Not long ago I was wearing an Arab Catholic Scout uniform and marching all over Jerusalem with the Palestinian Christian community to celebrate Palm Sunday.
Between Easter and then I traveled home, contracted a cold virus, spent too many hours awake, and made pilgrimage to Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, for my Easter break traditions with my bestfriend (hi, Hannah, I love you).
I struggle with knowing how to talk about two places that are so diametrically opposed.
I don't know how to be happy in each place when my heart just really wishes a tectonic shift would make Chicago and Bethlehem neighbors. (It would have saved me a couple bucks, too.) Honestly, coming home often feels really empty.
So on Easter, as I put on lipstick and wedges and sang hymns that my Grandma loved; I was also thinking a lot about those I love who celebrate Easter by playing bagpipes and celebrating holy fire miracles and making special cookies. Coming home often feels really empty.
One afternoon earlier this week, I was driving in the car and flipped the radio to the local AM Christian station, as I occasionally do. Generally their programming ranges from pre-recorded sermons to shows about parenting and marriage advice to "current events" programs which tend to mirror whatever the latest point of outrage on conservative talk radio is (Liberals! Gays! Intellectuals!). On this particular afternoon the topic of the show in progress was ISIL (or ISIS or Islamic State or Daesh or whatever we're calling them now).
The guest on the show, a "global security expert" whom I've never heard of, was making the case that the U.S. and Europe needs to "get into the gutter" and use the same "cold-blooded" tactics of brutality that ISIL uses. "If you don't want to fight the way they fight, you're going to end up being a victim,” the expert warned.
A friend wrote of his struggle to figure out what is truth and what is trash in popular belief. But his efforts to wrestle with issues have won him few friends among his Christian peers.
“I guess what bothers me about religion and a lot of people in religions is that they completely block out what I have to say just because I have different views, and they refuse to listen to my logic.”
People try to argue him out of his way of thinking rather than seriously considering whether he has anything worthwhile to offer.
That kind of Christianity seems foreign to me (and a little bit hypocritical). After all, if we believe that God gave us minds, then why wouldn’t we expect or allow people to use them? How might that possibly threaten our faith (unless there isn’t really any substance to the stuff that we claim to believe)?
Winter came like a shroud falling around me as a warm blanket in the morning but lingering until everything beneath it lost its color and gave life over to the cold and silence
Grief hangs in the air its silent particles an ever present reminder of everything lost of the darkness that clings to our eyes and clouds over our efforts to move forward to hope for life anew
At the Christian college I attended, giving up sugar for Lent (and replacing it with Splenda) was one of the ways we entered into that suffering. Some of us gave up Facebook. One year, I fasted. One year, I took on vegetarianism (something I stuck to for five years). Once, I was almost convinced to give up sarcasm. Almost.
I was choosing suffering in small doses, hoping that the slight ache of missing – sugar, Facebook, hamburgers – might remind me of a greater suffering.
Another way of thinking about Lent is that Jesus submitted himself to this world, and he suffered for it. This means that Lent is a time to remember: life is suffering.
As I have found myself drawn to Quakerism, it does not feel like I am discovering something new. In fact, I feel like I am rediscovering the impulses I had as a new believer in Christ, as well as seeing those subtle, quiet revelations I have gained over the years come together. I have often said that my charismatic convictions have led me to Quakerism, and I mean it when I say that. The implications of the Pentecost, in how it revealed the egalitarian nature of the Church and the accessibility of God’s power and presence, are radical and I find that Pentecostalism, the Charismatic Movement, and Quakerism have understood this to various degrees. The past few years, as I have been confronted by the revelation that Jesus defines God, and have had my views on both the Scriptures and sacraments change a bit, I have discovered that these sorts of things have been addressed and realized in Quakerism for quite some time.
More and more of my friends have expressed in recent years their disenchantment with the church. They struggle with a deep desire for authentic intimacy within a faith community. They long for simplicity. They feel as if life is not worth living without an experience of God’s presence within community. They are willing to sacrifice anything. But instead of these things, they find Christians who seem to have become wedded to American culture along with its promise of riches and relaxation for those who work hard and live well. And relationships, where they exist, seem shallow.
Please don’t get me wrong. These Christian communities are full of men and women who have spent their lives serving Christ and growing in Him. I’m part of one of these communities, and I know many here who faced similar struggles in their youth. But that was then. Life is much more comfortable now. And safe.
A friend posted on Twitter the other day: “the person that relies on culture for interpretation of the Bible will never be stable.” His tweet raised for me a few larger questions that I have been thinking about recently while studying here in Barranquilla, Colombia.
As James Cone has posited, the awful violence of the cross is simply more viscerally communicated by witnessing a lynched black body than it could ever be by words from someone “sitting up in some mansion somewhere.” In the same vein, my friend Cláudio Carvalhaes has described how we will write theology very differently depending on whether we’re writing about God from a calm seminary office or from a cantankerous, clamoring refugee camp. In climates of immediacy, our theologizing necessarily takes on a sharper, more tenacious tone.
In the Old City of Jerusalem, the streets are too narrow for cars. The streets stay narrow so they can squeeze through stone archways. Neighbors who live across the street from each other can look up and see the awnings above their doorways almost touch. Sometimes, a narrow street will become a staircase. The stone steps have probably forgotten most of what they once knew about right angles.
On a rainy day in November, I went for a walk down these ancient streets. The rain revealed shallow gutters in the street, and downspouts that I’d never noticed on sunnier days.
How can you prove a case in court when evidence can be faked? How much do I have to exercise to justify eating whatever I want? Where the hell is the last small key in the Water Temple?
So many questions.
Sometimes I’d ask my parents. But while my development was important to them, my adolescent musings on philosophy (and video game strategies) were taxing. Only a handful of the people I knew at church played Legend of Zelda, so I mostly avoided them. Teachers were amused by my vocabulary, but their answers rarely satisfied my curiosity.
A friend and I discussed evangelical Christianity's focus on the inherent sinfulness of humanity, its claim that people, who experience grace, must be changed into something new. But the prospective pitfall of such belief is the realization that perfection (a worthy goal) is always just beyond our reach. So we become a people impatient with impossible standards, who stop looking forward, start looking back, compare ourselves to those who lag behind.
Hi. My name is Ryan, and I’m a Christian who despises contemporary Christian music.
I admit there are people who find contemporary Christian music powerful. Affirming. Good. I am not one of those people.
There is one song – Matt Maher’s “Hold Us Together.” I first encountered this song at a church camp during a considerably more conservative point in my life, and considered independently, the song isn’t really anything remarkable. Maher has a pleasantly inert voice, sings over an acoustic guitar and handclap beat, and in a few places there’s just a touch of twang. What makes “Hold Us Together” really noteworthy is that Maher, a self-defined and explicitly Christian artist, manages to complete the song without a single overt reference to God. Or Jesus. Or the Holy Spirit. He never utters the words “worship” or “glory” or that contemporary Christian standby, “praise.” The song is positive and upbeat but about as religious as anything Taylor Swift sings.
A Quaker I admire is “Comrade” Mary Hughes. Mary was not content with the life of wealth she was born into. Giving up her comfort, but in good stewardship of her wealth and power, she lived on the streets, making people her priority, living with and for the poor.
Mary transformed an old pub into an inn for anyone and everyone who needed a place to stay. The Dew Drop Inn became a shelter and community center for the homeless and a resting place for travelers. It was almost always packed with people.
She was known for greeting everyone she met with a smile and a kind word. Mary’s life of kindness to all initially earned her a reputation for craziness, but over time her reputation changed. People knew her for her trust and for her friendship.
It's essentially a multi-day road trip with stops scheduled intermittently so we can keep our brains on overdrive and stretch our legs. The point of Sankofa is to reconsider how we talk and process race. It's a conversation that is ongoing, and the trip helps it get started. Each year looks different depending on the group of students who participate. Last year we stopped on a plantation, at the location of the Mike Brown Shooting, and at an old Underground Railroad house. Historically the trip has been focused on white-on-black racism, as that narrative is hardly taught and greatly misunderstood. But the trip last year boasted other minorities as well. Students of non-black ethnic backgrounds, of alternative sexual orientation, of non-evangelical religions, and of the mental health community all started raising their voices by the second day saying, "What about my pain?" On Sankofa I learned that when we become afraid of scarcity, things get ugly.
I stumbled across these words awhile ago: “If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we would find, in each person’s life, sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.” And I wonder if Longfellow had it right.
There are two perspectives at the scene of the cross.
On one side, we have the crucified God. On the other, we have God’s crucifiers. Who do you tend to identify with in this story? Are you the victim or the murderer?
It’s a hard question.
Members of the early Church probably identified with Christ on the cross, as they were persecuted and murdered by the Romans in the first century. Christ went before them -- the perfect example of non-violence, even to death. But Christianity would become the dominant religion of the West. And here we are today—offspring of an obscure Eastern religious movement now more massive than anybody could have planned.
After seven semesters at a Quaker university, I had decided that it would make sense for me to understand who Friends are and what they believe. And so I gathered with a group to discuss Quaker history and beliefs. After the first session, those of us who were less familiar with Quakerism were encouraged to do some poking around, to see what we could discover about Friends.
I came to the second meeting invigorated by what I had discovered. Having never spent much time looking into Quakers, I was surprised to see the wide range of theological diversity among Friends. In my research I had read about Nonthiest Friends, Orthodox Friends, Evangelical Friends, Neopagan Friends, and Fundamentalist Friends. I was shocked, but pleasantly so. Here was a group of religious folks who could stand to associate with one another despite vast difference in faith and practice. Or, at least I thought they did. As I spoke of my findings, an older Friend cut me off - "Well, Brandon, some of those people you're talking about aren't really Quakers." He didn't specify which group(s) he was ostensibly ready to vote off the Quaker Island, but his meaning was clear: I am not at all comfortable associating with some of those people as Friends.
I have often longed for a different kind of life, imagining joy in the simplicity of communal work, worship and service. But is close-knit community the key to an integrated existence? What if my longing for meaningful connection is a symptom of internal rather than external division? If I have learned anything about myself, it is that I too often seek the easy way out of uncomfortable questions.