Colour Supplement

Articles by Christians around the world

Sunday October 8 2006

 

The beginning and the end of wisdom

By Gordon Atkinson

 

Jeanene and I watched a movie called “Saved” the night before she had surgery. This was a serious surgery. Not particularly life threatening, but a significant incision and a general anaesthesia. The movie was a nice distraction for us that evening.

I don’t know who made this movie or why they made it. I don’t know if they intended it to be a wild exaggeration of reality, or if they felt it was a reasonable depiction of the way some people practice Christianity.

I can tell you this: While I’ve never been involved with any Christians who manifested all of the forms of insanity in this movie, I have experienced just about everything you see in “Saved” at one time or another.

The histrionic worship; the mindless, babbling prayers crammed full of religious phrases that no one really understands; the sickly-sweet “Jesus is so awesome” language; the controlling and emotionally crippled ministers with their grandiosity and closet sexual issues; the bad art; the scary t-shirts; the Christian label slapped on everything from cars to calzones in order to increase sales or boost egos. Yes, my friends, I have seen it all. Been there, done that, laughed at the t-shirt in a cheesy Christian catalogue. These are the sort of things that used to make me fantasize about leaving Christianity and embracing some other, “less crazy” worldview. Perhaps some form of scientific empiricism would fit the bill, wherein I wouldn’t claim absolute belief about anything without solid and repeatable evidence that can be detected with one of the five senses.

I mean, with empiricism you know you’ll miss some truth simply because humanity has not experienced it yet, and you know you'll have to fudge a bit when it comes to the subject of love, but at least you know where you stand. Christianity, on the other hand, is all over the map. One minute you’re watching the Discovery Channel and considering the evidence for global warming, and the next minute you’re standing before a group of people and telling them that Jesus died for their sins and rose again on the third day.

Who can make sense of a claim like that?

And yet, I have not left Christianity for a number of personal, emotional, and relational reasons that I have a hard time sorting out myself, much less explaining to others. I find myself wanting to say, “You kinda had to be there. And I mean for my whole forty-three year odyssey.” The truth is, it's hard to know where to begin talking about my personal reconciliation with matters of faith and the heart.

But I CAN tell you something that happened to Jeanene and me the morning after we watched “Saved.” It was nothing miraculous or even out of the ordinary, but it meant a lot to us.

That morning a handful of friends from Covenant Baptist Church came by the hospital before Jeanene was taken into surgery. These were not people who had gotten our names from a list of needs at the church office and were fulfilling some sort of religious obligation. These were old and well-established friends with whom we have fought many battles and walked through good times and hard times together.

These were our people, you understand. Our people. The people with whom Jeanene and I and our three daughters share our daily lives.

We gathered in a circle around her bed, holding hands. Jeanene closed her eyes and we prayed quietly for her. The prayers were not particularly fancy, nor were they filled with a lot of religious phrases. We were fully aware that our prayers would not guarantee some sort of miraculous healing or blessing, though we were humble enough not to count out that possibility. We were also well aware that this little prayer meeting did not mean that the Creator of the universe was suddenly at our beck and call, waiting to grant us special dispensations from the bumps, bruises, and grief that come with human life.

While we prayed, I felt a mysterious sense of awareness. I felt that something important was going on, something beyond us and bigger than us. Something, in fact, so big that we have no need or desire to try to explain it, market it, promise it, or claim any kind of ownership of it. We were dear friends gathered in love and in the very name of God. It was a quiet episode and no record of the details exists. Our prayers were not recorded for sale in some inspirational book. No movie will ever be made about that moment in time.

And yet, this truth remains. I would do just about anything, go just about anywhere, and even sell most of my possessions for a chance to walk through life with these gentle pilgrims. I will own any label you please. Crackpot, dreamer, shoddy thinker, weak-minded. None of these matter for I have found the pearl of great price. And the transforming power of that discovery and of that joy lies at the centre of my life.

The power of our shared community, which we call the Spirit of God, helps me to be faithful even when I am feeling faithless. It helps me to be trusting even when I am feeling cynical. It helps me to become like a child even when childhood seems very far away and long ago.

There is a truth here that is hard to put into words. It is a life truth, a living truth, a truth of sinew and muscle and shared history and held hands. It is a truth that is utterly beyond us and somehow within us. It is a truth that makes us feel so small and childlike that we may have slipped, unnoticed, into the very Kingdom of Heaven.

Something out there is much greater than I. I am aware of it and in awe of it. This is the beginning and the end of Wisdom.

This piece was written in September 2005, some time after Jeanene had her surgery, from which she made a good recovery.

Gordon Atkinson is pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in San Antonio, Texas and has his own excellent website www.reallivepreacher.com.  We are most grateful to Gordon for his permission to reproduce his essays here.

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