Last night when I couldn’t sleep, I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling and getting all tangled up in my sheets, and I started, as I usually do, thinking.
For no particular reason (or maybe for a very particular reason, who can ever tell?) I started thinking about all this religion stuff that has been rolling around inside my brain lately, but has yet to find a home in anything very concrete, and, in that weird state between puzzling something out and wishing like hell I would fall asleep, I assigned myself with the thought experiment of creating a church. Normally, the things I think in that space just before sleep really are ephemeral, and they disappear. Something about this stuck.
I started with a desire to peel away all pretense. I thought that was essential. Any church I was going to start would be, from the beginning, completely devoid of grandstanding and production value. Those things are entertaining, but I have trouble finding them authentic. That, I thought, would no doubt be the mood of things.
So in that mood of utter lack of pretense, what sorts of things would we be about? Why would we even be undertaking the project in the first place? I came up with (something like) this: we would acknowledge that we are utterly broken people living in an utterly broken world attempting to join with God in his work of fixing that world as revealed in the person of Jesus.
That seemed to say it all. It puts the focus where it should be: on the person of Jesus. It allows to move away from and past all of the truly disgusting baggage of Christianity and focus on an authentic telling of the story of who Jesus was, and how that story should effect our lives. From the start it acknowledges our former and perpetual brokenness, and places that brokenness in the context of a world that is also broken. It looks to be something that can serve as a foundation for a new kind life spent imitating the revelation of God in Jesus, while being cultivated in such a way that it takes a step back from all of the baggage of Christianity that alienates people from the message of Jesus.
We would have to acknowledge that our recovery from this brokenness is a slow process. While some people (even people in the Bible) may have experienced miraculous, instant conversions, we will probably not. We will acknowledge that our transformation happens so slowly, and it such odd, stumbling increments that we may not even recognize that it is happening at all, but our situation in a community of like-minded individuals will ensure that, even when we cannot see how we are changing, the people around us are constantly helping us to become something more like Jesus.
Such a view of transformation will ensure that we value our honesty. It will ensure that this slow process of transformation is not something that be envied, and that those who struggle with even the most elementary principles of the conversion will absolutely not be alienated because they struggle and freely admit those struggles. We will freely admit that we are small-minded, mean, vindictive. We will be honest about our drunkenness, our laziness, our pride. We will stare down the strange animals of our sexuality, admit that part of being exists, and be committed to the work of transforming that essential part of our humanity.
We will be people who acknowledge that we are full of mixed emotions and desires. We will not treat belief as some sacred cow, but we will readily acknowledge that some days we just don’t really think that any of this is true. We will not pretend that we have some fierce love for a God that is impossible to understand. We will admit the ready impossibility of having a relationship with something that is ineffable, and readily embrace all of the difficulties that entails. We will admit that, most days, we stare out into the distance to find the “something more” that we have always been told exist, and that we see only blackness. We will admit that we search our hearts to find some stirring of a fire that we have been told should be there, but instead, we feel only blackness. We will search our minds to find the things that should exist and infallible proof that some being exists, and we will find only more questions. We will not be afraid of using the hard words or facing the hard emotions. We will back down from no intellectual or experiential challenge about faith, especially when those words, challenges, and emotions exist in our own hearts. Yet, we will be utterly committed to the transformative work that we set out to participate in from the start.
In that way, we will be free. We will be free from others’ expectations of our faith, and we will be free from our own expectations of our faith, allowing ourselves to be transformed by our willingness to release all of the things that we take for granted.
Dare we? Even in the place between wake and sleep when the rules of reality have less constraints over our minds, dare we imagine such a thing? Dare we re-imagine the things that become the formative narratives for our lives? Dare we be bold enough to commit to such an incredibly messy project? Dare we commit to each other and throw our lives together in a way that acknowledges that we’re better to go down together, since we’re certainly going down apart? Dare we be bold enough to offer the realities of our very dearest selves to people that we know we can trust with our very lives?
I don’t know.
Dare we?