Best of Dave's Journal

The Grace Pages

Here we present the very best of Dave's online journal, The Grace Pages. Often written in an easy-going style, and engaging both intellectual and everyday issues, the journal has been a platform for Dave's thoughts on life and faith since April 2005, and currently attracts up to 200 readers a day.

Biblical & Theological | Devotional
Fundamentalism & Conservatism | Personal
Humour | Miscellaneous

Biblical & Theological

God our mother | | | |

God our mother
(04/04)

A few years ago, a lady very dear to me shocked me. With great bravery, I now realize in retrospect, she made a confession in the midst of a group of whom many probably thought she was off her rocker. She told our small Bible study group that for personal reasons, she could never relate to God as Father, and had always related to God as her Mother.

In my utterly stunned condition, I could not bring myself to combat this heresy there and then, but carefully listened to a few others as they tried to guide her thinking back to the correct place, and then quickly moved the study back into the comfort zone.

Of course, now I realize that I am not the grand arbiter of what is and is not heresy, and how God can and cannot reveal herself. (Oops, did I just say herself?) Looking back, I wish I'd encouraged my friend instead of letting everyone else correct her, affirming the journey of discovery she was on instead of leaving her feeling like she'd just been slapped with a wet fish. Perhaps she remembers it differently, but it's played on my mind ever since.

Anyway, I want to take this opportunity to affirm her now in a way I couldn't bring myself to do back then. M, you're blessed to know God as Mother. Rejoice that she's chosen to reveal herself to you in that way. I think that revelation came to you as the result of many years resting in the shadow of her wing. God is so faithful, and as our divine Parent, there is no human analogy -- mother, father -- that could ever be exhausted in describing her unwavering loving stance towards us.

Devotional

Grace Encounters |

Grace Encounters
(04/04)

I scan the coffee house to see where I can sit. An old lady is sat at the counter by the window. She is muttering to herself, and she seems lonesome. If I just sit down in her vicinity, I think, she can always turn to me and talk if she wants. I take a seat, and place my steaming fresh coffee on the countertop. She says nothing to me directly, but continues mumbling away, an incoherent string of half-finished sentences spilling ungracefully over her lips. She seems hardly to notice I am there. After about ten minutes, she takes a final gulp of coffee, and rises to leave. "Thanks for sitting with me," she says to my surprise. "Thanks for putting up with my talking. I can't keep everything together if I don't do that." I give her a smile and say, "No problem," and we exchange goodbyes.

Looking around me, our little group of ten or twelve are a motley crew: Some in suits, some in sweaters and jeans, some looking like bums off the street, and some looking like they are off for a business lunch; and none of us, to my knowledge, have met before. We sit in a circle as we wait for the priest to come and preside over our midday Eucharist under the gothic arches of this downtown cathedral, and I notice the guy sitting next to me. He is wearing a hooded sweater, he has a face that most people would find aggressive, I think, and he appears to have some sort of disability that I can't quite pinpoint. When the time comes in the service to exchange the peace, we shake hands. After the Eucharist, I can't bring myself to leave. I have a feeling there is more to do, so I begin to walk out of the sanctuary only very slowly, and turn around as the guy in the hooded sweater approaches me. He tells me he felt instantly at ease when he sat down next to me for the service, and he didn't know why. He gives me a short tour of the cathedral, pointing out which are his favourite windows, and why. He tells me a little about his upbringing, and makes an enigmatic reference to something like the "rainbow cross of St Francis" -- apparently something to do with gay rights -- and then he laments that people in churches can be cold, but this church has been warm, and he has found a home from home. He gives me a big hug, and as I wrap up in my scarf to go out into the chilly November afternoon, he encourages me: "Stay warm."

As I cross the road to get to my bus stop, I am accosted by yet another of the city's many homeless people. This one is very persistent. "I'm afraid I can't give you any money," I tell him, "but I'll happily buy you some food and a drink to warm you up." He is pleased at the prospect of a hot coffee, and we cross the road again to one of my regular haunts, and he begins talking as his coffee is poured. He tells me his entire life has been one long mistake. I tell him I think God put all those mistakes behind him two thousand years ago in Jesus. He tells me he is a "man of God," but the Bible never made any sense to him. "I've met the love of God in other people," he explains.

God's grace has a way of getting to everyone. Peter calls it the "manifold" or "many-coloured" grace of God, and charges us with distributing it through our gifts. I'm through with "witnessing" -- that was always forced, unreal, pious and crass. The incidents I described above all happened in a single city within a couple of days of each other, and they're what I call "grace encounters": Spontaneous opportunities to distribute the grace of God in its many forms. To some people, the Bible does not and perhaps never will make any sense, but God's grace and love will find other ways to break through into their lives. As John says, Jesus, the Word, gives light to every person.

Look out for those opportunities that come along for an encounter with grace, those moments when you can share something of the love, acceptance and grace shown you in Jesus. They're blessed moments.

Fundamentalism & Conservatism

Am I cynical? | Melting cakes and misplaced recipes | | Why I threw away my matches |

Am I cynical?
(04/04)

"Beware cynicism!" was a familiar refrain at seminary. Friends would warn each other against the danger of becoming "cynical". Along with liberalism, "cynicism" was possibly one of the worst things to fall into.

Why the inverted commas? Mainly, I suppose, because cynicism is such a subjective concept. Few of my seminary friends would have been upset were I to criticize, say, Mormons or Catholics or the loony (and godless) left. But being as critical of Pentecostals and charismatics, for example, would be "cynical". The long and short of it was that you could usually be as critical as you liked about outsiders, but if you crossed the line talking about the inside, it was "gossip," "negativity," "cynicism" or even "bitterness".

I'm addressing this because a lot of my innermost feelings and thoughts are coming out of the woodwork on this blog, and some of them are going to offend people. Some of them have already offended people, in fact, and there's at least one very dear seminary friend reading this who (I think I'd bet my bottom dollar) is probably shaking his head and saying to himself, "Dave, you've become cynical."

So, am I cynical? Actually, I am, and furthermore, it really doesn't bother me. I am at peace with the kind of cynicism I have nowadays. If that shocks you, let me elaborate. I am not cynical about everything. To be cynical about everything simply for the sake of cynicism would be a sad thing, I agree. That's not me. Here's the thing: I am not cynical about the things that matter. In fact, the more cynical I become about the religious games we play, the more I care about the things that genuinely matter.

I am not cynical about people. Show me the bum in the street, and I am not cynical about the compassion of Christ having the power to transform and heal and give hope to their crushed spirit. Show me the young girl thrown from pillar to post by a string of unhealthy, abusive relationships, and I am not in the least bit cynical about the possibility of the love and acceptance of Jesus melting her heart and mending her hurts. Show me people battered and bruised by manipulation, control and abuse in the name of religion, and I am not cynical about God coming in and giving them faith and a future. I'm not cynical about those things, because they're the things that really matter. They're the things I really care about.

I probably could have avoided having to say all this if I had called my webpage RescuingMormons.com or ExposingtheLiberalLeft.org. Then I could have been as cynical as I liked, and possibly would have been applauded for it. I just can't escape the niggling feeling I've picked a few -- dare I say it? -- sacred cows as targets for my cynicism.

So, yes, I am cynical. Cynical about the right things. And I don't feel one iota bad about it.

Melting cakes and misplaced recipes
(04/04)

Certain songs have become to me, at certain times in my life, like anthems. Know what I mean? Like a song was written just for me at that exact time in my life, expressing just what I was feeling or going through, giving voice to things I hadn't quite put into words yet myself.

Recently I went through a period where Nico's These Days seemed to match my circumstances perfectly. Before that, things weren't all that much better, and Gordon Lightfoot's In the Early Mornin' Rain was the one that seemed closest to what was going on inside me.

But let me take you back a few years before that. It was a time in my life when nothing was as it first appeared. Everything was changing for me. All the things I once took for granted were now being questioned, and the world I had been living in for several years was beginning to crumble. It was the beginning of my break with fundamentalist, conservative Christianity. And the words that summed up the process for me were from the song MacArthur Park. If you know it, you'll also probably be of the opinion that the lyrics are crass, confusing and fairly artless. Actually, I totally agree. What's more, it was made a hit by a guy who, frankly, couldn't sing a damn note (the late actor Richard Harris). Still, something in the chorus totally resonated with me:

MacArthur Park is melting in the dark,
All the sweet, green icing flowing down.
Someone left the cake out in the rain.
I don't think that I can take it,
'Cause it took so long to bake it,
And I'll never have that recipe again,
Oh no!

Don't ask me what MacArthur Park is or was, because I don't have a clue. Don't ask me either why the "park" metaphor suddenly becomes a "cake" metaphor, because I don't know about that either. All I know is that at that period in my life I couldn't have put it any better myself: The icing was falling off the cake for me, and I'd spent so long baking it, I was shit-scared I wasn't going to put it all back together again.

Put in plainer terms, I had grown up in a certain type of charismatic, fundamentalist Christianity, it had become my life, and now everything that seemed so real and unquestionable was starting to look false. Let me throw in another metaphor: Humpty Dumpty had fallen off the wall, and it didn't look like even all the King's horses and all the King's men had a hope in hell of putting him back together again. I was scared. I was feeling like a stranger in a foreign land. I'd spent so many years learning the recipe and baking the cake, and it looked like it was all going down the pan with no hope of retrieval. (Forgive the mixed metaphors. I'm on a roll here.)

Some of you identify with that feeling, perhaps. The journey away from fundamentalism has been a scary one, and maybe the most terrifying thing is that after so long putting that world together bit by bit, you've lost the recipe and can't find it again. Well, here's what I want to say to anyone who's scared they lost the recipe and aren't going to get it back: That's the whole point. For years they told us there was a recipe. For years Christianity was presented to us in the form of strategies and technologies for spiritual success: Do this, do that, jump up and down and through the hoop, and you'll be acceptable. For a long time someone convinced us that there was a formula we had to follow, a long list of ingredients and instructions we had to get right to build our perfect, holy and acceptable-to-God religious world.

For a long time, even after I had given up on fundamentalism and conservative Christianity for good, I still had this feeling that I had to get the recipe right. I mean, I had got rid of this and that belief, dispatched of this and that doctrine, and for a while I had this worry that I needed an alternative to replace them. Now I think, Hold it there: Who says I have to have the recipe figured out? Who says I can't just say, "Don't know"? Who said I had to have everything sussed?

I know it's painful moving on. It's not easy, even when we know it's the right thing to do, to leave behind things we gave our life to. And it's a scary path, that's for sure. But it's a while since the icing melted on my religious cake now, and I have a peace about where I am, a peace I doubted I would have when I was watching all that sweet, green icing flowing down and wondering how I was ever going to get it back. And if things started to change again, I doubt it
would be that same scary process, because the path I'm on now is an adventure in faith, where no turn the road might take is worth being scared of.

I think I've probably said more than I wanted to say, and probably not in as articulate a manner as I wanted to say it. (There's always the "edit" button for anal-retentives like me.) I just wanted to give hope to anyone whose cake is melting at the moment. No one decreed you needed a recipe -- that fiction was part of your old world. Don't sweat it.

Why I threw away my matches

"So," began my friend's housemate inquisitively, "You've been a Christian a long time, so tell me: Do you ever -- like -- do you ever lose the fire?".

How do you go about answering these questions when it's been so long since you were part of the kind of subculture where being "on fire for God" was the sine qua non of Christian existence? I had a good stab at the answer -- something about not worrying about "the fire," comparing a relationship to God with a marriage, where the love and commitment is not dependent on the amount of day-to-day passion and feeling you can muster -- but I felt rather that this was one of those questions that couldn't easily be answered without a systematic dismantling of the whole framework or worldview he took for granted as a Christian.

You see, years previously, I would have been asking the same question. Christian living to me was about never losing "the fire," and this meant periods when I was "on fire" and feeling like I was pleasing to God, like I was living the Christian life as it should be lived, but also depressing times when "the fire" wasn't there, and I'd feel I had backslidden, forsaken my first love, and wasn't pleasing to God. And I actually felt quite sad when I went away and thought about my conversation that day, because I wondered whether this young man had been swallowed up by the same machine, and was in for a Christian life full of disappointment and self-doubt. I wondered if he'd ever discover the truth that God is constant even when we are not, or whether he had fallen for the notion that God's feelings towards us go up and down as the amount of "spiritual" activity on our religious heart monitor rises and falls.

Maybe I was totally off in my assessment. Perhaps my mind was working overtime. It's just that sometimes I think of all the young Christians who are at the place I was at as a young Christian, and I want almost to grab them by the collars and tell them they've been conned, that the Christian life doesn't have to be the way they were told.

Paul told the Colossians not to fall prey to hollow and deceptive philosophies. Such philosophies are rife in Christianity: Do this, do that, take this step, take that step, follow this principle, follow that principle, and you'll be a spiritual success. Why do you still submit to the world's rules, asks Paul? Well, Paul, I suppose because someone came along and told us at an early age that this was what the Christian life was all about, and this was how to achieve it, and we never knew any other way. And so we spent our lives jumping through hoops and over obstacles. Paul's message to the Colossians was simple: Forget all that crap; Jesus is enough. (I forget the biblical Greek derivation of that profound theological term, "crap," but you know what I mean.)

Don't worry yourself sick over all that religious hoo-ha about being "on fire": It's just another religious attempt to make the grade; Jesus is enough.

Personal

Humour

How I know what Elliot had for breakfast this morning | Another tale of vomit on a Sunday morning

How I know what Elliot had for breakfast this morning
(04/04)

Now I know what Elliot had for breakfast this morning.

The reason I know is because approximately halfway through the vicar's post-Eucharistic prayer, said breakfast sprayed out of said choirboy's mouth in semi-liquid form in every direction. I am guessing it was Weetabix. Could have been porridge, but then, lots of things look like porridge when they've been regurgitated.

He looked rather pale sitting outside the choir vestry afterwards, poor lad. I think it was the heat.

Brings back memories. My cousin stayed over one night when I was five, and in the morning we ate Rice Krispies, and as soon as he was done eating, he vomited the whole lot straight back into the bowl again. I distinctly remember it looking exactly the same the second time around as it did the first.

Why do we remember these things?

After the service today, a fellow chorister (an old schoolfriend) and I reminisced about the time we were out in the car with my mom and our two French friends (French school exchange -- those were the days), and one of them got feeling queasy on a roundabout, and proceeded to spray barf everywhere. Rather than just let it fall out, he had tried to cover his mouth with his hand, which only made it worse, because then it just started squirting fiercely out of the cracks between his fingers like an industrial jet-spray. My friend even remembered the exact roundabout we were on, so it was obviously a special moment that lived on in his consciousness, too. And here I thought it was just my twisted mind that I remembered the scene so vividly.

Anyway, regurgitated Rice Krispies and vomiting French schoolboys -- they were the images running through my mind like a flashback as in horror I watched Elliot unexpectedly produce the contents of this morning's breakfast bowl.

There was a point to this, I'm sure...

Aha, that was it.

I wanted to remind myself not to use the kneeler on the front choir stalls. It was covered in the damn stuff.

Miscellaneous