Lancing a boil again
This piece is too long and rambling. I'm warning you before you start reading it so you can close it down if you're not up to something like that. Should you decide to go ahead and read it anyway, don't look for "answers"—there aren't any. At least none that are specific enough for a Western culture that has six year olds diagnosed with anorexia or bulimia and making television programmes about them. Six year olds for pity's sake! And don't look for balance either. I'm a bit too fed up for balance right now.
It's about the conflicting cultures (if I can use that word for established patterns) I think I can see when I look around me; all of them warped in one way or another and to some degree or another.
You go through periods, I think, when you look at the world (because you're tired of looking at yourself) and you feel like throwing up. You see the poverty and frustration and despair under injustice and oppression that drives people to the brink of insanity and then beyond. You know that anarchy or a bomb isn't the answer but you'll be damned if you know what the answer is.
I have no criticism for the tragically poor and oppressed at home or in foreign lands! I know they're sinners and I know that the plundered can and do plunder their own sometimes. You don't need to be a top-rank theologian or an especially sensitive observer of life to know that; but I'm going to leave it to God to talk to them about moral responsibility on that day when all wrongs will be righted. Being abused is no excuse for abusing others but savage and sustained abuse distorts the soul and it'll take more than a glib, full-bellied, happy Professor of Religion to convince me that that won't be taken into account when Jesus comes to right all wrongs! So I have nothing to say by way of criticism about these people whose world is all excruciating, ceaseless pain or dull deadening hopelessness. They're the centre of their world because they're in too much pain or too stunned by the world's great wrongs against them to get their eyes off themselves. Maybe God can criticize them but if he does he's the only one that knows enough about it to do it—the rest of us aren't fit for the job!
[And if you think I'm planning a ranting match against God, think again. Me, the paragon of virtue and the epitome of selfless devotion to humanity, I'm going to sit in judgment on the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ? Yeah, right! I've been persuaded by the biblical witness to God, a witness that includes the cross and the promise of the resurrected and glorified Jesus—I've been persuaded by that that we haven't seen the end of this human saga. Glory and joy and righteousness are ahead for all who want them! Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm all virtue and submission, a good little Christian who says the right thing; but it's too easy to dismiss the Story with a sneer and, anyway, I'll take Jesus' view of things before I'll swallow the ceaseless river of bilge poured out for our consumption by the media that either give it to us as they get it or puts their own spin on it. I'll throw in my pathetic little ounces with Jesus Christ rather than go along with this gloomy bleating or the smug sniping of "the wise" non-believer. Puddleglum has the right answer for all that stuff. Jesus likes Puddleglum though he likes Paul's gospel better—Romans 8:18-39.]
Then there are millions of thorough-going hedonists—their single driving thought is partying, more partying and partying after the partying. Whatever it takes! Nothing's to get in the way of having a good time; eating the best or the bizarre, drinking whatever, popping or snorting or injecting the next thing handed to them, travelling to the exotic and the exciting, having sex with whoever whenever however. A few coins in the charity baskets, buying tickets for the latest humanitarian gig, loads of criticism for governments, police, war lords, regular protests against war and then as soon as possible back again to the booze and the swinging centres with the deafening music, occasional moments when serious thought's attempted and as soon as the camera is turned off or the survey's been completed—back to the party! There they are, the happy helpers of the world's parasitic drug barons, the dependable support of the reptilian booze industry all, head and pelvis and no chest! "Look, Ma, made it, centre of the world!"
Then again, we have the millions of religious people who simply drift along thinking they've done God a favour by professing faith in him. They wish him well in his work with the world; they hope he'll be able to make the world a little better and a little safer for them and the ones they care about—well, all right, safer for everybody. They hate to hear the news about the awful things that are happening, they attend church frequently but there's no sense of destiny, no sense of mission in life, no conviction that they've been called by God to bless the world. It's all about them getting forgivness and going to heaven when they die. Faith in God must be taken seriously but it's easy, they tell us, to carry things too far and faith becomes toxic, a destroyer of inner peace and "joy" and everyone knows, surely, that God doesn't want us to be unhappy. No, don't let faith in Jesus Christ get in the way of being content and smiling—if it does, it's been distorted, it isn't true faith. "It must be true beyond debate that God wants us healthy and wealthy and wise. See? And I have a handful of verses that prove it."
Don't ask them to engage in their preferred form of outreach (that's bordering on toxicity) but let the government or some influential group try to take away their rights and they'll work harder than Paul did on his missionary journeys. "If you really believe in our Lord Jesus Christ you'll pass this email on to all your friends…" "You'll write your MP or Senator…" "You'll boycott this or that…" The wrongs of others galvanise them into sustained effort to shore up any government or form of government that's favourable to their understanding of the Christian faith. But it isn't the Christian faith they're defending at the ballot box—they're defending a government that will take up weapons if need be to see to it that they get their rights and that's what Christianity is all about, don't you know. The "rights seekers" with a form of Christianity—the centre of their world!
Then we have that other group of Christian people who, whatever else they do, gaze long in the mirror, always looking for moral improvement, deeper spirituality; always searching for dialogue partners in that kind of endeavour. Some among them have turned the pursuit of holiness into a personal project, as if they lived in complete isolation from the world God has put them in. Inner transformation rather than outgoing righteousness is the order of the day. Often the seekers are disappointed that others aren't as interested as they are in such a quest; and they know they aren't as interested because they're not as religiously involved as they should be; as the seekers are.
But, sometimes, we get the impression that it isn't God they're looking at because they're always talking about and looking at themselves, can't get their eyes off themselves. For a while we admire them for their earnestness but finally it's pretty much a bore. They not only bore others, I'm guessing that subconsciously they bore themselves witless and only compound the initial problem. Now and then—hopefully not too often—we feel like saying, "For heaven's sake shut up about yourself and tell us something about the profound riches of God and his purposes for us all and just leave it at that!" Centre of the world all in the name of a deeper spirituality! [There are those who see their image in terms of a local church and spend their hours, waking and sleeping, trying to build a great church in their own image and dismissing as insignificant the multitude of tiny churches. Oh well.]
Finally, there are some poor souls that are too high-strung and they're sick, made sick by some sustained abuse and made worse by some brand of toxic religion. Much of what they say is understandable even if we shouldn't approve it or agree with it. In cases like these we can't know where sickness and self-centeredness begin and end, if they do at all. I suspect that some of what they say is what they've got into the habit of saying and if they can work to break the habit, so much the better. But having been so badly abused in one way or another and being subjected to a brand of religion that Jesus hates they're forever looking skyward, waiting for a demanding and irritable God to smash them to pieces.
That they feel ill, fed up, down at the mouth, wishing they were dead—all that I can understand, it isn't hard, and God understands it better than we ever can. Is there a cure for these people, in this life? I for one don't know but if there is, it would surely involve getting their eyes on the God who has shown himself in and as Jesus Christ. If reflecting on the meaning of Jesus Christ doesn't persuade them that they're safe with God and if that can't see them through what chance do the words of anyone else have? Why should they believe the words of the experts if they can't believe God's cross? It won't hurt—will it?—if we give them ladles of rich truth about a God who loves them more than the psychologists or this crazy world in general. It won't hurt—will it?—if we make him the centre of their pain-filled world.
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.
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