Creed and My Resistance

Perhaps my resistance to creed is mostly in relation to the "authority" piece of creed. Perhaps I am having trouble divorcing the practical from the theoretical. My grandmother, in her 80s, confessed to me that she could not believe in the virgin birth and in discussing it with me, it was clear to me how much distress this had caused her over the years. She feared working out the questions because she thought she would lose friends if they knew she believed "wrong." I think it's a tragedy that this might be the kind of thing that kept my grandmother up at night, because her views on the subject had very little to do with her witness (and maybe discouraged it).

I think I can get behind an idea of "my creed," but when it becomes "our creed," I worry about its tendency to alienate. I want the atheist, the monotheist, and the polytheist (etc), to all feel welcome at my church and I worry that a creed might keep one of them from entering.

Perhaps I spoke too broadly originally. I can see how creed can be unifying and life-giving for some communities and people and that the development and evolution of creeds gives us a useful view of history. That history, however, in each of those moments when creed was created, is generally marked by divisions and silences. Aware of the difficulty of divorcing words from their historical usages, I think a creed might have more tendency to elicit harm than good within the kind of community I hope to work as a part of-- one composed, in good number, by those who have been harmed by church traditions or experienced them narrowly, but negatively.

I think each of us is a member of whatever tradition we're a part of as much because of what they are as because of what they aren't. Each time someone tells me that my way (or someone else's way) of being Christian "isn't Christian," I hold onto my noncreedal church and feel so supported by its commitment to theological diversity. I can cherry-pick biblical material with that person back and forth, but there is something about saying, "no, we refuse to draw the lines" (even if they're dotted) that is important to me.

Grace

So lately I've started developing a sense of grace.  I don't know if that immediately makes sense, so I will try to explain it some.

As an unchurched person for the majority of my life, my theology happened ground-up.  No one really told me what to believe or how to interpret the Bible, and while I had a brief stint as a fundamentalist-minded person in my teens, I only sought a religious community after spending time studying religion in a secular academic setting as a Religious Studies Major.  So: I haven't much taste for suspending historicity, nor the particular contexts of biblical figures and authors, textual criticism, etc. in favor of trying to maintain a theology that conflicts with my scholarly mind and my experience of the world.

More simply put: I built my own theologies (not without help from scholars and theologians) before entering any kind of space (like a church) that would "tell" me what I should believe (also, I chose a church that doesn't do that).  Furthermore, since leaving behind more conservative views that I adopted for a short period of time after reading some conservative authors and before my college experience in religious academia, I have found little use for theologies of grace.  Grace, perhaps like some forms of confession, has felt like a cop-out.  It's felt like a "reason" I can be a crap person.  GRACE!  It struck me as connected to the kinds of Christianity in which people feel they are forgiven for their asshole-ish-ness because they accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior... the kind of Christianity that manifests in the world in mostly unhelpful ways-- apathy toward issues of justice, except for maybe some hateful pro-life and homophobia stuff and more concern about whether you have the right kind of faith in Jesus.

I had developed a more "gospel of works" kind of theology, that I still feel is largely in line with the Jesus I find in my scriptures.  I've felt that my faith is about how it manifests in the world.  I can talk about being Christian all I want, but what am I doing about it, you know?  Am I protesting the rampant racism in this country?  Am I feeding the hungry?  Am I living a simple life that doesn't hoard resources in a world in which so many lack access to resources?  Am I practicing peace and compassion?

I still think this should be a dominant lens.

But I've started thinking about grace lately.  I've encountered some very justice-driven people who I know are trying their personal best to make this world a better place, but I sometimes feel a particular kind of hostility present in some of these ministries.  It is not without reason-- these hostilities generally come from wounds caused by oppressive forces, some of which look very much like me and my tradition.  Christianity and white people have existed in the world in some pretty terrible ways.  However, what is (perhaps more easily) important to me is being able to reach new hearts and minds.

I can talk to my friends all day about my liberal ideas, but the reality is that I am mostly preaching to the choir.  It seemed to me that some of my peers were so driven and angry (and rightfully so) that their ministries seemed to lack grace (except for particular kinds).  Part of grace, I think, is knowing that God is Love and that that love extends unconditionally to all beings.  I understand my call toward ministry as a response to this and also as a way to communicate this.  While it may be difficult for me to deal with sometimes, God loves the homophobes and the racists and the xenophobes and all of us unconditionally.  God certainly is saddened by homophobia, racism, and xenophobia (among other things), but God still loves people affected by such thinking and wants them to find the kind of love that can no longer be stopped by phobias or hatred.  And they need some help to get there... and yelling at them is probably not the best way to go about that.  They need grace and compassion, too.

Recently I've started to realize that I need grace, too.  My gospel of works was making me rigid in ways that weren't allowing me to forgive myself or to tolerate less than perfection from myself.  I realized that the compassion I feel so comfortable extending to others was not something I gave myself.  If I was as harsh on other people as I am on myself, I would make a terrible minister.  That might be true of all of us, but it's becoming more and more obvious to me.

So I think I'm finding grace.  Just a little bit of it and mostly as an idea more than a practice.

But it's something.

Peace

Today I am carrying 2 stones in my pockets. The peace “hearth stone” was part of a ritual in my morning class offered by Marie, one of my amazing Roman Catholic peers. The stone chose me (according to the ritual) and is a needed message for me about balance, center, and biting off more than I can chew. The other stone is one that I chose to pick up from a #tdor altar, “to help carry the burden of lives lost.” With everything going on in the world and in many of the circles I operate within and try to support, this time is heavy with grief and struggle. I find this contrast with a season of thanks and the coming of Advent to be infusive. May we all find a balance between grief and joy, saying “yes” and saying “no,” giving and receiving, works and grace. #prayer #ritual #tdor #translivesmatter (at Pacific School of Religion)

Grace

Because defining things is fun.

Grace: the extravagantly generous extension of community to all of humanity (including the most self-righteous, the most downtrodden, the wealthy, the unwealthy, family, friends, and strangers) in a way that equalizes us all in the realization of God’s active presence spread in and through each of us so continuously that we cannot think of ourselves as separate from each other in any meaningful way.