In and Out

Writing this, I feel like the furry blue Muppet Grover from Sesame Street (he was a precursor to Elmo), about to explain the meanings of commonly used prepositions to children (near and far.  top and bottom.)  Hmm.

My church culture rested heavily upon dichotomies.  Opposites.  Black and white.  On Facebook a couple of years ago, someone from the same kind of background as me tried to “correct” my nuanced thinking about things the bible says by insisting everything come down to the bible serving as nothing more than an ethics manual.  Right. Wrong.  

 Just talking to me, he could see that I was reading a lot more in there than just that stuff.  He suddenly blocked me on Facebook with a last message saying “If you are going to go right on Facebook and try to claim that there are any GRAY AREAS in ANYTHING the bible is saying, then I have no other choice except to block you!”

The idea that maybe there were not only grey areas, but colours also, seen in the bible, would have been quite beyond him, I suspect.  He needed to protect his belief system from that kind of thing.

My church group wasn’t even aware of how much it spoke and thought entirely in terms of “us” and “them.”  In terms of “among the gathered saints” and “those who are without/outside.”  The way everything came down to “the saints” vs.“professing Christendom” or “the meeting” vs. “This World.”

As I said before, it was about keeping clean, about keeping one’s doctrine right.  So, you kept out of the stuff other churches were doing, so as not to catch their lazy, sloppy, dubious habits and doctrine.  And you kept out of This World so as not to catch all that sensual, self-indulgent, self-pleasing, God-dishonouring evil.

When I was twelve, having grown up “in,” I asked in, too.  And got to join that inner circles of Matthew 18-grade correct Christian saints who were the only ones worshiping "right."  We were in and everyone else was out.  

I was in.  And as to my life, I didn’t go to movies or have a television in my house, or look at pornography, or swear, or drink alcohol outside of the Sunday morning service, nor generally “make friends with This World,” so as not to be enemies with God.

The thing is, Cain didn’t have a television. He didn’t listen to Judas Priest, either.  Now where exactly did the urge to murder come from, if not from C.S.I.?

The bible seems to present pretty clearly that evil comes into the world through the human heart.  It seems to present the idea that, Jesus said, it’s not what goes into you (your mouth, your eyes, your ears) so much as what comes out of you the defiles you.  We are imperfect.  We have urges to cheat, to lie, to manipulate, to bully, to steal.  We can be tempted to do these things rather than actually do things up right.    We know very well that the real thing to do is to speak truth, to deal with other human beings without resorting to bullying, lying or manipulating, and to acquire things honestly.  Trying to take shortcuts invalidates and corrupts the whole endeavour.  We know this.

But many parents were worried that if their kids saw the Roadrunner drop a piano on  Wile E. Coyote, that their kids would laugh, because the cartoon had put into their previously pristine little hearts a new-found, learned delight in the misfortunes of others.   

This is a big debate.  Are the kids laughing because the horrible thing hasn’t happened to them, and they’re imagining how much it would suck if it had, and feel almost a relief or "lucky escape" that they’ve lived thus far without any pianos falling on them?  Or are they laughing because it’s so exaggerated and unexpected?  Because in the context of the story, it’s perfectly set up, yet still surprising?  Because they had never thought of someone else being hurt, but thanks to the cartoon, now they suddenly think other people getting hurt is hilarious?  Or because it is deeply human to laugh when others get hurt, and those kids came with that built into them, and this cartoon was designed to depict something that would resonate with them?

I felt like we were getting mixed signals.  We were taught that each human being was born with the capacity to do the very worst kinds of sins build right into us.  We were told over and over again how we needed to read the bible, pray, go to church and failing all of that, trust God, or else we would instantly become the very worst kinds of sinners.  Old men and women who’d never seen a television show or drank a glass of wine would go on and on about how, if they let slip just once (let go of their flawed willpower?) they could just feel how they’d all too soon become a goat-raping serial killer who loved television.  (well, perhaps they didn’t word it quite like that, but the implications were, I thought, clear to all of us.)

But then they’d kind of turn around and speak of the depravity of This World and how seductive it was, and deceitful, and how we needed to keep well clear of all of the fun things it had on offer.  To keep clean.  Wait.  We were clean now?

I was a weird child, so one weekend on holiday at my uncle’s house in Mississauga, I read The Pilgrim’s Progress by John (not Paul or Ringo) Bunyan.  It was predictably puritan, though I didn’t know what that meant at the time, depicting the world as a place filled with tempting cities and bad company one could fall into.   A "just say no" theology.  But there was this one part that gave me (this was not meant to happen in my young life) new thoughts.  Thoughts that hadn’t ever come up at church.  The allegorical Christians in Bunyan's book are given white robes and when they are going on their journey, people throw dirt on them.  And it magically slides off and doesn’t defile their white robes.  Like, at all.

What?  They were walking through the world and once they got spiritual enough, or were on a path of growth, and progressing toward God, it wasn’t about locking themselves away from This World, and as they walked through it, they didn’t  have to worry about getting defiled so much anymore?  It wasn't their primary preoccupation to keep their skirts clean?

And then I noticed that in the Old Testament, there wasn’t any shame tied into all of those ritualistic washings.  If you carried the remains of a dead family member to their grave, if you defecated, if you menstruated, if you gave birth, if you did any number of things, you had to wash yourself and undergo cleansing afterward.  These were pragmatic people.  You worked and lived your life, and you needed to wash before shaking other people’s hands, hugging them, sitting at table with them and passing around food. And it wasn’t a shameful thing.  It was a life thing.

And in the New Testament: Jesus didn’t teach his disciples not to walk around Judea because it would make their feet dirty.  He walked everywhere, and wanted his feet washed when he arrived at your house.

Life defiles us.  Anyone who’s cleaned up after a sexual encounter or childbirth can tell you that the more “full of life” an act is, the more likely there is to be perhaps a certain amount of pain in with the joy, and probably a huge mess.  There is really no place for shame in it.  Shame is always divisive.  It doesn’t help in making connections.  It isn’t inspiring.  Life involved getting your hands (and other parts of you) dirty.  And we have soap.

I began to realize that my parents didn’t seem primarily concerned that watching The Dukes of Hazzard would dirty or wound my soul.  It seemed more about how that activity would make me look normal and usual.  Would make it impossible for onlookers to tell that I was in that Inner Circle of Correct Saints.  Would make it impossible to "be a good testimony."  Why, if a random person laid eyes on me sitting there delighting in the improbable feats a 1967 Dodge Charger was depicted as being capable of, how would they even know I was a Christian?  If at school, when the other kids asked “Did you see The A-Team last night?” and I said “Yeah!,” how would they even know I was a Christian?  If I dressed, combed my hair or spoke or moved like the people on television, if I loved the things the people in This World loved, how exactly would I be different?  What if the Rapture happened right when I was watching TV?  What a dishonour to the Lord!  

 In my church, they often quoted the verse about how the Israelites were to be a “peculiar people.”  We were to be peculiar, too.  Peculiarly disengaged from joy and all joyful pursuits.

I was getting a clear message that being a Christian wasn’t about being given something from God.  It was about giving up things for God.  It wasn’t really that I “had something” the other children were supposed to see and want for themselves.  Not really.  

 I was being raised mainly to not have what they had.  In theory, the idea was that all of the prayer and bible reading and going to church was supposed to pretty much fill the time I would otherwise have spent doing fun things, and that I’d not even want television and movies and music if I had these Christian things instead.  But that didn’t work.  Proof positive that I was carnal and sold under sin.

So the “method” behind all the life advice, behind the required church lifestyle boiled down to this: keep out the other churches, keep out the other Christians, keep out the fun things in This World, to keep yourself clean, and to keep yourself safe inside.

Predictably, people raised according to this plan found that the church hurt many of us, rather than keeping us safe.  Despite being "in" with This World locked "out," we Christians brought all manner of corrupting and damaging crap into the church settings.  And we got it from within.  Some of it we invented ourselves, finding way to hurt and cheat and sin without "breaking any of the rules. " Christians did not, as promised, consistently show forgiveness, grace and mercy in a way the Children of Darkness in This World would know nothing about.  

There are evil things, dirty things, hurtful and twisted things that don’t require television. We had suicides. We had incest and rape.  We had insanity.  We had stalkers and pedophiles.  We even had murder.  And the expected correlation between the occurrence of these kinds of sins, and a laxity of lifestyle, an association with This World, a lack of attendance at church or interest in the Things of the Lord? Wasn’t to be seen.  Zealous people sin too.  Zealously.

I wrote a pretty nasty “parable” to try to convey this, one time.  It was the story of a small church which decides that This World is so defiling, dangerous and dirty, that it is going to lock all of its ten families inside the building forever.  Then they are guaranteed to escape all the danger and all the filth and evil.  And so it does just this.

Thirty years later, some neighbors complain about the smell, and firemen break down the doors, which have remained nailed shut for the three decades. 

Inside there is one enormously fat Christian man, sitting alone atop a huge pile of bones.  He is filthy, and he stinks, and yet he has never been outside the room.

Not a very subtle point.  But I believe a hard-won lesson, after being raised how I was, was that this “us” and “them” thing has a real downside.  That the “them outside” and “us inside” thing led us astray. Roger Waters, in writing "Us and Them" on Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album was already thinking along these lines in the mid-70s.

In every church division, people reduced who was “us”, by deciding that some of our number had become “them” now.  The bible repeatedly says Christians are to love one another.  Almost like it’s the main point of being here, or something, or like we can’t get by or achieve anything without dealing with one another in love.  Almost as if treating each other without love is a worse testimony even than watching television.  And yet we live as if many other Christians simply aren’t Christians at all, are dead, or never existed. We go on YouTube and talk about “them” and how “they” are preaching bad things, or “don’t take a clear stand” for or against certain political positions like "we" do, and are, therefore, destined to become boils on Satan’s backside for all eternity.   

Maybe loving one another is about trying very hard to view lots of people as “us.” Maybe if you want to “save” people, or talk to them about God, you have to be able to say (and mean) “us.”  Maybe instead of continually contrasting ourselves with “other people,” we need to try to genuinely make a connection, see similarities and commonality.  Maybe we have to listen as well as talk, because we actually believe that we might learn something too.  From "them."

For me, I had to get comfortable with the idea that “in” wasn’t as safe and clean as it was advertized to be.  That reeking Jabba the Hut figure on the top of the pile of the bones of the saints was an ugly image.  I’d been all set to try to become him, too.  It had not escaped me that the kind of piety I was raised to live? Was mostly importantly a competitive kind of piety.

So I had to “go outside the camp” and walk around in This World (which is, one starts to realize, Our World too, at least this year) and see who each person was individually, instead of feeling like I’d already been briefed on everything and everyone.   

Even when you really do know what someone’s going to say next (which becomes more and more easy with age, and with having had a hundred little conversations each day for decades), usually we need to say it anyway, and be dead sure that we are liked, heard, understood, and that the person sitting opposite isn't there mainly to judge, categorize, dismiss or correct .  That is one of the hardest things for me.

But I went “outside the camp” and walked to and fro upon the earth, and saw pain and defilement and confusion, along with beauty, love and insight.  I saw life.  In bars with garage bands playing.  In video rental stores.  In corner stores.  In Central Park.  In pool halls.  At science fiction/horror conventions.  Everywhere I went, I saw people.  Some I could deal with, and some I couldn’t.  Some I wanted to judge awesome, and some I wanted to judge despicable.  Because I was raised with the feeling that judging was my job, for some reason.  But I worked on that.  I tried to remember that there is a “Judge of all the Earth,” and I am not he.  I tried to remember that there is a time to judge, and it isn’t when the song isn’t over, the painting isn’t finished, or the cake’s not been baked yet.

I went in to church, and I went out to This World.  I thought of the people at church as “us” because they were my people, my culture.  I increasingly thought of various other people outside the church as “us,” too.  I spoke to people who'd left the church, even though I was frantically warned not to, lest I become like "them."  

I was able to deal with people who were open to us being the same, meeting openness with openness.  If someone was a zealous atheist, evangelical Christian or Satanist, normally I found I couldn’t really even have a genuine conversation with them.  They remained “them” no matter what I did, sometimes.  We could make no “us.”  And they positively glowed and delighted in that black and white contrast.  Science va. religion.  Atheism vs. all other world views.  How one way was Right and all other ways were not only Very Wrong, but Really, Really Stupid.  And they ranted. And said they “[couldn’t] understand” how anyone could be different from them.  Bragged that they couldn't even imagine how other people could think and feel what "they" did.

I made friends.  Many of them could view me as “us” for a time, but then if they moved away, or made an “us” that was altogether narrower, or they just got sick of me, I was “one of them” again.

And at church, I was “them” too.  There’d been a division, in which about 60% of “us” and something like 90% of the people under forty had suddenly become “them.”  But I wasn’t staying “in” and I wasn’t frightened of This World, and I wasn’t going out of my way to be peculiar anymore.  And people’s kids had questions.  So they, the ones who were still “in,” kicked me “out” just like they’d already kicked “out” so many others.

I have tried to be “us” with various church groups.  It hasn’t worked out.  But when I try to have an “us” with one or two other people, Christians or otherwise, we normally can do it.  We end up being a support for each other, making each other think, caring about each other’s struggles, and sharing each other’s joys.  And we fight like family.

But when I try to go “in”to an Established Christian Anything, which anything has already defined who is “in” and who is “out” and what is required in order to be “us,” it doesn’t go well.

Increasingly, I realize that, like or not, in some ways the Plymouth Brethren are my “us.”  And “we’ve” gotten rid of me and don’t ever want me back.   We reject me.  In other ways, they were always “them” to me.

The New Testament doesn’t narrow “us” any narrower than “all Christians,” or when writing to Christians in specific continents or towns, all the Christians in that area.  I think maybe I’m not supposed to acknowledge any other way of looking at it.  If a Christian I know is part of an “us” that I am not, “we” are still Christians, and that’s more important than their membership list.   

I think that’s how we Christians should deal, but we’re not used to it.  We’re used to “They go to the Riverstone Bible Chapel now, so of course we don’t see much of them anymore.”

I think I’m supposed to hang out with people. I think I’m supposed to have coffee with them, play songs with them, eat with them, phone them, text them, email them and Facebook them. Some have spoken of many of these pursuits as “wasting my time.”  Because presumably anything other than face-to-face real-time spent with one’s own nuclear family  and chosen sub-sub-sub-division of the Christians in our area is a waste of time.  Well, maybe it’s not.

I know people with emotional struggles, family problems, money problems, alcoholism, relationship woes and all kinds of real “life” stuff.  Joy, pain and mess.  I think we need to be “us.”  I sometimes say “You’ve talked to me, now go talk to Martha or Jeremiah about it too and see what they say.  So far you’ve only got what I’ve said.  See what the others might have to add.”  I am often asked “What do they know?  They won’t understand a bit of it.”

And then I have to talk about how the “not telling” people stuff hurts us, all by itself.  How locking problems away allows them to really grow like mushrooms in the cellar.  How AA says we're only as sick as our secrets.  How the bible says that two are better than one (e.g. in the forest working, or rock climbing or something), because then if one falls down and gets hurt, there’s someone else there.  There is an “us.”  This is what I shoot for when I meet Christians who I presume believe in prayer.  Life has, as I said, the pain and problems and mess, so I assume they are troubled by something of that.  I'm assuming they are pushed toward growth, as I am, faster than they'd like.  So I offer to ask God for whatever they want me to ask Him for, for them.  I can't believe how often this gets Christians' backs up.  How often it's too intimate or too Christian or too real or too whatever.  I think that's what an "us" is about, though.  And most Christians I talk to don't have anything I can recognize as an "us" in their church groups.   Not for too many years at a stretch, anyway.  And people online get all choked up about how real and honest and workable the plastic discussions on the Internet seem by contrast. The "us" they find on a online forum.  I'm ashamed that this is how well "we" Christians do at community.

I have an “us.”  A small one.  My church “us” is no help, for the most part.  The “us” I have is mainly others from that same old church “us” who are all “them” nowadays, as far as “we,” the church, are concerned.  I don’t need another church “us,” either, ‘moving on’ and proudly considering my old church “us” a “them” now.  There’s enough of that around already.  I just need people.  And I have them.  And they have me.