At home now, Chad goes straight to his bed. He falls into the center of it, belly down, face planted in feather down pillow. Back from church, he feels as empty as ever. And he wonders what the point is. All this talk of hearing from God, all this talk about the love of Jesus, all this talk about God as a father figure. It's all theory and talk to him. It's not that the doesn't believe, even this anguish cannot separate him from his belief. But he's tired of belief. He's hungry for experience and that is what all these churches are failing to provide.
He knows better than to approach the pastor or one of the staff persons with his problems. He knows all too well that they will invite him to get more involved, to immerse himself into their "community." And it sounds appealing but without fail, an invitation to community turns out to be the first step into turning him into a cog to run the industry of the church. "Get involved," they say. "Be a part of something larger than yourself." And it sounds like something meaningful but it's a fishing expedition. They want to know what you can do and how they can use your talents to oil the machinery of the church.
As a scientist, geekery is part of his DNA and so he ends up behind some computer screen running a PowerPoint presentation of the sermon or editing ministry summary videos or worst of all, running the sound system. And it kills him because so often, he volunteered himself. He wanted to help, he wanted to be a part. He believed that this was a way to be a part of the Body of Christ as written about in the Bible. He thought this was living out the command to put others before yourself, to serve rather than be served. And he's not sure, maybe those acts did garner for him some treasure awaiting him in heaven, but he's come to understand that the Gospel is not just about good news in the life to come, it's about good news for the here and now - on earth as it is in heaven.
And it's there where he cannot reconcile surface to soul. He can understand the new life to come in the then and there but as for what to make of the here and now, he has no idea and the church is not offering any useful clues. It's frustrating because he can see the whole of it but it's the particulars that are hard to grasp. Christianity as he understands it is about ordering the world around the design that God made for it. This does not mean killing abortionists or banishing gays from our midst. It means learning how to love one another. It means understanding that no one, not one of us is any better than anybody else. We are all capable of unspeakable acts of depravity and wrath. It's the threat of consequences that haunts us, that corrals us, that makes society safe. But this is a thin veneer. We get away with what we can and test the limits. Christianity for him is about leveling the playing field, seeing everyone as one's brother and sister - a grand family living under the starry roof of the sky. It's utopian and idealistic, he knows, but he believes it's possible and true. It's easy enough to know that things are not as they should be. It's much harder to go past what shouldn't be and dare to envision things as they could.
This is the grand vision that enlivens him. As he understands it, Christians should be agents ushering in this ideal. He believes that the vision in the Bible of separating wheat from chaff is not a process of delineating between saved and unsaved (as the church is all too apt to do) but about gleaning the useful from the useless - and the standard is not a utilitarian one, it is about community and harmony and justice - the order of God's design. Put that way, he realizes he sounds like a hippy on good weed, but he doesn't care. He would rather believe that this is the aim of the Christian church than the thought that it's about getting people to pray some magical prayer, a list of words staring with sinner and ending with Jesus' name. He's seen it far too many times - Christians who will orchestrate the "salvation" of a friend, cajoling them into praying some prayer imprinted into the back of a tract, wearing them down until they capitulate and pray this thing called the sinner's prayer. Once they pull this off, they go about guilting him into getting his friends to pray this prayer. This is nothing but bullshit voodoo Christianity and he refuses to have any part of it.
But he also believes that this grossly misled church is God's agent of change - this broken, misled, institution is supposed to be the beacon, the light, the example. Instead, it's the wedge, the dividing line, the fortress that keeps the evil out in hopes of offering safety within. But it's a lie. Statistics show that life within the walls is no safer, no better, no happier than life without.
And so here, on this bed, he feels small, disconnected, misunderstood. The very church where he should find allies has become the den of thieves that Christ threw out of the temple two thousand years ago. It is so missing the point. It is blissfully, arrogantly, self-righteously passing judgment on the rest of society. What should be the source of solution has become a troubling problem. It confuses comfort with conformity and as such longs for control.
All these grand accusations. He's not above turning the mirror back on himself. He knows that he is just as much a part of the problem for not speaking up. What is he doing with his money, his talent, his resources that's so different from what the church does with theirs? He likes to believe that if he were to find a church with right vision, right heart, right understand of it's mission that he would sign on and join in the struggle, but the fact is that absence is no excuse for inaction. He sees the homeless on the street, at the intersections, on park benches. He passes them by with the same excuses, the same justifications. He sees the plight of suffering overseas but he turns the page and works on the crossword or sudoku puzzle instead.
It's an endless cycle of self-loathing. He hates the church, he hates himself. Everywhere he looks, it's all so wrong, so broken, so basically fucked up. Top to bottom, east to west. Where does one even begin. On his bed, he turns onto his back, looks at the ceiling for a second then closes his eyes. He prays for comfort, for understanding. He prays that he would know that God is there behind it all, that God is hearing him, that he is indeed loved as the Bible tells him so. He asks and he asks and he asks until they blur together, until sleep descends upon him.
In the corner of the room, the angel sits weeping into her wings. He gets it, he understands, he sees things as they should be and he feels so powerless. She wishes she could rouse him, reveal to him the potential, the power, the possibilities available to him. She weeps because she cannot, not yet, not without command. She so longs to burst the tiny bubble of love he's buried deep within his heart, buried, locked, walled, encased away. He's known so much heartache, so much disappointment, so much deception, so much misunderstanding peddled to him as truth, so much guilt heaped upon him in unwanted servings. She weeps for him. She gathers his prayers, picks them like flower petals up off the floor. And when she is sure that he is is asleep, she packs them away in the folds of her tunic. She walks out of the corner, unfurls her wings and with a rush of something like wind, something like fire, she ascends. In an instant she is gone.
He stirs for an instant, opens his eyes and sees something wispy, like the light grey smoke strands off of incense sticks. But before he can focus, before his mind can catalog the effect assigning it to meaning, it is gone. Maybe it wasn't there, maybe it was just the murk of sleep. He closes his eyes again and turns on his side. He pulls the covers up over himself with his free hand.
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