How I'm still a Christian (Part 2)

In which the protagonist shows that we're all a bunch of silly asses

Note: this is the second part of a two-part series. If you haven't read the first part, I advise you to read it (link here) before going on to the second. And if you just read the first part, give yourself a day or two before going on to the next. It’s a lot to swallow.

Dear H,

So?

Where do we go from here? What if we don’t believe the whole Bible is the word of God? What if we can’t prove we have the Holy Spirit? What if we can’t prove we’re saved? And what if we don’t look like Jesus? In other words, how can I, J, claim to be a Christian while questioning the whole foundation of the religion?

Let’s start off with the easy one.

Why can’t I walk like Jesus?

I submit to you that the main problem with all these questions is we’ve forgotten God is the hero of this whole story. In fact I posit the obvious: that you, as you stand right now, until the day you die and God makes you otherwise, will never be as good as God.

But I go one step further. You're not worse than God because God doesn’t love you, or because He didn’t give you magic powers, or you just didn't try hard enough. You're not as good as God because:

1. You're a finite being. This means you’re physically, emotionally, and psychologically incapable of radiating goodness like God does.

2. You exist in a world of change and you can't stop changing.

3. You need to learn how dependent on God you actually are. In fact, learning to miss and seek God because life sucks without Him is one of the primary reasons we exist here on earth.

Consider the second point especially. You can't stop change. You can’t determine all the ways you change, or the emotions that hit as life changes around you, or the fact that you don’t understand everything and you get caught off guard and you panic or you screw up. No matter what, here on earth you can't remain the same. If you're in love with God one minute you're in love with T&A the next. If you’re walking like a saint on Friday you're yelling at some poor kid by the weekend. Don't worry: it's a visa-versa deal.

Aside from being in constant flux, the point about being finite is so obvious that even Jesus' own life proved it. He commands, for instance, to give to everyone who asks of you. Then He got into a boat and ran away from crowds who were begging for help. He said do not resist an evil person and then beat up a bunch of money-changers. He said to be like our father in Heaven, who sends rain on the wicked and the righteous. Then He went to Galilee and never booked a plane ticket to Shanghai.

For a finite being, even the choice to love is exclusive. You have to pick sides and rank people in order of importance. If you direct your energy one way, you shift it away from a hundred others. Sometimes you have to shift it against a hundred others. My point is really simple, but hard for Christians to swallow: if even Jesus, due to the pressures of living in time and space, couldn’t keep up with His own commandments all the time, please feel free to give yourself a break. If Christ grew in wisdom and in favor with God (as Luke 2:52 states), I posit here that you also have to; and that growing in wisdom — emphasis on the ing — means sometimes you’re a complete putz*.

Being finite means you can reflect aspects of God — in moments. And that’s part of the beauty of being human. When we look up to God and thank Him and beg Him to be with us we get to reflect a bit of His light — not the whole thing, but the few rays He put you there to reflect at that moment.

God is a blinding-sun kaleidoscope of goodness. You’re a mirror, and you can be a single ray of brilliant color at a time. You turn away and lose the reflection and He turns you back — this time another color. You shine some of His light and then look away and it gives out. Repeat ad infinitum — the life of a finite being in Christ. Not the sun itself, but a prism trying to catch the right angle.

This isn’t a theory. This is what you see, and have seen, every day, everywhere around you there are Christians. In fact this is what we were born for.

What if I can’t tell if I have the Holy Spirit?

You don’t look so much like Jesus, so that's the first hurdle. But beyond this you don’t have tongues of fire on your head. You haven't raised the dead or told the future. And is the voice inside you the Holy Spirit or is it your conscience? Are they the same thing? What does this all mean?

I’m not an expert on the voice of God, but every single near-death experience I’ve read about says that God doesn’t communicate to us like we communicate to each other now. They say He speaks more effectively: a direct link from mind to mind, which translates ideas and emotions as they are. Not as the misfiring, garbled medium of words we use now.

Words are trying to describe what's happening inside the mind, and they do it only partially well. It depends not only on the ability of the speaker, but of the ability (and the interest) of the listener. As such, we say one thing and it comes across as another. One man's pouring his heart out and his girlfriend is barely listening because she’s tired. We miss part of the instructions and the IKEA table comes out crooked. We don’t have the vocabulary to describe colors and feelings and ideas and we bore people with a retelling of a wild dream. This is why poetry is an art form. We have feelings that we have to translate into words, and a true poet uses symbols to recreate a feeling.

What little we know of God, He doesn’t speak in just words. He speaks in dreams and feelings and visions and symbols — the root essence behind all the languages. And I theorize that He doesn’t usually say things baldly from out of a burning bush. He speaks in us and to us and all around us through symbols and we aren't paying enough attention to realize it.

After Jesus came back and left again and the Apostles were looking to fill Judas’ place, they prayed and then drew straws. If this is God’s will (in the Apostles’ opinion, at least), how much more is a bird singing outside your window on a rough day? Even Bob Marley knew a message when he saw it.

I believe He speaks to all of us this way and if we read the Bible we’re better at noticing it. Whether Christians are better attuned to this or not is beside the point. He’s always been speaking and we miss His sermons because He doesn't always sign the letters and we’re looking mainly for the signature.

God is behind every single atom of our existence. Just take a deep breath and feel how good it is and realize He’s right there making all of it happen. We live in a constant shower of beauty and light and poetry and music and we’ve gotten so used to it that we forget to say thank you. We relegate these moments of gratefulness to meals when we’re being fed all day every day with lessons and messages and masterpieces and I love you notes. A little thought on this proves that God hasn't forsaken us. We have forsaken God — and then we put the blame on Him just because we can’t hear Him in English.

How do I know if I’m saved?

When you read the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus says “give to everyone who asks of you” and "do good to the righteous and the wicked, so you can be like your father in heaven,” He knows damn well you can't do it. He knows you can do it sometimes. He’s telling you who He is, not who you are.

Take comfort in this. The reason He’s telling you this is because you are the wicked person who gets blessed anyway. You're the one who gets extra when you beg for something and you deserve worse. You’re the one who slaps Him in the face and gets the other cheek immediately. You're the one who gets forgiven seventy times seven for the same offense. Do you believe God is good? Well then you must also believe He sticks to His own principles.

Christianity is finding out about this and then, in the moments you feel it, reflecting it — and these moments are the only times in your life you're like God. He gives, you overflow, and other people see it and go wow. They see the twinkle in your eye and the quick way you give and forgive and they say that guy's got something I don’t. And at that moment you do.

A belief in Christ means that you want to hear Him audibly say you're saved, but you don’t really have to. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet still believe —a blessing specifically for you and me and everybody else who wonders about tongues of fire. And in addition to this, you already heard Him say ask and it shall be given to you; seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. To the people who take the Ten Commandments and the US Constitution literally, I call your attention to the lack of ifs, ands, or buts.

But this brings us to another serious question.

What if I’m not sure the whole Bible is the word of God?

Shouldn’t this have gone first? At first glance you'd think so, because the Bible is the main thing we all learned about Jesus from. But consider that Jesus isn’t based on the Bible. The Bible is based on Jesus. Even if all the Bibles were burned, God would still be Himself, and He would love us and speak to us and save us all the same — just like He did when Paul didn’t have a New Testament.

The Bible is a compilation of people brushing up against Him and telling what He did and what He’s like — but we forget it's always people brushing up against Him. It wasn’t written by God after He brushed up against people**.

What does this mean? First off, that because it's made of words, it's subject to all the failures, manglings, and all-around boobery I mentioned above. And that's before it gets translated into English.

But more importantly, every single one of the people who wrote the Bible was imperfect. As soon as we get that point straight, we say that at certain moments in their lives they were perfect. Sometimes in those moments they wrote things down, and you don’t need a creed to tell you when they were. You can feel the light beaming off the pages.

You don’t need to say “this whole thing is the word of God” to feel the warmth in 1 Corinthians 13. David said taste and see that the Lord is good and this is all you need, really. Just dive in, soak up the vibe, see what people said who felt the light up close, sift their judgments, feel their emotions. They were ecstatic and indignant and worried and wise and sometimes even in pain: take these things and think about them, talk about them, let their words become you — but don’t worry about what can’t. Because you, as a finite being, whether you say they’re the words of God or not, are incapable of treating them all like they are.

Some of these words will fly by you undetected — until twenty years after you first read them. Some of the ideas will fail to take hold because you can’t let go of aspects of yourself. Many of the commandments will go unheeded because you’re too weak. Some of the warnings will go ignored because you’re too dumb. If these are the words God wants you to read, I think the best thing is to be humble instead. Recognize how finite you are, how small: that you might be tired, or ignorant, or obstinate, or blind — that maybe it’s better to ask God to teach you Himself.

As such I don't advise ever opening the Bible without praying first. I say, Heavenly Father, if there’s something you need me to know here, please tell me. Make it stand out. Make me love it. Make me make it a part of myself today, and help me to share it with others by showing it. A much more helpful approach than a creed.

When you ask God to show you what He wants, you sidestep the whole issue of whether or not you believe it and start treating God like a living person — as a teacher, not as a textbook. And if those who ask receive, isn't God’s presence what He was talking about? And if God gives better than people do, won’t you learn more from the Bible this way? I posit here that real faith in the Bible means acting on it — not stating things about it.

The beginning of the end.

To wrap this up, why listen to me? Am I some modern-day Christ-in-the-flesh? No — I’m both uptight and too loose: a judgy, mocking, drinking, working-class ex-hipster clown and a horndog. I've been going to the same church for years and I refuse to apply for membership because I don’t think I'll pass the creed tests. I’m also the world’s worst evangelist.

But that’s the point. When I believed in myself and in Christians I was set up for failure. When I worshiped the Bible I was an idolater. When I banked on Christ my religion became real. And it became fun. I was able to sidestep all the objections above, and I did it on the premise that we — we, the blunderers, the stammerers, the fools, the slackers, the weaklings, the loonies, the clowns, the perverts in-closet, the rash, the eternally failing and learning and somehow still prideful — are putting ourselves way higher in charge than we need to be. And the result is our looking around and wondering if God is real and being afraid to ask.

Take hope, my friends, because He is — and I’m happy to say He’s not us.

Yours,

-J

*The biggest objection to my “you can’t be like Christ” statement is, what, you’re just going to give up? Is that what Peter and Paul did? Are you an antinomian? Didn’t Jesus say the way is hard and narrow, and there are few who find it?

Hell yes I’m going to give up. But at the same time I still believe in rules. Christianity is about getting a free ticket to heaven, not getting a free ride on earth. And that's because earth is a bitch.

Earth is such a bitch that if you don’t have good rules it’s feels like you're in Hell. And if the church looks like Hell, who’s going to want to join? Who really loves God but wants to make Him look stupid? I will goosestep all the way to the Pearly Gates if necessary, but I know I won’t be let in for the polish on my boots.

Our job, as Christians, is to receive a gift and spread it around. It’s to make other people love God because they see what He does for us and they can't help it. And I don’t believe that if people have a taste of God they can just comfortably go on living like the Devil. But you can’t get the cart before the horse. Salvation comes freely — the good behavior comes, in varying degrees of quality, only after.

**Because the Bible was written by people, there are some factual inaccuracies. So what? So what if Matthew and Luke had different genealogies for Jesus? Did He come back from the dead — and didn't the people who saw it go to their deaths saying so? So what if Paul says “do everything in love” and then hopes (in writing) that Jewish believers cut their dicks off? Wasn’t he trying to kill Christians and then magically, in a single day, turned into one?

Whether Genesis is literally correct is beside the point. People are meeting God face-to-face every day and doctors are cataloguing their experiences. And I would argue that if two soldiers had different accounts of D-Day, Normandy still happened anyway. I don’t need the scholars to agree on what caused The Great Depression to agree that it was depressing. I don’t need Thomas Jefferson and John Adams to agree about George Washington to know George Washington was the President.

The idea that history exists because we know it perfectly is an arrogant idea — and it should be thrown aside nowhere more ardently than when it involves Christ. We are all ignorant of Christ in many ways — and it isn’t our total knowledge of Christ that saves us. Nobody is getting to the Pearly Gates after Peter gives them a multiple-choice quiz and they ace it. We get into heaven because God gave us a gift: and He gives it to us at precisely the moment when we didn't deserve it. Christianity is a game of catch-up. If we place it the other way we lose not only the whole beauty of it, but the possibility.