That is more or less what I told the students at their baccalaureate service. Whatever your grade point average, whatever your relationship to religion, whatever people tell you about how the sky is the limit and you can achieve anything you put your mind to, there is a place where human knowing runs out. Strong winds really do blow through people’s lives, and the Spirit does not hand out maps showing where the wind came from, where it is going, how you are supposed to handle it, and how everything will turn out in the end. Only the Weather Channel does that.
The Spirit gives you life.
She comes and goes.
She is beyond your control.
Any questions?
I do not know how the sermon went over with the students, since I had no opportunity to talk with them afterward. They had lots of partying to do. The leaders of the Jewish and Muslim student organizations smiled at me when I sat down. The chaplain did not look stricken, which seemed like a good sign. As we all stood to sing the final hymn, the president of the college shared his hymnal with me. Since I knew he was Jewish, he startled me by singing harmony on every verse of the Christian hymn. When he registered my surprise, he leaned over and said, “I went to an Episcopal prep school. I know them all.” Two hours later I was on the airplane home, writing the final exam for Religion 101.
Preachers learn early on that we preach the sermons we most need to hear, and that was true of the one I had just preached as well. The story of Jesus and Nicodemus freed me from believing I had to know the answer to every question about what it means to be Christian. Church disunity, disrespectful evangelism, exclusive truth claims, triumphal language—I would never stop chewing on those bones, but they would not bother me as much once I allowed that I could never know everything there was to know about them. I could also stop worrying about whether I was Christian enough to stay in the room with Jesus. Thanks to his conversation with Nicodemus, I gained new respect for what it means to be agnostic—such a maligned word, so often used to mean distrustful or lackadaisical, when all it really means is that you do not know, which according to Jesus is true of everyone who is born of the Spirit.
Thanks to Nicodemus, I started borrowing a line from Maya Angelou, recipient of the 2010 Presidential Medal of Freedom, who said she was always amazed when people came up to her and told her they were Christian. “I think, ‘Already?’” she said. “‘You already got it?’”
“I’m working at it,” she continued, “which means that I try to be as kind and fair and generous and respectful and courteous to every human being.”1 She was in her eighties when she said that. It sounded like the perfect Christian baseline to me: how you treat every human being, neighbor and stranger alike. Even if you are still working at it, that is the mustard seed.
The greatest gift of my second birth, however, was being reunited with my birth mother—not the first one, who bore me in the labor and delivery suite at Lafayette Home Hospital in Lafayette, Indiana—but the second one, who bore me from above. Like plenty of other Christians, I had focused most of my devotion on Jesus through the years. Almost all of the prayers in my prayer book ended with “through Jesus Christ our Lord,” so I was conditioned to turn toward him every time I said, “Amen.” He was also the easiest Person of the Trinity to identify with. Even if I got the details wrong—height, weight, skin color, eyes—there was no question that God the Son looked human. He was put together like me. Well, almost like me.
God the Father, on the other hand, was the Big Invisible. In regal mode, He was the God of thunderheads and lightning bolts. In benign mode, He was the humming energy of the universe, filling up all the empty space between human cells, quantum particles, and planets. When I was a child I imagined Him with a lot of white hair and a great bushy beard, most at home on a gold throne in the heavens. God the Father was a dead ringer for Zeus.
God the Holy Spirit was the hardest to visualize. How do you picture the wind? The biblical image of the dove seems to have captured the artistic imagination. In one medieval painting after another, a downward facing dove holds steady over the crown of thorns on Jesus’s head while God the Father leans out a window of clouds even higher up. A falconer might be forgiven for thinking the dove looks more like a hawk dropping on its prey. This dangerous idea is repeated in depictions of the Spirit as a flame of fire, licking up the side of a wooden cross. It does not look dangerous in the logo of the United Methodist Church, but I think that is an illusion. Once the wind of God and the fire of God get together, the dove of God had better climb to a higher altitude. The Spirit is the least predictable Person of the Trinity, the one most likely to slip the leash and save in unorthodox ways. Just listen to the way Jesus defends her freedom to Nicodemus.
Her. For reasons beyond my understanding, this simple change of pronouns solves all my problems with God the Spirit. If I am born of her, she is my mother. If I am not born of her, she may yet return for me. No one knows when she may come blowing through the trees, the windows, the open doors, pitching all the papers off the desk and making the houseplants shiver in their pots. As scary as she may sometimes be, I can let her blow me around. When she flings me into other people, she is trying to tell me something. When she drops me off in unfamiliar places, I need to pay attention. She is completely trustworthy, even when I cannot explain a single thing she is up to. She comes. She goes. She gives life to all creation. I have plenty more questions, but the answers are not vital as long as God the Spirit keeps breathing on me.
Once I started reading up on the third Person of the Trinity, I discovered how many theologians were ahead of me.2 The feminine pronoun is not as important to all of them as it is to me, but the idea of divine multiplicity is—the idea that one God can answer to more than one name and assume more than one form. Even if Christians will not go higher than three, the case is made: unity expresses itself in diversity. The One who comes to us in more than one way is free to surprise us in all kinds of ways. This is especially meaningful to people like me, who mean to hang on to our singular Christian identity with one hand and our love of many neighbors with the other. Within the community of the Trinity, the one and the many do not cancel each other out. They lean toward one another in eternally circling, mutually inclusive love. That is the image in which the rest of us are made.
I will never figure this out, but that is good news, not bad. To walk the way of sacred unknowing is to remember that our best ways of thinking and speaking about God are provisional. They are always in process—reflecting our limited perspectives, responding to our particular lives and times, relating us to our ancestors in the faith even as they flow out toward the God who remains free to act in ways that confound us. If our ways of thinking and speaking of God are not at least that fluid, then they are not really theologies but theolatries—things we worship instead of God, because we cannot get God to hold still long enough to pin God down.
Lately I have begun to notice how my holy envy of friends in other traditions moves around the circle back to me. An observant Jewish friend tells me that he envies my ability to eat anything with anyone. He is committed to eating kosher, but sometimes it gets in his way. He watches the omnivorous Christians at the interfaith banquet and wonders what that must be like. A Buddhist says that she envies the devotion Christians show for Mary and her child. There are a few stories that feature the Buddha as a child, she says, but since his mother died a week after he was born there is nothing to compare with the tender relationship between Mary and her baby.
On my next visit to the Vedanta Center of Atlanta, the Hindu swami welcomes the students by offering an impromptu homily on the Collect for Purity—a jewel in the crown of the Episcopal prayer book. I have no idea how he came to know it by heart, but his talk includes quotes from the prophet Isaiah and the Sermon on the Mount as well. Listening to him speak so reverently of my sacred scriptures, I realize that I cannot recite a single verse of his. By the time he has finished, I am more aware than ever of the perfect love made manifest in Jesus—
and all thanks to my friend the swami.
On another occasion, I join two Christian friends and their Muslim colleague for lunch at the school where they all teach religion. When the Muslim woman does not order lunch, I offer her some of mine. She reminds me that it is Ramadan and says she will catch up after the sun goes down. Then we get into a conversation about the trouble in Israel/Palestine.
“At this point I think it is up to you,” she says, looking around the table.
“Us?” I say.
“You Christians,” she says. “You are the peacemakers, are you not? Perhaps you can see a way through where others cannot.” Clearly she does not know the same Christians I do. Or maybe it is a full-blown case of holy envy from her side, in which the neighbor’s yard looks greener than her own. Either way, her view of my tradition is so much more positive than mine that I sit up straighter.
Later, listening to a famous atheist being interviewed on National Public Radio, I am intrigued when the host asks him about atheist humanitarian movements. In hot spots all around the world, the host says, Christians show up with medical supplies, doctors, bottled water, food, and tents, often at great risk to themselves. Muslims do too. Are there any atheist efforts to compare with that, he asks his guest? The atheist cannot think of any at the moment. All of a sudden I see my crowd differently—even the ones who irk me by handing out Bibles with their aid. They are there, and I am not, which tells you everything you need to know about who is irking God the most.
In these and other ways I learn positive things about my tradition from people who do not belong to it, which triples the value of their praise. Without knowing it, they have joined the throng of my Melchizedeks—the perfect strangers who arrive with blessings on my tribe and go back to their own rejoicing. When I consider their gifts to me, I decide that part of being born again is looking for ways to return the favor, like the imam who sent my students away with the express wish that they be the best Christians, the best Jews, the best human beings they could be. Once you have given up knowing who is right, it is easy to see neighbors everywhere you look.
As far as I can tell, the only thing Nicodemus did wrong on the night he met with Jesus was to leave the room. If he had only been able to stay put with the sting of his ignorance a little longer—the fear of losing his grip, the anxiety of his unanswerable questions—if only he had been able to forgive himself, then a whole new way of life might have opened up for him. You should know by now that I am not suggesting he might have become a Christian—that is the old tape playing—but he might have found a new way to be a leader of the people that did not require him to be omniscient.
For all I know, the Spirit blew him back into the night at exactly the right time, but in my imagination he sticks around, and when Jesus asks him the million-dollar question—“Are you a teacher of the people, and yet you do not understand these things?”—Nicodemus leans toward him and says, “No, Rabbi, I don’t have a clue. Surprise me.”
10
Divine Diversity
In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?
JESUS OF NAZARETH
One of the greatest gifts that holy envy has given me is the ability to reimagine my own tradition. I would like to tell you that it is the product of gaining wisdom, insight, and perspective through the study of other religions, but that would not be true. Instead, it is the product of losing my way, doubting my convictions, interrogating my religious language, and tossing many of my favorite accessories overboard when the air started leaking out of my theological life raft. Only then was I scared and disoriented enough to see something new when I looked back at my old landmarks, many of which I was approaching from an unfamiliar angle.
I do not know if this has ever happened to you, but once, a long time ago, I lost a dog. She was only ten months old—my first Jack Russell terrier. She was wearing a new collar, so when she smelled something exciting on the wind just before sunset, she slipped her leash before I even felt her tug. Then she was gone, with more than a hundred acres to explore, while I ran behind her calling her name as though she cared. I chased her through brush, through running streams, and through barbed wire fences before she finally paused for breath and I grabbed her by the tail that had been cropped for exactly that purpose. Then she panted happily in my arms while I tried to remember where my house had gone.
About twenty minutes later I walked up a hill toward a barn, trying to figure out whether I had arrived at the Tiptons’ place or the Holcombs’. The barn was weathered, like the Tiptons’, but it was also unpainted, like the Holcombs’. Then I realized it was my own barn I was looking at, though from such an unfamiliar angle that it was as if I had never seen it before. I was also extremely stressed, which meant that I was much more invested in the dog in my arms than the barn on the hill. Either way, I was totally charmed when my own barn snapped into view, and I saw it as if for the first time. Should this ever happen to you—with a barn, a person, a photograph, or a religious truth—please do not overlook the gift. It is a great thing to see something familiar from an unfamiliar angle for the first time, even if it is because you have been worried and lost for longer than you would have liked.
After I saw the Nicodemus story from an unfamiliar angle for the first time, I was wide open to being surprised by new views of other familiar stories as well. This reminded me of something Jonathan Sacks had taught me back at the beginning of my journey—about how important it is for people of faith to make space for difference at the heart of our tradition. Common human values are great, he said, but when our groupishness sets in and we are looking for excuses to wipe each other out, we need stories from deep within our own tradition that show us another way. This is especially important for monotheists, he said, whose focus on one God can so easily lead us to believe we are the only apple of God’s eye. What we need instead are new understandings—each of us based on our own scriptures and traditions—that the unity of the Creator is expressed in the diversity of creation.
By this time it had become clear to me that human diversity transcends the diversity of religions. People of faith also need help living with people who reject faith along with people of uncertain faith, who come in a wide mix of colors, classes, cultures, politics, genders, means, and abilities. Any one of these differences has as much or more power to divide people than religion, which assigns religions the additional task of making room for difference as well as conferring blessings on their own followers. Fortunately, this is something that the great religions all have in common. Whether they confess faith in the same creator-God, they agree that the truth of their teaching hinges on how people treat one another: with partiality or justice, with dishonor or dignity, with cruelty or compassion.
When I began reimagining my tradition, I went back as far as I could—in my case, to the story of the Tower of Babel, which occurs early in the book of Genesis. According to the storyteller, everyone in the world spoke the same language at that point. They all used the same words, which made it easy for them to agree to build a city so grand that the top of its tower reached the heavens. They did this without checking with God first, and when God discovered what they were up to, God was not pleased. According to the book of Genesis:
The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the LORD said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” (11:5–7)
After that the people could not understand each other anymore. When they tried to talk, it sounded like babble. They got absolutely nowhere. With their unity in tatters, they left their half-built city where it stood and went away in different directions with anyone who could understand what they were saying. From that point forward, the story o
f humanity became the story of divided tribes and nations who had lost the ability to understand each other—and all because they disobeyed God.
That is how the story is usually told anyway. As with the story of Nicodemus, it is not what the Bible says, but for those who are not paying close attention it does seem to suggest that God’s original plan was for humans to be the same. Then we screwed things up, and God made us different to slow our malfeasance down.
For those who regard the New Testament as sacred scripture, the curse of Babel is reversed soon after Jesus’s resurrection, when in Acts 2 the Holy Spirit sweeps through a house in Jerusalem and gives the disciples the gift of tongues. They start speaking languages they never learned in school, so that people from all over the world are able to understand what they are saying. The damage done at Babel is undone by the power of the Holy Spirit—but only for a single morning. Once the disciples have settled down and their flames have gone back to the pilot light, they face the same challenges everyone else does: making themselves understood to people who do not speak their language. Like it or not, human diversity is here to stay. All that remains to be seen is how we will deal with it.
Emmanuel Lartey was the first person to reveal the counternarrative in the story of Babel to me. I saw his name in the program of a big religion conference where he was scheduled to speak about “polydoxy,” a word that was not in my vocabulary then and is not in my dictionary now. Lartey is a distinguished professor of pastoral theology who was raised in Ghana, which helps explain why he used the lens of colonialism to retell the story of Babel. That was the hill he climbed to see the story anew.
The way he reimagined the story of Babel, it was not about God’s judgment on diversity but God’s judgment on the dominance of one people, with one language, whose wish to make a name for themselves took over their lives. God saved them by confusing their language, so they could not complete their domination project. God defused their hegemony and scattered them like hot ashes, so their ambitious fire would not spread. In this telling, the moral of the story is that God favors the diversity of many peoples over the dominance of any one people. I could not write down what Professor Lartey was saying fast enough to keep up, so I hope if he ever reads this, he says, “Close enough.”
Holy Envy Page 16