Eight Shades of Crayola

by Rebekah Mays 

As a child, I used to spend hours coloring paper doilies. I’d click my Lion King cassette into the tape player and line my markers up, single-file. I could sit like this for hours and color for a whole afternoon, filling in the spokes of those doily wheels with the shades of the Crayola rainbow. Beaming, I’d present the finished work to my parents, who would marvel over my creations and hang them on the wall.

I’m thankful to say I never had to worry about how they would react. I never had to worry they’d say it was a stupid way to spend my time, or that the doilies weren’t good enough for our refrigerator. I wasn’t afraid they would reject my gift – they were my parents after all, and they’d love whatever I gave them. It was my offering, and they accepted it.

It’s funny that I felt so confident expressing my love to my parents. When I later developed into a devout Calvinist, I became a big believer in TULIP and resonated in particular with the concept of total depravity. The idea was that I was so hopeless on my own that I needed God to swoop in and carry me, kicking and screaming, to the foot of the cross. After that, any good things that came out of my life were, apparently, all because of Christ and not any action on my part.

For a myriad of reasons, I’ve since distanced myself from my Calvinist upbringing. I’m Catholic now, and if there’s one difference in my faith, it’s how I see myself in relation to God. I still believe it’s God’s grace, not my own works, that have saved me. I still believe that ignoring Christ’s call and instead living only for my own desires would be an enormous mistake, to put it mildly.

The fundamentals of my beliefs are all the same. But here’s the big change: instead of seeing myself as a worthless sinner haunted by my past and future failures – which I tended to do in my early years – I now see myself as infinitely valuable. The world and I are extravagantly loved by God. And therefore I imagine that God doesn’t see our devotions and offerings as disfigured by our “total depravity.” We’re made in his image and glorify him by our mere existence. And when we love him, we glorify him even more.

A declaration of the Vatican described it this way:

“The good works of the justified are always the fruit of grace. But at the same time, and without in any way diminishing the totally divine initiative, they are also the fruit of man, justified and interiorly transformed.”

If you’re skeptical, think for a moment of the woman who anointed Jesus’s feet with perfume. The disciples were shocked, criticizing her for her wasteful actions. This expensive perfume could have been sold, they say. But Jesus didn’t rebuke the woman. He saw the extravagant ritual for what it was – an act of love, a “beautiful thing.” Certainly God’s grace working in her life prompted her to honor the Lord like this. But she was also a woman in love, interiorly transformed and willing to do something profligate. And the fragrance of her devotion, we are told, filled the entire house. 

Many denominations in the Protestant church, as well as many parishes in the Catholic Church too, for that matter, have long started moving away from language that focuses on how terrible we are and how imperfect our worship is. I think this a step in the right direction. By dwelling too much on our sinful habits instead of honoring God with the incredible lives given to us, we’re missing out on a host of opportunities.

The way I see it, God loves our limp, bleeding paper doilies. He takes them in his hand and examines them. He doesn’t criticize our offerings and our attempts to love him, and so we don’t need to dwell on how unworthy they are, either. Because the longer and more deeply we love him, the more intricate and the more gorgeous our lives will become. Our love won’t be confined to eight shades of Crayola, but to colors even the naked eye can’t see. 

Rebekah Mays is a Barnard College graduate originally from Austin, Texas. She currently works and writes in Prague, Czech Republic. You can find more of her writing on her blog The Prague BLOG or follow her on Twitter @smallbeks.

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The Case Against "I Believe"

by Lyndsey Graves 

We believe in one God, 
The Father, the Almighty, 
Maker of heaven and earth, 
Of all that is, seen and unseen.

“I think it would be terrible to have to lie in church like that.” A classmate shared an anecdote about a friend who wasn’t sure he could agree with everything in the Nicene Creed, and I felt confused. Does this guy really think that everyone in the room believes everything in the Nicene Creed?

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, 
The only Son of God, 
Eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light, 
True God from true God, 
Begotten, not made, 
Of one Being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation 
He came down from heaven: 
By the power of the Holy Spirit 
He became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, 
And was made man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; 
He suffered death and was buried.

I, for one, am expecting a pretty mundane Holy Week; I’m not really feeling very holy. I’ve complained to everyone I know about my Lent fast, which I’m pretty sure is not its point, and besides that, I’m just too busy for Holy Week. I know you’re not supposed to say that, but I’m also too busy to guilt myself into fixing it or whatever, so it is what it is. Maybe this means I don’t really believe in Jesus; in fact, I’m pretty sure it does. I’m pretty sure if I believed, I’d do whatever it took to spend as much time as possible at least for this one week contemplating and celebrating these momentous events. But I’m probably not going to.

Go ahead and whisper that maybe I’ve gotten a little lukewarm if you wish. I don’t think I have. I know what I’ve gotten, actually - I’ve gotten burned out. After moving across the country to work at a church and then going to seminary, I’m quite done playing Christian, completely over doing things because I’ve decided that I “should,” and especially sick of what “I believe.” Various ones of my beliefs have been deconstructed block by block; some have been demolished in an instant. Others are buried and mourned; pushed, pulled, shoved and yanked, all without actually budging; nudged and finessed and nuanced into crystalline precision; and over-defended to within an inch of their opponents’ lives. My beliefs have been treated as if they were of utmost importance in the name of “orthodoxy” and “critical thinking” and lots of things about “context” and “epistemology.”

On the third day he rose again 
In accordance with the Scriptures; 
He ascended into heaven 
And is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, 
And his kingdom will have no end.

I’m not going to say that beliefs aren’t important. Our beliefs, stated and unstated, do change our actions; our theologies do affect our relationships to God. But my beliefs aren’t nearly as important as some teachers and pastors and denominational officials make them out to be. As one of my housemates said, “Some days you decide that Jesus didn’t actually do any miracles or rise from the dead. And you go on living your life for a day or two, and then things are fine again.”

We’re told, “You are going to be A Religious Leader. You must determine What You Believe.” We wrinkle our foreheads and Critically Think. We start to align ourselves with certain writers or systems and against certain enemies. But it all rings a little bit false.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, 
Who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified.
He has spoken through the Prophets.

People sometimes believe things based on what they’ve decided intellectually. But mostly, they believe whatever everyone else believes, because that’s the thing that the culture treats as reality. I know lots of churches say their creed this way – Credo. I believe. But there’s rarely any such thing as, “I believe.” There is mostly just “We do. We assume. We expect. We disbelieve. We censor. We remember. We are.”

We believe.

What’s important is that we are reminding one another what, in our moments of greatest fidelity to tradition, underlies the things we do, assume, expect, disbelieve. I don’t have to believe all of it before I can proclaim to my community what we believe. Nor do I even have to say it before I can belong to that “We.”

We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.

For long months of the darkest night of my still-young soul, I went to church and did nothing but stand. I dragged myself in as the sun set and watched the songs go by, feeling as lonely as ever, with a sort of numb wish to think the songs were true. Some days I silently raged through others’ prayers, prayers they clearly felt so deeply - What does this have to do with me? I used to pray like that. But you just wait till God leaves you, and then we’ll see how you pray. And then I would stand for the creed, say only the words, “We believe,” and cry helpless tears through the list of the things I didn’t believe. And in the midst of it all, the people of Emmanuel Fellowship bore me through that dark night on the raft of their imperfectly-faithful words, the repetition of the creed.

We look for the resurrection of the dead, 
And the life of the world to come.

Let Holy Week be for the doubter. Let Holy Week be for the lukewarm. Let Holy Week be for the burned-out, the sinner, the child, the angry, the bewildered, the bitter, the confused, and the liars. Say what you can; or say what someone else believes; or let the rest of us say it for you.
 
This is what we believe.

This is what we hope.

Amen. 

Lyndsey lives in Boston, MA where she is pursuing her Master's in Theological Studies at Boston University. She enjoys Community, Mad Men and Beauty and the Beast and her spirit animal is a sloth. She would like to know if this is some kind of interactive theater art piece. You can follow her on Twitter @lyndseygraves and you can find more of her writing at her blog To Be Honest. 

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A Theology of Filthy Rags

by Charity Erickson 

The other day my mother brought a green suitcase to my house, full of random crap from my old bedroom. There was a Bop-It, an illustrated costume design book for Othello I made during my theatre days, and stacks of journals, sketchbooks and other miscellaneous papers. She and my dad are moving, and their realtor told them, "Get rid of it; get rid of it all."

I pulled a notebook out of the pile and guessed at its contents. "A collection of dour post-pubescent musings," I said before thumbing through the first few pages. And instead of bad poetry, brooding self-portraits, and sketches of Jesus on the cross (as I’d expected) I discovered pages of hard data: graphs and numbers, neat and thoroughly organized information from my single semester of lab time as a nursing student at a Christian college. I had once believed these seventeen pages would pave a straight path to my calling as a medical missionary. Turns out they were a record of my diminishing interest in the sciences, a loss of drive that led my Christian biology professor to declare of me before the entire class: "What a waste."

A waste.

But I showed him; now I'm a blogger.

---

After my disappointing Christian college experience, I went through periods of not caring at all--and then caring too much--about the ridiculous dogma of various traditions, spinning from progressive, to conservative, and then back again, and I haven't found any branch of Christian culture that wouldn't declare a similar condemnation over me: "What a waste." Whether it be for my female-ness, my cowardly and tender heart, or my craving for nuanced judgment--my distrust of all sacred cows--I have heard the Christians say, among many sects: "You didn't buy into our system. What a waste."

A waste: refuse, garbage, extra leftover filth.

Waste.

And the feminist in me just adores that the prophets refer to all our righteous acts as "filthy rags." Excess blood, period-soaked fabric. Waste. And though Isaiah speaks derogatorily of this natural process of the body, I now prophetically appropriate his words and proclaim in all my heretical, feminist grotesquery: a waste is a gross extravagance. It's something more than what is necessary. It is something that is "too much;" but what I want to do here is argue that instead of looking at our spiritual idiosyncrasies--the things we do, say and believe that don't build upon or add to our official belief system--are not things to disdain or cast off like so much garbage. The inconsistencies we hold onto are "extra," but I'm starting to think that they are also grace.

All of us are at least somewhat aware of the embarrassing aspects of our bodies and our souls, parts that won't fit into any logical schema, facets of ourselves and of our beliefs that can't find room in the systems designed for us to inhabit. Awkward excesses of experience, wounds from endeavors that led to nowhere, that served no special purpose, that didn't teach us much of anything--but are part of us, anyhow. Weird scars that are not badass at all, purple veins and crooked stretch marks. Extra stuff that doesn't correspond with reason or providence. Waste. These things make each person's faith unique. It's not orthodoxy, and it's not pretty, but it's true; our quirks make us who we are.

For example: I once believed I had a supernatural calling in medical missions but now know that it's not going to happen. I have had beautiful words of prophecy spoken over me by people who, it turned out, were con artists. There have been dreams and spirits, and I don't know what to do with them. But do I think it's all bull? Think it’s all in my head, or someone else's head? I don't know. I reserve the right to not decide. I'm still Pentecostal. I think. And it's weird, and uncomfortable, and a bit humiliating, especially in the more "liberal" environments I frequent. It's this additional part of my faith that keeps me from fitting in one place or another. It's wasted faith, but there's something about it that I love too much to let go.

So I'm trying to make sense of it all, and I think this is how it works: we Christians--as individuals beloved by God--are too complex to classify perfectly into theological groups, categories by which we can be defined and judged by others (and too often by other Christians). There is always some part of a Believer that will end up as waste, as unaccountable excess. This is why it's absurd to equate all Calvinists with Fred Phelps--people are more than the sum of their theological parts. These inconsistencies might look like filthy rags, to some. But these are also the things that make us un-judgeable by others, unable to be categorized, wild. 

And I like to think there is something holy about that--that extra, wasteful part of ourselves where the Spirit will minister like it can with no one else who is or has been or will be. Yes, it's waste. But I'm coming to believe that that's not such a bad thing.

Charity Erickson and her husband live and work together in the north woods of Minnesota. Check out her blog for more of her writing and follow her on Twitter @CharityJill.

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The Christmas Story is Sexist and Faith Isn't Nice

by Rebekah Mays

The Sunday before Christmas, I attended a church service with my family. The pastor was discussing a familiar passage from Luke 1, commonly known as “The Annunciation,” where the angel Gabriel came down to Nazareth and informed Mary that she was going to “conceive and give birth to a son.” I’d heard it dozens of times before, at least once every Christmas, and year after year I listened as preachers praised Mary for her obedience, her willingness to carry a child into the world at the risk of cutting herself off from all good society. I prepared to tune out for the next few minutes.

But this time, hearing the story from my rather newly-formed liberal-feminist ears, I was offended. It seemed misogynistic and just plain creepy that God would (somehow) impregnate a woman and force her to have a baby. And given Mary’s status as an unmarried woman, the next nine months and potentially the rest of her life would be hell since her acquaintances would assume she’d committed adultery. Part of me, hearing the story this time, wanted Mary to stand up, look the angel in the face, and say, “No.”

I realize that would leave me and the rest of the human race completely screwed. If we accept what scripture says, it’s precisely because of Mary’s subservience, her desire to do what God asked of her that our salvation became possible. We could argue that it was her choice to obey, and someone more fundamentalist than I am would probably say that the act of obeying is in fact defiance against the pressures of society. But was it really a choice, considering God’s power and the relative powerlessness of Mary?

Luke makes it clear that Mary was excited about it, or (twist!) at least a really good faker, as she later says to her cousin, “My soul glorifies the Lord … for he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant.” But think what would have happened if she hadn’t agreed to it. IF she even had a choice in the matter, it was between obedience and, perhaps, going mute or blind until she relented and agreed to give birth to the kid. Before you excommunicate me, Catholic Church, remember what happened to the many others in the Bible who didn’t obey God immediately? Like Zechariah? Adam and Eve? Uzzah, who was struck dead because he reached out to steady the Ark when the oxen stumbled?

All this to say, while listening to the Annunciation story, my carefully watered, Biblically liberal, skipping-Ephesians-4-when-I-read-the-Bible Christianity-in-a-pot began to wither. A part of me had been convinced that, if I focused on the “Jesusy” passages in the gospels, I would get to the heart of what Christianity was, and not have to worry about troublesome things like the sexism all over the Bible. But this isn’t even a passage that you can skip over. This is the story of how Christ was born – it’s kind of important. And even this story is problematic.

For a moment, though, I was able to step out of my anger. As I sat in my chair staring at the pastor, silently boiling and wondering why this had never occurred to me, I realized I was relieved to be offended. It was a good thing that I hadn’t grown completely stony and impassive to this story. All too often, we sit in the pews and let this insane, radical, life-changing stuff bounce off of our seats as if we had force-fields protecting us. We need to let ourselves react, whether it’s in joy or anger or simply confusion. I don’t want to sit in church and think, “That’s nice.” No, it isn’t. If something in scripture makes you uncomfortable, that’s meaningful.  Think about it; examine why.

For me, it’s often passages that I see as anti-progressive that make me squirm. And then there’s all the scripture that condemns greed and wealth, verses from Jesus himself that ask us to give away all our possessions to the poor. I dig them, but they don’t exactly make me feel like a saint.

Non-believers have asked me, “If you’re so offended, then why are you still a Christian?” I don’t know. Perhaps I’m a lousy feminist. Or perhaps because there are fundamental human rights that I firmly believe in, and I think God ingrained those beliefs in me, even when they seem to contradict the scripture that makes me believe in God in the first place (yikes!). There are a lot of confusing and offensive passages in the Bible, and I still don’t really know how to think about them. At the same time, there are many other passages that I can get behind, verses like this one from Isaiah: “Learn to do right! Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow.” Yeah!

Despite my knee-jerk revulsion to parts of scripture and even some fundamental parts of orthodox Christian faith, I know that I don’t want to believe in a higher power that is just a better version of me. If I’m never challenged by my worldview, if there is nothing in my beliefs that seems sort of contradictory, then I may as well have made it all up. I can’t expect to understand, or even agree with, a being that’s supposed to have existed for all eternity and will continue to do so forever.

I could end with some wise quote from C. S. Lewis or Tim Keller or the book of Job, but I don’t want to. I don’t want anyone to nod along to what I’ve “concluded” and say, “Oh, that’s nice.” It isn’t nice. Faith is anything but nice.

Rebekah Mays is a Barnard College graduate originally from Austin, Texas. She currently works and writes in Prague, Czech Republic. You can find more of her writing on her blog The Prague BLOG or follow her on Twitter @smallbeks. 

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Image #2: "Annunciazione" by Fabrizio Boschi 
Image #3: "The Annunciation" by Henry Ossawa Tanner 

  

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A Work In Progress

by Ryan Hawk

We are all a work in progress; that’s the true reality of sanctification. At no point do I ever fully understand the faith I claim or the church to which I belong. There are mysteries that are simply unknowable, mysteries in my heart which are unknown even to me.

I have been on a journey. My faith has moved: a path which has taken me from the inherited certainties of my childhood to a place of questioning and skepticism; a post-evangelical landscape where our former assumptions are scrutinized in the harsh light of our newly discovered realities. And on this journey, certain questions continue to dog my steps, questions I never would have heard without starting down this road, questions about meaning, and identity, and privilege, and what it means when I am still not certain.

I look around at my fellow travelers. In this place full of evangelical refugees, we are quick to mock and caricature the traditions from which we’ve emerged. There is anger. There are wounds. These caricatures are birthed out of legacies of pain. Yet some of our stereotypes, we make unfairly. 

We are all a work in progress.

It is rare that I meet someone of my age who doesn’t have painful stories about the faith of their youth. Whether it be the doctrines that bound us, or the church leaders who preyed on their followers, or who let us down when we put full faith in their promises. The church is flawed because people are flawed, and it will be so until the new creation. 

That may not be optimistic, but it’s true. And this means I am flawed too. I am part of this same flawed body. Though I have left the institutions of my youth, it continues to be a part of the church universal. I cannot run away. I cannot forsake them. If I am critical of them (and I must be critical of them) I must never be so without the virtues of love and grace.

A professor of mine in seminary once taught me about the “ladder of inference.” It is a series of unconscious assumptions shaped by our context and experiences, which allow us to move from perceived facts to a conclusion or action. As a result, we are a shaped by all that has come before; it does not allow us to start over. We are molded by our history, our education, our place of birth, our families, our churches and their teachings. Whether we have attempted to relinquish those assumptions and move onto something new, or whether we continue to hold to them, they still shape us profoundly. We can’t escape that fact.

The church has failed many of us. But does this mean that Christ has failed us as well? Do the missteps of the institution invalidate the authenticity of faith? This is where hope comforts. If the church is to be like Christ, then there are plenty of reasons to say that Christ has indeed failed, but hope assures us that the stumbles along the way do not negate the journey. It’s a path, and we are climbing.
 
Failure on this journey is not found in the stumbles and falls, no matter how many times they occur. Failure is assuming that one has arrived, to make camp long before the end – when we grow comfortable by trading certainty for certainty; replacing the inherited assumptions from our youth with the new-found assumptions of our adulthood – when we feel justified sitting back, and mocking those who “haven’t arrived.”

But we are all on a journey; we are all a work in progress. And that compels us to seek truth with humility, to love with empathy, to extend mercy without condition. Challenge yourself. Read something you disagree with; talk to someone who doesn’t see eye to eye with you, because even those we disagree with must be looked upon with grace; they, too, are a work in progress.

Ryan David Hawk is a recovering cynic living in Colorado who looks good in a hat. His writings cannot be found anywhere because he struggles to deal with the pressures of blogging after trying and failing too many times. He sometimes uses Twitter and can be followed @ryandavidhawk.

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I'm Probably Wrong

by Ben Howard

"I'm probably wrong."

"Wrong about what?" I ask myself.

"Oh! Everything...probably. At least most things. To be more precise I am probably wrong about 90% of things. Except cake. I'm not wrong about cake. Unless, of course, I am. In which case I'm wrong about 91% of things."

"I don't think you're wrong about cake," my interior monologue counters.

"But what if I am? I mean, I don't think I am, but that's kind of the point isn't it? Nobody knows that they're wrong until they realize that they're wrong. You can only be wrong after the fact. Well, actually you were wrong all along, but you thought you were right and that was the only thing you knew. You only perceived yourself to be right. Maybe my perception about cake is entirely wrong."

"I don't think this is actually about cake. Unless it's about the band Cake in which case I think you take late-90's alt-rock far too seriously."

"You're right, it's not about cake. It might be about Cake, or at least the pyrrhic quest of the protagonist in 'The Distance'. I just wonder about the end goal of all the critiques and counter-critiques. It feels like everyone, myself included, is striving for some version of better/best, but such a pursuit necessitates a belief in a Platonic ideal for religion, for life, for reality in general. What if it's not actually possible to 'be right'? What if it's only possible to 'feel right'?"

"Are you saying there is no truth? No right answers? I don't know if I agree with that, it's a pretty bleak way to view the world. Also, are you stealing this artistic convention from Chuck Klosterman?"

"I'm not saying that there isn't a truth that underlies the universe. I believe in God and I believe God is the truth the underlies the universe, but I also believe that we can only ever see God through a glass, darkly. As a result, our perception of truth and reality will always be fuzzy and slightly askew. I guess it's more than a binary distinction between right and wrong, that false duality may be what's causing so much frustration. And yes, I am stealing this from Klosterman, but he probably stole it from someone else who stole it from someone else who ultimately stole it from Plato, so I feel like I'm in good company."

"I understand. It does serve as a useful vehicle to just openly say things you're trying to process."

"Exactly! I'm glad you understand."

"So what brought on this whole right/wrong existential crisis?"

"Christian leaders saying stupid things. To be more specific, my arrogant responses to Christian leaders saying stupid things. I realized that I was assuming that my faith, my interpretation was always right and I was judging everything against it. But that faith has changed so much over the last few years, and if I use history as a judge, it will continue to change and shift. My shifting, evolving faith isn't a very good benchmark to hold others to, that's not fair."

"So what should you judge them against?"

"That's exactly the problem I'm encountering. I can't judge them against my believe, because it's always moving. I can't accurately judge them by the Bible, because it's affected by my interpretation. I can't accurately judge them by historical Christianity because it's unfaithful to the contextual nature of faith. So I have to triangulate all of those and it's difficult.

"You could always, I don't know, try not judging them. That whole 'Judge not lest ye be judged' thing."

"I was going to get there eventually. I don't know, maybe some people need the message of Piper and Driscoll. I can't comprehend that, but I also can't comprehend people who like reggae, so maybe my understanding of the world isn't the end all and be all. Yeah, their message can be damaging when it's pushed on people who it doesn't help, but my faith could probably be damaging to someone who needs something stricter and more forceful."

"Could it be possible that the varying expressions of Christianity are all useful to some people in some situations?"

"Yeah, I think it could. Good talk self."

Peace,
Ben

Ben Howard is an accidental iconoclast and generally curious individual living in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also the editor-in-chief of On Pop Theology and an avid fan of waving at strangers for no reason. You can follow him on Twitter @BenHoward87. 

 

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The Jenga Tower of Faith

The true meaning of July 4th

by Amanda Taylor

Recently my world came crashing to a halt when I learned that the signing of the Declaration of Independence was actually carried out on July 2^nd, and not on July 4^th, the day in American society when we all lose our minds over the founding fathers and the beauty of this nation and fire in the sky and blueberry-strawberry sheet cake flags.

“…Nothing happened in Congress on July 4^th, 1776. (John) Adams, who had responded with such depth of feeling to the events of July 2, recorded not a word of July 4. Of (Thomas) Jefferson’s day, it is known only that he took time off to shop for ladies’ gloves and a new thermometer.”

Oh really? I’ve spent all this time and energy and reflection every Fourth of July meditating on democracy and boldness in action and depth of commitment and principles and complexities of citizenship all while making an inspirational freedom cake to celebrate Thomas Jefferson’s purchase of ladies gloves?

Is that so?

I am incredulous. I am outraged. I am…already over it. The whole process of learning about this, then feeling some combination of betrayal, shock and confusion, before giving way to acceptance of this fascinating secret, seems to parallel the way I consume information about the Bible, as well as faith paradigms, their history, and countless other facts surrounding everything about religion.

I grew up learning about the rules of religion, facts associated with the Bible that all compounded to make a very genuine, very real story about the history and salvation of the world; various datum stacked one on top of the other to create a Jenga tower of truth. Over time it began to feel that if any one Jenga piece were pulled out and called into question, the whole tower might fall. Each fact needed to be true in its own right, layered among other truths that were dependent on one another to keep the entire story sound, intact, sturdy.

Nooooooo!!

If you’ve ever played Jenga then you have an understanding of the immense laser-focus needed to handle each piece with the utmost care, steadying your breathing, your body’s stance, and your nerves to move one of those 54 blocks to the top of the tower. Each is the most important block in that moment, until the moment shifts, the players shift, and a new piece becomes the sole focus of the game.

I wonder how much of my life I’ve spent studying faith in this way. Any given fact, any given element that serves to build the tower, is fundamentally tied to the truth and stability of the whole. Was the earth built in 6 days? Did a donkey really talk to Balaam the diviner? Did Joshua stop the sun from shining? What does this tell us? There is incessantly a temptation and a need to believe the finite, external meanings of these words in order to fold ourselves into the boxed tower they create. Then we ask ourselves if we are right. Or not. Will it stand? Or fall? Are these the building blocks of faith?

In some ways I think they are, so I don’t discredit or devalue their existence. The problem with the Jenga illustration is that you build the tower first. You weave it together into a stable entity, and then pick it apart at your leisure and entertainment to see what happens. I don’t think we build faith this way. It is my understanding that instead we stumble into it graciously.

When push comes to shove we have to start talking about what we believe in, what we think is real, and why. I avoid these conversations in most settings because I’ve found the process of defining the various amorphous components of faith to be imperfect, and I don’t like being bound to this inevitable shortcoming. In describing my truths, you will instinctively begin comparing them to yours, which is good, but if we lose each other somewhere along the line you start to become the other, which is bad. These disparities of belief grow increasingly exclusive, and we clutch our facts tight against the chest and peer outward, with a careful, vigilant eye.

Yet time and again the facts are called into question, and it’s the larger story we’re left with. Is it still real when we can’t understand the particulars that have built it? The insular practice of maintaining correctness in all forms is not only exhausting, but a direct path to stagnation and defense. Yet the flip side of that coin is to believe in everything, to avoid “correctness” and to acknowledge all faith as good faith, as truth. This is troublesome, too easy, and lacks the difficult aspect of religious submission that requires us to actually commit.

Happy Socially Accepted Day of Celebration

I don’t mind in the end if the Declaration of Independence was signed on the 2^nd or the 4^th, or a month later (when the majority of delegates signed it). Maybe it was signed on the 4^th after all, as Adams and Jefferson contended late in life, and history is confused. The document was signed. It is real, and it impacts my life and my country, and stands as a representation of fundamental principles of justice and humanity. These are the things I celebrate as I build my delicious flag cake. As a unified body, it helps us all to have a single day to stop and reflect, and the day that has been chosen is each Fourth of July. This, as a manifestation of recognition and indebtedness is good, and the celebration of the underlying truths is good, and lest we forget, our God more than anything, He is good.

Amanda works in “community development” and no, she doesn’t know what that means either. Forever the critic. And enthusiast. Never one for dichotomies. Follow her on Twitter @tayloram03 if you’re not into receiving tweets.

You can also follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology.

You might also like:

• Rule Number 1: Your Faith Lies
• Faith As Measured By Camels
• God and Meteors