Tag Archives: life

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Some Thoughts on Christian Atheism

Some people would think that I would not encounter much rejection of God while teaching at a Christian school, but those people tend to believe that atheism is only an overt spurning of belief, a specific and active form of rejection. However, if we are true to ourselves, we might recognize how much of our lives are marked by disbelief rather than belief, both in supernatural and corporeal realities. I’m not calling professed believers atheists, but I will be bold enough to say that atheism exists within us like a lump in a bowl of mashed potatoes – we can’t see it, no one can be certain it is there, and everything looks fine; however, once we begin to dig around inside ourselves, we find that our capacity for belief is not wholly dominant.

I’m not referring to doubt. Doubt is an element of faith. Without doubt, faith cannot flourish.

Balloons really hammer the point home, don't they?

I’m speaking of a posturing of our lives in a manner that aligns itself against belief. This is the covert nature of atheism – people of faith certainly would not profess unbelief, but they may very well go on living like there is nothing beyond their own dreams, their own desires, their own bodies. They believe in God as a concept, but there are days (or weeks or months or years) where that concept is disconnected from actual living and breathing reality. They may testify to the reality of God, but day by day they show allegiance solely to the law of man. Thus, there seems to be no point to this recognition of God, at least in the sense of altering one’s life. Instead, it’s more like citing a documented source in a research paper – an acknowledgement of God in a deistic sense.

I see this kind of hypocrisy in myself every once in a while. I can claim and speak about my faith, but, in the drudgery of the day, all I’m really thinking about is myself. Awareness of a greater reality is the furthest thing from my mind. As the writer Frederick Buechner has written, some people who claim there is no God may be living as if there is, and some who claim that there most certainly is a God may still live as if there is not.

I think that our shortcomings often stem from this particular problem. It is no easy thing to cultivate an awareness of the Other – one that remains powerful and persuasive throughout our days. However, until we can do this – until we can truly practice this presence of God in the here and now of our spinning world – we will find that the words of our mouths and even the work of our hands do not always match the inclinations of our hearts.

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Life in Ten Minutes

Every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday morning, before my first period American Literature class, I am allotted ten minutes for what administration calls “devotionals.” At 8:50, the electronic bell warbles, the students take a seat, and the morning announcements click on over the PA. Depending on how many talking points the principal has for the student body, I get the remainder of the 8:50 to 9:00 slot, and I am meant to spend these fleeting minutes offering my students some form of wisdom or insight in regard to our life in a God-centered reality, perhaps reading something from the Bible, and then wrapping up with some meaningful prayer. No problem…

The lightning round begins... right... NOW!

As a teacher, I am plagued by the curse of honesty. One of my biggest problems is teaching something (especially something out of history or ancient Scriptures) without giving a lot of background to make sure the information being received makes sense in the grand spectrum of life. I know the reason for this stems partly from some of the teachers I had growing up who skipped over contextualization in favor of barrelling right into application. Unfortunately, it is not as easy for me to leave out “where this concept comes from” or “how this belief arose” – I find such information vital. After all, if I’m going to base my life on something, I want to know the details!

Needless to say, ten minutes is not quite enough time for me to impart all the wisdom (ha!) that roils within, no matter how strong a communicator I may be (or that I also teach Public Speaking). I am able only to point to the tip of the iceberg, and hope the students catch on that there is much that lies beneath. Perhaps I’m being too dramatic, or trying to bite off more than I can chew, but, seriously, ten minutes?! It’s hard to offer anything worthwhile in that amount of time. I feel like I’m in those old Al Franken skits on SNL – Daily Affirmations with Stuart Smalley (“Because you’re good enough, and you’re smart enough, and doggone it…”)

Don’t get me wrong, I manage. However, like prisoner from shackles, I can’t help but want to break free from the time restraints. We’ve become a soundbite-obsessed culture, drunk on talking points and eager for more ways to water down the wine of truth. Life cannot be summed up in ten-minute increments each day, nor can our devotion be encapsulated so easily. This may be making the proverbial mountain out of a molehill, but I worry that such brevity perpetuates the system.

So, down falls the gauntlet. Life in ten minutes. Can it be done?

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Extracurricular

For my Sono Libero kids…

On Tuesdays, thirteen students saunter into my classroom a few minutes after the final school bell chimes. They gather here to commit themselves to something none of them can do alone, something greater, requiring their collective talents and a communal vision. Granted, some days the vision is dulled by the fog of pressing schoolwork and college applications and rival clubs, but I know that they participate in our creative endeavor because somewhere inside of them burns a flame of innovation and imagination. And, when they choose to fan that flame, mountains move.

We’re putting together a literary magazine, a compilation of artwork, prose works and poetry from the student body. The students who come to my room are the ones who not only believe in the power of art in general, but are convinced that power burns confidently within the hearts and minds of their fellow students. Essentially, they adhere to a notion that people are so much more than what is found on their surface. They have faith in the existence of depth, of mystery, to life, and they want to celebrate this fact rather than disregard or deny it.

Maybe there’s hope for the world after all.

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The Center

I’ve been thinking lately about finding my center. I know, it sounds like ridiculously futile, New Age recreation. However, I mean this in an intensely practical manner. I’m not interested in “finding” my center because I think it has gone missing in some subconscious or metaphorical way. If anything, it is I who have gone missing.

As Yeats writes in “The Second Coming,” ” Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / … The best lack all conviction while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” Perhaps this is an odd reference, but if I am to war my way through the thousands of daily skirmishes – the decisions and the distractions and the desperations – and still place my head to the pillow in peace, then there must be a center that reels me back in, day after day. That keeps me breathing and thinking and just courageous enough to look in the eye this ravenous world with its starving stare. It is not my center that has strayed from me, but I from it. And each day that I do, things fall apart; the center cannot – or will not – hold.

Much of what I have written so far might seem pointlessly abstract. However, when we begin to consider our centers – that which holds our life together and gives it meaning and purpose – I believe many of us, if not all of us, will find that we must speak thus. Words only go so far, whether they are passed between friends, expressed in lines of poetry, partnered with a melody, or delivered from a pulpit. Eventually, even the words fail us. (Such is a frightening and sad reality for a teacher of literature and composition to accept.)

Perhaps this is why “centering prayer,” as it is popularly known these days, does not depend solely on spoken words to communicate our desires and our attitudes to God. There is even more basic forms of expression that go on, such as breathing, posture, and that wonderful communique, silence. Sometimes, we have to leave all our many babbling words behind in order to genuinely express our inmost inclinations.

As a Christian – specifically one who desperately wants that to mean something more than a political preference or a moral mindset – my center is Christ. Not the tired metaphor of Christ “living in my heart as my personal Lord and Savior,” (was there ever a more selfish way to describe the work of the Savior in someone’s life?), but as the unifying and very real God drawing every single aspect of my life into communion with Him. Christ, the benevolent giver of mercy and grace, is proclaimed as Lord over the lives of his followers. But unlike some eternal foreman or power-hungry overseer, this Lord draws us into a relationship that transforms servanthood to friendship, worldliness to meekness, selfishness to humility.

Finding my center means daily doing whatever it takes to live in communion with this wonder-filled Christ. What I am beginning to discover is that while I seek to do this, life does not slow down. The skirmishes keep tumbling over my horizons, making the need to commune with my center even more necessary. After all, without our “circumferences,” as the writer Richard Rohr puts it, there is no center. Without the world around us turning and turning in Yeats’ “widening gyre,” we may not even know we had a center, let alone what that center must be. We would be flung into the depths of our lives, fighting and scrabbling our way through the muck of earthly experience, without any awareness that turning with us and waiting to draw us back into a sense of wholeness and purpose is something – Someone – greater than it all.

Evangelism, then, begins with reminding people there is something to which all the spokes in our wheel connect. Something that remains central while we are hurled back and forth by the centrifugal, retrained chaos of our years, our months and our days. This is the truth of living, and only once it is established can a greater Truth be recognized and possibly accepted.

And when things fall apart, as they are apt to do again and again, it is the greater Truth that holds out his steady hands and calmly asks us to take hold and find our footing once again. Finding the center, and finding the courage to hold on to Him, is the greatest undertaking a person will ever face.

Maybe words go farther than I thought…

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The Big 3 … Oh!

I was thinking recently about the ramifications of turning thirty, which is happening today as I write this. A lot of people freak out when they encounter their thirtieth candle, and a few may even go so far as to begin age-denial before it is really warranted (that should happen a decade later, I think). On Friends, Joey weeps and cries to the heavens not only at his own thirtieth, but at each of his friends’. With all the trepidation and anxiety of turning thirty, one would think the transition was an excruciating transformation on par with David Naughton’s sudden lycanthrophizing in An American Werewolf in London. In reality, I don’t feel much different today, and I haven’t noticed any extra hair on my palms or the gradual emergence of a uni-brow.

I was explaining to a friend that thirty doesn’t seem so old when you avoid the big picture perspective. In other words, as long as I only consider myself no longer twenty-nine, the change seems hardly significant. However, were I to consider the cold, hard truth that my twenties – an entire freakin’ decade! – are over … well then, that might cause my stomach to lurch or compel me to curl up into a fetal position in mournful denial of what is taking place.

The other day, as I walked the dogs along the strips of grass between the plowed fields that surround the farm on which we live, I told God I was sorry for the way I lived my twenties. Specifically, I confessed that I had spent the bulk of my twenties living quite selfishly, not to mention lazily. Sure, there were good moments: the summer of ’03 before seminary, which was the last time I can remember feeling comfortable singing praise songs in the car, May of ’05 when I was ushered into the richness of the Church’s liturgical tradition courtesy of the monks at Christ in the Desert, and that one shining day in April of ’07 when I made a vow and swore to keep it. I believe these were sacramental moments, times when God and I met together in perfect allegiance. However, I have come to realize that in between these good moments are a plethora of days in which I rejected His sacramental nature, where I turned a deaf ear to His song, where I cast my eyes away from his wonder.

There were too many days lived within the bleak, black tunnel of my world, rather than the vast, rolling vista of His landscape.

I prayed to God that this new decade of life – should I be blessed with another full set of ten years – would find me turning aside from myself and falling graciously into His purposes.

May it be so for me now, on this day, and for you as well, no matter what day, year or decade in which you find yourself.