Wonder, Worship, and the Imagination . . . and Dr. Who

I made a sketchy deal with my good friend Rebbiejaye the other night. I think there might have been whiskey involved on her end, but I have no such excuse--I don't drink and never have. At a friend's birthday party we somehow got on the topic of the wonderfulness of fiction and the imagination and how essential fantasy and science-fiction are to forming one's conception of God, blah, blah, blah, and she looks at me expectantly and says, "That's why we have to agree to write one fiction book for every non-fiction book. Deal?" I opened my mouth and stuck out my hand to seal the deal before my brain caught up to my excitement about the conversation. I ended up hemming and hawing and dithering a bit about how I tend to have extremely long fiction projects and how I didn't know if I could keep up with that production speed. But I found I believed in what she said so much that with a gasped, "with the Lord's help" (I think I was cringing and gritting my teeth at the same time) I sealed the deal. "Deal," I said firmly. "You know what that means, don't you?"

"What does that mean?" she replied.

"It means we'll really be like the Inklings." I say "really" because Rebecca and I have been in love with the life of the "Inklings"--C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and others--since we were in undergraduate together. I read the biographical book The Inklings by Humphrey Carpenter back in high school and went green with envy at reading about the life of people who spent much of their time in "imaginative academia." I dreamed of cozy philosophical conversations around a fireplace before I had ever studied philosophy and of writing stories that really mattered before I really understood what was important about stories. (One is always learning more about such things.) But it certainly is amusing when life catches up with dreams. In high school I really had no idea what the life of a writer or an academician might look like--PhDs don't exactly run in my family--but something about it fired my imagination.

Fast forward about ten years and I find myself in my last year of a master's of divinity program after having studied philosophy and theology in my undergraduate degree pondering PhD programs and making deals with my friends about writing fiction. How some things do stay the same! One thing that has remained constant in my life is the need I have to retain a sense of wonder about the cosmos in which I find myself living and a sense of how imagination influences my ability to think philosophically and theologically and my ability to relate to God at all.

Mystery is a key concept in Christianity. If you cannot understand mystery--the mystery of God, the mystery of salvation, the mystery of sin, even--you will have no room for the Trinitarian God of Christianity or anything he's up to either in the Scriptures or in your own life. And "mystery" does not mean theologically what it means in common parlance. Usually when modern Westerners use the term "mystery" they mean something that has yet to be explained but that undoubtedly will be explained by someone who is very clever.  People read mystery novels or watch movies or television or even go to dinner plays. But this is not at all what the word means in the context of God, the church, sin, and the world. Here, "mystery" means the ineffable--something that is in fact intelligible, inherently logical or able to be understood, but also inherently incommunicable or incomprehensible to human beings, i.e., possible to be understood, but not by us homo sapiens. Thus theologians will say that God is "intelligible" but incomprehensible and this isn't simple nonsense. One could sum up the book of Job by saying that it is a book devoted to capturing a good man's very real struggle with the mysteries of human life--both the beautiful ones and the ugly ones. Job was found to be more righteous with his friends because he could name the mystery and wasn't afraid to be angry about all the apparent contradictions of human experience. His friends were rebuked because they tried to pretend that the mysterious was comprehensible and easily managed.

Heretics in the early church provide us especially great examples of people who sought to explain too much, to have everything figured out, neatly categorized and easily referenced, to have God in control and nicely inside their philosophical systems--they were people who lost sight of the mystery of God: of God's everlasting capacity to surprise us, to go beyond our imagination, to exceed everything we could ask or imagine. What's more, when humans beings lose the ability to accept and respond to mystery, they lose the ability to be flexible and to cope with the depths of goodness and the depths of tragedy in their own lives and the lives of others.  Wonder, I think, is our response to the presence of the ineffable, the mysterious.  Wonder, I think tends to move in one of two directions: when the thing of mystery is seen as beautiful or good, we respond to mystery with love and adoration and extreme attentiveness.  When the thing of mystery is seen as something bad, we respond with horror or hatred.  In either case, wonder and mystery take us beyond the every-day and the humdrum and into something deeper.

On a more personal note, I wither and die when I lose touch with wonder. I fall out of touch with the world, my calling, my happiness. Things become dull and grey and I can't really function all that well. The petals of my flower come to bits and fall off and I conclude of the universe, "it loves me not." I imagine that many people do not have such a dramatic reaction to losing their sense of wonder, but it is nonetheless a discouraging thing.

But what does one do when the world suddenly contracts into something explainable, predictable and entirely two-dimensional?  How does one recapture a sense of wonder that has flitted away or get back  to seeing what is more than the eye can see?  There are many things one could do or say about this, no doubt. I will relate to you a story of a couple of different ways in which God jump-started my imagination in the past year and dwell for a bit on the second of those encounters.

The first part of my saga began last fall when The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader came out in theaters. There are many things to say about this movie, perhaps, some good, some critical--one could note the insertion of a completely extraneous "video game" style plot, for instance--and spend some time grumbling about how "Jack" would not be pleased. However, the thing that struck me the most, the thing that they got absolutely right was the sense of wonder at being in Narnia, especially seen through the eyes of Lucy Pevensie. The movie is visually stunning like her predecessors and very nicely captures the magic and beauty of life in Narnia--which is fully half the charm of Lewis' stories in the first place. Watching Voyage of the Dawn Treader reminded me that all of life was supposed to be beautiful and mysterious and imaginative and more than meets the eye. It started me questing to recover an attitude of wonder that I had lost.

But the thing that has truly inspired me over the last few months is the unexpected acquisition of another beloved science-fiction show, that is, the long-time British favourite: Dr. Who.

I have to make a few caveats. One, I gave up on science-fiction television after The X-Files went off the air in 2002. Little did I know about what was happening on the Sci-Fi channel--I had no idea about Stargate and I somehow missed Farscape and Firefly. (I also had a grudge against Joss Whedon for many reasons.  I have more or less repented.  Mostly.) It wasn't until I started seminary--ironically--that I picked up Stargate and with it some of the more recent sci-fi shows. Second, I was prejudiced against Dr. Who since high school: one of my friends who had notoriously bad taste in movies and television absolutely adored Dr. Who and I knew that meant I needed to avoid it.

Third caveat: when I saw the pilot of the reboot "Rose" I was not impressed. Evil plastic creatures enlivened by an evil plastic monster bent on enslaving humankind was not conversion material. I was fully prepared to be only "tolerant" of Dr. Who, but I been introduced to it with a group of fellow sci-fi nerds, so we ended up watching the second episode "The End of the World" which in which the principle characters of the show, the Doctor and Rose, are transported 5,000,000,000 years in the future to the day the sun goes nova and destroys the earth.

Just from watching the trailer I knew I was in completely new science-fiction territory. No other show has done this, I said to myself. In fact, no other show would do this. Its too risky--if you do something this dramatic and important and absolutely insane you feel you have to reduplicate your success. With few exceptions (Joss Whedon I now recognize as exceptional in this regard), science-fiction/fantasy shows tend to hoard their creative energy for the grand finale. There is reservation and moderation about the futures or possibilities that writers envision in order to maintain suspension of belief. You don't want to ruin something by doing something completely unbelievable.

But somehow through some magic charm or muse Dr. Who manages to break every single "rule" of the industry and get away with it. Dr. Who is a show whose creative potential seems absolutely limitless--they will tell a story about absolutely anything they can think of and somehow it always seems plausible. Somehow at the beginning of the episode and at the end of the episode I find myself saying, "Why not? Why not? How would I know? Why couldn't that be true?" And then, as the 9th Doctor likes to say, "Fantastic!"

Part of the reason why Dr. Who works so well is because of the attitude of the principle characters--especially the Doctor, but also Rose--in the first couple seasons of the reboot. The characters know the world they live in is absolutely mad and full of every kind of possibility and they are bursting at the seems with excitement that they have a chance to encounter it all. No one pretends like the things that happen aren't insane--they are insane, delightfully and sometimes dangerously so--and that's the whole point of being happy about the adventure in the first place.  And they understand the value of a "relative good".  Aristotle thought that shame was a relatively good thing in a world of people whose behavior was oftentimes blameworthy--feeling shame in certain contexts is better than not feeling shame.  C. S. Lewis once said something similar about "pain"--pain is God's "megaphone to rouse a deaf world" and thus is sometimes good.  I think he would agree that adventure and especially danger share that same status--in this mad world, its absolutely insane to encounter no danger.  Thus the Doctor and Rose are absolutely right to pursue such adventure in the face of many dangers. 

I think this taps into something we are sometimes hesitant to believe about what it means to be human. Being human involves being a part of a world in which absolutely anything could happen at any time. It involves living in a cosmos that we are hardly on the cusp of understanding the least detail of and it involves facing the unknown at every moment. We struggle mightily but labor in vain to form a construct of the universe in which everything is easily understandable and nicely under our control, but deep down inside we know that even if the cosmos is not a chaos, it is certainly not under our control and we really don't know what's going on in most of it. Modern life with all of its industrial abstraction sometimes provides for us an illusion of a life as a contained system capable of mastery . . . but that's really just boring. Life gets really interesting and really beautiful when we see the mystery and the unknown as beautiful and get excited about it.

This is why Dr. Who is such good stuff and such food for the imagination and for the soul. My current favorite set of characters are (cliche, I know) Rose and the 10th Doctor (played by David Tennant). What is absolutely riveting about these two is their mutual joy in seeing what the universe has to offer. They are constantly beset by danger and adventure as they roam about time and relative dimensions in space, but somehow they have a sense that in spite of the danger it is worth it to see what life has to offer. The Doctor is a person who has spent hundreds of years roaming the cosmos and he is still thrilled to death with the newness of it all, and his friendship with Rose consists in the fact that they love it in the same way.

There is one scene that sum up nicely the sort of spirit of adventure that is at the soul of Dr. Who. One is a conversation at the end of the episode, "the Christmas Invasion" between Rose and the Doctor.  Right at the end of the episode Rose, her mother, Mickey, and the Doctor have settled down to eat Christmas Dinner only to discover that its snowing outside.  They all go out to look.


Rose: It's beautiful! What are they, meteors?

The Doctor: It's the spaceship breaking up in the atmosphere. This isn't snow. It's ash.
Rose: Okay, not so beautiful.
The Doctor: This is a brand new planet Earth. No denying the existence of aliens now. Everyone saw it. Everything's new.
Rose: And what about you? What are you going to do next?
The Doctor: Well... back to the TARDIS. Same old life.
Rose: On your own?
The Doctor: Why? Don't you want to come?
Rose: Well yeah.
The Doctor: Do you though?
Rose: Yeah.
The Doctor: Well I just thought... 'cause I changed.
Rose: Yeah, I thought 'cause you changed you might not want me anymore.
The Doctor: Oh I'd love you to come.
Rose: Okay!
Mickey: You're never going to stay, are you?
Rose: There's just so much out there. So much to see. I've got to.
Mickey: Yeah.
Jackie: Well I reckon you're mad, the pair of ya. It's like you go lookin' for trouble.
The Doctor: Trouble's just the bits in between! It's all waiting out there, Jackie. And it's brand new to me. All those planets, creatures and horizons—I haven't seen them yet. Not with these eyes. And it is gonna be... fantastic.**

(Quotations Courtesy of http://www.planetclaire.org/quotes/doctorwho/christmas-specials/christmas-invasion.php)

A Sermon for St. Michael's and All Angels

Longer version of a sermon preached at the chapel of Trinity School for Ministry on 9-29-2011



Sermon for the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels


O LORD our Governor, how exalted is your Name in all the world, your majesty is praised above the heavens. Thank you for being mindful of us, for calling us into being in the beginning, and for sending your Son to be with us now and forevermore. Amen.

I am excited that today is the feast and celebration of St. Michael and All angels. Angels are an important part of the story and sacred history that we have received from God. We are told that they are present at all the important events of the history of salvation. They are present in the Garden of Eden in the beginning, and God speaks to Abraham, Jacob, and Moses through angels. Angels of course are present at Jesus’ birth, and they minister to him both after his temptation in the desert and during his long night of suffering in that other Garden, Gethsemenae. Angels participate fully in the mission of God in the church—they break apostles out of prison and bring messages to the disciples in order to get the gospel to go where it hasn’t gone before. Angels are absolutely everywhere in our story and they are intimately involved in the work of God to bring his salvation to pass to the whole earth.


But angels are so very mysterious. We don’t really know where they came from or where they are going to. What we do know for sure about the angels is that they are the preeminent servants and worshippers of God—that they see God and know God and love God not with the partiality or with the eyes of faith that we human being know and see and love God. No. They see him face to face, not in a mirror darkened with sin. They see him and they worship him and they are with him right now in a way that we will some day know for ourselves when Jesus comes again to raise us from the dead. They know his glory right now.


And the angels—the good ones anyway—are made of more noble stuff than we are—they are higher than we are, the Scriptures say— more powerful, more beautiful—in just about every way conceivable. Lancelot Andrewes notes in a sermon on Christmas Day, 1605 that “no long process will need to lay before you how far inferior our nature is to that of angels’ it is a comparison without comparison . . . they are in express terms said, both in the Old and New Testaments, to excel us in power; and as in power, so all the rest. This one thing may suffice to show the odds; that our nature, that we, when we are at our very highest perfection it is even thus expressed that we come near, or are therein like unto, or as an angel. Perfect beauty, as in St. Stephen, ‘they saw his face as the face of an angel. ‘Perfect wisdom in David, ‘my lord the king is wise, as an angel of God.’ Perfect eloquence in St. Paul, ‘though I speak with the tongues of men, nay of angels.’ All our excellency, our highest and most perfect estate, is but to be as they; therefore they above us far.” End quote.


But to what end and purpose? What is the point of celebrating the feast of St Michael and all the angels or what is the point of Lancelot Andrewes preaching a sermon about angels on Christmas day? You may have heard here at Trinity from more than one professor that the purpose of liturgy is catechesis, teaching, instruction. One of our professors here likes to call liturgy a ‘catechetical marinating process’. So in this case, in the case of the angels, in what are we being called to marinate? What does celebrating angels have to teach us about the nature of God and our salvation? David mentions them in his songs of praise to God, the book of Job speaks of them, and the author of Hebrews focuses on an extended comparison between Jesus and the angels for two whole chapters of the book. What we don’t know about angels far outweighs what we do know, so why engage the subject at all? What is the point?


What mentioning angels in all of these cases and throughout the Scriptures and the liturgy does for us is emphasize the mystery, majesty, wonder, and awe of the all-surpassing nature of the salvation that has been won for us in Christ Jesus. Angels are beyond us—we don’t know their history or origins, we can’t contemplate their nature because most of the time they are invisible to us, and we can’t stand in their presence without being overwhelmed and driven to the ground. And these are just angels—we are not talking about God here. If Lancelot Andrewes is right and angels excel us in just about every way possible to an untold degree, how much more does God excel the angels? For one, encounters with angels help us see and grasp just a little bit more of just how infinite the mystery of God really is. If just one angel appears to us a mysterious and miraculous thing—how much more is God himself above and beyond all that. This can help shake us out of thinking of God and treating God as if he were something small and containable and controllable simply because he is unseen and we forget. Angels remind us that the unseen packs quite a lot of firepower—far more than we can ever know right now.


The author of Hebrews is counting on the fact that we have some idea just how much firepower the unseen angels are packing. He’s counting on the fact that we can understand the angels to some degree and that his audience and we have some connection to what they have done and the kind of things they can do. And this is why the contrast between Jesus and the angels is so effective. Here goes the story: God’s own son takes on the nature of human beings—which Psalm 8 and Hebrews 2:7and 9 tell us is a little lower than the angels. This by itself is amazing. Jesus—God himself—doesn’t take on the nature of angels—arguably the “highest” sort of creatures in the cosmos, but rather takes on human nature—something a little more modest and humble. But something has happened since Jesus first became Incarnate in Bethlehem—something, the author of Hebrews tells us, has changed: “After making purification for sins, he—Jesus—sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to the angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.” In other words, Jesus’ obedient death on the cross, and everything that he accomplished with that and after that in his resurrection and ascension—particularly, his work in purification as we see in Hebrews 9 “For Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. Nor was it to offer himself repeatedly, as the high priest enters the holy places every year with blood not his own, 26for then he would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.” All of these things that Christ has done—cleansing the holy places in heaven as well as the earth—won for himself a name and an inheritance that far eclipses any accomplishment or inheritance of the angels. Not even the angels could save the human race or purify everything that sin had polluted, just like in the book of Revelation no one is found on heaven or on earth or under the earth who is worthy to open the scroll or look into it. John weeps because no one is found worthy—no angel, no human being, except “the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David, who has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals.”


It is to this human and divine being that God says, “You are my son, this day have I begotten you.” And “I will be to him a father and he shall be to me a son,” and “let all God’s angels worship him.” Jesus is both God and man and he does something no angel can do—that only God can do—he saves. He saves and he will finish the work of redeeming the entire cosmos: “we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.”


The angels also reveal something to us about the way in which God has ordered the cosmos, which is especially relevant to this chapter of Hebrews. The general point is that God has made all things good and that they all cohere and hang together in Christ. The particular way that the passage illustrates this is in the fact that it shows us how God has made the cosmos such that no one part of it lords over any other part of it. The angels who are mighty and powerful beyond our comprehension who “excel us far” as Lancelot Andrewes said, do not rule and do not lord over us. Instead, they are all “ministering spirits, sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation.” They help us. They protect us from harm. They do the work of servants unseen, unthanked, unappreciated and unnoticed for most of the time—and they do it for frail jars of clay such as ourselves. And you know what? They don’t seem to mind. In fact, the angels don’t even despise us in our sin—rather they rejoice over one sinner who repents. They are not like the elder brother in the parable of the Lost Son—they do not envy us the mercy of God, but rather long to look into the mystery of salvation.


What’s more, it doesn’t seem like they are ever going to rule over us. That’s not their destiny even though right now they have more glory than we do. And we aren’t going to rule over them either. The Scriptures have a couple of things to say about how the eschatological fate of human beings and angels seem to be conjoined. It seems that human beings have something to do with the judgment of evil angels—probably because they have been our enemies from the beginning—and the angels have something to do with gathering up the elect from the earth in the last times. Augustine saw the unity of angels and human beings as being deeply profound—the City of God is that perfect number of elect human beings and elect angels worshipping God together. But there is no concern with mastery or lordship here. Here, it seems that the higher exists to serve the lower and glories in that humble service. And of course we see how this all comes together in the person of Jesus and how Jesus exemplifies this most of all in that he did take on the humble nature of human beings. That he stoops to help us and that this is no embarrassment but rather the glory of God. The glory of God shines in the cross and in Jesus’ humility, and in the fact that he did not scorn us in all of our sin and our weakness, but rather gathers us up and takes us to the Father. Jesus is exalted because of that humble and humiliating service he has done for us.


When Jesus sat down at the right hand of Majesty, he inherited all things—the heavens, the earth, and everything in it. Chapter 2 of Hebrews tells us we will see everything put in subjection under his feet. And Paul tells us we are coheirs with Christ. Jesus has the name above every name, but he is giving the kingdom to us as well. We inherit the kingdom of heaven, the earth, we shall see God, we shall be called Children of God. The angels are for us a witness to all things in heaven and on earth. They show us how deep the miracle of Christ’s Incarnation is. They are an eschatological witness—they show us and remind us of how it will be when we see God face to face and when God brings all other kingdoms to their final end in his one kingdom: the kingdoms of the world are become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ. They are a thousand radiant mysteries of God’s creation. But they all point to and they all look to Jesus and they help us see what kind of salvation we have inherited in him.


So, when you are doubting and distressed—and we will doubt and be distressed--and it seems like it is only you and God against all the powers of the world, the flesh, and the devil—take some time to remember the angels. Remember that there are thousands upon thousands of angels who are looking at the face of God right now, who see him in all his glory right now, and who are waiting at God’s command to aid you in the fight against the world, the flesh, and the devil which is the only true fight the Church has right now. And there’s something else, if this helps you: it helps me. It helps me to know that somewhere for some—the angels in this case--there is a really rich and deep and beautiful way that all is right with God. We struggle with sin and with death and every human being has this struggle. But no angel has—the angels that did not fall were perfect in their obedience and they have not sinned and they have never known separation from God and they have no need for redemption. And there’s millions of them. Alleluia, thanks be to God. There is no shadow of sin in all their being and all their life and for them, everything really is perfect with God, perfectly beautiful, perfectly wonderful, all the time. That’s a nice thought and something to look forward to and something to meditate on when things seem bleak here.


Lord Jesus Christ—we thank you that you became poor and suffered and died for us that we might be filled with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. We thank you for the ministry of your faithful angels who do not look down on us with contempt, but rejoice as we learn to follow you and know you as you are. We pray that the glory of God and of angels might be revealed to us today that we might know the height and depth and breadth of the salvation you have prepared for us from the foundation of the world. Grant these things through the power of your Holy Spirit and to the glory of God the Father. Amen.

The "War of Art" and the War of Life in Contrariety

Today I happened to be reminded of a book I ran across in high school: Steven Pressfield's The War of Art. The premise of the book goes something like this: Art--the creative process--is the battle of waging war against all the factors that militate against you in order to quench your creative potential and output. You have to fight yourself and the powers that be--the everyday distractions and the karmic energies that all seem to conspire against you to keep you from writing. He describes how the daily battle against all these forces must be waged in order to safeguard one's muse--one's openness and ability to act creatively. It is a fascinating read that is helpful for any writer or artist and does contain some of the most heartfelt and apt profanity I have ever read. And when I was 16 and read that book I was quite the moral crusader against cursing. I still thought it was apt.

However, my musings as of late have steered my thoughts in quite another direction: what a tricky, evil little monster discouragement about one's voice can be. I remember reading (also in high school) an article by Carol Gilligan called "In a Different Voice" that was about how young women's process of moral decision-making tends to be different than men's and tends to be overlooked or dismissed. The use of "voice" in this manner has certainly been abused, trivialized, and made cliched and deathly boring in a multitude of ways . . . and yet "abuse does not negate proper-use". I was forced to begin to rethink my dismissal of this concept (or at least, the phrasing of this concept) some months ago when I began to have a rather peculiar experience in prayer.

A moment of explanation: inner healing has been one of the most important ways Jesus has shown me that he is real and has power over absolutely everything and that he knows me and knows what he is doing with me. He has healed me from stuff that I never expected to be healed from and didn't even think was broken. One of the ways in which He sometimes shows me what He's up to (He doesn't always and that's His prerogative) is by giving me a very particular physical sensation that localizes what is wrong and what he is doing about it. For example, a few years ago I heard a sermon on the parable of the sower and was challenged to discover what things in my life were falling on good soil and what was falling on rocky soil or being choked out by thorns, etc. In the weeks that followed, when I prayed I had the recurring sensation that there were these huge boulders in my soul that Jesus wanted to take out and deal with. That should have been my first clue to go to counseling! But alas, 21 year-olds are often proud and stubborn and naive about their ability to handle everything and I was no different. Jesus certainly dealt with that rocky soil and those "stones" are now gone. But it wasn't pretty because I tried to do too much by myself.

In this case, the sense I had was of vocal constriction. When I prayed sometimes, my vocal cords felt tense and tight and when I was praying about certain things the feeling worsened. And I knew instantly what it meant: I knew that it meant that I was having trouble speaking--that I was compromised in my ability to speak the truth about myself of all things. In short, I knew Jesus was revealing to me that I was having trouble with my voice--and as a singer, that meant something doubly significant to me: it struck home as a metaphor dramatically for me because I have spent years working to make something beautiful come out of my mouth when I open it. The meaning here was inescapably obvious to me: I was having trouble with voice, I was having trouble with myself and that this was a problem Jesus wanted to address.

Address it he did: The first thing Jesus had to tell me was that he actually liked what I will call "the prophetic personality". The truth is, there is no such thing as a prophetic personality and that all Christians are called to embrace the call and sacrifice of a prophetic to one degree or another when we do everything we can to proclaim Christ's good news to the world and are hated and rejected for the sake of His name and His word. (It goes without saying--though I will say it anyway--that when we are hated and rejected because we do hateful things, that certainly has nothing to do with prophetic suffering.) However, it is also true that Jesus makes us all different and He makes some of us much more comfortable with external conflict, external resistance, going against the grain, going against the status quo, resisting the system and ignoring the crowd. There are many different definitions of what it means to be a "contrarian". I am a purist on the subject. Some people think being a contrarian means simply "doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing". I have always thought the true art of contrariety consists in refusing to be moved by the crowd--meaning, if the crowd is right, you engage with it, if it is wrong, you resist it. Contrariety is about being full engaged and being fully alive and not resting on your laurels and waiting for someone else to tell you what to do or how to think. It is about embracing one's responsibility to find the whole truth not just the part of it that we are partial to or comfortable with.

Yet, the contrarian lifestyle has its drawbacks. People really resist being made uncomfortable and they will do everything in their power to create space for themselves to be wooed back into dogmatic slumber. And they will call you names and if you are a Christian they will tell you that you aren't meek enough or humble enough or gentle enough (and if you are a woman) submissive enough . . . just to get you off their back and to get themselves back to their comfty-cozy nap they were taking when they were undisturbed by your rabble-rousing after the truth. What's worse is that they will undoubtedly be at least partially correct--if you are a true contrarian (or any sort of human being at all) you will have your virtues and your vices and your weaknesses and some of them will be that you aren't extraordinarily gifted with meekness and gentleness. Regardless as to whether you are passionately devoted to loving your neighbor, it may not look like the kind of love that someone who is invested in their own comfort wants to receive. We are so picky, after all. Its not good enough that love be love--it has to look the way I want it to for me to acknowledge it or receive it or heavens help us--appreciate it. We are very fragile creatures.

C. S. Lewis once said something about the lot of us not being strong enough for heaven--how the joy in heaven with God is much too powerful for us to bear. That is why we must be changed into God's own image and participate in His own life--so that in Him we do have enough strength to bear all the goodness of God. Without becoming partakers of His divine life, we wouldn't have a chance. Instead of being the bush that burns but is not consumed by the fire (which is the destiny of Israel in the Exodus story and our destiny in Christ), we would be consumed. This is why we are so often threatened by the virtues of those who are different from us. We are not strong enough to bear them yet. Moreover, if someone--like a prophet--has the power and Spirit of Christ in them, they don't just have virtue, they have supernatural virtue, they have "spiritual superpowers". Spiritual superpowers are hard to bear--which is exactly why the people who hated Jesus when they saw him make the lame walk or the blind see or wipe away the tears of the grieving--that's exactly why they hated him as much as they did. Jesus had all the power of God to do good in the world, to do supernatural good--and it was too much for their feeble flesh to bear. They had a choice: they could either let the fire invade and consume all their dross and stubble and be saved only by the power of God working in them or they could resist and close themselves off to it and save their lives only to lose them. We are confronted with these choices nearly every moment of our lives and are oftentimes tragically oblivious to this.

All to say, there is something about trying to be the kind of contrarian that Jesus himself was. Some of us don't have a choice. Some of us are like Paul--we are a fiery, driven, dangerous mess of wrong until Jesus gets a hold of us and turns us in the right direction. Then we are on our way to being a fiery, driven mess of the Holy Spirit dangerous only to the powers and principalities of this world and this age, though that transformation is the work of a lifetime. Jesus takes us each on different journeys to become like Him. Who can say what that will be until you walk down the path after Him? And we ought to stay close behind: there are twists and turns that we cannot possibly anticipate from the beginning.

In the beginning of this post I mentioned that discouragement from one's voice is a "tricky, evil little monster". Until sometime after college, I was a happy little contrarian, oblivious to the world of self-doubt and discouragement until something happened that sent me spiraling downward into Cartesian-grade skepticism about who I was as a person and what I had to offer to the church, to the world, to my friends and family, and to God. Looking back, it is a real shame that I got bamboozled into that kind of radical skepticism about myself. Not only was it a real waste of time, its just a shame to doubt God like that. But the kicker for me is for much of that time I was questioning and doubting some of my best qualities and refusing to engage with them because I was scared it would be fruitless or that I would hurt someone. Some of my friends and family members tried to talk me out of it, but I was committed to my Cartesian methodology.

One of my favorite things that the Lord ever said to me about this that helped shake me out of it was (and this is for the philosophers out there), "You are a figment of my imagination. If I had not loved this idea, I would not have have reified it." (Reify=to make an idea concrete or real.) Granted, God does not love my sin. But he does love and delight in all my feistiness and in every gift that he breathed into existence in me, from the smallest bit to the largest. And He will save and redeem every aspect of my personality that he made and turn it to His use and for the glory of His name. So he will do with all of us. This is also the reason we must seek to love the good in our neighbor without qualification, no matter how tempting it may be to be threatened by it or indifferent to it.

We have to fight for this perspective, I think. A friend of mine has a thing about "magnanimity"--"great-souledness": the call of us all to love and serve our neighbor so they can be the greatest and best creature under God that they can be. I have a thing about absolute freedom: to learn how to so embrace the freedom of Christ that we fear nothing and are set free to be and to do absolutely everything Christ has for us. But this is war, peeps. Spiritual warfare, in fact--of a more intense variety than even The War of Art. The last thing that those spiritual powers that fight against God want is for God's creatures to rise up in the full power of Christ knowing who they are and how they can be Christ for the world with everything they have. So they will take advantage--if that means getting you lost in fear or self-doubt or whatever. It doesn't matter what it is, the enemy takes every advantage.

Now the question is, do I have my voice back? The answer to that: Jesus is working on it. Every once in a while, I feel something in my throat that reminds me of ways I need to learn how to speak again. And I say to myself: "I can't do that, how on earth is Jesus going to do that?" He manages--even through my cowardice and sloth and weakness, he miraculously manages to lead me to a better way of doing things, to being stronger and whole and not so ruled by fear. "For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery." There are many "yokes of slavery". Galatians 5:1 was talking about the slavery of the law. Fear is another yoke, and so is thinking that change is up to me or that one can set oneself free. We don't fight the spiritual battle with our own power and we don't have to know or understand how God is going to change and heal and save us. We just have to trust that He can because of what He has already done and ask so that we may receive.