Man Turned In On Himself

Nothing clears a room faster than the word sin.

Sin. Sin. Sin. Sin. Sin. That’s all you Christians talk about and we’re sick of it. We don’t need it. We don’t want it. And we don’t believe in it anyway. So says the culture in 21st-century America.

But denying sin’s existence doesn’t make it go away. And without the recognition of sin, the gift of grace means nothing.

So where do we start? How can we even talk about sin when it’s linked like a keyword to leeches and bloodletting and Da Vinci Code drama, to hateful zealots, hypocritical priests, or wagging fingers all worked up about sex? Well, we might want to try this. Homo incurvatus in se. Man turned in on himself. Sin as the slippery slope of me, me, me. As the roiling sea we each contribute to and are then forced to swim in—us in our hoodies with our ear buds in, blocking out any and all input that does not delight or serve us, perpetually curving in on a world of our own creation. This Renaissance-era teaching put forth by Martin Luther nails the zeitgeist of our modern era. #ManTurnedInOnHimself. Deep in our hyper-individualistic hearts, we turn towards the sound of it, the truth of it, longing to find some answers there. Or maybe even something like grace.

That America is a monument to individualism is not news, but increasingly we can see the cracks: isolation, depression, apathy, anxiety, narcissism, addiction. Where once there was purpose, confidence, belonging, and hope, now there is more of a gnawing void. Now we trade in the town square for laptops behind which we disappear, hide, seeking to dwell unchallenged in worlds of our own design, ideology, ambitions, pleasures, secrets, shame, terror. We are masters of our own free will, but still we cry out in the dark each night, “who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24)

Man Turned in On Himself gives shape to this brokenness. Just picture a body curved in on itself—in the fetal position, say. The shape of the curve protects and defends the thing it is turned in on, guarding it and the right to have it to oneself in the secret shadow of the curve. It also creates a barrier between the heart’s desire and the things it wants to keep at bay: judgment, change, help, love, God. When man is turned in on his own desires, the world—despite his best efforts to the contrary— becomes smaller and darker. Without access to any power greater than himself—and with the sudden realization that he is, in fact, only human—he becomes trapped in the “hamster wheel” of his own thoughts and enslaved by his own feelings and desires.

Is it hard to imagine, then, that this perpetual incurvatus state would lead us to create—and be subject to living in—a nation where, over the past 30 years, anxiety disorders have increased by 1200%? According to the World Health Organization, America is, by a wide margin, the most anxious country on earth. If you don’t personally struggle with anxiety, it is a statistical certainly that someone in your inner circle does. And nearly half of those who suffer from anxiety will, according to Andrew Solomon, develop major depression within five years.

So what does all this anxiety have to do with sin? Well, let’s go back to the beginning. (Even if you don’t believe in Creation, the lessons still hold). In the Garden, God tells Adam “to guard, protect, keep safe, watch over, keep vigil.” According to Robert Kellemen in Anxiety: Anatomy and Cure, vigilance is the “God-given emotion to respond to a threat, and the constructive concern for the well-being of others.” In other words, vigilance is a good thing. It’s a gift from God. Ok, so now let’s take God out of the picture and what do we have? 320 million people waking up in America every morning still wired for vigilance but determined to be our own God.

Vigilance without God means manically scanning the horizon for threats or opportunities with no reassurance that we are under the care of a benevolent Creator, that justice will prevail, or that our neighbor is anything more than a competitor in a zero-sum world. Vigilance without God leaves us with this felt truth in our bones: if everyone’s in charge, then no one’s in charge. And how does that make us feel? Anxious. Because humans don’t fare well when no one’s in charge. The void must be filled. So now in lieu of God, we find ourselves subject to the worldview of whichever ambitious god-wannabees clamber to the top first. Or we ignore our true selves trying to be one of them, creating even more anxiety and disorder.

Enter the smart phone and gaming and Facebook and Tinder and Snapchat and a few thousand new apps a week, all to help us cope with our anxiety or our quest for control, and all drawing us every further in on ourselves (just a few more minutes) and away from the needs of the real (and often demanding) others in our midst.

This is the just one of the faces of sin lived out in the 21st-century. And we don’t need a preacher or a Bible or a church to see it. Because we already know. It was, in fact, written on our hearts (Jeremiah 31:33) and our clenched spirits testify to it everyday: the more we turn in on ourselves to increase our sense of control or avoid our myriad sufferings, the more we become a slave to that seeking and avoiding.

John speaks of this slavery when he says that, “everyone who sins is a slave to sin.” (John 8:34). Peter reminds us that, “people are slaves to whatever masters them” (2 Peter 2:19). Paul spells it out even more clearly, “I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:14-15). And Matthew delivers the hardest truth of all “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You can not serve God and wealth” (or power or pleasure or any of the other false idols we choose for ourselves and then desperately turn to as if they can save us).

"Bound Figure" by Brian Main
“Bound Figure”
by Brian Main

It is in light of this “slavery” that Jesus promises “we will know the truth and the truth will set us free” (John 8:32). That he speaks into the still, small place in our hearts, “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). And that He watches over us even as we reject Him, even as we turn inward again and again and again, issuing the same invitation he’s made to every man, woman, and child who came before us, and will make to all who come after we’re gone. “Turn back to me with all your heart” (Joel 2:12). “Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other” (Isaiah 45: 22).

(This post was originally published as a guest blog on RJ Grunewald’s wonderful site Theology for Everyday Life).

Why Do You Think America is the Most Anxious Country in the World?

I explore the possibilities this month on Theology for Everyday Life.

Beyond The Limits of Knowing

Another glorious jolt in my inbox this morning from Richard Rohr’s new series on The Wisdom Tradition. This passage in particular spoke to me. “Alongside all our knowing, accompanying every bit of our knowing, must be the humble “knowing that we do not know.” That’s why the great tradition of prayer is balanced by both kataphatic knowing, through images and words, and apophatic knowing, through silence, images, and beyond words. Apophatic knowing is the empty space around the words, allowing God to fill in all the gaps in an “unspeakable” way.

This is why the music of Taize creates such powerful worship experiences. Perhaps too powerful for some—the silence leading them places they may not want to go. Each chant refrain is a few simple lines sung in repetition. This frees the mind and the spirit from the task of reading and staying locked in the language and allows us to enter more deeply into the sung prayer.

The seeker’s heart is called back home. The impatient heart is infused with stillness. The troubled heart is unburdened and set free.
But the greatest gift of Taize worship is when the music stops and the silence starts, letting God and wisdom and your own soul come together to move the needle of your own understanding. Sometimes the silence lasts for 3 minutes. Sometimes 10. When I went to visit the Taize community in France, thousands of people would sit in corporate silence for 30 minutes between songs. It sounds crazy to our modern ears, but in that space it was luminous.

If you’ve never listened prayerfully to music like this, or have never tried sitting in silence as a method of prayer, be gentle on yourself. You’ll probably get pretty twitchy at first. When the monks at St. Andrews Abbey first instituted periods of silence after each sung Psalm—an ancient practice, with a similar rhythm—the monks were downright childish about it, developing sudden coughs and the need to drop things and retrieve them in protest. But try it. Just for a minute. And maybe the next day a minute more. You might discover elements of grace in new ways.

But this idea of knowing through images speaks to my heart as well.

"Closed Eyes" by Odilon Redon
“Closed Eyes” by Odilon Redon

This was the impetus behind The Renaissance Service, which gathered all sorts of unlikely people into God’s house thirsting for beauty, truth, and peace in new ways. These services used a blend of Taize chants with the glorious, liturgical hymns from Marty Haugen’s Holden Evening Prayer. You can see how even a small worship gathering can be blessed with his version of Psalm 141.

I miss creating these services. I’m wondering if they might be resurrected in some new form this year. I think that will be my prayer. Until then, let your servant now go in peace.

We Have A Lot of Unloading to Do

Last month I was talking to an 80-year old gentleman I know quite well. He’s bright, cultured, active, and very combative about aging and the whole notion of death. He is also no fan of “the religious.” And yet, last year he chose to fly to Spain for his annual hike and walk the Camino de Santiago, a renowned route of Christian pilgrims since the Middle Ages. Over the holiday, at dinner, the topic of my new book Loaded Words came up and so I asked him how he felt about, say, a word like Confess.

“Confession,” he said without hesitation, “Is one of the very few things that the church got right.”

I was startled, to say the least. I can think of a great many people who feel that confession is The Church’s way of trying to exert power over individuals, or keep people in a perpetual state of fear.

“Well, you know,” I said, trying to build on his thought, “If you are feeling that you want to confess to someone, you don’t actually have to go to a church. Any willing believer can hear your confession and offer you absolution.”

And then he said the most shocking thing of all. Swiping his hand dismissively, he snorted, “I’d never do that. If I’m going to confess I want to make sure it’s official.”

And so it goes in the cognitive dissonance that is the modern spiritual dilemma. Belief, disbelief, some belief, anti-belief, all rolled into one, and often time revealed under the finger scratch of these old, hard Bible words.

Last week I asked readers here and on Facebook to help me with a short survey I was doing to prepare for a conference next month. The simple, 10-question survey— Loaded Words: What do you think of when you hear these words?— was quickly shared by people both inside and out of the faith world. Many asked if I was going to share the results. And so below you’ll find, not a list of data and numbers, but rather the sort of human details that help us recognize the layers and disconnects that have been heaped upon these words, and the very real need for a thoughtful, intentional re-education process.

That said, I offer a few impressions beginning with the results of Question 5: Which Christian word makes you cringe the most?

1) Saved (by a wide margin)
2) Judgment
3) Born Again
4) Sin & Repent (tie)
5) Obey

(This was reaffirming as five of these top six unprompted answers are chapters in the book, Loaded Words. Obey, under the heading of Submit).

Other words with at least one mention: Tolerance, Blessed, Spirit-filled, Holy, Hell, Joel Olsteen, Adultery, Heathen, Christian, Evangelical, Fundamentalist, Culture, Pastor, and Praise Chorus.

Although the mention of Saved as the most “cringe-worthy” was unprompted, I concluded the survey with a more direct question:

Q10: Have you ever been asked if you were “saved” and, if so, how did it make you feel?

A few people had never been asked. One such answer was particularly compelling. He/she wrote: “No. They assume that I am.” This seems to indicate that this person participates in the world as a “believer” or affiliates to such an extent that no one would question it. His/her other answers reflected a disbelief in heaven, hell, and Satan, and confessing to another human being. They found both the words “Church” and “Christian” to be “mostly negative.”

Many people had been asked and were either neutral, fine, or happy about the question, saying it made them feel “comfort,” “calm and at peace,” “grateful,” or “confident in the blood of Jesus.”

But nearly two-thirds of the respondents (who appear to be a mix of both believers and not), had personally been asked the question and took deep offense to it. As to how it made them feel, their answers included: defensive, labeled, judged, eternally wrong, furious, stunned, violated, creepy, queasy, odd, irritated, shunned, sorry for the person who asked, “like they want me to be a cookie cutter of them, their religion and beliefs,” and “like they wanted to slap the person.”

One responded said this, “As a kid in the south, I was asked often. If you didn’t immediately say yes, people would surround you and try to save you. I learned early on to say yes, quickly.” This respondent’s other answers reflected a range of beliefs. About the words “Repent” and “Judgment,” he/she said that the word that came to mind was “church dogma” but as to whether the word Christian was positive or negative (Q7), he/she said, “depends on the person. Can mean Christ-like, good. Can mean judgmental.”

As we can see, Loaded Words are a complicated business. The second most complicated is, based on this small sample, Judgment. And not only because it is the second most cited “cringe” word, but also because it revealed such a broad range of meaning/understanding.

When asked what words come to mind when they hear the word Judgment, several people said, simply, God. They did not elaborate or editorialize. One noted it was “something that does not come from us but from God,” another that it was “God’s will,” and a third wrote simply “end of days.” There were also several who understand Judgment through the lens of a benevolent God, citing words such as justice, just, mercy, necessary, getting what one deserves—reward or punishment—even “jealous God.” One noted, “not worrisome, justice will be done for many.”

But the bulk of the responses fell into two distinctly different categories: 1) those who saw the word through the lens of a Supreme Being who was angry/punitive, and 2) an essentially human application of the word, in many cases formed by the behavior of Christians.

Some of the word answers from the first group would be: hate, wrong, fear, condemnation, shame, punishment, pay back, a price to be paid, a harsh God, and terror. It was interesting to note that the person who responded to the word Judgment with the word “terror,” said that being asked if they were saved made them feel “comfort.” A similar link was seen in two other respondent’s answers: 1) asked about being saved made them feel “fine, because I am,” and the words that came to mind about Judgment were “a harsh God.” And 2) Judgment to this person meant “God, saved or unsaved,” and the question about their salvation made them feel “calm and at peace.”

On the other end of the spectrum, there were answers about Judgment that did not include God, per se, but seemed to include a reaction to His people. Their words included: hypocrisy, hate, religion, harsh, unfair, small, close-minded, smug, self-righteous, discrimination, blow horn, religious, a—holes, “belief that isn’t positive,” “not living up to someone’s standards” and “judge me; judge you” (which actually comes from Jesus, Matt 7:1-3) One respondent wrote, “the word judgment in combination with religion makes the word small and narrow-minded.”

There were those who heard the word Judgment in wholly secular terms ie: lawsuit, decision, review, greater (greatness), consequence, decision by a court, thoughtfulness, “ideas and actions requiring our own internal judgment rather than judgment as punishment—or a scorecard—by a divine being.” And those who expressed a wide range of associations—both secular and religious. Here a single person wrote these words about Judgment: insight, judgmentalism, hate, justice, discerning.

Another wrote simply Hate under not only the question about Judgment, but also Sin, and Hell. Curiously, he/she said they had a positive association with both the words Church and Christian.

I will close with two responses that I found particularly moving. Judgment means “someone doesn’t understand you.” And judgment= “unkind seeing.” Although neither of these seem to directly acknowledge the Divine, they feel to me like a cry for one. “When I call, answer me, O God of justice; from anguish you released me, have mercy and hear me!” (Psalm 4:1)

More results later. Until then, let’s continue to ponder together the challenges of Loaded Words.

Tell the story

This month I was honored to have my story told by Concordia University. The story of how I came to faith, came to be a writer, met my icktank parter, Leann Luchinger, and the lessons we learned in our MA Theology program. If you only know me from my words on the page you might be interested to put a voice to it. Reclaiming the Christian Conversation Video.