Archive for September, 2012

Not that I’m an especially cool guy, but according to society, I am a little strange. I got married at 21 while still in college, never lived with my wife beforehand, we had a baby while still in college, and now we’ve got two more. Furthermore, if you see me coming down the street, you’ll see my license plate says “Faith Hope and Love” and I’ve got pictures of Our Lady of Lourdes and St. Jude dangling from my rear view mirror where most similarly bearded gentlemen keep lusty nudes. So, sometimes, people ask, “Peter, what’s your story?” and they suspect something awful happened to me. If they know me, and know the awful things that have happened, then they’re justified in the suspicion, but the truth is not interesting. The truth is, I started reading the Left Behind books on a recommendation of a bearded man when I was 16 while working at Waldenbooks and I stopped reading them under the recommendation of a girl who said, “aren’t those bad?”

But, in between the pages of what I clearly knew to be an attempt to rekindle a hundred year old money making device, I saw a few people acting out a faith they never knew they had. I read of people starting to make life and death decisions purely on moral, philosophical, and (shaky) theological grounds. I understood more and more how the love of Jesus could help to inflame the love between His people.

That was the start of something, it also happened to start at a time when my brain was going through a reading renaissance. I was devouring Asimov and Heinlein novels and the Christianity of Left Behind made a good counterbalance. It’s funny though, because my mom bought me “The Rapture Trap” in hopes to ensure that I wasn’t going to become some sort of a millennialist. But, what she should have gotten me was the “Pan-hedonistic Solipsism Trap”, because that was where the negative philosophy was coming from in my life.

I never wavered from Catholicism, though I remember for a while thinking that the only reason I was going to Mass was to think of new ideas for scripts I was going to write, but that didn’t last, because soon I would meet a girl who would introduce me to a woman (who is she?) who would set me up with a lady who would become my wife.

The girl was my best friend’s cousin, of whom he had been proclaiming the praises of since time immemorial. She was a Straight-A violinist whose presence was like a black hole for hostility. And, if she had the audacity to bend light, it was was only to magnify the Lord. She told a friend of mine that he had beautiful eyes and from that day forward, I can’t look at him without thinking, “Man, you have beautiful eyes…” No punch.

So, she came around because she was going to be my best friend’s confirmation sponsor. But, she needed to go to Mass like, every day, which was crazy. So, for some reason, she dragged me and my friend along to this other thing you do at Church called adoration where you pray before Jesus who is fully present in the Eucharistic Bread exposed for a time until the Benediction which culminates the celebration.

I had never heard of or seen a monstrance before and when I did I think I found myself praying for the first time. I may have prayed before in some wrestling matches, I may have prayed that at least one of my grandparents linger a tad longer in this life, but I had never just prayed before. Not in a way that connected my mind to Jesus’ in a way I could feel.

Well, I was on guard against “feelings” the Left Behind books said to happen. And rightly so; I can’t expect that everyone who walks in to a room with Jesus standing right there before you is going to be blown away, but sometimes signs are nice to have and especially nice to reflect on. But from that point, I felt like Jesus was there and I felt like I wanted the Holy Spirit to do something to me when I got confirmed.

As a present, this wonderful girl gave me my first rosary. She made it herself and had it blessed by the Bishop of her diocese. It’s one of the only things I have never managed to lose and kept with me every day (which was excellent advice from a great priest). If you keep your rosary in your pocket, you’re much more likely to pray it!

But, for a year, I didn’t pray it. And then my first night living on my own after moving out of college came and I prayed it. I didn’t want to make a commitment, but I prayed that night and I have prayed the rosary nearly every day for the last 10 years.

I even prayed it on the night I considered whether to pursue one of two options:

• A girl I knew who I liked being with and I had a hankering* would eventually want some sort of physical relationship (not you, if you’re reading this).
• Amber, a genuine woman (she was a bit older than me) whose mother went with my mom on a pilgrimage to see the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe and together decided to set us up.

Praying about this sort of thing is important, but the question was simple, who is the narrower gate? Amber. (I’ve never met anyone so small who was so hard to get around, and I was a defensive lineman.) Who will help you store up treasures in heaven? Amber. (We have three of them now plus one already in heaven.) Who would you rather cast your pearls before? Amber. (She’s even beginning to consider what I say as “wise” now, that makes a man very happy.)

I didn’t exactly know that I was praying over a decision to pursue the woman I was going to marry, but I did know that I was praying over a decision to remain a virgin before marriage. I knew that whatever God has planned is inherently difficult. God is more challenging to appease than any coach, teacher or parent. God probably is more critical of the way I make the bed or fold the laundry than my wife is. That may be my personal theology. I’ve never read it in the Catechism; that the true test of whether something is the will of God is whether or not it is hard. But, it seems to jibe with the Theology of the Body. God made us to work hard and become stronger. He certainly did the same thing when it comes to virtue. And Chesterton says something similar**.

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.” – Chapter 5, What’s Wrong With The World, 1910

And, that’s where I leave you, to try Christianity! If you do, I doubt you’ll find it lacking. That’s the whole point of “life giving water”. Even if your heroes and inspirations prove wicked, false, or insufficiently human, you can still drink deep the waters flowing from the side of Christ.

*@trig, poor word choice + pun intended

**The story of how I encountered Chesterton is even more mundane, I just randomly saw a big line of black books (his collected works from Ignatius Press) at the UW Memorial Library (home to well over a million volumes) and I started reading things like, “the Supersition of Divorce”, “What’s Wrong With the World” and “Eugenics and other evils” and I was quite understandably impressed, especially that I could find humor in such books along with the most incredible insight and moral clarity.

For the next two months we are going to try something a bit different here on Eschewmenical. To give our regular authors a bit of a break (Y’all have done great, keep up the good work!), we’re going to run two months of testimonials from several of our users (we’re hoping to get 8 full weeks, but may still have spaces available, come by Eschewmenical chat to find out).

A testimony is just a story, in Christian parlance it is usually the story of how you came to the faith. However, a testimony can also go much deeper than that. This month we are going to hear from people who both have always been Christians and also those who have converted later in life. We will hear their stories of how they came to the faith, or how they grew in their faith.

Testimonies serve a very important purpose to me. They remind us that God is real and that he is working in people’s lives, even if we don’t see it right in the thick of things, we can often take a step back and see him orchestrating things for his purposes. Hearing these stories from others can sometimes illuminate things in our lives that we have heretofore thought of as obstacles, problems, or detriments and make it more obvious how God is working in these difficult situations for our betterment.

These two months we are going to take a break from our normal 4 perspective style, but we are still aiming for a post every Monday (or when we remember to post them). However, I’m sure that we will have plenty of different perspectives all the same. We are a fairly diverse community and the types of testimonies that we give should bear out some of that diversity.

Because we have so many authors and I’m not completely clear on the schedule yet (and if you haven’t signed up but want to participate leave an answer here), I won’t be posting a schedule this month. Instead I will add the posts as they go live to this section.

As always, please feel free to comment interact or debate our authors in the comments, or in the Eschewmenical chat room. This is Eschewmenical!

Just this week, I had the opportunity to visit the boyhood home of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints.  Work had taken me to Rochester, NY, so I drove to Palmyra.  There I saw his farm, the Sacred Grove where God the Father and God the Son appeared to Smith, and Hill Cumorah, where the Angel Moroni eventually deigned to allow Smith to dig up the Golden Plates.

As I visited, I was very open to what the Mormon missionaries there had to say to me.  I was greeted by a Bible open to James 1:5, where Smith himself understood from Scripture that if any man lacks wisdom, he should ask of God, who will grant him understanding.  I had good fellowship with several missionaries, all of whom were just flabbergasted that a Baptist could be respectful and even acknowledge the depth of feeling on which Mormon faith rests.

Mormons really do understand feeling well.

What they miss, I fear, is authority.

Theirs is personal. Mine is far wider than that. Theirs is a man. Mine is bigger than that.  Theirs ultimately rests on a question of whether or not one feels Smith is right. Mine rests on a tradition that is frankly longer, wider, and even more bloody than Smith’s.

While I toured Smith’s own house (the one that was purchased by a friend and rented back to his family after it had spent the rent completing his dead brother’s frame leaving them unable to pay the rent due, only to be later repossessed), I learned of Martin Harris, one of the three witnesses to the Golden Plates. I learned of the “lost 116 pages,” a document which when shared with Harris’ wife, broke a pledge to keep the document secret.  I learned of the faith of the men who continually had to hide the new “Scriptures.”

Then, I learned of the story of Lehi and Nephi, who had been given a divine compass that guided God’s chosen from Israel to the New World.  I learned the story of Helaman, who, after his own people had renounced war led their children to bloodless victory over their enemies. I learned of Moroni who hid the Golden Plates so conveniently near where Smith resided.

I cannot fault them for outrageous claims. After all, I believe a man was whipped, hung, asphyxiated, pierced, and dead, and then he wasn’t.  (Grant you, I can look at DNA that says there were Jews in Palestine, but not in North America, but I digress.)  Still, I take comfort in understanding that men have travelled the whole world to return to that place where God became man. It is a backwater conveniently like every other, so I cannot say that it lacks authority because of its place of origin.

I heard the witness of Smith’s wife proclaiming that he was incapable of manufacturing any decent sentence on his own, and thus he had to have received this from a higher power.  (This, despite his portrayal as a clean, articulate, handsome man in the Mormon movies, made me glad to know that cheesy religiousity in film is not restricted to Christians.)

And, sad to say, as open as I was to the depth of feeling and ardent belief, I couldn’t bring myself to believe a word of it.  Indeed, I truly believe my Mormon brethren feel far better than I do, but their Scriptures lack authority.

Why can I say that about the Book of Mormon, but not the Bible, you ask?

In fairness, let me cast out my primary defense of the Bible.  I believe in the authority of the Bible mostly because I have seen it change lives.  I have seen men return to their wives because they were convicted of God’s love for them in Corinthians and John.  I have seen drunks give up the bottle because they understood God is a sober minded judge who is bound by a divine logic evident in Romans.

But I say, I cannot fault my Mormon brothers on this – for I have seen lives transformed by their Scriptures as well.  When it comes to depth of feeling and experience, frankly, they have me beat.

But I also know something more about feeling.  It is good, but it must be tempered.

I know that in my own life, Jeremiah speaks truth when he tells me “the heart is deceitful and wicked above all things – who can know it!”  I know that left to my own devices, my heart is too willing to make a God and a world who suits me, rather than an external God in an external world who shapes me. Like a written constitution, it sets the boundaries past which my interpretation may not stray.

But as I say, I cannot fault my Mormon brothers on this, for they too have Scriptures which proscribe their activities.  They do not drink coffee or cola, let alone beer or wine.  They understand that God’s rules give structure to their lives.

So, what differs between my Bible and theirs? Many things, but the chief of which is authority of those who promulgated it to me..

Of the three witnesses to the Book of Mormon, all spent the majority of their lives disassociated from the Mormon Church.  True, two of the three reconciled, But none played a major part.  In contrast, of the eleven disciples who were with Christ, all endured to the end.  I can too easily explain away disagreements between Chowdry, Harris, Whitemer, with Smith. I also know that Peter and Paul had disagreements.  And, I cannot so easily dismiss that neither Peter nor Paul claimed any special headship within the church.  When Peter and Paul disagreed, they did so within the authority of the Living Word, Jesus Christ.  They acknowledged and agreed with each other in their writings – and even in spite of their disagreements, commended one another in Christ.  They pointed to an authority beyond themselves.

There are three witnesses to the Golden Plates. There are none to the original manuscripts of the Bible – but guess what? Here too, the authority of the Scripture is subordinated to that of Christ.  Where there is unanimity of authorship within the Book of Mormon (and the Qu’ran, and the Buddha), the very disparate nature of the individual revelation of Scripture to men over the course of 1500 years has an authority that rests on more than one man. That there are differences of opinion lead me to suspect a greater strength of purpose.

My pastor is not a perfect man. When I was a pastor, I was not a perfect man. (Trust me, the only prophetic statement I ever really made was “Jesus is Lord, I am not. Everything else is theology.”) But even in our imperfection, we recognized that our faith was not the product of one Man, but of something revealed over a much longer time.

I can’t help but wonder about those 116 pages.  Was it a rejected draft? Did Harris and Smith decide to change their theology?

In contrast, my Bible was assembled over a period far greater than the life of any one man – or even any one kingdom. There could be no revision (and, yes, I hear that gag) because there was too much time for any one draft.  (No, Jesus did not change the law! He fulfilled it.  Can we move on?)

In the end, Smith, and James, were right.  Ask God for wisdom – it will be given.  Wisdom is fundamentally the ability to try and test the authority of given revelation. I believe not in the witness of one or three or eight, but many.  It is not the authority of twelve disciples but of twenty, forty, and sixty generations. It is the authority not of 200 years, but 2000.  (And is it not interesting that Mormonism converges back to the Bible?) The authority that has transformed lives is backed up by not by a man but by a Scripture that transcends them all.

That my friends, is the beauty of the Bible.  It is ugly. It is both short (in length) and long (in time.) It is partial, but it is not exclusionary. It is assembled over time by men who disagreed but recognized the authority of one over them.

In that disagreement and messiness, a certain authenticity of subordination to a common Christ reassures that this thing is real.