A Road to Emmaeus

Echoes

It’s spring again.

That’s three springs that I’ve seen in Spokane. For some reason this one, the spring of 2014, holds some special significance for me. Perhaps it was the harshness of this past winter. Perhaps it is the many evenings I have spent recently taking walks in Browne’s Addition, admiring the tranquil beauty that I know I will come to miss.

Or perhaps, on a deeper level, it is the prospect of my imminent departure from this town, which I have been anticipating for some months now. Spokane was, is, a stage in the ever meandering road of my life. In a few weeks time, I will be 28. It is an occasion to assess the choices I have made and what I have come to believe. Over coffee at the Rocket, a friend recently asked me why I’m a Christian. I was not sure how to respond. I have since thought of the twists and turns of faith that I have taken over the past five years, and especially over the past two. Faith, admittedly, is the greatest of my personal struggles. I am continuously confronted with the same question: why do I believe?

These meditations reached a turning point in a striking encounter I experienced earlier this month. It is the kind of encounter that one replays over and over in the theater of the mind. One could describe it as transcendent, though not in a miraculous way. It was not an encounter with God. Rather, it was an encounter with beauty, which is itself, I think, a trace of God. I was walking in Browne’s Addition after dark near the roundabout on 1st Ave. It was so unseasonably warm that I didn’t even bother to bring a jacket. Along the sidewalk near Browne’s Tavern, I stopped at a flowering tree. There was a fragrance that seemed to pervade the air, and the leaves were almost spectral in the glow from the street lamps. Across the avenue, people were chatting amicably outside the Elk, savoring this foreshadowing of summer.

I thought then about the idea of beauty, and about how fleeting it is. I thought about our desire for permanence, our longing for an elusive beauty that does not diminish or disappoint. There must be something beyond this moment in time, I thought, something of which the momentary beauty I find here is but an echo.

And that echo, I think, comes from God.

Faith as Choice

I came to a conclusion that night: I believe because I want to believe. I want to believe in a narrative that posits a creator God who emanates beauty and truth. I want to believe that there is a story of creation, fall, and redemption that is even now in progress. I want to believe because I want to be part of a redemptive story, a story that makes sense of the world’s complexities, to include all its evil and injustice.

Faith is a choice. For those of us who have not seen definitive proof of the supernatural, faith does require a certain suspension of disbelief. One can choose to believe that, behind the curtain of the material world and its laws and limitations, there lies a higher force from which emanates our encounters with the good, the true, and the beautiful, a force that is directing everything towards some kind of conclusion. Conversely, one can believe that no such higher order exists, that it is indeed a fiction born of humanity’s desperate search for meaning, and that what we perceive as good, true, and beautiful is nothing more than the product of chemical reactions in our brains. CS Lewis, in Miracles, defines these as the “supernaturalist” and “naturalist” views, respectively. The naturalist position strikes me as more logical, the kind of result a computer program would spit out. In the end, however, I am not an android, and I cannot see the world purely through the prism of logic. For instance, I recoil at the notion of love as simply a chemical process. The mystery of love, its inexplicable power to captivate, to move us to the heights of self-sacrifice…I cannot, will not, reduce this phenomenon purely to natural processes.

I say this as a rational creature, one who is by nature skeptical of all supernatural claims. There is a significant part of me that dismisses the very idea of religion as absurd. In another life, I could even see myself as a self-assured atheist. Yet in spite of my reason, I’ve realized that I’m a dreamer at heart. I write poems because I’m a dreamer, because I see traces of beauty in this world that I believe speak to something larger than just us. These traces are the “echoes of a voice” that NT Wright describes in Simply Christian, and the voice speaking across the cosmos belongs, I think, to God. More specifically, the voice comes from Christ, the incarnate God through whom, as Christians believe, all things were created. The author of the Gospel of John attempts to convey this divine mystery: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…What came to be through him was life, and that life was the light of the world” (John 1:1-3). This is a manifesto for the dreamers. Life and light, all that we value as good, has its source in the incarnate Christ.

A Place for Reason

The inherent uncertainty of faith is the price one must pay for throwing one’s lot in with the dreamers. In a recent interview with Marie Claire, the actress Jennifer Lawrence discusses how she eventually “outgrew” her Christian upbringing in Kentucky. “I don’t know whose beliefs are wright or wrong,” she says, “so I just believe in everything, and I guess that means I don’t believe in anything.” What Lawrence is illustrating here is that, in the end, we simply don’t know whose beliefs are correct. I happen to agree with her. Indeed, I will be the first to admit that I don’t know for sure if God exists. I don’t know if Jesus really did break the laws of science and rise bodily from the dead. There is a gap in knowledge when it comes to such questions, and to bridge this gap it is necessary to take a leap of faith of sorts. Nevertheless, this leap of faith cannot be completely divorced from reason. As anyone can attest, simply wanting something to be true does not mean that it is true. If faith consists purely of wishful thinking without any rational basis, then there is no way to weigh the validity of the world’s various philosophical and religious systems. In short, blind faith simply will not suffice. We live in a world of competing truth claims, and they cannot all be true. To address Lawrence’s point, how can one possibly decide between them?

In assessing this question, it is important to point out that Christianity has been subject to intense scholarly criticism and debate throughout its history, and especially over the last three centuries. Christianity has faced numerous challenges: historical criticism of the Bible, the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, Darwinian evolution, and, more recently, materialist philosophy and the New Atheism. Wave after wave of scholarly criticism has allowed the Christian faith to mature in light of new knowledge, and the faith has proven adept at adapting to the times while preserving its core tenets as expressed in the Nicene Creed. In some cases, modern scholarship has reinforced core Christian doctrine. The majority of biblical scholars, for instance, agree that the synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke) were composed no later than fifty years after Jesus’ death, and possibly quite earlier. This buttresses the idea that the first Christians firmly believed in the bodily resurrection of Christ, and that this notion of a physical resurrection – the pivotal idea of Christianity – should not be dismissed as a mere myth concocted by later communities of believers. Christianity is an intellectually rigorous faith precisely because it has grown within a Western cultural matrix that is hostile to supernaturalist claims. On the whole, there is enough plausible evidence for the claims of the Christian faith, centered around the historical event of Christ’s resurrection, that one can make the leap of faith while guarding one’s reason. If this were not the case, I would not be typing this manifesto and you would not be reading it.

An Answer to Evil

For some people, such a leap remains out of the question. Where one stands on Lewis’ metaphysical dichotomy has profound implications for one’s ability to account for and respond to the evil that we see in the world. If one is committed to naturalism, then no miracles are possible and God is effectively ruled out. The universe is therefore left without an objective moral order, and in the ensuing darkness we are truly to be pitied among all creatures: intelligent enough to grasp the horror of our suffering, yet unable to make sense of it. If, however, one can accept the possibility of supernaturalism and can progress from this assumption to Christianity, then what one gains is an answer to our existential predicament. If God is real, and if Christ is his incarnation in the world, then the question of life’s meaning has been answered. The answer is a story, a story of redemption in progress – often interrupted, but always in progress – and this story can account for the problem of pain that we see in the world. To borrow another NT Wright metaphor, God is in the process of painting a masterpiece across time and across cultures, one in which we are called to participate. “The Kingdom of God is among you,” declares Christ in Luke 17:21. Through this Kingdom and what it promises, human suffering is stripped of its finality. Evil does not have the last word. Evil is potent, but love more potent still. In the Gospel of Luke, the priest Zechariah prophesies concerning his newborn son, the one who will become John the Baptist:

“You will go on before the Lord to prepare the way for him, to give his people the knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of their sins, because of the tender mercy of our God, by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven to shine on those living in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the path of peace” (1:76-79).

Salvation, forgiveness, mercy, peace – these are the signs of the Kingdom, and in Christ they are made manifest. In Christ, the new creation has arrived and indeed is still arriving. Christ, the author of all things, is restoring – recreating – what humanity has so hideously degraded. Conceived in God’s image and made for community, we have marred our humanness through our greed and our insatiable lust for power. The perennial habit of seeing others as things to be manipulated, rather than people to be loved, continues to be passed on from generation to generation. We are the author of our own suffering. If Christianity is true, evil is an objective reality. Evil is a turning away from the voice. Evil is a rejection of beauty and, ultimately, life. The solution to evil, posits Christianity, is the saving grace made possible by Christ. By passing through death and resurrection, Christ somehow exhausts the power of evil. The atonement of Christ on the cross is vicarious – unable to attain righteousness on our own, Christ achieves it for us.

The vicarious atonement is a mystery that naturally seems bizarre, even cultish, to those outside the faith. It has taken me years to accept this idea in principle, and even now I struggle mightily with its implications. I will also admit that the Christian explanation of evil, while mostly satisfying, does not answer every question. The predicament posed by theodicy – the simultaneous and seemingly irreconcilable existence of evil and an all-good God – is perhaps the thorniest question in all of theology. I was reminded of this in a recent conversation with my grandfather, who listed this as his chief objection to the idea of God. Why does God not simply eliminate the possibility of evil by restricting what humans can do? Why allow wars and genocides to continue? In addition, as Richard Dawkins asks in The God Delusion, why can’t God simply forgive our sins without the need to send Christ as a sacrificial atonement? Why does someone have to suffer in order for justice to be restored? These are perfectly fair questions, and attempting to answer them is beyond the scope of what I wish to accomplish here. I will simply say that no philosophy is without weaknesses. Christianity, I believe, answers the big existential questions while leaving some of the details obscure.

Meeting God

Thus far, I have discussed my understanding of faith according to its rational and philosophical implications. For me, this has always been the most helpful paradigm with which to discuss Christianity. I have spent my entire life searching for a system of philosophy that can account for what I observe in the world. From where I stand, Christianity can explain the complexities of the world better than its rivals.

Nevertheless, philosophical coherence is but one aspect of faith. I am admittedly less comfortable in discussing the vastly more important relational aspects of faith, whether this involves my role in the community of believers, my relationship to those outside the church, or, most critically, my relationship with God. Most Christians report having a “personal relationship” with God, and with Christ in particular. I have always found it difficult and even unhelpful to describe the mystery of faith in such intimate, anthropomorphic terms. God is invisible to the senses, and one cannot converse with God the same way that one converses with a human being. Silence is a maddening but inescapable aspect of our attempts at communicating with God. There are times when I have fulminated against this silence. There are times in which I have felt my frail entreaties dissipating, seemingly unheard, into the cosmos. More often than not, my image of God is not so different from that of the Enlightenment deists: the Creator who sets things into motion and then steps back from all involvement in human affairs.

And yet I have found that God is not without presence. At the end of the Gospel of Matthew, Christ, whose very name means “God with us,” promises his followers that “surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (28:20). If one can imagine God’s presence as detectable by a kind of “sixth sense” of sorts, a sense seated somewhere deep in the soul, then God is indeed present, just not in a way that is measurable through conventional means. As an undergraduate, I remember one of my theology professors describing God’s presence as a “gentle reassurance in the heart.” For him, this is the confirmation of his faith. “It is not much,” he admitted, “but it is what I hold on to.” I feel God’s presence most often in times of weakness and despair. I have at times found myself lying awake at night, speaking audibly into the dark, pleading with God not to abandon me. I have felt an enveloping warmth take hold of me in these moments, as if God were making a promise: I am here, I am not leaving you. Am I delusional? It is certainly reasonable to pose this question. According to the naturalist, it is my mind that has concocted this supposed encounter with the divine. As I have previously explained, however, I have consciously chosen to be a dreamer. As such, I believe that there are some aspects of human existence that transcend science, one of them being our contact with God. To borrow Hamlet’s celebrated advice to his friend: “There are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.”

My encounters with God are obviously of a far less spectacular kind than what other Christians report. I have friends who claim to have been physically lifted up in the arms of Christ. I have other friends who speak in tongues or who have witnessed incidents of miraculous healing. I am in no position to assess the validity of such phenomena. All I can say is that such encounters, while not impossible, have not been part of my spiritual life. In answer to the question of whether or not I have a “personal relationship with God,” my answer would be a qualified “yes.” There are moments when I sense hints of God’s presence – the evening walk described earlier, for instance, or the aforementioned reassurance in the face of despondency. To echo my theology professor, this is admittedly not much. I wish that I had a “real” miracle story to tell. Indeed, more generally I wish that God would manifest himself clearly and often and leave no doubt as to his existence or his care for this world. I believe that he already accomplished this, but it happened two millennia ago in an otherwise obscure corner of the world.

The Gospel of John explains how Thomas doubted the resurrection until Christ appeared to him. “Have you come to believe because you have seen me?” asks Christ. “Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed” (21:29). I have not seen, and yet I believe. Am I therefore to be considered blessed? Faith in Christ sometimes feels like a burden rather than a blessing, especially when the vast majority of people in our culture dismiss Christ as irrelevant and seem to be liberated to pursue their own happiness as a result. Yet I continue to believe, which is perhaps a miracle in itself.

Breaking Bread

What does it mean to be a Christian in community? I often describe Christianity as a corporate faith. That is, it is a faith that is to be experienced in community with the body of believers. This means more than simply attending services on Sunday morning. It is a regrettable fact that Christianity in the eyes of the American public has often been reduced to “going to church.” Even the word “church” when used in this sense is misleading, as it refers to a physical house of worship rather than the people that are worshipping. The church, or ekklesia in Greek, is a community of people, the vessel of Christ’s redeeming work in the world. The purpose of the church is to provide encouragement, guidance, and support to the body of believers as they manifest Christ in the wider world. The church is supposed to reflect redeemed relationships, providing the world a glimpse of community as God intended it to be. If the body is functioning properly, all are honored, valued, and respected as people made in God’s image, irrespective of individual differences. As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians: “God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one parts suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it” (12:24-26).

The presence of the church is another reason why I believe. Over the past two years, my community at Soma Spokane, my ekklesia, has walked with me through the dark hours of doubt and disbelief. My brothers and sisters have encouraged me through prayer and, on at least one occasion, the laying of hands. They have also rejoiced with me in my triumphs and in my growing awareness that I am a deeply flawed individual in need of grace. In their patience, they have mirrored God’s grace, demonstrating that Christ continues to reveal himself in the world through the work of his body.

James, the brother of Christ, writes that one of the church’s primary responsibilities is spiritual encouragement: “Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed” (5:16). Spiritual healing and maturation occurs in community. In fact, I cannot conceive of it occurring outside of community. We all experience loneliness and despair at times, some of us more than others. In addition, I think that we long for an authenticity in human relationships, a way to break through the walls that separate us from others and discover, deep down, what is really going on inside the human heart. At least, these are things that I seek. There is liberty in being able to abandon one’s secrets and confess one’s transgressions. There is pain in this, too: the pain of stripping away one’s pretenses and revealing weakness to others. Christ, I think, makes this transparency possible. Christ enables us to confess our sins and receive encouragement from other believers. It is this authenticity, this realness, that is the hallmark of living in community. It is through our interactions with others that we are given opportunities to extend and receive grace. Indeed, I have found that community is the mirror in which we see ourselves as we truly are.

Sometimes I think that I’m a Christian because I’m terrified of loneliness. In the end, I am not ashamed to admit the truth in this. Nearly all people, I think, fear loneliness and seek solidarity with others as a result. We gather together to celebrate what brings us happiness; think sports leagues, political rallies, dinner parties, religious festivals. Similarly, Christians gather to celebrate Christ. If I were not a Christian, I would naturally seek and find human solidarity elsewhere. However, I am not so sure these relationships would exist at the level of authenticity described above. There is something about breaking bread with a brother or sister in Christ that allows one to be transparent with one’s thoughts and feelings. This is a tremendous gift that the church provides, and it has on many occasions saved and sustained my faith.

In Search of Glory

“Heaven and earth are full of glory,” writes NT Wright, “a glory which stubbornly refuses to be reduced to terms of the senses of humans who perceive it.” Glory is at the center of the Christian faith. We read of the glory of Christ, the Incarnate Word of God, in the Scriptures. We see glory in warm summer evenings and in participating in the life of the community. In spite of its manifold horrors, the majesty of ordinary life often leaves us in a state of wonder. The universality of this experience was put on full display during the opening ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympics. Presiding over a spectacular reenactment of the Industrial Revolution and the resulting transformation of Britain, the actor Kenneth Branagh delivered this quote from Shakespeare’s The Tempest:

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.

This is the creature Caliban speaking. Enslaved by the human sorcerer Prospero, Caliban attempts to kill his master but is foiled by the spirit Ariel. Ariel’s invisible music perplexes Caliban, prompting him to express his wonder at phenomena that he does not understand. Human beings, of course, possess a far better understanding of the world than does Caliban. And yet Caliban’s declaration still speaks to our very human capacity for appreciating beauty and our inability to explain everything that is happening around us.

Life itself, I think, is ultimately a quest in search of beauty and glory. It is a quest that the naturalist and the supernaturalist alike can understand and appreciate. I have chosen to place myself in the latter camp, and as such I see a narrative behind the curtain, the source of the echoes. I see a story in progress. I believe that the story is true because I want it to be true. I want Christ to be the source from which springs all that is beautiful and good and true. In its ability to explain evil and injustice, and in its use of grace as the means of redemption, the Christian faith provides a framework with which to account for the vicissitudes of human existence. Faith does not provide certainty, but rather hope in the face of uncertainty.

As I write this, I contemplate the fact that I have been alive for almost three decades. There’s more mystery that I wish to unravel, more beauty to discover, and I hope that I will have many more years with which to do it. I felt the same way five years ago, but the difference today is that I don’t see myself as acting alone. I am not a lone ranger attempting to define myself. I am part of a larger narrative, one centered around Christ’s redeeming work, and one in which I have already been defined. From where this dreamer stands, I cannot fathom a story more glorious, more liberating than this.