I Used to Be Smart.

I just finished reading Nick Hornby’s new book, “Slam.” If I were really trying to be clever, I would probably start this with something “Nick Hornby does it again!” or something cute like that.

I’m not going to do that. That makes it look way too much like I’m doing a “review.” I’m not doing a review. I sit in English classes all day. I’m not up for some exhaustive summary on all kinds of technical points. As much as I love all of that, sometimes it just gets old, and I have such an intense fear of being pretentious that I won’t even try it unless I’m getting a grade for it. So this is probably more of a reaction than a review.

I’m a terrible narcissist the books that I like the most are the books that remind me of myself. So, I like this book. Whether any of my English professors would like or not — who the hell knows. But I enjoy it on a very emotional level. So, even if it were complete rubbish, I would’ve enjoyed it because of the emotional impact it has on me.

Sorry. On with it.

I’m going to say that there one’s exchange that does a great job of summing up the book. However, to give my narcissism continuity, it’s probably just that this was the part I liked the best, so I’m projecting it back over the whole book.

The plot of the book is simple enough — boy meets girl, boy gets girl pregnant, boy has to deal with it. The book is the self-reflection of that boy. Near the end of the book, after all of the events of the plot are happening and it’s narrator is wrapping up a scant few of the loose ends (not that the loose ends are few, the ones that are wrapped up are few), that narrator (Sam) decides that he should rate the way he’s living his life on a scale of 1-10. His answer to himself is quite good. It does a great job of showing how his character has matured from the skater kid who opens the book to the young father who closes it. He answers that it’s much too simple to rate his life from 1-10. His observation is that he must make two separate rankings. If he rates his day to day life — how well he cares for his son, how he performs at college, at work — he can give himself an 8. There’s not much that he does badly on a daily basis. However, if were to step back and ask that question of his entire life, he can only give himself a 3 — he’s a teenage father who never intended to be in that position.

That’s the journey of the book — showing how life can, in the micro, be an 8, but in the macro be a 3. And this is where Nick Hornby does it again. His power isn’t so much in the great, riveting plot that he develops. In this book, it’s not even the character he develops. Sam is no Rob Gordon. Life all of his other books, what really sticks, long after you’ve finished reading the book, is Hornby’s unbelievable to say something that is [em]utterly[/em] true about life.

That’s not trivial. In a world where we are mostly lied to about life, anyone who has the power to say something true about life is valuable beyond measure. Hornby has this power, and it should be paid attention to.

Of course, maybe I just like this all because it reminds of me, and I want people to like me. Maybe I think Nick Hornby tells me something true about my life so that means he must be saying something true about everyone’s life. I’m open to that possibility.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read it.

I updated the “monday’s child…” post from…Monday a bit. It’s the part after the little page break. Not a whole lot, but something. Read it.

(A work in progress. Started as being pissed of about Monday morning, decided to try and see if I could have a little fun with it. No clue what’s to come.)

Monday morning always does this. It sneaks right around when I’m not looking and it gives me a ridiculous punch right to the stomach. That’s the problem with Monday morning. Some days are bold enough to hit you right in the face. I’d rather have those days better. It smarts for a few minutes, and then it’s gone. You move on. I can handle a punch in the face. But I can’t Monday morning. It leaves me doubled over. Embarrassed and sore. Pissed off that Monday morning won’t even do me the courtesy of looking me in the eye. Monday morning doesn’t have that kind of character. It drills the breath out of you, and while you’re in a heap, just trying to catch your breath, it stands there. Daring you to make a move. Daring you to challenge it. That’s Monday morning. I used to think it was some particular problem, like a rainy day or a busy week, but now I’m convinced that it’s just Monday. That’s what it does. That’s how it operates. I’m powerless against it, and I should know better than to try and fight.

Monday morning is supremely capable. It is supremely capable of brining out every insecurity. It is supremely capable of shining a light on every place in my life that is stressful. It is supremely capable of stealing from me all of the things that make me happy and replacing them with all of the things that frustrate me.

I’ll be fine by Monday afternoon, there’s just no dealing with Monday morning. Everybody knows it. Even when I shuffle all 4,362 songs in my iTunes playlist, the first one that plays is titled “Monday.” It’s a song from a film called, “I Heart Huckabees.” It’s one of those movies where you’re pretty sure that nobody will get the movie except for people who spent hours in college reading Sartre and Camus, but then again, it might not even be that substantial.

That’s not the point. The point is that it’s Monday. Again. And it always happens like this. No matter what happened before, and no matter what happened after — it’s Monday, and we just have to deal with it for a slim 24 hours once every week. It shouldn’t be that hard, should it?

So here I am. Dealing with it. I got myself out of bed. Finally. It was one hell of a fight. I wasn’t tired. I had plenty of sleep. I was just trapped in the inertia of being in bed. Why should I invest the energy in breaking the inertia? What was the point? I was just going to up back there at some point anyway? But in the battle of boredom and inertia, I guess boredom won, and I pulled myself out of bed.

I snuck around the house, avoiding human contact. It was no morning for talking. There was nothing to talk about. Sure, there was listening to be done. There were a million sad songs to hear. Those would be fine. Those would do nicely. They all know how it feels. They all live in a perpetual Monday morning. They don’t ask why. They don’t need to know why Monday morning is so bad — they just know that it’s Monday morning, and they know how to sing on a Monday morning. I’m good with that. (Yeah, Mick. I will lean on you, buddy.)

I climbed out the window. It made the most sense. Monday morning isn’t a day for doors. Doors are much too loud. They announce me to the world. Walking out a door means that I’m giving legitimacy to the world outside the door. Doors are the world’s rules of entrance and exit, and if I defer to those rules, then I’m deferring to the rules of the world around me. I don’t defer.

So I climbed out the window, armed with headphones as insulation from a world that I didn’t really feel like engaging anyway.

———–
She was the kind of girl you only find in a Ben Folds song. She always looked like something was wrong — even when it wasn’t. Even when I made her smile, there was something else going on there that I wasn’t sure I would even figure out. Of course, I can only tell you that because of all of the things that hadn’t happened yet. Right now, she’s still just a girl in a Joy Division shirt with too much eyeliner. I wasn’t sure whether to fall in love with her or to laugh at her. She was right at the line between a cliche and a daydream.

You probably think I talked to her. You probably think that I was so enraptured that I removed my headphones and became this utterly engaging person who absolutely won her heart with my incredible sense of humor. You probably think I impressed her with nugget about some obscure hipster band and that we laughed about some joke that only 10 or 15 people in the world understand and that we were immediately and irrevocably bonded by our shared knowledge of minutia and obscurity.

You’d be wrong.

I didn’t do anything at all. I just spend way too much money on coffee, fumbled my money because I was trying to figure her out, hoped that I could convince her to notice me, and left.

I have a sticker on the back of my car. It says “You deserve love.”

I’ve always thought that was True. Not true in that it’s true in some unreachable, ethereal sense, but really true. Everyone deserves love.

But, increasingly, it’s been harder for me to live that out. It seems that, daily, I get worse and worse about making that a mantra of my life. Daily, I act like nobody deserves love — not even me.

Maybe I’ve got it all wrong. Maybe the belief that we deserve love is not the solution, but the problem.

What I’m starting to think is that we don’t deserve love. Not a damned one of us. We’re all idiots. We’ve done nothing to be worthy of love, and all of the things that we do that make it appear that we’re worthy of love? We’ve probably done all of those for all the wrong reasons, and we’ll probably do something more evil than any good we’ve done in the instant.

We’re messed up creatures who do more wrong than we can count. We’re self-absorbed, self-interested, self-aggrandizing bastards. We’re disgusting, profane, short-sighted, stupid. We’re unsympathetic, cold, impatient, rude.

We don’t deserve a damn bit of love. We’ve done nothing to deserve it.

So — if we are love? That changes everything. If God really loves us — then that changes everything. God doesn’t love us because we’re some great, lovable creatures that deserve love. God loves us in spite of what we are.

That’s something totally different. If we wrap our heads around that? Maybe we’ll start to understand who we really are.

Even as I’m writing this, I’m torn about whether it’s something I want to share or not. I feel like it’s one of those things that I’m going to put into this space that, honestly, I’m not sure if I want to become “real.” I want to write about it so that I can figure out my feelings, but sharing it changes it. Sharing it means that someone may force me to do something about it. I’m not sure I want that. However, in the name of honesty, I think I have to submit things like this to review…for better or for worse.

I’m still trying to puzzle out in my head what happened in church this Sunday. Honestly, it wasn’t anything very far out of the ordinary. At the end of what was a compelling sermon, there was a pretty standard fare “invitation” (what a weird word for me to be using now). It was the kind I used to make fun of. It was the “bow your head and close your eyes, raise your hands” variety. I’ve seen them more times than I can count. They’re great. They’re so easy. You can raise your hand and nobody even knows it. You can ease your guilt in secret and nobody is ever any wiser. They’re perfect fodder for a cynical jackass like me to doubt and discredit. That, however, is beside the point.

While the preacher (who I do really like) was praying through a pretty standard prayer, my usually distracted mind managed to stay on topic. Perhaps I was just able to focus, perhaps I was just the guy who was trying to find a way to prove the preacher wrong (because that’s what I do). At any rate, I was giving a thorough investigation to each part of his prayer.

Do I believe that I am a sinner who is utterly incapable of making myself right and finding God?

Of course I do. I’ve tried and failed enough times to know that is undeniably true about myself. I know without a doubt that I can’t do anything right, and that the things I seem to be doing right, I’m doing for all of the wrong reasons. That point isn’t even controversial to me. I believe it so thoroughly that I could write on it for hours. I have no issue admitting that I’ve messed up.

Unfortunately, that’s not the whole prayer. I was with the preacher on that point. The kid who grew up in church, who got a degree in Religion, the guy who work in churches and who made it through an entire semester of seminary knew exactly what was coming next. There was no stopping it.

Do you believe that God sent his only son, Jesus Christ, to die for your sins?

I’ve heard that a million times. It’s what I’ve always been told that this thing we call Christianity hinges on. Without this, there is nothing, right? This is it. This is the one thing.

I felt like I hit a wall. It was a wall that I couldn’t see around and that I wasn’t ready to climb. I had to stop and ask myself — do I? It was one of thew few times that I couldn’t shrug it off when an, “Of course I do.” I had stop. Do I?

Do I believe in Jesus Christ as a person who existed at a specific time in history? Of course I do. I think you would be silly not to. There’s too much evidence to think that it was all the work of some delusional conspiracy. There was a man named Jesus.

Do I think that Jesus had some special connection with God? I don’t doubt it for a second. The character that is recorded by the four gospels is utterly unique. There are things there that are nearly impossible to find anywhere else. There are things there that are crazy.

Do I agree with Jesus about how life is to be lived? Absolutely. There is no better way to live than to love every single person in the world as if that person is the same as our very self. There is no better principle than including those who have been excluded. Meeting violence with violence has never, even been then answer. We are not defined by the things we own.

So what’s the hang up?

What’s my problem?

Do I believe that Jesus died for my sins? That’s absolutely it. That’s the wall.

I want to make it clear that I’m not “that guy.” I’m not going to reduce this to theological quibbling and semantics. This is not about whether or not I believe in substitutionary atonement or some other obscure theory that doesn’t make much sense. I wish it were that easy. Rational assent to specific points isn’t a problem. I’m a smart guy. I can make sense of arguments and counter-arguments and the like. That’s not it at all. This doesn’t have anything to do with any of those things. I see the issue unpacking itself in a very, very different way.

This is where it gets muddy.

Behind my computer table there is a mess of wires and cables for every electronic gadget I own. It’s ridiculous. It’s tangled and it’s dusty, and if you want to find one cable, you have to tackle the whole mess and sort through every bit of it. Sometimes, you have to untangle three other cables just to find the one cable you need.

I hope the metaphor works.

What I’m discovering is that figuring out this one issue is really figuring out a whole set of issue, and they more I toss around the question in my brain, I come to a fork in the road.

You see, there are different ways to ask the question.

Do I believe that Jesus Christ “died for sins of the world?” (I don’t trust those words, but I’ll keep using them.) Do I believe that, because all people are basically corrupt and broken the historical figure of Jesus submitted himself to a public execution, aware of the grander implications of this execution? Yes. Very much. I do not doubt that Jesus died because of the sin condition that exists in the very core of each and every human being and that Jesus death makes it capable for us to begin (yes, I use this qualifier on purpose) to rectify that condition. To give it a nice (though) incomplete label, I do believe in the communal aspect of Jesus’ death (and subsequent resurrection).

That’s all fine. I can still say all of that without being very emotionally invested, or without revealing any tough truths about myself. However, narrowing the focus of the question finds such a tough tangle of knots that I don’t have a clue where to go. Or, if I do have a clue where I am going, I will surprise myself when I get there.

In American churches, the focus is utterly on the individual. That leads to the question — Do I believe Jesus Christ died for my sins. What I believe about everyone else in the world is great — but what about me? On an individual level? A great illustration of this is the way that pastors often take the collective found in John 3:16 and refine it into a singular. They ask me to believe that God so loved me that he sent his one and only son, so that if I will believe in him, I will not ever die. And the question becomes whether or not I actually believe that. Do I really believe that God loves me so much that he enacted the life and death of Jesus because of that intense love he has for me?

Maybe that question needs less qualification. Maybe I should simply ask, “Do I believe that God really loves me?” That question is a punch to the stomach. However — before I try to figure out why it is such a blow, there is another knot to untangle.

As much as that question has an emotional impact, there is another question behind it. Yes — there is a question about the question. In fact, I must question whether it is even appropriate to ask the question. (I don’t know? Third base.)

Our American sensibilities are rooted in the individual. We often (if not always) define ourselves in terms of the individual. Our lifestyle is increasingly pushing us toward the individual. Much of what we are is centered in our concept of the self, and that concept — the self — is revered as the most important concept. We spend more time alone in our cars, walled behind headphones. Our advertising appeals to notions of the self and the individual. We self-actualize and self-discover. The concept of the individual is utmost. When I start asking the question about whether I believe that I — me — my own personal self is loved (and not just loved, REALLY loved) by God, I wonder about that baggage. I wonder if I’m merely a product of my context. Perhaps the question is not really an appropriate question, and I remain hung up on an inappropriate question, I’m missing the point, and I’m investing all of this energy into finding the answer to a question that was wrong to begin with.

(Wow. There’s no way ANYBODY is reading this anymore.)

I will justify the asking of the question by saying this — how I feel about myself often translates into how I feel about other people. Much of the time, what I think about the individual is transferred into what I think about the collective, or even about other individuals. I think Jesus himself even acknowledges that when he relates our love for other people to our love for ourselves. There is a way that the two are connected.

So, perhaps in asking the question of whether God really loves me, I am, in turn, asking the question of whether God really loves everyone else in the world. And there may be a way in which the way I receive love directly impacts the way I am able to give love.

That’s a big deal. That’s a really big deal. That means I have to face the answer to a question that I would rather avoid.

Do I really believe that God really loves me?

No. Not really.

I don’t know where it happened, but at some point, I came to believe that God may really love other people, but I convinced myself that God doesn’t really love me. I don’t know why. I don’t know if it’s some sort of self-loathing that I’ve projected on to God, or what — I just know, than when I really look that question in the face, that, even though I absolutely hate admitting it, I have to admit that I really do not believe that God loves me.

I think I used to. I think that there was a time in my life when I did believe that, and I didn’t have any trouble believing that. That makes the whole thing more complicated. I don’t think it means that I was “better” then — I’m pretty sure that I was just naive. However, treading old ground does me no good. Going back is simply not an option. I must find ways to move forward.

I’m sure that if I admitted this to the people at church, I know how they would answer. They would answer that I must have never really “accepted Christ.” I never really understood what it meant to follow Christ, and that if I would join with them in that prayer, then we could erase all of that.

That sounds so great. I wish so deeply that a prayer could change my heart and that all of these things that are an issue could fade away.

However, I know me too well. I remember too many earnest prayers prayed too many times that didn’t change a damn thing. I know all too well that “what was so easy in the evening by the morning’s such a drag.” Nothing changes overnight. Especially not an issue like this. This is one of those that goes deep. Overcoming it isn’t something that can be done in an instant. It’s something that is done incredibly slowly, by sheer force of will, by battling to become something different. By being intense about changing what is true. I have no idea why I have marked myself like this — but I have. There’s no doubt that I have. (And I very much think that extends over into how I interact with other people too.)

Changing yourself is hard. The old person wins the fight so easily. The old person is so familiar. It is so comfortable. It is so much easier. Though it is killing you, it’s easier to give in than to find the will to fight.

I’m thinking of so many cliches right now — the one about how the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step — silly stuff like that — but I know that it’s true. I’ve changed myself. There are pictures to prove it. I know it’s possible, and I know how unbelievably hard it is, and that it takes time, time that often seems fruitless, but I’ve got one success story already.

I don’t know that I’m even ready to begin this transformation. I don’t even know that I can. I don’t know if this is even anything more than “words, words, words.”

I can’t think of anything else that I need to say at the moment. That’s probably quite enough anyway.

(The more I think about all of this, the more I find that my problem isn’t with what I thought it was at all. But I’ll leave this as it is anyway.)

Perhaps what I getting ready to write is completely pedantic and shows that I’m missing the point. However, I don’t think it is. It may seem like that at first, but I think that’s it’s more than just a question of a complicated theory that nobody has made sense of anyway. So, stick with me.

I have rediscovered a problem I have with a thing called Substitutionary Atonement. You can read that Wikipedia link, or trust me that the short definition is that Jesus came and died “for our sins” — that is, Jesus died in our place, and his death effectively and forever removed all of our sins.

For the vast majority of people — they don’t know anything else, and it’s hard for them to imagine that the event that was Jesus death operates in any other way or has any other meaning. I understand that. However, I’m going to take issue on a few different grounds.

First, I think that we have taken a metaphor, and we have misunderstood the metaphor to the point where we decide that the metaphor is what the thing really is. Understanding the events of Jesus’ death as a necessary sacrifice to atone for sins is an apt metaphor. The Biblical writers loved it. They understood it well, and their readers understood it well, so it is frequently employed to help all get their minds around an event that is difficult to describe. I do not think that substitutionary atonement is the thing itself — rather, it is a way of describing the thing. However, that is the part of the discussion that is mostly pedantic and doesn’t have any real impact on anyone’s life.

The second issue is this — I think that substitutionary atonement creates an inappropriate view of what life really is. As far as describing this goes, this is the hard part. However, instead of describing what life is not, I think I’ll describe what I think life is, and then perhaps I’ll have some room to contrast that with the kind of expectations for life that I think this overuse of substitutionary atonement creates.

Life is not a series of grand events. The grand events happen, and they stick in our memories, and they are important. They impact us emotionally, and we feel large things at those moments (whether good or bad). However, the grand moments aren’t the whole of life. Life is mostly the in-betweens. It is mostly waiting, living a slow day-to-day. If we were to create a timeline of our lives, life would not be the dots, it would be the spaces between the dots.

That’s not sad, that’s not tragic, that is simply life. And if life is like that, it impacts our faith severely. Faith, like life, is not something that is lived in the big events, it is something that is lived in the in-betweens. Huge, emotional moments resonate, and they stick in our memories. However, they are not our life and the are not our faith. Our faith is found in the times when those emotions have faded, and we’re living our simple day-to-day.

We, have, however, been sold something different. What we are led to believe is that life is the big events. It is the hallmark of the advertising that we consume. The advertising’s goal is this: we are led to believe that we are incomplete, and if we find this ONE thing, we can be complete. (And we are told that many, many times a day — no wonder depression statistics look like they do.) However — that’s a falsehood. There is no one thing. There is no magic formula. Life is this slow grind. It has many more moments of mundane existence that it has of startling clarity.

What does this have to do with anything?

I think that we have transformed Jesus, by way of substitutionary atonement, into another product that has been marketed.

That is our presentation of the gospel — it is a commercial. You are incomplete, and if you just will do this one thing, then you will be complete.

It doesn’t work like that. It never has, and if we’re selling people on that, then I believe we’re selling them on something that is not true. And while they may initially be buoyed by a significant emotional response, the clarity of that response will fade. We may attempt to constantly manipulate emotions so that initial experience never loses its “charge.” However, like a battery, the cells are eventually emptied, and emotional manipulation is not significant for sustaining this. There must be something else.

Instead of selling faith as a solution — perhaps we ought to be selling it as a story and a problem. Perhaps instead of asking people to buy a new product, we ought to be inviting them to share with us in a story and to join with us in the great problem that faith creates. Perhaps we ought to be asking them to join with us in the story of God’s desire to recreate his world (and how Jesus fits into that) and invite them to help us investigate just how it is that living in a world that needs to be recreated becomes an utter problem for us.

I think that changes everything. If we’re selling faith/Christianity/Jesus/whatever you want to call it as a solution, I think that we’re missing the point. More than that, I think that people are going to be utterly disappointed. Perhaps, for some folks, it is a solution. Perhaps they have some great moment and, from then on, their life is never the same. However, for most folks, I would guess that it is not.

In my own experience, it has been no grand solution. It has made life messier. More difficult. Decisions are more complicated. Everything is more nuanced. Most of life becomes an upstream swim. It’s constantly trading the easy way for a harder way. Most of the time it has nothing to do with grand epiphanies and a complete sense of grand truth. More often, it feels like running through mud, or staring into utter blackness. Perhaps that’s because I’ve gotten it all wrong, or perhaps that’s what it really is.

Rather than the answer to a trumped up emotional sales pitch, perhaps it is something deeper. Perhaps faith is more than just being buffeted from emotional wave to emotional wave. Rather, it may just be something that transcends all of our emotions. It may be something that comes from such a deep place that we do not need emotions to confirm it, and though it continually gets messier and messier, we have never been more sure that it is utterly true.

Otherwise — it’s cheap. Emotions are easily manipulated and easily won. When faith becomes something else — then it has actually been won.

That’s not an easy sell. (”It’s a hard sell, the ringing bell…”) But perhaps it’s something more like the truth.