, with God.  Because that’s what he was doing, and mostly it worked for him.  I don’t think he’d have been able to keep coming out otherwise.  And that’s all that ever worked for me, too.  I knew I surely couldn’t trust anyone else in that room.  Everyone seemed to be keeping an eye on each other to see who would slip up and indulge in unchristian acts first.

Whenever at school we had to do a “moment of silence” for someone who’d died, or for Remembrance Day (Veteran’s Day in the States), it felt very, very familiar to do this.  There was something familiar and soothing about quiet reverence.  It was less easy for my fidgeting classmates, who didn’t generally do that kind of thing.  I’d been punished for fidgeting from a very young age and had learned to sit extremely still and silent for an hour at a stretch long before I ever went into my first day of kindergarten.

We are creatures of habit.  To this day, if I go to any kind of religious thing, I reflexively disrespect humour and energy and levity.  It seems completely out of place.  I can’t connect to ecstatic, triumphant moods, songs or colourful diatribes, friendliness, jokes, smiling during sermons, and most of all, I want it to be quiet so I can go inside myself and open up in that sombre, silent, awed feeling which is what worship has always been to me.

I’ve been to churches where the experience is, compared to what I’m used to, turned right inside out.  People don’t even bring their bibles or any hymn books with them, and really, they’re being more of an audience than anything.  Instead of going inside yourself and thinking about our Lord suffering and dying, and kind of feeling empathy for him in that situation, it’s clearly about everyone throwing their hands up in the air and making a large forest of blissfully swaying arms while singing God-ified teenaged girl love songs that have very few words and a simple tune so they can be repeated over and over.  I’ve heard them called “7-11” songs, because they seem to have something like a seven word line being repeated what seems like eleven times, over and over.  There doesn’t seem to be the accustomed guilt or self-erasure.  You could sing them to a girl and she’d have no idea it was supposed to be sung to God, your Heavenly Boyfriend.  They say things like:

Draw me close to you
Never let me go
I lay it all down again
To hear you say that I'm your friend
You are my desire
No one else will do
Cause nothing else can take your place
To feel the warmth of your embrace
Help me find the way
Bring me back to you

You're all I want
You're all I've ever needed
You're all I want
Help me know you are near

( repeat all)

(I know, I know.  That song is bound to be downright sacred to someone, who will be deeply confused as to why, for me, it just isn’t packed with significance and those memories of deeply cathartic worship services.  “How can you not love that song?!” someone will want to demand of me.  Hard to answer a question like that.) 

Or the modern hymn might be even more “intimate” and say things like:

Your love is extravagant
Your friendship, it is intimate
I feel like moving to the rhythm of Your grace
Your fragrance is intoxicating in our secret place
Your love is extravagant

Spread wide in the arms of Christ is the love that covers sin
No greater love have I ever known You considered me a friend
Capture my heart again

Spread wide in the arms of Christ is the love that covers sin
No greater love have I ever known; You considered me a friend

Capture my heart again
Your love is extravagant
Your friendship, it is intimate

Our worship was about contemplating blood, spit, sweat, vinegar and agony in the thirsty dust.  There was nothing “intoxicating” in how Jesus smelled in our imaginations while we envisioned him dying under a Mediterranean sun, wracked with pain. 

For me trying going to a more modern church, it felt like they were celebrating a blood-free, tidy, clean, well-scrubbed, sweat-free, sweet-smelling, deathless crucifixion.  And it was like they felt that “laying it all down” for Him, or “surrendering completely to Him” was some kind of big, magnanimous act they had to psyche themselves up for, and which was really important and should be celebrated in song. 

I’d always felt like I was in God’s clutches from time immemorial, and that He always did with me and mine whatever He wanted, and got what use out of me He felt like.  I felt very much that I was nothing more than a creation of His, my whole life long, no matter if I struggled, strayed or surrendered.  I’d been raised to see Peter and Paul and Jonah as great examples of it not mattering how hard you tried to struggle to escape God.  He “had” you, so don’t kid yourself, was my experience.  So, no huge magnanimous vowing and re-vowing to “surrender myself” to Him.  I wasn’t my own to begin with, and I’d never escape Him, no matter what He wanted to do with my life.  I felt like I had nothing and no one to “surrender.”  Best to try to get along, of course, but surrender?  I was as likely to surrender myself to breathing air, or to being a human.

For us, worship was not about us and how much we loved Jesus, and how fondly we imaged him as a kind of Magic Boyfriend.  It was about feeling horrible about what Jesus suffered, and imagining in vivid detail all of those indignities and sufferings, with him accepting all of it meekly, like we were to do with our own hardships in life.  But mostly it was about feeling responsible for those sufferings and indignities, and kind of “suffering with him.”  Because it was, we sat and reminded ourselves, completely and only our fault.  So we felt as grateful and reverent and shamed and sad as we could work ourselves up to feel.

And that felt really good.  Because sad is good, in a very human way.  Sad songs make us feel good.  Sad movies make us feel good.  It’s like that rocky heart you’ve been keeping locked tight all week can suddenly melt and in so doing unclench, open and relax into a warm goo. That quiet, intense, inner release is a very zen sort of relief.

When I turned twelve, I “asked for my place” and three men came to visit me at my parents’ house.  I wanted in.  They talked about how solemn it was and what a privilege it was to take communion each and every Lord’s Day morning (that’s what we were to call Sunday) at the Lord’s Table. Though they called it “The Lord’s Table,” they clearly felt empowered (as “gatekeepers”) to deny people access to and cast people away from it. 

They talked about how important it was that there was nothing in my young life that would make “taking my place” a dishonour to the Lord.  So, if I swore, or fooled around with girls, or drank alcohol, or went to the movie theatre or live concerts or shoplifted or gambled or smoked, I needed to speak up.  They didn’t have to mention these things.  They just referred to all of that as “anything in your life,” and expected me to know what they meant.  I could proudly say that, at age twelve, there was nothing in my life that was a problem. I was clean. There was nothing in my life anyway.  I was good to go.  And so I was allowed to take my place at the Lord’s Table, they decided.

Drinking alcohol was not okay outside of Lord’s Day morning Breaking of Bread, when we drank a sip of it each, if we were members.  My first time, I sat proudly up beside my parents, after having sat for a couple of years in what was joking called “Sinner’s Row” in the back of the room next to my grandfather. He would die without ever being a member again, because he’d divorced his wife.  She sat up next to my parents, because she’d not been the one to initiate the divorce. 

So I sat back up there with my folks, feeling that I’d entered the inner circle, and I tore off a small piece from the torn-open loaf of white bakery bread that was extended on a plate to each of us, and took a small sip of the sweet, fruity communion wine.  This was long before the gluten free superstition.  I’d never tasted alcohol before and didn’t like the taste terribly much, but I liked the way it felt warm going down, as my esophagus and stomach absorbed the alcohol communion wine is laced with. The wine was to represent, variously, the blood of Jesus, shed for us, and the cup of joy that was ours, now that the “bitter cup of judgment” had been drank for us.  I feel that the lack of wine ever being used as a part of any kind of celebration (including weddings) in Brethren houses really kind of made that “a cup of wine is a symbol of joy and celebration” thing fall upon deaf hearts, in our cases.  We knew little of celebration.  We knew about all manner of abstinences, though.

After I got to sit up there Lord’s Day morning, and “take of the emblems,” the only remaining roles left for me to aspire to were to help church services out by speaking up during the meetings and passing the emblems around and praying and so on.  Of course, this wasn’t normally done until one was an adult, and so I held off until I was about twenty, at which time a division happened and my attendance had dropped steadily off, making me feel unworthy to speak up very often.  I did a few things a few times.  It was nerve-wracking to be driving that big ship, to be handling that whole room, and directing the worship or bible contemplation of twenty or forty people for that moment when they were singing a hymn I’d chosen, or I was reading them a part of the bible aloud. 

I also remember saying a couple of things during bible discussions.  After I got my degree in English Literature, though, I was starting to get bothered by how people were drawing those lines between literal and symbolic, and with how they used symbolism in general.  The traditional Brethren views as to what in the bible symbolized what seemed to change and morph as suited the men talking, rather than holding together and making sense the way I thought they did in the actual bible.

In particular, when our meeting was “studying” the book of Revelation, and the velociraptor/scorpion-sounding monsters “with the hair of women” were being described, it was explained how that men with long hair (these were monsters, and not men, I thought), just like men with beards, clearly were intended by the apostle John to represent Rebellion.  And we knew that this world was all about rebellion.

I had short hair, but was thinking of growing a short beard, and said that really, men with long hair and beards were only seen as rebels and upstarts in America in the 1960s, and that Revelation had been written much earlier, in a time when the hair of women seemed in scripture (or in the case of David’s son Absolom’s thick hair, cut only once a year) to represent beauty, glamour or “glory.”  I also mentioned that one would be hard-pressed to find a single male person in the bible, including John, who wouldn’t have had a beard.  Exception were, of course, eunuchs and those rejected delegates in the Old Testament who’d had their beards shaved to shame them, and were therefore given time to regrow their beards before having to appear in the King’s court.  Obviously, no one smiled or nodded or acknowledged that I’d spoken in any way.  They continued talking about how rebellion was bad, while ostensibly dealing with a part of the book of Revelation that didn’t seem to be about that at all.  Just because they really hated rebellion and didn’t care what the apostle might have seen, or what he’d been trying to say.  Or so it appeared to me.  And any attempt to listen to what the bible said, rather than make it say we should hate what we already hated (rule breakers and modernizers and people who loved to party) fell on deaf minds.

This approach to “bible discussion” bugged me.  Making the bible say things, like our puppet, seemed almost as bad as using it to make points which were very clearly contradictory to the very stuff the bible was shot through with from beginning to end.  We kinda went through and co-opted bits of verses to spur us on, in our diatribes.  We didn’t look at entire chapters or books or periods of time as whole things very often.  Certainly not when it got in our way.  The system seemed to work by making certain no one and nothing connected. 

One thing I have done to try to cure myself of this way of vivisecting the bible is to sit down and read whole books of the bible at a time when possible, or in ten chapter chunks.  It’s astounding how much stuff gets missed if you slice it up too much.  The bible “calls and answers” bits of itself from one place to the rest more than any book I’ve ever read.  If I’m reading a letter from the apostle Paul, and I read it one “chapter” at a time, with twenty-four hour breaks between chapters, it’s no wonder I lose sight of the thing as a whole.  I mean, how is that a natural way to read a letter? How you read a letter is you read the whole thing, and then go back through it afterward.

On one very uncharacteristic occasion after a youth camp in Pennsylvania back in the day, Shawn Allan and I, both about twenty, each gave a small talk to a room full of “young people.”  It’s the only time I can remember guys in their early adulthood being encouraged to teach.  So Shawn and I did.  We were the only two. 

In my talk I contrasted the scriptural concept of being transformed inwardly by God into the image of Christ, with merely imitating the outer appearance of what a Christian life was thought to look like, superficially.  “Transformed” rather than “conformed,” the bible wording went.  The talk didn’t go over terribly well with some, but I remember some nice words from a few, and sharing a brief congratulatory moment with Shawn over having gathered the nerve and having talked for about twenty minutes each, and having made sensible sentences and having not embarrassed ourselves.

I was pretty into Sunday morning right from age twelve.  Eventually, though,  my attendance dropped off in my later teens, starting with the other church services, as I lost respect for the “teaching” that went on “about the bible.” I also had a problem as infighting and bitter, underhanded ecclesiastical betrayals became the order of the day, with my father an early casualty of this   Even so, I still could “do” Sunday morning for quite a few years.  I just pretended no one else was in the room.  And that rock of tightly controlled heart matter could melt hotly, deep inside there where I kept it locked closed.  I could plunge myself deep under the waves of shame, gratitude, reverence, awe and melancholy and wonder if I’d ever come back up for air again.

Of course I know that’s not what it’s like for many other people, nor do I think it’s wrong of them to do things differently.  I just have never grown out of feeling deeply that it’s annoying and weird when they do.  For their part, when I have come out to their churches, they have seem offended that I don’t feel what they feel when they do what they do.  They have encouraged me to “get over myself for one hour and just enjoy Jesus.”  I have not pointed out that they are the ones being mic-ed and amplified, standing on elevated stages.  I’m sure they don’t want to “get over” themselves, and are going to say they are honoured and humbled to be treated like a rock star for Jesus, and that they’re doing it for everyone else, as a form of service.  And maybe it is.  I can’t see it like that, though. Upbringing.

I think this typical Christian inability to tolerate differing views on much of anything including “worship style” is the main reason we subdivide into our little church groups, sometimes with several meeting within a mile of one another. I have come to believe this splitting up rather than working things out is directly disobedient and contrary to how God intended and how the New Testament describes how Christian community is meant to work. 

My church, for example, felt completely at home (well, I’d go so far as to say they preferred and taught by example that it was absolutely correct) to live and act as if there were no other Christians in the town. If there technically were, we always lived as if they had nothing to do with us, that we had no responsibility or connection to them, and that we were better off keeping our distance. 

“There’s connections that contaminate, there’s things in this world that contaminate.  Not only moral questions, but doctrinal questions contaminate, and ecclesiastical connections contaminate as well,” a respected Brethren worthy once opined before a thousand Plymouth Brethren people, back in the day. 

For those who don’t speak Brethren, this speech was being heard by most of us as “It is extremely important not to let our lives and our church and our souls get contaminated with adulterants, and there are things outside our church that will contaminate us if we have anything to do with them.  It’s not safe.  Don’t mess around.  Not only are there physical and sexual kinds of self-indulegence that can rub off onto us and ruin the purity of our Christian lives, but the doctrine and theology of other Christians can rub off on us also.  And connecting to other churches can do this same kind of damage as well.”

Living this way in practice, we were also always taught that in theory anyway, we Christians were “one body.”  So, all Christians were “one,” the teaching went, but all the other Christians clearlyl simply didn’t seem to know to show up at our street address, so that was their own problem.  If the Christians living across the road from us, who attended that church up our block didn’t show up in our church, what could we do?  Just go on with our Christian lives and always remember to thank God and wonder at how bless’ed we were to have been gathered aright.  Always remind each other how, but for the grace of God, we might well be associated with their unscriptural church shenanigans.

Naturally this meant that every time I met someone who said he or she was also a Christian, my instinctive, trained reaction was one of suspicion.  There should have been a natural reaching out to them and recognizing a like human being.  To some degree that was in there too, but it was kind of overmatched by something else.  So I asked the same question Christians the world over reflexively ask in that situation: “What church do you go to?”  Because I needed to check the name of the church they went to against my database of how weird that church’s doctrine was thought by the Plymouth Brethren to be.  I certainly wouldn’t be going to their church, nor they to mine, so we wouldn’t probably be hanging out, but for the sake of friendliness (and expediency, if we were work colleagues or people going to my school) it was good to know how close to being “normal” and correct this person’s Christianity was.  Perhaps a friendly wave across that uncrossed doctrinal fence would be shared. 

I’ve been trying, with uncertain success, to get over this lifelong dysfunctional approach to connecting to other Christians.  One of my main ways of trying to connect to another Christian is to ask if there’s something we can privately pray for in each other’s lives.  This is a way of seeing if there is sufficient trust to share anything personal whatsoever, and see if it is possible for the two of us to share goals in any way, or even agree upon a single thing that would be good.  You would be amazed at how many Christians have found it too intimate or personal to trust me with something that’s a struggle for them, or something that troubles them, or something they really want.  They feel safer doing that with Christians on the Internet who are complete(r) strangers, and who therefore won’t be running into you at the grocery store and asking how things are going in your life, even though they don’t even go to your church, the intrusive weirdos.

In recent times, the teaching of the “One Right Place” doctrine has all but disappeared in the brethren group that excommunicated me.  When even hardliners like my father started saying “It might be true that we’re the Only Right Place, but it’s prideful to teach that,” I knew the old regime had crumbled a bit.  Still, for the most part many believe this, and most live as they ever did, with those walls of ecclesiastical separation as firmly in place just like always.  To this day, when a young Plymouth Brethren person wants to impress me with how “free” he or she is, I always get told the same thing: “I have gone to other churches sometimes, and I haven’t been kicked out.”  That didn’t used to be the way of things.  I know someone on Facebook who got kicked out of an “open” Brethren group in the sixties because she was secretly practicing with a Baptist choir group.

The best thing I hear about from my hermit’s cave is that the younger Brethren sometimes routinely socialize with Christians from other unaffiliated Brethren groups, or even more mainstream churches.  Hockey, concerts, movie nights, video games, going on trips, whatever.  I think that’s great.  

The New Testament talks about people “causing divisions” in groups of Christians.  I think for the most part, these situations which angered the apostles, were about the Christians in a given area having factions causing trouble in their group. I don’t think, despite the condemnation rained on them, that these situations had ever, in most cases, progressed to the point where you’d have “the Christians in Crete who meet on Broadway Avenue” not talking to “the Christians in Crete who meet on 2^nd Avenue,” with apostles writing separate epistles to both groups, or the Christians only accepting epistles from apostles who took a clear stand for the one group, and against their opponents.  Yet we see this kind of thing as quite normal nowadays, or normal enough that we will continue in it and do nothing about it.  I’ve had trouble even conveying the idea that maybe it’s weird for two churches to be seen by the world, sitting across the street from each other, going on just as if the other church wasn’t there, and didn’t have Christians in it; just as if the two groups had nothing to do with each other.

Something that has been, given all of this, quite difficult for me to grasp is to see God in good things.  Sunsets.  The swaying walk of a happy, beautiful woman.  The warm buzz of teasing in a comfortable group of family or friends.  Your friends meeting your friends’ friends and getting on.  Stuff like that.  To see God outside of church, in things other than hymns and prayer of self-abnegation or grandiose vows of “total surrender” of self.  To see God making me better, rather than in me remembering not to be me, for Him.

I’m still learning to see life and connection and beauty as being good things from God, instead of “distractions” from proper Christian solemnity, as things you have to indulge yourself in or become a rebel to enjoy.  I was always taught that many enjoyable things were fine, “in their place” and “in moderation.”  It was always added on that that experience of getting so into any experience as to lose one’s self, or lose track of time, or forget one’s troubles, was something God would be jealous of, and could be “an idol.”  I’m learning to see Him in that stuff now, too.  It’s not easy.  Learning that “the things of the Lord” aren’t just church things.  Just like I learned that church things weren’t all “the things of the Lord.”

We were taught from a young age that God was watching us every moment, even when we weren’t at church.  From the moment we woke up to the moment we fell asleep, “the Eyes of the Lord [were] in every place, beholding the evil and the good.” We had a tape we really liked of Nancy Weeks and her sister Bonnie Imbeau sweetly singing that.  (to us, "Bonnie and Nancy" was a singing duo, just like Simon and Garfunkel or Donny and Marie, and we eagerly awaited another single from those two.) At Sunday school we were rewarded with stickers for memorizing that phrase. And yet, how it got passed down to me, it might have just read “the eyes of the Lord are in every place beholding the evil.” 

 So I lived my childhood “on security camera” as it were.  God was watching.  Like Santa Claus, but without presents for us.  Instead of “good kids getting presents and bad kids getting nothing” it was “bad kids getting punishment and good kids getting nothing.”  Naturally, if He was looking at us and everything we did, both good and bad, the only “good” we could possibly do was in not doing fun stuff. 

I was always terribly aware that God was always watching me all day long.  It had never occurred to me that He might be smiling.  Ever.

A bad lesson I seemed to have imbibed with my mother’s electric stove heated baby formula is the idea that if something is easy, or fun, it’s not worthy of our time.  The idea that we should always need to be “striving” as to some things, and yet also be very passive and self-sacrificing and loath to bother with going after things for no better reason than that we wanted to.

The word “virtue” is all through the bible.  There is a virtuous woman.  Jesus felt virtue go out of him.  I always understood the word to mean “purity.  Freedom from corrupting, sinful crap.”  In fact, it means “merit, excellence, worth, that which works and is of benefit.”  Now that’s a very different thought.  I think I grew up with such a focus on sin and wrath and evil and hell that the idea of good or acceptance or heaven almost completely failed to ingrain themselves the way the shame did.  God was Someone who judged or didn’t.  He wasn’t someone who approved.  He loved in the sense of not judging.  (And when it comes down to that, why does “judging” always mean “judging to be guilty of something” and never includes the connotation of “judging to be innocent”?  That’s pretty messed up.)

I was paid $20 to read the entire King James Bible when I was twelve.  The interesting thing, looking back is that it wasn’t the money I was really doing it for, although that was nice.  And my motive certainly wasn’t what it should have been, that the bible was good (that it had virtue or merit or excellence), so I was going to experience it because of that inherent worth. 

It was to be able to tell people I’d been able to do it.  At age twelve.  In the 17^th century King James translation. The whole thing.  (Like I just did, there.)

When my father helped out with the bible discussion at our church, he sweated through all of these hundred year old books of Brethren doctrine, as best he could.  John Nelson Darby’s interminable run-on sentences, all strung together with commas and semi-colons.  William Kelly’s shameless excesses of exclamation points! Dad isn’t a strong reader, and it was all he could do to make sense of them.  And he wasn’t reading them so much because he wanted to know about the bible, as much as because he had a job to do.  He needed to serve those people at the bible study by making sure “something of substance” (something traditional and unassailable) was on offer.  He wasn’t just going to open and the bible and make up stuff or tell people what the verses made him think.  For him, it was the activity of serving that was worthwhile, and not the books themselves.  They were just awkward tools he needed to use. Work was virtuous.  It was an end unto itself. 

And once my father ran afoul of the political infighting and was “silenced,” having to sit mutely in disgrace while the other men discussed the bible around him, he stopped reading those books entirely.  He didn’t even read his bible much.  It really seemed to have been about the task, rather than the content.  I don’t think he would have considered the experience of taking in the bible for no reason other than it having merit.  He was always having to “use” something “useful.”  It wasn’t about it being actually good.  If a painting or a song or a dance was really good, it would be only human to want to enjoy and share it, but in my culture, if it wasn’t “edifying” (useful and instructive) then we were indulging ourselves and wasting the time God had given us, purely to please those selves we weren’t supposed to be being at that point.  To say that this has marked me from my formative years upward, is a massive understatement.

Adam sinned to get knowledge of Good (and Evil.)  We only want to know what’s “wrong” and carefully not do it.  A huge secret from us Brethren people, apparently: there is good in this world.  Because God put it there.  We can and should find it and enjoy and share it.

It’s not just “Oh try him out and prove that the Lord is useful, and that he works in your life.”  It’s “Oh taste (a quite sensual word, literally) and see (again) that the lord is good.”

So I don’t feel like we trusted God and the bible to be worthwhile and good, all by themselves.  And I think the time we spent and the interest we took in endlessly justifying them to others shows that we felt like they needed us to be there doing that.  All of the pat answers and twisty arguments for the existence, relevance and the goodness of God, for creationism and why gay marriage, divorce, early-term abortions, drinking alcohol and listening to pop music were all killing out society and bringing damnation upon us seem a bit shrill to me now.  I see people arming themselves with these and going looking for someone to fight as to them, in a time when people don’t usually care much.  And it looks less and less like we’re doing this for God, or certainly for our victims, who we’re trying to “logic” out of blind faith in science and into heaven.  And it looks more and more to me like it’s ourselves we’re trying to convince.