There's something important I'm trying to work out. Something I'm very much in the middle of. Something I absolutely do not have figured out. One thing I do know: usually there are two extremes to an issue, and quite often, when people "get serious" about a thing, they pick their favourite of the two extremes, and they resolve to pursue and teach and support it. And meanwhile they hate on the other one. Like cheering for NFL teams, but about real people's real lives. Red vs. Blue. Us and them. Dumb. Hypocritical.
So, I'm going to look at two extremes when it comes to being a Christian, and dealing with God. I'm going to think about it in terms of wants. Getting stuff from God. Here's the first extreme:
The Lord Is Thy Shepherd, Thou Shalt Not Want Things
I'm starting with the extreme end of things, the one that was endlessly taught to me, growing up. Essentially, we're talking about puritanism, which is neo-phariseeism, if we're honest. This is about learning to reflexively not want things. In fact, to make a show of not wanting and enjoying things. Preaching that it's not safe to go around just wanting things. Believing that if you want something, and you let God know (ever), He will certainly take away from you any chance of having it. Because you believe in that god, it turns out.
God the Great Ruiner of any and all stuff you want. You appreciate a person, a song, a meal, a movie, a book, an activity? That's fine and deeply enjoyable, until you let God into it, and then He's going to communicate disapproval and shame on you and it, until you can't help but realize that what He really, really wants you to do is just sacrifice that thing for Him. This puritan god you've created will have no reason whatsoever, other than that you are enjoying it, if one looks deeply enough. All the judgments, doubts, aspersions and suspicion levied against the thing you want is really simply being fuelled by a view of God that involves Him being selfish and hating you having any fun.
The thing about puritanism, is that it's quite natural. At first glance, you'd think it against nature, but people all over get into it. (Like scrapbooking or eating gluten-free.) Puritanism/neo-phariseeism is an ancient, terribly typical idea that comes from what the bible calls "the flesh." The part that's trying to live life "right," but isn't open to the idea that people need God to get any of it right at all. That people can't just figure everything out for themselves, and hand it to Him afterward, wrapped up in a bow, and get any of it right.
The flesh thinks it knows what God wants, without ever needing to know Him very well, or ask Him stuff, wait for enlightenment or anything.
The flesh is that thing that can't please God, but keeps trying, mostly through sacrifice and hurting one's self, all the while secretly, understandably starting to resent any god who is this kind of Person. The flesh doesn't know God loves us. Not really. To know this, one has only to see exactly what kind of god would be best pleased by the efforts of the flesh when it "does religion."
The Flesh Doing Religion/Living Life Right
I got a message from Kurt, a childhood friend today. Haven't seen him since the 90s. I'm going to go back and remember something about him, to use as an example for this entry.
When I was a kid, I loved comics. Superhero comics, mostly. I wanted to get a bunch of them and collect them and read them. I mean, they were incredibly colourful and action-packed, and they let me imagine I was cool, stalwart, good, brave and funny. A badass who made the world a better place. A hero who could save girls. A hero who knew what had to be done and could do it, even if no one understood him.
But that very colour, the extremes of it, the "spice" to it, the drama and action clashed with our empty, silent, beige household. My mother said Spider-Man was "garish" and what few comics I had when I was a small child got tossed. Tintin was okay, because it has more subdued colours and art. But it was pretty hard to get Tintin until the past few decades, when it was released in America and Canada, so I didn't find it in stores in the town where I lived.
Now, no one actually told my mother my wanting comics was bad, or that comics would be bad for me, or what was wrong with comics. She didn't know anything about them. Upon consideration, I don't believe she was getting rid of the comics for my good at all. The comics didn't fit. Not with our lifestyle. They didn't go along with the family and church image, or style of life/lifestyle. They clashed. We were content, decent, quiet, grey folk. No sudden moves, nothing in bright colours, no flair or fashion or any of that. Outfits didn't have to be hopelessly out of style, but they had to carefully lack flair. If we wanted to look like we were real originals, filled with style and character, that was a want that the puritan heart assumed God needed sacrificed immediately.
And I grew up, programmed to fully exercise this puritan part of the flesh that all humans have. When human beings decide to "get religious," no matter what hemisphere or race or era, that "sacrificing whatever our deepest heart wants most" thing can always be seen. And it has nothing to do with what God, the real Person, actually wants. It's just people being people. Assuming there is some inherent good in sacrifice, even if they are disobedient and completely out of touch with God and what's He's doing. They often dutifully, devoutly, horribly sacrifice things God gave. Like having a life. Like talking. Like the company of others. Like romance. Like a baby girl's genitals.
But I was raised like a puritan. I dressed blah. If I listened to music, it had to be blah. I spoke in a quiet, mumbly monotone. I didn't make sudden gestures, loud noises or make actual facial expressions. And church people respected all of that. It made me gain status among them. It was the Best Thing to Do.
By 19, I was starting to wear a lot of black (usually with one item of clothing that was brightly yellow, blue or red, to contrast), was cultivating facial hair (though I didn't dare do anything interesting with my hair, because you'd be able to see that on Sunday morning), and was getting "pulled in" to music that was downright vehement. Music that expressed something other than beige. Music that expressed jubilation, deep sorrow, frustration and rebellious anger, silliness and angst. Even sexual feelings. Music with the entire human emotional palette.
I was well on my way to becoming a person. A person who, in clear defiance of How I'd Been Raised, was getting distinctive. Was getting recognizable in a church crowd as an individual, for things other than being the beigest of the beige, the greyest of the grey. I was cultivating more colours. Right from black, through the vibrant hues, to gleaming white.
And at this point, my friend Kurt enters this story. He had always had an interest in Christianity, without really wanting to be a church guy. We "brought him out to Sunday School." And I forget what event he attended, but when we were almost twenty, he got all fired up and decided to "get serious" about Christianity. He wasn't taught how to do this. His flesh just filled in the blanks, though he wasn't taught in the bible, and didn't come from a church home at all.
Still, he knew what to do. He threw out all of his comics. Because we "both knew" that God wanted this. I'd started, by eighteen, collecting my own comics, to make up for all the years of no comics. But I wanted to support Kurt in what I did recognize as rather dubious, fleshly Christian efforts, so I threw mine in the dumpster behind his apartment too. There was a bit of a pang, but it was the Christian thing to do, right?
He also threw out a carefully culled selection of his cassette tapes, following the mysterious, arbitrary fleshly selection process his flesh was coming up with on the fly. He could judge in about two seconds which tapes God most wanted tossed. Some stuff got kept because it was pretty innocuous. Some got kept because it was loved enough that he could justify it to his tyrannical flesh somehow.
The assumption was that God would love him better if he threw out a third of his cassette tapes. The ones with the gaudy covers, mostly. The ones that were extremely anything. It wasn't like he could bring himself to listen to any actual Christian music (goodness knows, I've seldom been able to do that myself) but his flesh was telling him exactly what God most hated from his tape shelf.
We, neither of us, had a lot of money, so the huge stacks of comics and cassette tapes and books and horror movie VHS tapes and so on, just looked to me like a whole lot of recently-spent money. I asked Kurt about selling the stuff at a used stuff store, or giving it to someone less spiritual than the two of us, someone who might want it, and he had an answer he'd not learned at my church, but which came right from the bottom of his flesh:
No. If it was bad for us, and if God didn't want it, it would be even worse to defile someone else with it. It had to burn. And burn it did. There was a pang.
A month later, Kurt had forgotten about all of this, and would go on to greater life excesses than ever before, and I don't actually know how long any belief in God lasted, with him. I guess I'll find out this weekend if he retains any of it.
But one thing: no matter the religion, no matter the knowledge of God, or lack thereof, the flesh always attacks the same joyful stuff, when trying to be religious. The appealing stuff. The stuff we want too much. Stuff that gets some kind of deep, visceral reaction from us. We make up our reasons after we recognize our own appreciation for the stuff. We decide God doesn't want us to want stuff that much. Everyone knows God wants all of us to live like monks and nuns, like puritan missionaries in Africa. Of course that's what He really wants. From all of us. Always. And never anything else. Right?
God Wants You To Want Stuff
Shortly after this chapter in my life, I started spending more and more time with people from my church who were pursuing an alternative life path to the one offered to us at our church. The 90s was a time for alternative stuff. We weren't gay, but we were all about challenging assumptions we kept suddenly finding we had, without quite knowing where we got these assumptions from.
It was almost the most valuable thing we could do, for our Christian lives, to play devil's advocate to our church teaching, and to our fleshly ideas. What does the devil ask Eve? He asks "Did God really say that?" (yea, hath God said).
And what I found was, this is a pretty easily answered question, if God has really said anything at all, and if you know Him and want to separate Him from your fleshly religion. I found it terribly useful to have a look at my assumptions, especially about how to live, and the bible and God Himself, and see if it was solid. Like the Bereans, seeing if these things were so.
It was a testing time. Did this work? Did the bible even say it outright to begin with? Was there another possible other way to view the invariably tiny bit, or vaguely connected, often mistranslated, frequently badly translated scripture scrap being used to say we needed to live like we were? We turned "How is this edifying?" to "Show me the actual harm." Because we knew that there was a lot of harm among puritans, and not always the advertised edification, no matter how much fun they forswore. We were starting to suspect you needed to get actual good stuff, for its own merit, and that you couldn't do this, just by trying to purge out more and more bad stuff. Good was a thing unto itself. And bad was a far, far lesser thing.
Our church was about to have, then had, and then had had, a huge division. No one seemed to be following much of the bible, nor presenting a very Christian attitude during that time. Oh, they quoted it a lot, and they put on those deadly serious, fleshly Christian faces when they talked about how they "had no other choice" but to be forced to do horrible things our Lord would have had (and perhaps had) no part in.
But what if they'd gotten things wrong? What if some of what they were saying didn't work? What if the lifestyle they were enforcing upon all of us led only to emptiness, shame and death? A whole lot of us were thinking this way.
In the 90s, pretty much every one of us who thought along these lines wandered off to see what all the other Christians outside our isolationist, puritan church were up to, or we were kicked out because we weren't beige or grey enough to fit the colour scheme, just like Spider-Man hadn't been, back in the day.
Want Extremes
There were all kinds of (to me) extremely weird Christians at this other extreme of the "wants" question. I knew Christians who, no sooner did they want something, than they let kindly God know, so He could get right onto bringing it to pass.
Now that was very weird, to me. I looked on at these people who wanted what I thought of as pretty superficial fleshly things like cars, jobs, clothes, wives, boats, pastorships at new church, to plant a string of churches in their own image, and things, and thought "God's not going to just give you all that stuff! He doesn't do that! He's not a vending machine! He doesn't care about that stuff? It's our job not to want things, not His job to give us whatever we want!"
And what happened was many of them got all that stuff they wanted. Easily. Fast. I couldn't tell you if God "gave" them that stuff or not. But they got it all. Some of them still have that stuff, and more, to this day. Others have screwed it all up pretty badly and have nothing. Others have screwed up a few churches and wives and children and jobs, and always seem able to get more. Quality ones, too.
And a lot of church friends just decided they could justify alcoholism, excessive drug use, wasting money and all manner of nonsense, if they said it was good. If they said they wanted to be an alcoholic, or if they denied being one, but just wanted to drink like that. That didn't go anywhere pretty, either. Same place as the church teaching, actually. Death.
As for me, I always assumed God didn't want to give me things I wanted. I had to try to get a few simple things myself, and hope God was going to turn a blind Eye. And whenever I couldn't help but want something, whenever I felt like my little life was so empty that maybe God would, just this once, give me some small thing that would mean a lot to me, invariably I wouldn't get it. Over and over again.
I don't know why all this apparently not getting stuff from God challenged, rather than affirmed my view that God doesn't give us stuff. But it did. Mostly for other people. When I spoke to the large number of wandering, confused, anguished sheep scattered by our church's division, and the misdoings at other churches, and the failings of their families, I wanted those people to want stuff and get it. From God. And I told them to want stuff and ask for it. And they did.
They rebuilt their lives, sometimes right upon the ruins of what had been smashed down, and sometimes having moved somewhere much nicer. And God smiled on a whole lot of it. He seemed into it. He got involved.
And they learned to want new stuff. Stuff other than that coveted reputation for not wanting stuff. They learned not to assume God wanted them to be missionary puritans in Africa. They learned to realize they couldn't just assume they knew what God wanted (always, from everyone) anymore. And they started working with Him instead of the church, and with something more than the flesh.
I could and did preach this, but I didn't walk it very well. I still had the habit of praying earnestly for God to give stuff and get involved and help out and enrich people I cared about. I got used to seeing Him do it, eventually, but feeling like He didn't do the same for me. Not unless there were Christians who wanted Him to, and asked on my behalf, like I'd asked on theirs. And Christians didn't think I needed much, or forgot about me as soon as they were done that transitional, healing, rebuilding part of their life. Or they didn't want me to have stuff.
But in all of this, increasingly I felt that I was supposed to not only want, but want well. Not by the book, not by the numbers, not according to the assumptions of the flesh, or What my church had taught me God was. I felt like He and I had to work things out together. And I felt like He wanted sacrifice from me, alright. But not the kind of sacrifice that involved serving the Lord in hot, sunny Uganda, with my fit, beautiful wife and our six lovely children, deeply respected by church people the world over, who we'd regale with exotic tales, whenever we'd visit and get free lodging and food.
No, He seemed to want me to live in "dull as dishwater," grey/beige Ontario, and listen to people who were trying to build lives, and needed to talk to someone. He seemed to want me to want what Holden Caulfield wanted: to be a catcher in the rye.
In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden mishears the words of a song about people dancing or running happily through a field of rye, and he decides he wants to keep kids from running over a cliff he imagines is there in the field, though it's not mentioned in the song at all. In Holden's world, as in mine, there's always a cliff.
And maybe God did want me to "catch" people whose parents and churches and social groups didn't notice were in danger. I caught some, I guess. Others I clearly did not. Some of them are dead. But there's something else to be learned from Holden Caulfield: when it's time to run happily through a field of rye, or dance and sing, if you can't seem to join in, but are always on the sidelines, poor-me-ing, seeing all the phoniness that certainly is there, seeing the squalour, the problems, and trying to spy out danger rather than join in fun, you're missing something.
Why Is Wanting Stuff Hard?
Is there stuff you can want? Is that okay? My first thought upon meeting up with Christians who seemed to just assume that they should want all kinds of stuff and that God would give them the desires of their heart was "But, we fallen humans want bad stuff. If you pursue what you want, you will pursue bad stuff which will hurt you, and far more importantly, make you not look very Christian to those looking on." I really did used to think like that. Even more so than now.
What I didn't believe in sufficiently was the idea that the work of Christ worked, and that being a Christian who is open to him (and not merely adhering to fleshly bible teaching, or church lifestyles and expectations) involves being transformed, inwardly. It means that if you take a good hard look at your wants, or if you pursue them, you learn God's side of things for real.
It is simple-minded to think that we all want to eat rooms full of cake, and have sex with several thousand people. We, fleshly, ignorant, unspiritual people to begin with, start out with dissatisfaction with that nonsense built right into us, without even needing to know Christ to get that. We come with emptiness we are always trying to fill. We strive. We are not content. And like kids, we try to fill that all up with the equivalents of Saturday morning cartoons, comic books, Froot Loops and ice cream. In our teens, probably we see if we'd actually want to play video games for sixteen hours straight, pausing only to pee. Or we buy more than sixteen pairs of shoes.
And more interesting, passionate, bold, less beige people than ourselves may go into things they end up addicted to. Promiscuous sex, alcohol, drugs, dieting, fitness, plastic surgery, perfectionism, work, money, church leadership, all that kind of stuff. Stuff that's supposed to be the "be all and end all." Stuff that's supposed to be enough to satisfy adults. And it isn't. We are invariably still empty, and feeling slightly ill, like the kid who's played Nintendo for sixteen hours straight and consumed only Red Bull. We can consume that as hard as we like, and it's not quite right.
What that tells me is that the emptiness, the dissatisfaction that drives us to pursue excesses of things, is universal. The dissatisfaction is good. It's from God. It drives us to Jesus. It drove Saul and then Paul, John the Baptist, Peter, John, Mary Magdalene and Zaccheus. It drove Jesus himself. They all made sacrifices, as we all, invariably do, hookers and heroin addicts perhaps most of all. But they didn't make sacrifice the point. They didn't do it for its own sake. They didn't bow down and worship it. They didn't personally cultivate sacrifice as an image, to capitalize upon. They were pursuing something. They were not trying to remain complacent, content, conservative. They were all radical. They were driven. They wanted.
God Prefers People Who Want Things
I've read the bible a few times, and what seems an uncomfortable but inescapable fact is that God seems to love driven people better than complacent ones. Or certainly, depicts them better, works with them instead of the others, blesses them more, talks to them more, and all that, than the others. Than Esau, the prodigal son's elder brother, the friends of Job, or Felix: these guys do not get what the passionate screwups get. They never "get there in the end," either, as far as the bible relates.
Jesus loved Peter so much. Look at how much personal time Peter got. Not because he was a screwup. Because of his passion. Jesus was deeply moved by it. Jesus could chide Peter for being the only one brave and faithful enough to defend Jesus with a sword, but still feel it deep down for what it was. We've been taught to judge Peter, and assume that he was showing off, or whatever. I think he loved Jesus and had to do something.
So, it's not as big a stretch from my fleshly, puritan upbringing as I'd like to think, simply knowing God wants me to sacrifice, to give up time and energy and money on people who need to grow beyond the whole fleshly "God demands everything you want be sacrificed on His Altar for Burning Stuff You Want." But what about me? Maybe I am freer to want things than I once was, but will I ever learn to know God as someone who wants to give me stuff I want? Or at least as someone who might help me find better and better things to want more and more deeply, and to open up my heart and learn to let in joy and fun and delight? And harder still, to let those reciprocal feelings pour out in response?
Well, I've done my "poor little me" time, sitting alone, trying not to resent God for not bringing people and stuff into my life, for letting all my friends marry and procreate and drift off and away forever, to resent Him for all the sacrifice and emptiness. I'm done.
And what I'm doing now, only fairly recently, is starting to work. A bit. What I do is I follow my discontent. I am male, white, middle-class, healthy, employed and have a solid, "together" lifestyle. I am "supposed" to be content, so when I'm not, I listen to that and see who and what there actually is around to do and interact with. I follow the discontent to see where it leads, what's missing inside, and then I look outside to see what's floating past. Because it's far better to see what's floating past than miss it. And God's in stuff floating past. He sends opportunities we are fools to pass up. I have often been a fool in the name of timidity and false contentment.
So I "fish." I frequently cast bread upon the waters to see if the bible is true about it returning (ever, ever, ever). Instead of assuming and resenting there being no one reaching out to me in the course of my day, I let God know I'm open to Him letting stuff drift by me I can hook and fish out and eat or throw back or make trophies of or whatever. I go walk along the beach and play beachcomer. I check the mail. I look for stuff to happen. I keep my ears open. I look for people to do something other than close down, or need stuff from me. You know? I live a life.
I'm letting God do all kinds of stuff instead of asking Him for one thing and whining if I don't think He'll give it to me today. I'm looking to want lots of little things that float by, rather than imaginary things.
Let me say that again. It seemed important: I am learning to look around at real people, places, things, ideas, opportunities and so on, and want something that is, rather than resent what I do not have and am only imagining.
I am a Christian. Contrary to popular belief, this does not mean I think I have things figured out, that I have everything I need, that take black and white positions on everything to be identifiable as a Christian pinhead, nor do I worship things I imagine myself. If there is a God, He has to show up. Every day. And do whatever He wants. I will not imagine Him and play elaborate, self-deceiving games of let's pretend. I will not assume that, with just my flesh, my upbringing, and a storehouse of traditional church doctrine, that I have what God wants figured out. I will not continue to do all that. Because I do not want to.
