Here is an excerpt from another essay in my forthcoming book, A Spiritual Life: Perspectives from Poets, Prophets, and Preachers. The essay, titled The Pie Social, is by LAUREN F. WINNER. Find our more about Lauren and her work at: www.laurenwinner.net.
I am asked, all the time it seems, why I am a Christian. What people mean is: why did you become a Christian? Sometimes they mean: how could you possibly have given up the beautiful rituals and compelling community of Judaism for the pale performances of Protestant Christianity? Sometimes they mean: tell us a story of drama, of God’s arresting you on a road one fine afternoon, of voices from heaven and lights from the sky and certainty. Sometimes they mean: tell us about that dream you had, a million years ago, the dream about Jesus coming to rescue you from a kidnapping.
In all cases, they want an answer about something that happened to me almost half a lifetime ago.
But here’s the truth: I can’t really remember why I became a Christian. I can remember bits and pieces of the why, bits and pieces that you’d think might add up to a story, but they don’t, not really. And here’s the other truth: the events that happened to me fifteen years ago—the dream, the purchase of a Book of Common Prayer, the first shy church attendance—those vignettes have very little to do with why I am a Christian today. They are not wholly unrelated—they make a sort of genealogy, that dream and the prayer book. And perhaps they answer the question “Why did you become a Christian?” But they don’t do much to answer the question “Why are you a Christian today?”
Think of it like this: If at your golden anniversary party someone asks you why you are married to your husband, to that particular balding, half-deaf man who fathered your children and once got fired from a job and loved you through the trauma of your mother’s death and took you to Italy for your twentieth anniversary; that man who in midlife learned to cook and started hosting elegant dinner parties for all your friends on the first Friday of every month; that man who had the slightly annoying but slightly adorable habit of repeating what you just said before he responded to it; that man who stopped drinking for ten years and then started again and then stopped again; that man who always said that if you wanted to become a dolphin, he would find a way to make it happen, and he would get you the moon if he could—if your answer to the question “Why are you married to him?” were purely historical, about your first date and why you fell in love with him way back when, fifty-one years ago—that would be a sad and partial answer. Maybe it would be no kind of answer at all. What the question wants to know is why you are married to him now.
And so with Jesus: why are you still here with him? What sustains your spiritual life this week? What makes you a Christian today?
In church today the Gospel reading is the end of Luke 2, that story where the boy Jesus stays back in Jerusalem at the Temple and his parents don’t know where he is and it takes them three days to find him. After church my friend Q says to me, “Of all the Gospel readings, that was the one that most got me as a kid. How on earth do parents lose a child?”
I tell Q that I have great sympathy for Mary and Joseph. How did they lose him? Haven’t you? I lose Jesus all the time.
I suppose there are different kinds of loss that “losing Jesus” might name. There’s losing Jesus in a kind of William James way—a change in religious experience; we sense Jesus’ presence intimately, and then we don’t. Or, again, there’s losing Jesus because we have departed from his norm, from his derech: You begin to take for granted that he is next to you. You head home after some intense temple experience and just assume that the direction in which you’re walking is the direction in which he’s walking, and your assumption, it turns out, is wrong. Then perhaps there is a third kind of loss—the loss that comes when we notice the limits of our knowledge of God, when we feel bereft of guidance, when we feel the loss of God’s saving power or of God’s grace. This is the loss that notices, and mourns, the Deus absconditus, the hidden God. This is the loss you name when you ask why God does not answer your prayers. It is the loss entailed when we realize that Jesus is more mysterious and more inscrutable than we had at first understood.
and Losers, Loners, and Rebels: The Spiritual Struggles of Boys (Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), co-written with Robert C. Dykstra, and Donald Capps, as best resources for congregational leaders.
resources for congregations and their leaders, and identifies the best resources available over six areas of congregational life—Care, Engage, Discover, Manage, Lead, and Worship.
