My faith journey

For my practicum class, we were asked to write a "faith timeline" which chronicled the way our spiritual faith developed. Here is what I shared:

"I was born in Houston Texas in 1988 while Ronald Reagan was still President, just before George H.W. Bush was elected.

"Although I have very little memory of my life during that time period, I know that there were two things that were very important to me: one was my dance career, which began when I was three years old; the other was church, which my mother and I attended every Sunday. I started my life as a Baptist, attending Nassau Bay Baptist Church in Houston Texas. What I really remember most about that church was that my Sunday School teachers were horrified to discover that I could not color within the lines. Interestingly, this habit has turned into quite the metaphor for my own life of faith: I still refuse to color inside the lines.

"My life changed abruptly in 1992 when the company my father worked for was forced to go out of business. PoFolks restaurants across the country closed down, and my father was forced to look for new work. At the same time, the neighborhood my family lived in was declared an unsafe place to live thanks to illegal toxic dumping, so my family was left with no choice but to move.

"My father found work in what I consider to be one of the most beautiful places in America, which also turned out to be a very unique place to grow up. We moved across the state of Texas to Big Bend National Park, which is situated right on the border of Mexico, about 300 miles South by Southeast of El Paso, and 120 miles away from the closest grocery store. My father worked as an Assistant Manager at the resort and restaurant situated in the middle of the Chisos Mountains, and eventually my mother became an Interpretative Ranger. My neighborhood there was very small, and I was the only child in the particular subdivision where I lived. My school was 10 miles away, and during my entire time living in Big Bend, its maximum enrollment was 22 students in kindergarten through 8th grade.

"What did this new and unique location mean for spiritual life? Well, for one thing, the closest church was approximately 36 miles away, too far to drive on a Sunday morning. For my first few years in the park, a unique ministry organization called Christian Ministry in the National Parks sent seminary students and volunteers to run church services on Sundays for park visitors, and I managed to attend them until the organization stopped sending volunteers. Church services were held in an outdoor amphitheatre, so our altar was a mountain face. In my mind, God became indelibly linked to the eternal forces of nature. God was in the mountains and the wind and the trees, and God was in the river that slowly and patiently cut its path across the dry desert landscape. This idea of God that I developed while I lived in Big Bend is probably the strongest influence on my current faith.

"In 1998, my father was diagnosed with a type of skin cancer that affected his lymph nodes. A great tumor swelled on the side of his neck, and we were offered the opportunity to take unconditional sick leave until his cancer was under control. This was during my 5th-grade year, and we spent the second half of my second semester staying with my grandmother in Atlanta Georgia while my father sought oncological care. I transferred to an elementary school in Atlanta, and started attending my grandmother's church there. It was during my time there that I chose to be baptized, although it wasn't until a year later that I finally was. Then I was baptized in a good old Baptist fashion, dunked fully under water to the point that it felt like I was drowning, and when I was lifted up again my life was changed.

"Water became important to my understanding of God as well. Baptism is understood in many traditions as life-giving, but in the desert landscape where I grew up, water really WAS life-giving. Since my mother was a park ranger, I memorized her lecture on the dangers of dehydration: did you know that a 2% decrease in water in your body results in a 10% decrease in brain functionality? And rain was always a blessing, whether it was accompanied by raging thunderstorms and flash floods, or a slow gentle rain that was absorbed into the dry soil and nurtured the flora and fauna found there.

"My life faced a great upheaval again at the end of my 8th-grade year in 2001, when my father's company was absorbed into a larger corporation, and my dad was laid off and we were once again forced to move. This time, though, there was not much choice in our decision of where to live; my paternal grandmother was growing old, and we moved in with her in Atlanta Georgia to ensure that she received proper care and treatment. We started attending my mother's childhood church, which was United Methodist, and I was confirmed and sought refuge there most Sundays. But it wasn't the polity and doctrine that I found so welcoming and wonderful about this particular church; it was the people, and when I went away to college I found that the Methodist Church no longer held the appeal that it used to for me. I returned to my own self-enforced religion: God was in the world around me and I could find him there without the church.

"I still held certain church rituals sacred; most specifically, I embraced the wonder and mystery of the Eucharist. This may be in part because of my study of ancient Gnostic sects, some of which chose to take the Eucharist every day, and others which rejected the Eucharist entirely, and many others which fell somewhere in between. It is clear through the history of Christianity that there is something powerful about this particular ritual, and I find the same emotion fills me when I partake of God's cup.

"So what do I believe? I describe myself to non-believers as an agnostic Christian. My strongest belief is that there is very little that we can truly KNOW, but there is quite a bit that we can accept on faith, and I CHOOSE to accept the story of Christ. At the same time, I feel that God is in the world; the glory of creation is made up of God's own being, but God transcends all of it. There is innate holiness in our bodies and our minds and in the world we walk in, but God is above all of us; he transcends creation. There is something sacred in water and baptism, and again something sacred about the Eucharist."

Thoughts on anger

But the Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul, and a distressing spirit from the LORD troubled him. And Saul’s servants said to him, “Surely, a distressing spirit from God is troubling you. Let our master now command your servants, who are before you, to seek out a man who is a skillful player on the harp. And it shall be that he will play it with his hand when the distressing spirit from God is upon you, and you shall be well.” So Saul said to his servants, “Provide me now a man who can play well, and bring him to me.” Then one of the servants answered and said, “Look, I have seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, who is skillful in playing, a mighty man of valor, a man of war, prudent in speech, and a handsome person; and the LORD is with him.” Therefore Saul sent messengers to Jesse, and said, “Send me your son David, who is with the sheep.” And Jesse took a donkey loaded with bread, a skin of wine, and a young goat, and sent them by his son David to Saul. So David came to Saul and stood before him. And he loved him greatly, and he became his armorbearer. Then Saul sent to Jesse, saying, “Please let David stand before me, for he has found favor in my sight.” And so it was, whenever the spirit from God was upon Saul, that David would take a harp and play it with his hand. Then Saul would become refreshed and well, and the distressing spirit would depart from him.
-- 1 Samuel 16:14-23

A colleague of mine, Leonard, posted a question on facebook about the ways in which we view God, and he questioned why we seem to conveniently forget depictions of God as "wrathful" or "angry," and focus instead only on the loving nature of God. My colleague questioned whether there was a sort of misogyny in ignoring the wrathful side of God because anger is so often associated with the feminine. I have attempted to gather my thoughts on this subject here.

"This is a fascinating question and one I actually wrote a sermon about. One of the things people seem to frequently overlook about Jesus is the fact that he gets angry... a lot! There is of course the time that he turns over the tables in the Temple, which is probably the most memorable, but there is also the time that he curses a fig tree so that it does not bear fruit. And don't forget how many times he outright called the Pharisee and Sadducees stupid! However, whenever I have pointed this out in Bible study or some similar situation, it's usually brushed off as 'Oh that's just the human part of Jesus, not the God part.'

"What gets me about it is there is no specific reason that the anger is attributed to the humanity of Jesus and not the divinity. There is plenty of evidence in the Hebrew Bible of God being angry; therefore anger is quite evidently a quality that belongs to God. I think that our describing God merely with phrases of love and comfort is in fact avoiding the truth: God is not always loving and is in fact quite capable of anger."

In response to this post, I was reminded by another poster that "anger is not always the absence of love." I responded to this comment in kind:

"I was not trying to imply it was; in fact I would agree with you completely. Love and anger exist independently of each other, and both can co-exist. However, the typical understanding of God is that God does not get angry at his followers, sine qua non, and I think this is a false supposition. Anger in love is in fact very common in the Old Testament. Perhaps one of my favorite stories is when God gets angry at Saul because he does not live up to God's expectations of him; Saul does not live up to his own potential, and because of this God actually sends an evil spirit to plague Saul. Is this anger without love? I think not; it is anger because of love.

"And as for the idea that there is an inherent misogyny in referring to God as only loving, I think one must consider what value is assigned to God's anger. Is God's anger virtuous or shameful? There is a sort of binary in cultural understandings of how anger should be expressed. In men, it is perfectly acceptable to show anger, so long as it is not excessive and as long as it seems reasonable. As soon as a woman displays anger, however, she is immediately labelled as 'unstable' or 'crazy.' Would we be so bold as to claim that God's anger demonstrates instability or insanity? I do not have a satisfactory answer to this question. I can see the misogyny that you imagine, Leonard.

"Another thought: when there are descriptions in the Bible of God's love for his people, it is often described in feminine imagery: a suckling breast, a cradling mother, a protective hen. What is the implication of this?"

These are just my quick thoughts on the subject, and I hope to update with more as the conversation continues.

Peace like a river

“Rejoice with Jerusalem, and be glad with her, all you who love her; Rejoice for joy with her, all you who mourn for her; that you may feed and be satisfied with the consolation of her bosom, that you may drink deeply and be delighted with the abundance of her glory.” For thus says the LORD: “Behold, I will extend peace to her like a river, and the glory of the Gentiles like a flowing stream. Then you shall feed; On her sides shall you be carried, And be dandled on her knees. As one whom his mother comforts, So I will comfort you; And you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.”

I have often encountered the phrase "peace like a river." Most notably, perhaps, it occurs in one of my favorite hymns, "It is well with my soul": "When peace like a river attendeth my way, and sorrow like sea billows roll, whatever my lot thou hast taught me to say: 'it is well; it is well with my soul." I only recently learned that this hymn, written by Charles Wesley, derives from a very Wesleyan Methodist practice--did you know that there are kinds of Methodism that are not Wesleyan? I did not--of beginning each gathering with a reflection on the state of one's soul.

I never really thought much about the phrase "peace like a river." It was obviously meant to convey peacefulness, and there is nothing religious people like to use as a metaphor more than water--unless perhaps it's fire. So what kind of water is peaceful? Obviously a river!

However, tonight during a Lectio Divina meditation, we reflected on the text I shared above from Isaiah 66:10-13. During this meditation, I started thinking about this phrase in particular; for some reason it held my attention more than the rest of the text. And what I began to think about was my own experience with rivers.

Growing up in Big Bend, water was not very commonly available, and I definitely did not encounter rivers very often. The only real river nearby was the Rio Grande and some of its tributaries, and in the Big Bend area, the Rio was always muddy and usually quite low. After rainfall was a different story; the desert came alive with rain, and empty arroyos and creek beds suddenly flowed with water: fresh, clean, and rushing very quickly. I remember one specific instance where I was out hiking with my parents and it began to rain. My father had crossed a dry river bed, but before Mom and I could join him on the other side, the creek filled with violently rushing water. I could not get to my father, and he could not get back to me.

I contrast that experience of water with what I learned about rivers when I moved to Georgia. The major river in the Atlanta area is the Chattahoochee, which perhaps reflects more strongly the kind of river one usually associates with the phrase "peace like a river." I have childhood (and teenage) memories of floating down the Chattahoochee on an inner tube, a common spring/summer activity for people in North Georgia. During these inner tube trips, I started learning the rhythms of a river that was more constant than my desert rivers. Here, where the water ran deep the river moved slowly. Where the water grew shallow, the river rushed along more quickly. The shallow water was the more dangerous because it was easy to get caught on a river boulder and flip over. My cousin Taylor had the unfortunate happenstance wherein he cracked his head on one of these boulders in the shallow of the river, and had to rush to the hospital and have his head stapled.

So as I think about the phrase "peace like a river," I think about the different parts of a river. There is no river that runs deep the whole way, quietly passing slowly and peacefully. Instead, the river itself has moods; in one place it is calm and peaceful, in others it is violent and fast-paced. And these natural rhythms of the river are changed when it rains excessively, or when an area suffers from drought. So then what do these texts mean when they say that peace is like a river?

I interpret this text to be speaking not about peaceful relationships between people, but rather of the inner state of one's soul, much like Wesley's hymn. This peace that is described is not necessarily the calm part of the river, but encompasses the river as a whole. It includes the rapids, the shallows, the boulders, the muddy parts, the clear parts, and the deep parts. When comparing this to the state of one's soul, perhaps this text shows that a peaceful soul has moods just like a river; we are to recognize that there is grace in every emotion; in calmness, but also in turbulence.