Short Essays
(from past editions of “Table”)
Compassion & Crowds
When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Matthew 9:36
I imagine him on a hill. He’s looking down. There are masses swarming, maybe four-thousand. A mother offers a piece of bread to her three-year-old son. A man is pushing through the crowd, his broad shoulders strike everyone he moves past. Even at a distance it isn’t clear where he’s going. The sun hits exposed necks like the snap of a rubber band. One rubs his hands together and whispers to another, “This should be good. I heard he does healings.” Thirsty, ready, tired, they are all waiting.
It’s early in his ministry. There hasn’t been a hint of death in his teachings, but he’s regularly undone death’s messengers. The man filled with demons so dark that he was, for a time, just a shrieking swirl of self-hatred, goes on dates now and has taken a job. The woman, whose bleeding kept her from the Temple and trapped in her own cage, has a new power, the ability to look anyone in the eye and to go on believing that she is loved.
But these crowds are not filled with pure devotion. Some are jockeying for a touch. Each is burned enough to be half-cynics. Listen, at a distance the crowd’s noise sounds like a groaning belly. Breathe through your nose and you’ll smell a blend of unwashed underarms, earth, and leftover lunch. It’d be easy for him to look in disgust. But he does not.
Matthew’s word for compassion is “splanchnon.” It means “compassion,” sure. But also, curiously, “entrails” or “sacrifice”--or even “womb.” It’s a word that isn’t interested in concepts or dictionaries. It insists on being felt. A knot inside the chest, cinched tight and then undone. Frozen ground warming, becoming soft to a barefoot. It is the twisting, or wringing out, of an organ. With Jesus, there is no wagging finger or escape hatch away from the crowds. There is pain and love, braided around each other until no one can tell which was which.
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A man accelerates in the dark through a red light. He isn’t running from anything. He is running from everything. A mother wants to clock out early to see her children, but leaving early means less groceries later. Twenty-five years old and single for too long, a young man lies enough to get some interest. A family sits together on the living room couch, the faces dimly reflected in their various screens. Three kids at night blow smoke into the trees and laugh, kicking their feet into the ground. A girl looks in the mirror and mutters words that she’d never say to anyone else. This world, this saggy-eyed and beautiful and worn down world keeps assembling its crowds. Buried or burning right in the open, they are no different, each long to be longed for. We want this love that cannot be dictionaried, but felt. We crave a power that can dismiss all the damnable darkness away, melt the ice and untie all the knots. We rub our hands together, whispering, “This will be good, this will all be made good.”
On Becoming a Child (Again)
There are many ways to chart a life; financial security for one. You might remember the first dollar earned, the first job procured, the first promotion, a retirement cushioned by planning, and then the disbursement of an inheritance. Look over your life with the lens of relationships and you may see yourself becoming increasingly loving as you survey a movement from childhood friendship, marital love, parental love, and finally the love of a grandparent. Physiologically, we could follow the line that reveals the development and loss of intellectual capacity or physical strength. But, I’m interested in the steps we use to grow closer to, or fall farther from, intimacy with God.
Puritans, Medieval Monks, and Desert Mothers have crafted spiritual theologies to describe this journey towards (and with) God. Because so many have offered various and sundry spiritual formation schemata, I feel free to offer another. It is a journey in three or so parts, one that has points where some stop, stalling along the way. It begins with naiveté and moves through the valleys of confusion, only to return, through God’s aid, to a mixture of wisdom, relinquishment, and trust–a “second naiveté.”1
Lucy, in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, the youngest of her brothers and sisters, is the first to see Narnia. Susan, Edmond, and Peter all initially resist until a mysterious professor convinces them to trust their sister. It is no mistake on Lewis’ part that the youngest sees Narnia the easiest. Even if you never believed the back of a closet could be a doorway to another land, we have all once been Lucy. My son Soren, for example, after driving by a string of propped up tarps and ripped tents in the wet of Tacoma’s November, prayed later that night that “all the homeless would have a home.” If I asked him if he thought the prayer would be answered he’d respond, “Why wouldn’t it?”
For some this wide-eyed belief shows up again when faith first does. This was the case for me. In my late teen years, having wrestled with and been pinned by a squad of predictable vices, the Holy Spirit re-enchanted my “blah” and broken world. If God’s joy could expel my grabby need for poisonous thrills, wouldn’t the healing of a family or a broken leg be a cinch? The born again, like the child, sees the world through their own newly found holy wonder.
In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Peter and Susan tell Lucy they are too old for Narnia. But age is a coincidence and not the cause. Over time this wonder adjusts, settling and often diminishing, through the normal rhythm of life and the world’s grinding wear. This is the end of the first stage, what I’ll call naiveté. Many sentimentalize this stage and attempt to re-enter it, overly-romanticizing children and childhood along the way. But, there is no going back, only forward. Our lives disenchant because naivete, innocent as it is, cannot withstand the toothy horrors of the world. My son’s belief that his quick prayer would change our city’s homelessness problem, in any noticeable way, is diminished the next time we drive by that same sequence of tarps and tents. Years ago this would happen to me, having faith but not seeing the mountains I wanted to move, moving. Maybe you remember when it happened to you. It isn’t as if the instinct to pray and the belief that God will work through prayer is wrong. Absolutely not. When we exit naiveté we begin discovering that prayer is not transactional slot-machinery but something far more vast and mysterious; but I’m jumping ahead. Every follower of Jesus–the born again and those born into it–at some point bang their head against Narnia’s seemingly locked door. This is, then, the second stage: confusion.
Part of the marvel of us humans is that we don’t allow ourselves to stay confused very long. We make maps, create philosophies, and bring in consultants, to steer us away from any prolonged confusion. It is no different with the spiritual life. When the scripture passage doesn’t seem to harmonize with what we’ve learned in the science class, or when the prayer doesn't yield the desired result, or when the person (or institution) we revered is revealed to be flagrantly untrustworthy, we begin to make adjustments. None of us can stand too much cognitive dissonance. Some, perhaps because of pain, slip into cynicism, sneering at wonder and feeling wiser because of it. Others resolve things internally but don’t talk much about it, in an effort to not rock the proverbial boat. A few attempt to stay straddled over the line of naiveté and confusion, stifling forward movement. Still others find their way to the next stage, the “second naiveté.”
In Mark chapter ten, Jesus deals with the worst but somehow normalized elements of adulthood. There’s the power-hungry (39-45), the money-clinging (17-31), and a debate about divorce (1-11), but right in the middle like a thread through a needle’s eye he says, “anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it” (15). Jesus puts all the poisonous faux-mastery of the “adult life” on exhibition, revealing it for what it is. If the cynic resolves the confusion through making himself large and in control.Those who have become “second naiveté” are aware of their relative smallness and are comfortable in the face of mystery.
This stage is not characterized by becoming childish and it is not a regression. It is the repeated discovery that there is more in the heaven and earth than is dreamt of in a thousand philosophies. It is the recognition that all our various Narnias are “shadows and copies” of what we look towards. It is the awareness that cynicism is a false peak. It is the knowledge that God is farther off than a telescope’s eye and nearer than our upper intestines. The secondly naive, in the end, have been made foolish to the world, guides to fellow-travelers, and wise to God.
1. I have put quotes around “second naivete” throughout this email because the term was coined by the Philosopher Paul Ricouer, and not me. Ricouer uses the term in a different way so I didn’t feel it was right to try and shoehorn his use of it into the piece, nevertheless, it’s his term… and I really like it.
10 Parables on Prayer
It is enough to simply adore. Sit on the bench in front of the masterpiece. Look at the way noble purple holds lowly umber. If you sit long enough you’ll see a crown, unlike any before or since. When your mouth widens you’ve understood.
A father lifts his son, setting him on his shoulders. The father’s muscles and height now the child’s. Extend your arms. Try him. He'll reach out before you can ask, “Up?”
You almost missed it, the gold hiding in the empty wrappers and crushed aluminum. Your darting eyes, busied by a cacophony of sight, until there it was, waiting, the one thing needful.
It is sweat and strained folds of flesh, a face absorbing pain. Breathe in and breathe out. Scream and beat your fists. Hold nothing in. The throbbing will stop soon. New life is nearly here.
Take your time with my words, you miss too much with a chug. Sip. Notice. See how each slow drink possesses notes of “silence” and “miracle.”
Call a thousand times. Send the 50th e-mail. Use your lungs. Say it loud. There is no having without asking.
Open up the paint chipped basement door. You know about the rats and the spiders, all hidden in shadows. Pull the beaded light string and watch them disappear. Notice the ground, clean as a dinner plate.
A thousand fiends riding towards you on a thousand dark horses become laughable when you say the word.
You can still taste the faint flavors tap dancing on your tongue. The plate is empty. Your stomach testing your pant’s waistline. Watch the beaming host, feasting on your thankfulness.
It is also breath, as in, without it there is nothing left.
The End of Loneliness
A few months ago the Surgeon General announced that another disease was sweeping over the United States. This spread, however, would only worsen through separation and distance. The recent health crisis, we were told, was an epidemic of loneliness. While the announcement was shocking in its formality, many cultural watchers saw this train coming for years. Beyond the evaporation of nearly every social and fraternal organization there is the immersion of faux communities of message boards, social media, and online gaming. While these spaces connect people from different geographic spaces, they leave relationships disembodied, lacking the hand on the shoulder or the hug. Technology and consumerism has further disrupted our relationship forming efforts by offering mere avatars and veneers. Tech, a deep undercurrent of individualism, and consumerist tendencies offer an inoculation against community, giving just enough of a relationship to make us think we don't need more. All the while loneliness isn’t just ‘kind of a bummer’ but is more deadly than smoking.
The church, the largest community-based organization, offers the antidote to loneliness–though for many it is a bitter pill. First, it forces friendship on us, albeit gently. The church does not ask what “type” you’d like to spend time with. It does not invite swiping to the left or right. It opens a door and lets people walk in, yourself included. And once inside it sends you next to people with weird laughs and personality tics and voting records and body odor. Church is not brunch with friends. Sometimes it is a table in the presence of perceived enemies. And this is, strangely, the balm that heals. When I realize that those that I could easily abhor online have knees that bend like mine in prayer I may notice other things we share as well, like tears and laughter. It is, in contrast, the quest for the perfect friend or spouse that will often lead to no spouse or no friend.
The church doesn’t just open its door to you–and a host of awkward others–but it weds you to the past. The author of the book of Hebrews tells us we have a “great cloud of witnesses” that is cheering us on while we “run the race” of life (Hebrews 12:2). This means both the 18th century revivalist John Wesley is raising a fist and shouting your name. It means the 4th century saint Macrina has cupped her hands around her mouth and is urging you forward. The church has its hierarchies, but it is in the end the most anti-hierarchical community to exist as it maintains with theological conviction that all our not just friends but sisters and brothers. As we open the stories of the past faithful we see others, like us, riddled with physical ailments, beset by constant temptation, and longing for God and friends. The church of history and of the future tells us through a thousand ways that we are not alone.
I do not know if the plagued will take the antidote. Perhaps a community that does not orbit around individual choice feels like more malady than medicine. Or, perhaps the polarized loneliness is preferable to some compared to the church’s cheery call to death to self. But it stands; the doors open as wide as the crucified arms. God has, in his generosity, given us more than himself; he has given us each other and this is often how he heals.
What Nostalgia is Trying to Tell you
There may be a moment in your life that feels almost perfect. It starts to return with the smell of a leather baseball glove freshly conditioned with shaving cream, your father’s secret trick. The sight of sand sweeps your mind off to childhood escapes at your grandparents’ beach house.You smell mulled spices at a coffee shop and all of a sudden you’re seven years old and smiling, looking up at your mother as you make cider together. It could be the sound of a song or the look of your friend’s velvet loveseat. Just last week I dug through our family’s basement until I found a small plastic tote. It held my remaining baseball cards. Soon I forgot all of my typical Saturday responsibilities and had fallen into the plastic tote. I swam through my childhood, only coming up for air when I heard, “Dad, where are you?”
The word “nostalgia” comes from two Greek words, “nostos” and “algos.” Nostos (homecoming) and algos (pain). Is it actually a type of “home” that we long for when we pick up the old mitt or smell the sea?
It was the poet William Wordsworth, and other romantic poets, that first wrote about nostalgia as something positive. Before Wordsworth nostalgia was a clinical condition. A literal term used to describe the experience of depressed soldiers far from home. But while Wordsworth, and company, may have transformed the term itself but they didn’t invent the experience. Us humans have always looked backwards, with a mix of imagination and memory, to some lost, but once held, gold.
But these nostalgic memories are not precise—they are more poet than scientist. Lonely in a new city, it will tell you stories of your old city; it will paint images of friends, conjuring up sounds of laughter. It will pretend that the old was a place without pain. It will convince you that a return to the old will free you of all loneliness.
When my daughter was young I found myself lamenting her emerging adolescence. I wanted to, albeit briefly, fence her off from her teen years, keeping her from the casual cuts of middle school and everything else that would lay beyond. Keep making up words. Dance. Twirl. Don’t stop wearing your Halloween costume in May. This is common, parents often project their own fears onto their children. Others, like me, are reminded of their own loss of innocence in the development of a daughter or son. It is nostalgia, coursing through, inviting us to live through our children’s childhood with the hope of tasting a bit of our own lost Eden. But, once again, this is that “poet” memory employing creative license, the best childhood’s are only Eden-adjacent.
What if this “home-ache” was a holy instinct? What if, in each moment of nostalgia, you were actually beckoned deeper, past your childhood, to something more? Could the dim and lingering light of Eden hide behind and in between our ache and longings?
If so, nostalgia’s poetry can instruct our longings, pointing them past the sentimentality of baseball mitts and the smell of sea, towards what we all, ultimately, long for. Because it is not in returning to an old city or anything else, where we find what we truly desire. Our common ache is for a world without the paper cuts of gossip, loneliness’ dull throb, war’s uncountable evils, or our own regrettable temptations. C.S. Lewis, drawing from Plato, wrote, “A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.” Our crooked souls long for what we know must be.
We need not paw through our own past for scraps. Nor do we need to stack accomplishment upon accomplishment justifying ourselves with a bulletproof curriculum vitae. It is the church that confesses our empty belly will be filled in God’s finale as all that was lost will be offered back transformed–as a gift. There will be a table. Heaven and earth will wed. The dwelling place of God will be, again, with us. Eden, in the end, will be given back and any tear will tell a story not of grief but overwhelmed joy. In the end, nostalgia is not about the past, it is anticipation.
Honesty’s Promise
When I was 19 and drove a 1969 Ford truck, I had to turn the music up loud. The type of music didn’t matter, I just needed noise. It was how I’d wash away all the clicks and squeals from underneath the hood. Turn the music up, sing along, and any mechanical issue will be declared dealt with through the magic of avoidance.
Once, when the power steering pump and the headlights went out 80 miles from home I survived, having learned how to ignore danger until it hit me. But each winter the truck sat immobile. I eventually sold it. Months later it was found along the highway. The new owners left it abandoned and because they never registered it, it was still my problem.
The hidden but still loud signs of danger, the short-term fix of avoidance, these aren’t just car issues. Look close enough at your own life and you’ll witness the same aversion. One man buries his compulsive use of porn and contorted view of women under his last promotion and his house’s new fence. A woman holds a painful childhood so closely that it finds its way into her body. For every wound there are a thousand ways to hide it. Turn the music up. Another show. Spend the money. Another drink. Keep the headphones in. Fill every lunch slot. Do it all, but the squealing and rhythmic clicks will remain, until something gives. As Wendell Berry tells us, “To flee from [reality] is only to arrive at it unprepared.”
But if avoidance is a fool’s solution the alternative feels equally foolish. To admit guilt is to accept a sentence, we think. To accept responsibility is to find yourself on the hook. Seeking help offers the corresponding demand that we “do the work.” The Nietzschean so-called-wisdom is to hide weakness and to flex rather than confess.
It is this delicate and pulled space, between avoidance and admission, that is, I imagine, where most of us live. But while the way of Nietzsche might be normal it is us Jesus-followers who are called to a different path. We thumb our noses at shame, damning the hiddenness, reclining in brightness–cellulite, warts, and all the rest. And we are called to and to welcome all the similarly broken down into the cheery company of God’s lovely boneheads.
If we claim that we’re free of sin, we’re only fooling ourselves. A claim like that is errant nonsense. On the other hand, if we admit our sins—simply come clean about them—he won’t let us down; he’ll be true to himself. He’ll forgive our sins and purge us of all wrongdoing. 1 John 1:8-9 (Message)
Any real hope lies on the other side of honesty. And that is, it would seem, where God is as well, patiently beckoning us forward, approachable as a mother’s denim pant leg. But he is not just there, he is wherever you are. He is offering his hand. But there again is the deep breath, the fiddling with the latch, the pain before the healing, the light opening on what was kept hidden away, under the hood. The fear tempts us to turn back. This light is always, at the start, terribly startling. So, we are left to choose our pain, the kind that comes for us, imposed with headlines and shock, or the type we pass through on our way to remedy.
Love’s Three Tears
When I proposed the second time and she said “yes,” we had talked enough that we should have had a few degrees in it. Confident and soaked in the unearned saccharine love that comes easy, we didn’t know what we were doing. On our wedding day, off and on, I took deep breaths, each gulp of air a futile attempt to keep happy tears at bay. The heaving breath and salt tracks were prophetic, in an unexpected way.
Love, that word we toss around without blinking–a dollar in a tip jar–is still the word for it. We were in love. Fixated thoughts, flushed cheeks, unmanageable emotions, the non-stop fawning of obvious fascination–love came with its usual tells. But we were, much more than we realized, oblivious to what love will do.
A cynic would tell you it’s all a trap. The low levels of serotonin, the high levels of dopamine and cortisol, any Biology 101 student will tell you it’s not sustainable. Love can’t maintain its initial offer. Love knows that it’ll get you with the beauty and feels and hit you with the hidden fees.
We were not cynics. We were, in all senses of the word, romantics. We saw each other and felt springtime in our veins. Ten months later, in a different state, she went to classes during the day and I worked nights. We were surprised when our wounds knocked on the door and walked into our previously cheery lives. Humanity’s first marriage would have been a helpful template for us. Beginning with poetry (“bone of my bone”) and naked and unashamed oneness only to be bumped into exile by the pair’s own brokenness.
Tired and without friends and lacking the self-awareness that life would later give us, we raised our voices. Holding sworded words and clumsy with fatigue, we’d eventually retire, coughing out a few tears, sometimes embracing. We shared a wall with another couple, and they were always kind. Fresh after a fight, they would smile, when they saw us in the parking lot.
The more profound the truth, the more it can be reversed. Marriage is painful. Marriage is beautiful. The complexity adds to the mystery. Marriage, Eden’s echo of intimacy is also the recurring reminder of Eden’s loss. It offers the biggest tears and the loudest laughter, in arhythmic supply. But, fortunately, marriage is more than pain and beauty’ it is also covenant.
Covenant in Hebrew means “cut,” as in carve out a rock as proof of a lasting thing that is not easily double-back-able. The Christian ethicist, Stanley Hauerwas, has said that we always marry both the wrong person and the right person; a covenant ensures safety in the face of that realization.
As the wedding day tears transfigured into a tear of the frustrated and confused type we continued to sleep and wake and live in this sure thing, this protective enclosure called covenant. Sickness. Health. Wealth. Poverty. It is in this place of frustration and safety that we began to understand each other. At some point during that first year we started to know–just a bit–of what we were doing. We were learning to listen, understand, and forgive, which is the true weight of love.
Paul tells Ephesians, tells husbands and wives to “submit to each other out of reverence for Christ” (5:21). The word, this accused and maligned word, “submit,” comes from two words “underneath” and “support.” Hold them up. Go low. Carry each other. When practiced through winters of a spouse’s chronic pain or a battle with mental health or just the doldrums of a normal life, a third type of tears slowly emerge. These are not the tears of unbridled infatuation. These are not the tears of anger and confusion. They are tears of honest, battle-tested, knowing. The tears of proven love and of covenant. They say, “I know you. I see your pain and later we will laugh together” and these tears water all the gardens in our dust dry exile.
On Saint Dympha or A Model for Social Change
For centuries the residents of a small town in the north of Belgium have invited the developmentally disabled into their homes to live as guests. The hosts aren’t told what specific condition their guest has. There is no relation between the guest and the boarder, prior to lodging. Guests come from all over the world, and are not limited to language, or ethnicity. This practice has been going on for over 700 years.
Some have sneered at this practice. Care should be offered by professionals in buildings prepared to handle the developmentally disabled, the thought went. But, this unusual practice of hospitality has not only endured but over time it has shown itself to be more humane and offer more healing than other institutionalized models of care.
But, how in the world did such a costly practice become a local custom? Where is the common anxiety around the ‘disabled’? Where is the question, “What happens when they get angry and break my door or window?” Where is the reluctance to host a stranger within walls that once ensured privacy? All these questions, as real as they are unkind, aren’t immediately visible in the hosts of Geel, which makes this small town all the more puzzling. How has this alarming instance of altruism become normal? The explanation is equally startling.
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Over a thousand years ago a princess named Dymphna left her home in what we now call Ireland. Her father, a petty king, had gone mad after the death of his wife. The father, searching for a new wife that might rival his first wife’s beauty, turned his eyes to his own daughter. At 10 years old, Princess Dympha escaped with a priest as protection past the sea to the city of Geel, in modern day Belgium.
Dymphna, for her part, wanted nothing more than to live her life in unyielding devotion to God. And there, in Geel, she did. There were a few miracles, at first. A sick person healed. Another plagued by the whirlwind panic of anxious thoughts, made still and sober as a windless day. With money she brought from Ireland, she built a home to care for the sick and dying. The miracles continued and while far away from the kingdom she stood to inherit, she in Geel, became an exile queen. Her renown spread across nations until, eventually, it reached the courts of her father. He came with soldiers and killed the young exile queen. Dympha was said to be 15 when she died.
The townspeople, struck by grief and reverence, built a church in honor their queen. Within a century it was overflowing with travelers seeking healing from maladies of both heart and mind. The townspeople, not knowing what else to do, took them into their own homes. They were called boarders, and never patients. They were given jobs and through work and familiarity wove seamlessly into the community of Geel. Centuries later Vincent Van Gogh’s father would consider sending his troubled son to Geel. A few centuries later, at its height, in 1938 the city hosted over 3,000 boarders. Some stayed for days, others months, others their entire lives.
What has the power to convince a city that welcoming others, different in language, intellectual ability, and ethnicity is normal? Where is a model for actual social change? Governments and think-tanks and NGOs spend millions on this quest. Hard and soft-power push agendas but lack the ability to change our hearts. Books have been written that detail out steps that, if only practiced, promise the desired change. Some, disillusioned by their broken effort, have sighed, calling all these efforts futile. Where is the able tactician? Where is the heart changing teacher? Where is the philosopher of this age? All the high-falutin dreamt up blueprints show up in the real world beautiful sand.
Perhaps that’s the point. It is the forgettable Galilee that raises Jesus and the bustling Jerusalem that kills him. It is the small and unbecoming, the meek and mixed up, that stand with trumpets at the front of God’s parade. And so it was with Dymphna, who–even in her death–held this strange power.
In Defense of Holiness
If you’re older than 30 and younger than 45 and you happen to follow Jesus, you may remember a youth leader recommending that you get rid of all your CDs that were potentially corrosive to your faith. I never got this recommendation myself and, frankly, I’m glad. If I was thus encouraged I would have gone all secret police on myself and flipped through lyric books with an inquisitor's eye. I can only imagine this because I loved Jesus so much and if someone told me that truly following Jesus required me to sell my bootcut cords and Timberlands and walk around in a potato sack, I would have at least considered it.
At some point during my senior year of high school in 2000, deep inside my chest, an egg cracked open and the Holy Spirit came fluttering out. I had new desires that stirred a hunger for scripture and more of Jesus. I would happily renounce anything that got in my way. I had already thrown away the porn mags that were hidden under my mattress. I had declined every invitation to get stoned or drunk. No youth leader told me to do that, I just did. I felt complete and whole and I wanted more of the One who made that happen.
The 18th century Christian leader, John Wesley, was convinced that you could be so affected by the flame of God’s love that close enough all sin would burn away. He called it being “perfected in love” and while he never claimed to have experienced it, he met those that had.
There may be a few alerts going off in your brain with the word “perfected” or “all sin [...] burn away” but try to sneak Wesley’s phrases past the bullies of cynicism and you may realize that this is what everyone that follows Jesus truly longs for. Not “perfection” per se but an eye to eye experience with the one that is Love. What else can you do there but let go of the sin revealed to be as insubstantial as styrofoam in his presence.
Wesley didn’t drum up this doctrine in a whiteboard session and attempt to market it as his own novel addition to Christianity. He learned it from mothers and fathers of the early church who spoke of God’s own nature breaking open inside the willing. Some of these mothers and fathers endured desert heat and solitude in their quest for intimacy with the divine; others experienced the pointed edge of Caesar’s power, each happily renouncing the world to gain Jesus.
The problem with the purging of the CDs (and related ventures) is that it became a practice that was half-enforced, without much thought, and often imposed on the partially willing. Whether it’s Communist Russia, Medieval Christianity, the rising current of secular soft-power, or mid-90’s youth group culture, imposing anything on a half-interested populace is an expression of problematic power which always leads to rebellion. But while the legislation of sin and virtue always produces bad fruit, the follower of Jesus is not excused from renouncing the world, the flesh and devil. But the point is not in the renouncing, it is in the declaring. And if what we declare is the worthiness of Jesus above all earthly power it might be natural to, at very least, long to be “perfected in love.” You may even find yourself not needing a few previously cherished songs.