Not in the sense of self-satisfaction over any exceptional accomplishments. As a matter of fact, the case could be made that I've recently been experiencing something of a lull. I had a spate of magazine pieces recently published, and I am somewhat active musically, but it all falls short of heyday status. I've been busier.
No, it's all the churchy stuff. Three years ago, I was just a guy, depending on my own dispositional resources to see me through the challenges attendant to this life. Now I regularly attend a small rural Methodist church, the demographic profile of which skews older. I provide special music for that portion of the service every few weeks, and I help out with vacation Bible school. On recent Tuesday evenings, I've been participating in an eight-week discussion series at a community church here in town. The structure is provided by a book and video series called Starting Point. It's for those new to a faith walk, as well as those who are coming back to one after a hiatus. I pray, fervently, all day long.
A few days ago, in a post here at LITD, I gave a brief synopsis of my trek:
As I've stated before, one of the last sticking points for me before committing to a faith walk was that I saw myself as an alright guy, with room for improvement as is true of anyone, but on balance a decent human being.There was actually one other sticking point, and it was really basic: We can't see God. I even read Michael Novak's No One Sees God, and it provided a helpful nudge. (I think I started flirting with church attendance - at the local Catholic parish - about the time I was reading it.) Still I was vulnerable enough that I found the avalanche of cynical dismissals of the Judeo-Christian model that inundate us all daily tugging at me, inviting me to consider the possibility .that it was all a fairy tale.
And it didn't help that most of the invitations to consider Christianity that I encountered were boneheaded turn-offs. Little pamphlets that thought they were winning me over with messages like, "We deserve Hell and death, but there's good news!" or, "Your works are as filthy rags before the Lord."
Might be just the sales job for some people, but my reaction was, "Save it for somebody else, pal." And I continued to let my Bible collect dust on a shelf.
I was a conservative long before I became a follower of Christ. With regard to Questions of a Spiritual Nature, I went years vaguely deferring to the Buddhist and Taoist teachings that resonated for me during my hippie days. But after my ideological conversion experience, I had to admit to myself that I'd become a secular agnostic. The whole notion of what the nature of ultimate reality is was pretty far down my list of important stuff to think about.
Another helpful nudge was what C.S. Lewis had to say about the nature of reality - that the things of this universe had jagged edges, that scientific discovery was by definition the stuff of surprise, that irregularity characterized the way it is all put together. I started to see what he was saying about how it would actually be odd if the universe conformed to our expectations for uniformity of patterns. The example he cites is our solar system. The planets' orbits aren't perfectly circular, they're not equally spaced, the planets's sizes don't progress from smallest to largest, and the number of moons revolving around each vary considerably.
So the human being's relationship to the Creator of it all is going to be surprising as well.
But the invisibility of God still nagged me. To compound my sense of reservation, there was all this talk of angels and devils.
But then the stuff that comprises most of the content of this blog became so egregious that I could find no word that more effectively characterized it than "demonic." 1 Peter 5:8 hit me right between the eyes. I saw it as far more than metaphor. America and Western civilization generally were indeed being devoured by the Devil.
I'd already had this blog for some time when this came together for me, and the more I looked at what needed to be addressed, the less adequate I found my resources as a secular polemicist for doing so. The first question I now had to ask myself was whether I was contributing to the cultural rot, and in what way.
The resulting inventory of what I was about as a blogger showed up in small ways. I narrowed my criteria for the applicability of snarky monikers for public figures. I was less inclined to offer pat solutions to vexing policy dilemmas.
And then the Trump era got underway, and I took extra care to make sure I was not engaging in naked tribal turf-defense. And I saw a number of pundits I'd formerly admired doing just that, which brought on the ongoing fracturing of conservatism. It was becoming more clear by the day that a label, even one with as noble a pedigree as conservatism has, was going to fall short of ameliorating all this world's ills.
One could say God was backing me into a corner. I had to take Him seriously, since everything else, around me and inside of me, was broken. He and His laws would not be mocked.
But I saw that grace is available for the deliberately humble. And community - a commodity on which there is a premium in fragmented post-America - is available for those who want to give and receive encouragement on the faith walk.
So on pretty much any Sunday morning, you'll find me in the pew at my little country church. And in my office you're nearly as likely to find me with folded hands at my desk as banging away at my keyboard.
I still like cocktail hour, I still let loose with flurries of blush-inducing expletives during lapses in my reverence, and I still have my moments of confusion and doubt. I still size people up on the basis of standards of appearance and speech that I now understand don't amount to much if anything.
But there's a hope I couldn't conceive of five short years ago that leavens the daily life wrought by my foibles.
I understand the actual purpose of what I've been doing. The question of how to be an effective human being has an answer.
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