life: unmasked — i, fundamentalist

Today, I share a post about life: unmasked, a blog meme started by my sensational friend, Joy.

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We enter the season, dying leaves and whispered winter, when it is time to start thinking about the future. There is a graduate school application to fill out, interviews to be had, and the slow, toiling question of Next sits in the hollows of the cosmos of my soul, drips sticky-sweet into all the fragmented places and spreads thick.

I’ve had occasion recently to discover something: after a series of interviews and conversations, some concerned with an actual job and others with reflection on the concept of education as a whole, I have come to realize that I am a fundamentalist.

The confession shocked me. When I first came to Baylor, I considered myself religious, but with a progressive temperament that allowed me to place reason and faith in balance. I would objectively inform my parents in what I imagine was irritating condescension that the education in the liberal arts was not necessarily a Christian endeavor, that God could find a way through the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, speaking pagan ideals as if they were a sort of trinity all their own.

Now, nearly four years later, I find myself repugnant of an education model that supposes something like virtue can be taught without a firm rooting in the reality of the incarnate Christ. I see no distinction between philosophy and theology, for I am fool enough to suppose that any statement of belief is a theology in and of itself, that people are never loosed from theological discourse, that this whole great cosmos filled with all these little peopled cosmoses is saturated with the spiritual. That there is nothing, not one thing, that does not share in some way in a relationship to God. That He, omnipresent, is either accepted or rejected in every breath–that nothing, no movement, no action, is ever neutral, and that single vibrations of atoms change the course of history forever, and that He indeed holds this aching world in His hands–but more, so much more, for at the same time, “in Him we move and have our being.”

So I am a fundamentalist.

But I am a fundamentalist in the sense that Madeleine L’Engle describes in her achingly beautiful and delightfully titled Penguins and Golden Calves: Icons and Idols in Antarctica and Other Unexpected Places: ”I, too, am a fundamentalist, though the word is too often used pejoratively, to describe anybody who disagrees with a particular brand of Christianity. I believe the fundamentals of the faith … which to me are the rock of love on which I stand, the Love that was great enough to create not only the magnificence of the starry sky but each one of us … so yes, I think of myself as a fundamentalist, that is, someone who still cares about fundamental things.”

This is not to suggest, mind, that those who do not feel this way, who see the ability to teach something like virtue apart from God, are inherently wrong. This is, instead, a confession of my own inability. I cannot see it as they do, I simply cannot. I have tried, many times, and for a season I succeeded. I lost the touch of fiery Presence, for I supposed the better story was found in the vocabulary about God and not in Him, in the abundance Himself.

But now. Now there’s no retreat into that thinking. This place is too beautiful for me to leave, so here I shall tarry as long as He allows.

With this admittance comes the whispered worry, alongside whispered winter. Such a stance is an exiling one. Doors shut quickly to schools who, aligned with state restrictions and funding, cannot expressly profess belief. And I, with all my incarnational theories and references to people being cosmoses, am cast adrift in an odd world, an ocean of poetic memory and rooted faith, in which to speak of virtue is to speak of Him, to argue ethics is to ask what He would have us do, where the True, the Good, and the Beautiful are nothing without the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

What’s to be done?

As I write these words, I glimpse the dangers, how it could be seen that what I advocate here is a kind of rampant proselytizing, throwing my religious convictions into the midst of everything and at all times, such that suffocating dogma beats the Life out of the very Faith.

No. It’s not that.

It’s having you ’round for dinner. Cooking while we talk. I’ll ask you questions because I can’t help it, because I see you as a cosmos and I want to know what galaxies spiral in the vastness that is you. You’ll know I’m a Christian because I’ll speak of mystery without apology, because dogma turns my cosmos; but, I’ll be careful to give as much as is willing to be received, though liberal in the willingness to give.

Baking will be involved, for that’s where I do my best theology and oftentimes my best love. And somewhere between pie and coffee cups and grace, you would know exactly where I considered the Source of all gifts and talents to come from, and there, having hung up the worn coats of the problem of evil and the epistemological crisis, we would share laughter and pie and joy and you would see, transparent and true, that I don’t really know how to live any differently than this: having conversations about Him, because I am daft enough to believe it all matters and it’s all His.

What that means for Next, I don’t know. The brave face takes hold and I spill grace like consecrated wine on each day, claiming that I believe in the providence of Providence. And, in the grand scheme, I do.

But in the everyday, in the day I realize I am a fundamentalist and it means that the job offers shall be dicey and bric-a-brac, I worry.

I worry because I am human, fundamentalist or no, and I don’t know what sort of job I am going to end up with in this chaotic, broken world.

But–and this today I savor–in recognizing who I am fundamentally, I come to face who I am vocationally.

And this is enough. Oh, and somehow–this is enough for today.

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It is my joy, with Joy, to share here words that expose life honestly, openly, and messily. Some days my posts for this meme are about this chaos of being, other days I manage a bit more gentle words.Would you join us in sharing the vulnerable times, the unordered times, the unkempt rooms? 

© 2011, Preston. All rights reserved.