Blessed are the Single

I spent much of yesterday afternoon feeling sorry for myself.  My stalwart band of single friends has been steadily shrinking since graduation, but recently people seem to be deserting in record numbers, leaving me (and a few others) to fend for ourselves on the battlefield of loneliness.  Okay, that metaphor was a little melodramatic.  But, really–it’s kind of depressing that my social life might now consist of merely tagging along as the third (or fifth, or seventh…) wheel on my friends’ dates.

So yesterday, as Danielle (one of those traitors) and I prepared for our 56 Club lesson series on the Beatitudes, I was kind of grumpy.  “We should include ‘blessed are the single’ some week,” I suggested, only half joking as I lay on the ground drinking my Blenders smoothie loudly and bitterly.  It’s not that I’m so desperate for a man; it’s that romantic relationships are necessarily exclusive, and the vast network of these relationships sometimes seems to leave little room for the unattached.  Sometimes (after a little too much wine and Sister Wives) I even find myself questioning the wisdom of monogamy: Christ redefines family relationships in terms of the Church–in which we’re all one, not just little pods of couples or nuclear families–right? 

But then the kids showed up, only five of them this week, and we all went out into the warm, early summer evening to play on the church’s fantastic new playground, and I climbed high up on the jungle gym and went down the slide backwards and joined the kids in laughing at Jason when he spun too fast on the merry-go-round and almost threw up.  I felt joy.  And I remembered how especially joyful these past two weeks have really been, even when (and often because) I’ve been surrounded by my twitterpated friends.

And I breathed a prayer of thanks I’ve been repeating lately: God, thank You that You honor singleness, that, truly, eschatologically, I am blessed.  Christianity declares that singleness is holy, that it’s not a sign of incompleteness, that, in fact, it’s a gift.  It doesn’t promise I won’t be lonely, it doesn’t mean I want to be single forever.  But, counter to the conventional wisdom of other traditions (sorry, Mormonism, I’m mainly thinking of you), it insists that there is nothing wrong with me because I’m single.  Loneliness is not the same as inadequacy.  I have an equal place in the economy of the Kingdom, in which curses turn into blessings and the meek can inherit the earth.  I am enough, and God is enough, even when singleness sucks.

(And yes, I believe God also blesses marriage, and I’m usually a fan of monogamy, too.)

Eschatology & Me

Confession: decades after the craze first started, fully aware of the problematic implications of its theology, I have starting reading Left Behind.  I figured it would be a good thing to do, considering its historic popularity, and also because much of my generation (myself included) has been scarred by rapture nightmares evoked by the series.  I’m about to finish the first book, and I just returned from picking up the second at my local library.  (I also checked out The Brothers Karamazov–I’ve been meaning to read it for a while, but I also needed it to cover up my more shameful selection on the walk back to work.)

It’s actually worse than I thought it would be.  Danielle had to endure constant interruptions from her own book while we ate dinner together last night.  “How can you think that verse refers to the anti-christ?!”  “Why are these conversion narratives so homogenous?!”  “Paul’s talking about the resurrection, not the rapture, you idiots!”  (After this interjection Danielle mentioned something about Christian love…)  I guess there are worse books out there right now (Twilight, anyone?), and I do consider Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins my brothers in Christ, but it’s hard for me to read Left Behind unemotionally, because (1) it’s hard for me to read any theological work unemotionally, and (2) they’re messing with my favorite branch of theology!

When I tell people about my interest in eschatology they usually assume I’m asking the same questions Left Behind purports to answer, just coming up with different answers.  “Oh, so are you post-trib?  Post-mil?  Preterist?  What’s your expected timeline of the last days?”  I suppose there’s some validity to hashing out possible answers to those questions – theology always has practical implications – but the reason I love eschatology isn’t because I think it’ll help me predict the future. 

I love eschatology because it helps us imagine (through a glass darkly) a redeemed world consumed with the presence of God.  It rejoices in the reality of Jesus’ resurrection, and also in the anticipation of our own.  It gives us space to ponder, imperfectly, bigger questions.  Where are we going?  What does it mean that all of creation will be redeemed?  What role will memories and relationships have in the eschaton?  How do we live, now, in the tension of the already/not-yet Kingdom of God?

I don’t like Left Behind (so far) because the theological questions are so settled.  “Here, watch this video our pastor recorded before the rapture, pray for, like, five minutes, and then you’ll be saved.”  And the Christians all knew exactly what was coming before it happened – down to the last detail.  You’ll find that on said pastor’s tape.  Plus, the Bible has apparently become so perspicuous that, within a week, the new post-rapture Christians can figure out the whole shape of the last days.  But… really?  Did Israel know exactly what to expect the Messiah to be?  (Answer: no.)  And if a God-incarnate-baby came in place of a military hero, how can we think we know exactly how He’ll come again?

This Evangelical brand of theological simplicity, of almost arrogant knowing, seems to come from another eschatological mistake: we’ve misimagined our place in redemption history.  We think we know everything about God, so there’s no room to be ever-growing in both our answers and our questions.  But what if we don’t have everything about God figured out yet?  What if we don’t even have the Bible figured out yet?  What if our minds are still awaiting full redemption, too?  What if God’s story isn’t over yet?  What if it gets even better?  A true study of eschatology is a joyful act of faith that it will.

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I’m all about art as a way to do theology, so here’s an (incomplete) list of reading, viewing, and listening that has stretched my eschatological imagination beyond Left Behind.  I recommend it all!

• The Great Divorce, by C.S. Lewis
• The Last Battle, by C.S. Lewis
• Revelation 21-22 (The Bible?  Who would have thought…)
• the last chapter of Original Sin: A Cultural History, by Alan Jacobs – But read the whole thing first.  I like that Jacobs, after spending so much time talking about the implications of sin, closes his book picturing the story of redemption as a literary comedy.
• Give Us Rest or (A Requiem Mass in C [The Happiest of All Keys]), by DavidCrowder*Band – An evangelical band basing their whole last, epic album on the Requiem Mass?  Yay, ecumenism (a sign of the end times??)! 
• “The End” (the last episode of Lost) – I don’t agree with all of their implied theology, but the eschatological reunion at the end is beautiful.  And, come on, the title of the episode is eschaton in English!
• “End of the World” (Parks and Recreation season 4, episode 6) – This is mostly a satirical (and really funny) take on rapture predictions like Harold Camping’s, but the soundtrack to the last scene makes the whole thing seem genuinely eschatological.  A song called All Will Be Well (Gabe Dixon Band) at the end of an episode about the end of the world?  So great.
• The Return of the King, of course (although I’m not sure what the excess of endings says about Peter Jackson’s eschatology…)

Of Synagogue and Sacrament Meeting

Last Friday I tagged along with Julia and her boyfriend Jesse when they went to the Shabbat service at Congregation B’nai B’rith Santa Barbara.  I’d never been to a Jewish synagogue (and I couldn’t spend my Friday night watching TV like I usually do), so I jumped at the chance to expand my body of religious knowledge.  Jesse is Jewish, and Julia’s been attending Shabbat services with him for the past few months, so I felt comfortable going along as their guest.

Unfortunately we somehow missed the memo that the service started 45 minutes before we showed up, and Jesse gave me a hard time for forgetting to take off the cross necklace I wear habitually (he was joking… mostly), but for the most part I really enjoyed myself.  The prayers sung by the congregation were beautiful interpretations of Torah passages, and the sermon was delivered by a spunky young woman rabbi.  Plus, I enjoyed covertly trying to figure out if a certain women across the aisle from us was my 11th grade history teacher (she’s Jewish and I heard she moved to Santa Barbara… I’m pretty sure it was her!).  I’m planning on going back another Friday night.

But I’ve been wondering just how comfortable I should have been, how much I should have enjoyed myself, especially when I compare my synagogue experience to my interactions with Mormons.  At the LDS chapel I very intentionally chose not to partake of the “sacrament,” but at the synagogue I didn’t think twice about drinking the wine and eating the challah used in a communion-like ceremony after the service was over.  At Institute I’m extremely cautious about the hymns I choose to sing and the prayers I choose to join, but at the synagogue I participated in every (English) prayer I could.

See, one of my interfaith dialogue pet peeves is when Mormons assume that they believe everything I do with a few additions, that I’m “on the right track” on my “faith journey”… with the implication that I just haven’t arrived yet, that maybe one day I’ll be more completely evolved.  I believe in the authority of the Bible–which is great!–but it’s too bad I don’t have the more complete understand of this ambiguous book provided by modern-day revelation.

This kind of thinking is annoying, because: (1) it’s frustratingly condescending, (2) I think it misrepresents most Mormon teachings on mainline Christianity (we did add things like creeds that Mormonism teaches corrupted pure, New Testament Christianity), and (3) it reduces millenia of diverse Christian thought and practice to one neat package of doctrine that just serves as a precursor to the “Restoration.”  It tries to tell me what I and my community believe, and leaves no room for me to bring something new and challenging to the conversation.  This attitude is so prevalent at Institute that it’s refreshing when a teacher or student says something directly against Christianity.

So I want to avoid doing the same thing to my Jewish friends.  I think most Christians view Judaism the same way many Mormons view Christianity: as a quaint, less evolved version of “real” religion.  We host our own Passover sedars, read historical fiction about the Holocaust, and some dispensationalists even turn to Christian Zionism to protect the Jews… but only as a means to ushering in Christ’s return.  Is our popular fascination with Judaism, our willingness to sentimentalize Jews as more honorable people than, say, Muslims, condescending?  Do we assume we know everything there is to know about this ancient and complex religion just because we’ve read the Old Testament?  Are we silencing Jews by insisting on narrating their stories, neatly summarizing their theologies?

I’m quick to dismiss Mormon interpretations of the Bible that don’t align with the theological training I’ve received, but I’m sure most Jews would do the same with the way Christians apply messianic prophecies to Jesus (or disagree that certain prophetic writings are even messianic!).  My Christian understanding, of, say, the “other sheep” Jesus mentions in John means I don’t believe that the Book of Mormon’s stories about Jews in the Americas are true, but, positively, it could also teach my Mormon friends about my own views on what it means for gentiles to be included as part of the people of God.  Likewise, we Christians could learn from Jewish interpretations of books like Isaiah not just that Jews don’t believe Jesus is the messiah, but what past or future events they ascribe to those particular prophecies.

Again, I’m not a relativist.  I believe the Christian story best describes God and His interactions with humanity, and part of that story involves Christianity’s own theological understandings of the role of the Jewish nation.  We’ve somehow been grafted onto the olive tree that is Israel (not the modern nation-state), and that means we need to think and speak about that relationship.  But let’s also allow our Jewish friends to speak for themselves.  We don’t have to pretend to agree about everything pre-Jesus; respectful disagreement and mutual education is far more appropriate.  Maybe we need to consciously allow for some degree of tension when we enter into Jewish spaces like the synagogue I visited–not to create animosity between two religious groups, but to wrestle both individually and collectively through the implications of our respective beliefs and practices.

So the question I’m still asking is: to what degree should I participate in Shabbat services if I end up going back?

Lent: Staying Awake

“We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God.  The world is crowded with Him.  He walks everywhere incognito.  And the incognito is not always hard to penetrate.  The real labour is to remember, to attend.  In fact, to come awake.  Still more to remain awake.”  ~C.S. Lewis

That’s the quote my pastor selected as the “thought before worship” this Sunday, an interesting thought to consider on Transfiguration Sunday, when we remember the blatant revelation of Jesus as the Son of God to Peter, James, and John.  I never before noticed how stark the juxtaposition is between this Sunday and the following Wednesday: Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, a season in which we practice solemnity and self-discipline, bearing in mind Christ’s own suffering.  It, of course, ends with the biggest celebration of the Christian year–Christ is risen!–but perhaps the glory of the Transfiguration is part of the Lenten story, too.  The Transfiguration is a brief burst of holiness, an event that leaves Jesus’ disciples speechless or babbling.  It reminds us that God walks among us, even when He walks incognito.  Like Christ’s painful walk to Calvary between Palm Sunday and Easter, like our own stumbling journeys between Eden and eschaton, our somber Lenten path is bracketed by unavoidable inbreaks of the presence of God–events that would startle even the soundest sleeper awake.  One day, every knee will bow, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

The challenge is to stay awake now, to remember Jesus transfigured even when He’s walking beside us, invisible.

I’ve identified two especially challenging barriers to my own everyday wakefulness, and this Lent I’m going to see what happens when I mindfully regulate them:

#1–The internet, specifically, T.V.
It’s far too easy (at least, for me) to hop on the computer and end up wasting hours browsing Facebook, StumbleUpon, etc, not to mention the amount of time I spend watching T.V. on Netflix or Hulu every night.  T.V. is my go-to activity when I’m tired and don’t want to think–I recently realized, to my chagrin, that I consistently follow nine shows, and that’s not even counting older seasons of other shows I watch when nothing new is on.  Goodbye for Lent, T.V. (except for when I’m watching socially–trust me, the vast majority of my T.V. time is solitary).  And I can’t really avoid the internet when I’m at work, but during Lent I’m going to stay offline when I’m at home.  What will I do with my hours of free time on weeknights now?  I have no clue, but I’m going to have to figure it out.  I’m hoping to develop more contemplative spiritual practices.

#2–Food
T.V. and food often go together.  I eat when I’m bored, or when my brain’s turned off (sound like prime T.V. watching time to you?).  Or I read while I eat my meals, totally oblivious to what I’m doing.  This means I often overeat, which is both unhealthy and wasteful.  So during Lent I’m getting rid of my food of choice–junk food (it’s much easier to binge on chocolate or potato chips than on veggies!).  I want to be more aware of what I’m doing when I eat, so I’m also going to try to pray before I eat anything, thanking God for His provision, for the next forty days.  We are ashes to ashes, dust to dust, but in a time and place of abundantly available food it’s easy to forget that we are fundamentally dependent on God to sustain us.

So those are my Lenten intentions.  May I emerge celebrating Easter more wakefully.

I’m currently…

• reading T.S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday.
• writing a piece explaining the seasons of the Church for one of my Institute teachers to use in her New Testament class.  She requested I do so after our long conversation about Lent and the Church calendar last night.
• preparing to guide my 56 Club (fifth and sixth grade youth group at my church) kids through the church’s Ash Wednesday service tonight (and planning for a BBQ on Sunday!).

Prayer for a Strange Season

NOTE: I’ve been thinking about much more than just interfaith dialogue in this strange post-college season, so I’ve decided to expand the breadth of this blog.  I’ll write what I want, yo, because, well, no one reads this blog anyway, and writing is how I best process my thoughts and feelings.

I was introduced to the following prayer by my friend Jasmine at a recent meeting of our prayer home group, and I found it particularly apropos of this current stage of life:

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O Thou who art the Lord of the night as of the day and to whose will all the stars are obedient, in this hour of darkness I too would submit my will to Thine.

From the stirrings of self-will within my heart:
From cowardly avoidance of necessary duty:
From rebellious shrinking from necessary suffering:
From discontentment with my lot:
From jealousy of those whose lot is easier:
From thinking lightly of the one talent Thou hast give me, because Thou hast not given me five or ten:
From uncreaturely pride:
From undisciplined thought:
From unwillingness to learn and unreadiness to serve:

O God, set me free.

O God my Father, who art often closest to me when I am farthest from Thee and who art near at hand even when I feel that Thou hast forsaken me, mercifully grant that the defeat of my self-will may be the triumph in me of Thine eternal pupose.

May I grow more sure of Thy reality and power:
May I attain a clearer mind as to the meaning of my life on earth:
May I strengthen my hold upon life eternal:
May I look more and more to things unseen:
May my desires grow less unruly and my imaginations more pure:
May my love for my fellow men [and women] grow deeper and more tender, and may I be more willing to take their burdens upon myself.

To Thy care, O God, I commend my soul and the souls of all whom I love and who love me; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

–A Diary of Private Prayer, by John Baillie

On Being Unpopular

Advent: Joy

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world.  Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable.  Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
-from “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” by Wendell Berry

Church Exchange, Part 2

A couple weeks ago I wrote about Brad’s and my experience at the LDS church.  Here are–finally–my reflections on the service we attended that same day with the missionaries and Alex at Santa Barbara Community Church:

SBCC isn’t “my” church (I usually worship at Montecito Covenant Church), but it’s home to Brad and some of our other friends.  Plus, they have an evening service: perfect for scheduling around the ward’s morning meetings.  And, of course, I acknowledge that SBCC is part of the universal Church; I’m fully comfortable worshipping with my brothers and sisters who are part of that local body.  This point–I hope–spoke well of the Church’s (often halting, stumbling) progress towards unity.  Our diversity can be both a blessing and a curse in our interactions with Mormons.  On the one hand, it was partially inter-denominational bickering that made Joseph Smith question traditional Christianity, even to the point of declaring that the Church no longer existed on earth.  On the other hand, our diversity proclaims the value of theological debate, of cultural contextualization, and of God’s own creativity and glory that eludes denominational confinement.  Elsewhere I’ve written more extensively about the importance of ecumenism in the realm of interfaith dialogue.  Suffice it for now to say… it’s really important.

The service began with a pretty sweet worship set–yeah, that’s right LDS church, our music is way cooler than yours.  ; )  I let my mind wander a bit during the announcements that followed, and suddenly I realized that I had forgotten to have the “communion talk” with the guys.  See, that morning during the LDS service Alex had told us to feel free to take the “Sacrament”–the Mormon equivalent of communion.  As he explained to us later, it wouldn’t have mattered if we had taken the Sacrament because it doesn’t become effective until after baptism.  In Mormon theology, the Sacrament is a renewal of baptismal vows, a kind of mini-baptism performed each week.  Brad and I, having not been (properly) baptized, would have just gotten some free bread and water (score!).  We didn’t, because we don’t consider Mormonism part of the Church, and communion is something we both believe should be taken only by a group of (“orthodox”) Christians.  At Montecito Covenant, for example, we say the Apostles’ Creed–one of those darn creeds Mormons believe is an “abomination“–before taking communion.  I had meant to talk with Alex and Elders Smith and Harris before the service at SBCC to let them know–sensitively–about our stance on communion, but the missionaries had been running late, so I forgot.  Now, during the announcements, I nervously tried to figure out what I would do if they tried to take the elements (SBCC goes with the get-up-and-come-to-the-table approach, rather than the pass-the-plate one).  Awkward confrontation in church?  Not my favorite thing in the world.

I grew increasingly uncomfortable regarding the communion question as the service went on.  The pastor had chosen this week to preach a sermon on hell–on the “narrow door” described in Luke.  Okay, yes, this passage is in the Bible, and I think I believe in hell, but did this have to be one of the only weeks I’ve ever heard a sermon on the topic in my life?  Plus, the context of this passage (which we didn’t discuss) juxtaposes the exclusivity of salvation with the expansiveness of the Kingdom: it’s like yeast that levens large amounts of dough.  The point of the sermon was mainly to encourage costly discipleship–something I think the Evangelical world definitely needs to talk more about, and something that I think is actually really helpful in dispelling a common stereotype Mormons have about Evangelicals: that our emphasis on grace creates a do-whatever-you-want religion.  So I exaggerated a little bit: it wasn’t a “sermon on hell,” at least, not the fire-and-brimstone preaching that phrase connotes.  But the thrust of the sermon was, “Make sure you go through the door!  Don’t be left out!” and I had to make sure my Mormon friends were “left out” of communion.

My Religious Studies senior seminar this past year focused on ecumenism: the visible unity of the Church.  We talked a lot about communion as both a means and sign of unity, and learned to collectively mourn our inability to take communion with, say, our Catholic brothers and sisters.  This scenario was different, because, well, Mormons aren’t Catholics.  Interfaith dialogue isn’t the same as ecumenism.  But there’s something that’s still painful about the fact that I can’t include these friends at the communion table, especially when they claim to worship Christ, too.

I’ve alluded to the fact (in previous blogs) that I think the question, “Are Mormons Christian?” is usually answered too simply.  I don’t know the answer, but I draw my provisional view partly from John 4: the story of the Samaritan woman at the well.  We usually hear the story explained as an example of Jesus approaching the “least of these” to offer Himself as living water, and there’s nothing wrong with that interpretation; I think it accurately describes one level of the story.  But lately I’ve been reading this encounter as an example of healthy interfaith dialogue.  The woman is surprised that Jesus would even talk to her, much less ask her for a drink, not just because she has had five husbands, but because “Jews do not associate with Samaritans” (4:9).  Like contemporary Mormons and Christians, the Jews and the Samaritans were closely related religious groups with differences significant enough to cause widespread animosity between the two.  The Samaritans were Jews that had intermarried with other races (definitely not kosher), and they also accepted only the first five books of the Old Testament (the Torah) as canonical.  The two groups even argued over the proper place to worship God: “Our ancestors worshiped on [Mount Gerizim],” explains the woman at the well, “but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem” (4:20).

Nevertheless, Jesus chooses to engage in His own kind of “interfaith dialogue.”  “Believe me,” He declares, “a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.  You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews.  Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.  God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth” (4:21-24).

Jesus isn’t a relativist.  He tells the woman that Samaritans have an incomplete understand of God and upholds the “scandal of particularity” that “salvation is from the Jews.”  But He still declares that the Samaritans worship, even if it’s “that which [they] do not know,” and that one day they’ll be able to worship in both “the Spirit” (which they already do?) and “in truth.”  And the woman’s response is significant, too.  Even without the more complete picture of God the Jews have, she knows to expect the Messiah (4:25), and she recognizes Jesus for who He is.

This passage isn’t a perfect analogy.  It’s poor exegesis to overlay–with a simple, one-to-one correspondence–a contemporary religious movement on a theological issue facing the New Testament church.  The Mormons are the ones in this scenario, for example, that accept additional revelation as canonical, so maybe they’d be the Jews and we’d be the Samaritans (uh oh…).  But I think John 4 is a helpful, hopeful picture of what Mormon-Christian relations could look like ultimately, eschatologically.  I think the LDS church has a lot of things seriously wrong, and that means I can’t take communion with Mormons right now.  But it’s possible that one day I could break bread with Mormon Christians, if not in this world, then in the next.

The words “Jesus Christ” keep getting bigger in the LDS church’s logo; as one of my professors joked, soon they’ll market themselves into orthodoxy.  But, seriously, Pastor Greg Johnson, who led the trip to Utah I took this past spring, believes there’s hope that Mormon church might be making a slow, institutional return to the fold.  They do talk an unsettling amout about Jesus, and, even if they misunderstand who He is, they too recognize Him as the Messiah.  I hesitate to make pronouncements about whether or not Mormons are Christians.  I suspect some are, and some aren’t, and the proportion of each within the LDS church changes depending on how I’m feeling about Mormonism on any given day.  But it’s an intriguing question, one that beckons us to a liminal, ambiguous threshold.  And that’s why I keep asking it.

(Oh, and I didn’t have to worry about the awkwardness of thwarting my Mormon friends’ communion-taking after all.  The pastor used the language of “bread and wine,” so, even though the cup was only filled with grape juice, Alex and the missionaries conveniently misunderstood our sacrament to violate the Word of Wisdom (we found this out from Alex afterwards).  Usually it’s a bad thing that we misunderstand questions of metaphor as regards communion, but I was sure thankful for it that day!)

Church Exchange, Part 1

Last Sunday my friend Brad and I visited the El Camino YSA Sacrament Meeting–in other words, Mormon church.  Highlights included:
*Listening to a talk on kindness in which the prime example of the virtue was a lady who “used to sell Bibles” inviting the speaker, a former door-to-door saleswoman, into her house for a glass of water on a hot, discouraging day.  Yes–score one for the Christians!  ; )
*Earning a spot in the “Gospel Doctrine” Sunday school class.  Normally first-time visitors (and new converts) get sent to “Gospel Principles,” a more basic class.  Alex–our friend from Institute–confirmed that we knew enough to handle the big-time lesson.  Legit.
*In said class the lesson was on false doctrine, taking material from 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus.  One of the passages we looked at talks about silencing false teachers.  I briefly considered following this mandate by standing up and denouncing the teacher as a heretic, but decided that’s probably not what Paul had in mind.  Or maybe it was.  Oops.

On a more serious note…

On the drive home I mused aloud that I had found the service “surprisingly Christian.”  “Really?” Brad replied.  “It seemed pretty Mormon to me.”  [This isn’t the time to get into whether those two categories are mutually exclusive.]  I started to explain what specific aspects of the service gave me this impression, but I came up with some pretty lame and shallow examples.  I kept thinking about my observation the rest of the day and eventually realized that the Mormon church service hadn’t been surprisingly Christian; it had been surprisingly “normal.”

Here’s the thing about my job: I have a lot of free time.  So I spend a fair amount of time browsing the ‘net.  A couple weeks ago I discovered–and spent hours reading–exmormon.org, which offers itself as a resource for people who have left the LDS church.  A large part of the website is devoted to a discussion board, organized topically, on which former members can vent their frustrations and seek solidarity with their fellow unbelievers.  Of course, I’ve never been Mormon, but it was fascinating to read people’s stories of their experiences within the Mormon faith.

Not surprisingly, however, the overwhelming majority of these posts treat the LDS church with bitterness and contempt.  Apparently it’s pretty typical for ex-Mormons to leave the church disillusioned and angry, partly with the church for having “deceived” them, and partly with themselves for having been deceived.   The exmormon.org discussion board is full of exaggerated rants and personal attacks on Mormon leaders and lay members, some of which seem justified, and some of which really don’t.  I sympathize with the single woman in her thirties who was mercilessly pressured into marriage, but I just get irritated by the guy who delivers a drawn-out complaint about being “called” to serve in his local ward.  Yes, because church should be a completely passive activity to which we don’t contribute at all (I hope you can hear the sarcasm, here).  And then there are the conspiracy theorists, nervously anticipating the establishment of a Mormon theocracy (don’t vote for Mitt!).

But even though I think a lot of the posts are unfair, I have found myself all too eager to “side” with their authors against the LDS church.  Mormon-Christian relations, especially as regards theology, are often ambiguous, and sometimes it’s just easier to draw lines and condemn instead of remaining in that tension-filled middle space where our similarities overlap.  I’m all for maintaining distinctives (hopefully I’ll write more on this soon, because I’m often frustrated by my Mormon friends’ hesitancy to acknowledge them), but saying, “Amen!” to gratuitous attacks on this faith community probably isn’t the best way to do that, even if it does feel safer than defending a belief system I think is at least partly wrong. 

All that to say, since I had never before been to a Mormon church service, my expectations were colored by what I read at exmormon.org.  I expected to hear talks on marriage and gender roles and hymns like “Praise to the Man” (about JS, not JC) and “Oh My Father” (in which Heavenly Mother is also addressed).  I half expected to meet judgmental housewives and other congregants who would really rather not be there.

But instead what I got were fairly Pelagian teachings supported by large amounts of prooftexting: definitely not what I think the Church should be doing, but not “weird” in the sense that the ExMormons had prepared me to expect.  You can find this kind of teaching at many liberal Protestant churches (or even–gasp!–Evangelical ones).  And the congregation was mostly made up of people I recognized (and like) from Institute, and they seemed pretty happy to be at church (or at least happy that their non-member friends were there!).

I think it’s clear that I need to alter how I think of “weirdness.”  Mormonism increasingly looks more like mainstream America: hard-working, friendly, busy, patriotic, optimistic.  Anyone following the church’s recent PR campaign knows they are really into promoting that all-American image.

And why do I instinctively think of Christianity as “not-weird”?  Many of the angry posters on exmormon.org weren’t just ex-Mormon, but ex-religious, or even ex-theist.  Today I came across a posting titled “Mainstream Christianity and their [sic] strange beliefs,” part of an ongoing battle on the board over whether traditional Christianity is just as bad as the “cultic” Mormon church.  The author listed everything he finds “weird” about Christianity, including: “[Christians believe] that Christ is God incarnate, that he died and was resurrected, and that this action was necessary for the salvation of all humans.”

Yup, we do.  A few weekends ago at church I was talking with one of my pastors about my interfaith dialogue experiences, and he recalled one of his kids talking about how “weird” Hinduism was.  “You think that’s weird?” Jon replied.  “We believe in the Trinity, and the incarnation, and the resurrection.  Christianity is much weirder.”  And I think that’s how it should be.  “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18).

Lessons from the day:
#1: Don’t judge a religion based on rants from disgruntled former members (I sure wouldn’t want my faith represented by, say, an ex-Fundamentalist atheist).
#2: Don’t pretend Christianity’s normal.  I don’t believe America is God’s country, or that evolution is a scientific conspiracy theory, or that the righteous will soon be raptured while the earth burns.  I don’t fall into the common stereotype of the weird Christian, but I believe something far stranger: the story of God’s redemptive mission as told in and through His people and Himself.

A Confession

For the past month or so I’ve been hosting weekly Mormon-Evangelical conversations at my house.  It started when Elder Smith and Elder Harris (these are pseudonymns)–the missionaries in my Institute class–asked if I would like to receive “more in-depth lessons.”  Well-versed in Mormonism as I am, I knew this meant they wanted to have the standard missionary discussions with me.  I’d never actually done this before, so I decided it would be a good learning experience.  Plus, I’d been frustrated that, after attending Institute for several months, I had had very few conversations about the class material.  Apparently an hour and a half of class is enough religious talk for most people, and the post-class snacks are an enticing diversion, but I missed the kind of real conversation I’d gotten to have during my Utah trip this spring.

So I excitedly prepared for my first missionary “lesson.”  I warned the missionaries that I wasn’t at all interested in converting, but that I’d love to hear what they had to say.  I studied up in my I ❤ Mormons book about the best ways to welcome missionaries.  I added both lemonade (in case it was hot) and hot chocolate (in case it was cold) to my grocery list, determined to be hospitable without violating the Word of Wisdom. 

Then came the first discussion–if you could call it that.  Elders Smith & Harris arrived with Alex, another Insitute classmate (and required chaperone, since I was a woman at home alone).  After a healthy amount of small talk all three guys sat down in a row on one of our couches.  I, realizing that our living room layout is not the most conducive to comfortable dialogue, sat alone on the couch across the room.  They launched into their lesson, asking me about my religious background and why I don’t believe the Book of Mormon is inspired scripture.  Throughout the lesson I felt very uneasy.  I sensed that the missionaries considered themselves in a place of spiritual authority over me; their patronizing remarks about how I was on the right spiritual “track” were irritating, and I wondered if my gender had anything to do with their tone.  Even if I were to convert to Mormonism, I wouldn’t be able to hold the “priesthood” (think “of all believers,” except for women).  Overall, I was disappointed that the thoughtful discussion I had anticipated turned out to be little more than an opportunity to proselytize me.  They didn’t even accept my considerate drink offer!

So the next week I invited my friends Julia and Brad to join us.  The conversation was much more satisfying: I didn’t have to be so defensive because I had others on my “team,” and we actually got to talk about real theological issues.  I was greatly encouraged, and wrote this (awesome) essay about how participating with the Church in these conversations makes me a better “missionary” in my own right.

This Sunday Brad and I are doing a church exchange with the Mormon guys.  At 11 AM we’ll all meet at the El Camino Young Single Adults Ward chapel in Goleta, and then at 5 PM we’ll attend Santa Barbara Community Church.  I’ve been looking forward to this ever since we planned it two weeks ago.  Last night at my weekly prayer home group (made up of a bunch of us recent Westmont grads who can’t figure out our lives), after Brad invited everyone to attend SBCC with us this weekend, some of our friends expressed interest in coming to the LDS church, too.

You’d think, for all my glowing advocacy for participation in the Church as missional, that I’d welcome these new participants.  They’re good friends, and I should be excited that they want to enter in with me to this particular and unusual ministry, right?

Wrong.  I went home grumpy and irritated.

I do have good reasons for being uncomfortable leading a huge group of Evangelicals who are otherwise unfamiliar with Mormonism to an LDS Sacrament Meeting.  I know, because I interrupted my dear roommate’s practice GRE (sorry, Danielle) to make sure.  “Showing up en masse would be weird, right?  Like we just want to watch how the weird Mormons do their weird church services?” (I’m not very articulate when I’m angsty.)  I’ve been attending Institute for five months now, and Brad tagged along for many of those months, so we have context within the ward, relationships (however stunted) with its members.  Danielle agreed, even after I disclosed the following not-so-noble motivations, so I’m gonna push for keeping the group just me, Brad, and the Mormons this Sunday morning.

But then there’s this big part of me that wants to be exclusive for the sake of exclusivity.  I’m petulant because this “Mormon thing” has been my thing.  Especially during a season when I feel like very little about me stands out, like I have little to contribute to the world outside the confines of a classroom, I’m threatened by those members of my Christian community who are more gregarious, better able to connect quickly with strangers.  What if my friends start developing their own relationships with my Institute classmates?  I should probably rejoice that they’d be able to do so, but instead I just worry about my fears that I’ll, once again, be pushed to the sidelines.  I won’t be needed to mediate the two communities.  I might not–heaven forbid–even keep my status as the resident expert on Mormonism.

I think my emotions are at least partially justified.  Right now I’m reaching for anything that will make me seem “special.”  As much as I hate to fall into the stereotype of the insecure woman, that’s kind of what I am right now.  It has been a really rough six months, and finding my place within this particular group of people that make up my home group has been especially tricky.

But I hope that I can move beyond these issues to be able to welcome all willing partners in this “ministry.”  I pray that God will make me confident enough in my own sense of personhood that I can extend a kind of hospitality to those who so lovingly want to support me, or even those who are just curious about the weird Mormons (although, obviously, I’ll always have to be careful about how to do that!).

Ultimately, it’s not about me.