when i live in the houses of the interpreters

I

For a few years in my undergraduate, I attended a church that I will politely call the Church of the Windowless Resurrection.

It was a church consumed with its own questions and its own frantic belief that doubt was the most virtuous aspect of non-faith.

Each week was a hodgepodge of frantically poor theology and each week my heart burned violent with grief because of it.

I have never felt the need to defend God, but I have seen far too many people trapped in the bondage and burden of bad theology that when I hear it spoken my skin crawls and my hands shake.

I want to tear down all the oppression and nuclear bomb the landmarks of the old order.

And so I would get loud.

Clever by a half.

I spun words white hot and wounded the misguided children of God and in that became one of them myself.

II

God came back last Friday.

He wasn't gone as long this time as the time before. I woke with a feeling in my bones that I knew what I was to do without knowing what it was, the itchy touch of purpose whispered against flesh.

I read 2 and 3 John, emailed my best friend about the NRSV's rendering of the endings, "to speak face to face," asking him if there was something happening there about the Old Testament language of face to face.

I read Wisdom 9 because I missed the lyricism of the deuterocanon.

Then I read the appointed readings for the day.

But you, mortal, hear what I say to you; do not be rebellious like that rebellious house; open your mouth and eat what I give you. I looked, and a hand was stretched out to me, and a written scroll was in it. He spread it before me; it had writing on the front and on the back, and written on it were words of lamentation and mourning and woe. He said to me, O mortal, eat what is offered to you; eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel. So I opened my mouth, and he gave me the scroll to eat. He said to me, Mortal, eat this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it. Then I ate it; and in my mouth it was as sweet as honey.

Ezekiel.

What can I say that is true of what happened when I read that passage? That I knew and yet did not know, that I felt the sudden prick of awareness of what He was calling me out of and into.

I have been given something specific, I have been given a particular task. That is mine to eat. No other. And I must return to anchoring myself in that.

III

A few weeks ago I wrote a post for Deeper Story about how our stories cannot be our dogma. They cannot be what we use to determine doctrine and best practices. I offered examples of setting up blog posts and scholarship when they were anything but, warned of the dangers of laying claims where we have little room to make them.

I was careful to never once say that I had the right to make pronouncements about dogma.

But.

Though I never once mentioned that I am in divinity school, that I am in a masters programme and entering a PhD in the autumn, it was surprising how many people latched onto those facts as evidentiary of what inspired my words. They discredited my point by parodying my meaning, asserting the tiresome and age-old foible of evangelicals that academics are in ivory towers, privileged, and removed from the real world.

I may be an academic, but that does not define who I am.

Over the past few months there have been increasing instances in which friends in the online community have asked me to weigh-in on a theological question or a translation issue. More often than not I was willing to accommodate, but I am wary to continue.

What I study in divinity school is the interaction between the arts and theology. I do not study Biblical languages. I do not study the Bible. I do not study biblical history, second temple Judaism, or theories of justification in Paul.

All of that has been learned on my nightstand.

My collection of books that I am reading consistently, the dinner table conversations I have, my best friend whom I email more often than not---there is no relation between the 2 and 3 John and the Old Testament wording, by the way---and my rigorous undergraduate training in the Christian tradition. I learned Greek in undergrad and keep up with it now, and am learning Hebrew on my own, reading the Psalms in chicken-fried French to edify my own wayward heart.

While this means I know a thing or two about Scripture, I have no interest in being set up as an authority of the Text.

That's not who I am.

IV

I've been praying about this blog a lot more lately. My posts have felt off, or, at least, the tensions of who I am and what I am doing have felt off.

When I read Ashleigh's wonderful post last week about a return to simple blogging, there was a moment when I thought that maybe this was about me. Maybe this was my answer. Maybe what I was supposed to do was return.

But it didn't quite fit. It's a perfect idea, a beautiful one, but it is not for me.

It was Friday, Ezekiel, when I realised who I am and what my books and my blogs and my daily conversations really are.

I am someone deeply, fully, impossibly indebted to a tradition that is larger than anything I have ever done or could do.

I live in the houses of the interpreters.

In the words of Augustine and Catherine of Siena, in Thomas Aquinas and Simone Weil, in Barth and Tillich and von Balthasar, in Beth Moore and NT Wright and L'Engle, and scores and dozens more that litter my book shelves, line the margins of my soul, have storied my own story.

Do not think me a biblical scholar. That is not who I am. (And pay care, here, that this is a post about me, not about all of us.)

Think me a translator.

What has been written on my scroll, what I have been given to consume, is a habit of translation.

I sit in the houses of the interpreters. I go from place to place and listen. Question. Wonder.

Then I come here or to manuscript pages or to my dinner table and I share in the common language what it is I have seen. That is my return to the simple days of blogging, to share what big ideas I have been leaning on and into and through.

My stories do not determine dogma, but, goodness, you better believe they are influenced heavily by a deep knowledge and love of it.

That is my place. That is my joy. And I must stop fighting against it to wade into conversations that are not for me to speak to. They are for me to read about, ponder, and dwell in.

I am content in that.

V

But how will they know? How will the bad theology ever end?

When the blogs are written and the Hebrew is abused or God made a monster and the people enslaved again to ways that are parody of the true?

Do you still believe in God?

Of course I do.

Then I guess you have to believe that if He found you, then He can find them too.

I admit, some days, my response is, Isn't it pretty to think so?

But then on other days, like today, with the sun cresting the sea, it is Timshel.

when it is mother's day, but not for all

It is Mother's Day in the States today.

I did not plan to write a post. If I had planned it, I would have a post dedicated to my Mother, a woman who is fierce in conviction and beautiful in prayer. However, this past year I have perhaps been more aware than ever the tensions that a day like Mother's Day can bring for those who do not share the story that I have, of being raised in the purging fires of beauty and grace, who only knew the fires of abuse.

So, here, a short, unplanned post, a note to those who come to this space and who know a story that is not my own.

On a day that for many is so dear, but for many such a struggle, to those who have known mothers that neglected, abused, mistreated, who did not stay for long, or perhaps stayed longer than was ever wanted, may this day not be a quickening of old pains, but may you find rest in the maternal images of God, the One who nurses her children, who knows their names forever, is their ever-comfort, who clothes them in splendour, and so in Godself may rest and comfort be found, beyond the circumstances of the darkness of this age, a darkness that should even visit those places we would call our homes. (Numbers 11:12, Isaiah 49:14-15, 66:12-13, Nehemiah 9:21.)

Grace and peace, and love,

P

when i am listening for a common language

I

I spent yesterday working on a chapter for my book that's about my childhood and growing up Southern Baptist.

Pressing the memories, I was reminded by how much I loved my childhood, loved the tradition of faith that raised me, brought me into my own.

They were a people who prayed.

A people who lifted hands during the upbeat songs and lifted them higher during the mournful. They sang all the best hymns and all the best new songs, and the lyrics of those songs seasoned the way I prayed. If the Baptists do not have a prayer book, they have a hymnal, and that hymnal is its own sort of liturgy, its own sort of teaching a vocabulary of prayer and habit of being.

I will always love them, even now, as I enter into church fellowship with the Anglicans, these people of a prayer book.

They're more similar than they realise, these two families of faith, but I suppose that comes in the standing on the outside long enough, just long enough, to see them both.

II

I am becoming an Anglican because that is where I pray best, but it is not the best place for everyone to pray.

When I first shared that detail, a handful of people let me know it was good that I was coming home.

This always puzzled me. Anglicanism is not home. Jesus is home. The denominations are the houses of the interpreters, in which Jesus is always and ever but the same.

Why does this make us nervous?

Are we so bold to believe that the denomination we are in has God completely and fully and faithfully figured out? Do we truly think that we have settled in the best of all possible beliefs?

I don't understand denominations as being anything more than interpretations of the same Song. I believe in certain boundaries, in the confession of the Scripture and the revelation of God, but what I believe beyond that is that we worship a God who desires intimacy and has no trouble being found.

So the God of the Southern Baptist is the God of the Roman Catholic; and, I may put my theological foot in it with this one, but I'll chance it, in that I believe the presence of the Eucharist in the Southern Baptist church is the same presence as in the Eucharist in the Roman Catholic.

What that is, well, that is for God to know and for us to receive.

But in this I believe all Gods are one God.

So once believed the saint. And I believe the saint.

III

I have been thinking of Eliot.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where. And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.

What more needs saying than that?

IV

You asked me once about my generation and its leaving the church.

You asked me if we should have more activities to reach the youth.

My generation is leaving the church because of the laser light shows and the fog machines. We are not enticed by your sensitivity to Seekers, and your circus theme or fourteen services on Easter do little more than promise that the church like all businesses is in the trade of commodities.*

You forgot to make disciples.

You taught just enough for the ultimate prize that you forgot how to tell of the journey there.

Maybe this isn't all your fault, but you haven't helped.

Aren't you tired? Don't you want to sit here for a moment and rest? Maybe we'll tell a few stories, about the God who is One, about what He hath done, and maybe then we'll circle back, samsara, to one another and to Him.

V

There are mystics on my bookshelf. Reformation thinkers. Roman Catholics. Eastern Orthodox. Jews.

I am trying to make my heart look like my bookshelf. I am trying to cobble together enough fragments of those who have encountered Him that at the end of all things I may say that though I have not seen in full, I have seen in myriad part.

It's so much bigger than heaven or hell, child.

It's so much bigger than you or I or right.

I am unconvinced that Christ's prayer for unity was about denominations. I think it had something to do with denominations shutting up long enough to listen to each other. To fill their bookshelves. To stitch together the patchwork of saints and know the joy of a God who is always and ever bigger than we ever realise.

But I am so tired of writing that out.

Would that it just be.

For now?

Oh I suppose for now it is the season of stitching. Stitching together the pieces of self.

I am listening for a common language these days. I am listening for anything that rings of Spirit. That is my measuring stick. That is enough. If it speaks of the True, then it is a language that is my own, whatever form it comes.

May it find me; and may I not be too fool, too proud, too certain, to not hear it.

I think there's something of the old stories in that. Of the old and ancient magic. Of the One and only King, who sends out His heralds in whatever manner He wills, in innumerable forms, but with the same Song to sing.

But who's to say? These are the tired days. Maybe all of this is foolishness of a kind.

---

*They have their place; I think you take the overall point.