A Holy Winnowing
Since I was a little pig-tailed girl with frilly socks attending Sunday school, I have had a desire to know Christ. So much so, that I used to want to be a nun even though I did not grow up in the Orthodox Church. The monastic life seemed romantic to me in a way that I actually still find desirable. One’s whole life is dedicated to simplicity, service, and solitude. It’s a life of reflection and surrender, and profound intimacy with our Creator.
These qualities and virtues are not reserved for nuns and monks of course, but those living a monastic life at least have the advantage of side-stepping the pitfalls of culture a bit.
I have realized how damaging culture has been to my faith. The church I grew up in was rooted deeply in fundamentalism and was a breeding ground for rigidity and a terribly ironic estrangement from love itself. The image of God that I saw through my formative years was strong-fisted and angry, temperamental and unpredictable. The odd thing is that while so many fear-based teachings did not settle well in my spirit at the time, they became ingrained in me through sheer consistency of hearing.
Fundamentalism has curdled the faith of many, it isn’t a story that I have exclusive rights to. And now, with the scandal of celebrity Christians, unloving congregations, and the hard lines of division, we have so contaminated the baptismal that people are abandoning their faith altogether.
Our knee-jerk reaction to the multitudes of those who are soured by their faith experience is to try and make God more relevant. This leads to all kinds of impotent practices and even worse - slippery theology.
The problem isn’t that we need to make God more appealing in His nature, it’s that we need to re-learn that His nature is actually deeply loving.
The face of the church will always resemble the god that it serves, and it seems the problem is that the face that the church currently bears looks nothing like Jesus. It reminds me of the passage in scripture that speaks of looking in the mirror and immediately not knowing ourselves when we walk away. When we don’t live a life deeply rooted and formed in Him, we become duplicitous, forgetting the depths of who we are, how to relate to others, and how we interpret God’s heart and motivations. We seem to be in a collective moment where faith communities don’t like what they see in the mirror, and are leaving in droves.
To quote artist David Hayward, “True change isn’t an adjustment of the old way, but a birthing of a completely new way.” Our country is in the midst of an existential crisis that I don’t believe can be corrected, rather, it needs to be completely re-birthed. Our theology is so rotten and our understanding of God so distorted that we are in this place of mass deconstruction for a purpose. At face value, faith at large seems to be falling apart. If we adjust our eyes though, we may be able to see that it is all coming together again, and by way of invitation from God Himself
This is nothing more than a holy winnowing; a time of throwing our tired beliefs to the wind and letting the empty hulls be taken by the very Spirit of God. This is a time when everything that can be shaken, will. When our errors will be graciously exposed, and when what remains is what is true.
So, if you’re in this very place of doubt or skepticism, I encourage you to see it as the sacred invitation that it is: an invitation by God Himself to forget what you think you know, and to experience him. Deconstruction is the hot new label, but it feels so implosive. It’s simply starting again.
God is a God of new beginnings, of painful origin stories turned beautiful, of new names, of impossibilities, and most importantly, a love that leads us to a cross. Your questions and rebuttals, your fears and even your anger can lead you to God because when you demand the truth, and Christ is Truth, it will lead you right into His arms,* you just can’t see it in the tenderness of right now.
“If Christ is truth, then a relentless quest for Truth will lead us right into His arms, won’t it?” - Bradley Jersak