When I think about the events in my life that have made me the man that I am, few are so important as my parent's divorce. My dad had fought with all of us for years. He was, and to some extent still is, a very unhappy person and very solitary by nature. He has always been a good father to my brothers and I, but as a teenager I thought I hated him. Growing up in a strict Baptist family, my nonpracticing Catholic, drug addicted, often hard drinking, very blue collar father didn't meet up to my asinine standards. And so, to my everlasting shame, I was happy when he moved out. That was, although I didn't realize it, the beginning of the end of life as I had known it. I didn't even know I was miserable but I lost all interest in school and church, I was always in trouble(more so than before), and I began to suffer from migraines and dizzy spells. Although I was too stupid to know that I was in pain it was tearing up my life and my body. For the first 14 years of my life, everything revolved around my parents, my brothers, and my grandparents. And then daddy left, my two older brothers left, one for the Navy on the other side of the country and one for college 6 hours away. Desperate to escape my misery, I left at the first chance I got, not even staying long enough to finish high school. In the course of about 2 years my entire family was torn to pieces. We now live scattered from Florida to Nashville in isolated worlds of our own. It would be about 3 more years before I began to understand what had happened and how it had broken me and since then I have tried to somehow heal the break, but I don't even know where to begin, and I deeply suspect that nothing I could ever do will help.
It seems to me that my situation is very similar to that of most Christians with the church. It is the source of all of the goodness and happiness we have ever found, but it has hurt us more profoundly than anyone else ever could. For many of us, there was a time of great happiness when we first began to feel what it was like to be a part of Christ's body, to not only feel His heart beating in us, but to see the very same heart in others, to know that there were others who understood and shared our deepest, most inexpressible desires. And then, it all went to shit. The stories and the reasons vary, but almost everyone knows what I am talking about. Disappointment and disillusion set in. We thought we were in Heaven but we were only on Earth. We wanted so desperately to be different people than we are, I think the realization that our heroes of the faith were liars and cheats just like ourselves broke our hearts. All we wanted was to be perfect like our Father but we have been slapped in the face with the hard truth that whatever that perfection is, it is nothing like what we think of as divine perfection. I think I can sum up much of what is wrong with us by saying that we are afraid of our Father. We don't understand and can't accept the way that He runs this family, but we can't admit that. To confess that we doubt Him, that His plan doesn't seem that good to us, that we have some hard questions about His qualifications to lead is the one thing we need to do and can't. We have been told over and over again that only those with faith, which is taken to mean the absence of doubt, are really part of the family and have His love. We have tried every kind of reform and revival we can think of. We have filled the world with empty churches running like Jonah away from God's terrifying mercy and His incomprehensible grace.
I can't help but dream about the ancient unity of the church before it was torn by schism and strife, in much the same way that I dream about a time when all my family was together. I think of all of the truly Christian people I have known and become separated from and try and imagine some scheme to bring us back together. I can at last admit that I don't like the way that the Head of the Church runs things and that I would do them much differently, because I finally know that nothing, even unbelief, can separate me from the love of God in Christ. There is therefore now no condemnation to those that are in Christ Jesus even for heresy, schism, or doubt. G.K. Chesterton tells us that the cure for doubt is not to decrease doubt but to increase it until we are able by some strange insight at last to doubt our doubt. So, let's try for a moment the hypothesis that our doubts are misplaced, that in fact the church is exactly as it should be, that our family hasn't been destroyed but only transformed into a good that we aren't able to understand or appreciate. I think this is the mystery of the Gospel, and why it is so offensive to us, that it doesn't make bad things into something other than themselves, they remain themselves but become good. In our eyes they are still bad, because we are still clinging to a past that is not as good as the present. We think that a man has to stop sinning to become righteous, but God has declared us righteous and I think that I have been in enough churches and known enough Christians to say unequivocally that we have not stopped sinning and are not even on some course of improvement.
Our problem is that we don't understand, or like, Christ's plan for us. His plan is not to bust every Christian out of jail, but to make them free even when they are in jail; not to take away all of our sadness but to give us joy in sadness; not to take away our pain and illnesses but to give us a life and health that transcends pain and illness; not to take away our doubt but to give us a faith that can doubt and still remain itself; not to take away our failure but to make failure itself His greatest triumph; not to take away death but to make death itself the highest form of life.
Broken Together
