Concluding My Falsani Series

Source: Cathleen Falsani’s Sin Boldly: A Field Guide for Grace (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008).

The Cathleen Falsani book is due tomorrow, and I’ll be getting my exercise today by walking to the library to return it. Consequently, I want to finish up the series I began a long time ago on Cathleen Falsani’s Sin Boldly.

Part 6 was supposed to be about God speaking, but there are three other themes that I also want to discuss. And so here we go!

1. At the very beginning of her book, Falsani talks about learning about God’s grace as she watched the movie Bruce Almighty. She was having an especially bad day, and she stumbled on the movie as she flipped through her several HBO channels.

Bruce Almighty was a good movie for her situation, for it’s about a discontent reporter who learns to see others through God’s eyes. At the beginning, Bruce is not happy about his life (even though his girlfriend is Jennifer Aniston). He works at a news station, but he doesn’t do serious news. He does funny, inspirational, touchy-feely stories, which sometimes get cut for segments deemed more important. Bruce also has a crush on the female news anchor (not Jennifer Aniston, but the lady from JAG), who doesn’t give him the time of day. When Bruce doesn’t get the job as news anchor, he has a meltdown and is fired.

Eventually, God lets Bruce be God for a while. In the course of this experience, Bruce loses his girlfriend and gets run over (if my memory is correct). In heaven, God asks him what he wants, and Bruce responds that he wants Grace (his girlfriend, aka Jennifer Aniston) to find someone who sees her through God’s eyes (love). Bruce has moved beyond thinking only about himself.

Cathleen is moved to tears by God’s love, patience, and grace towards Bruce, a real malcontent. I could identify with this part of the book because TV, movies, and books are often a catharsis for me, and they give me something different to experience and think about as I plough through my discontentment.

That brings me to the second point:

2. Somewhere in the book, Falsani defines God speaking as God interrupting our thoughts, as he gets us to stop and think. Many of us are continually on the move, as we go with the flow with the inertia of our day-to-day thoughts. But God can interrupt that inertia and get us to think about the good and the beautiful. He can do so through books, movies, TV shows, people, and nature.

I like that perspective because it’s so open. It seems to assert that God is somehow involved in the lives of everyone, not just those who accept Christ as their personal Savior. And Acts 14 and 17 has passages that indicate such to be the case (although not everyone is saved). Falsani gets impatient with those who like to divide grace and make it so technical, with their labels of “common grace” (for everyone) and “special grace” (for the redeemed). In her mind, why can’t we just say that God shows people grace (undeserved favor), period?

Part of me likes what I learned about Friedrich Schleiermacher in college. For Schleiermacher, “God-consciousness” is recognizing that there’s a power greater than ourselves–that we are not autonomous and did not bring ourselves into being. My understanding is that Schleiermacher thought all sorts of things could bring us to a God-conscious state: literature, nature, the Bible, maybe even other religions. Schleiermacher’s definition of religion bypassed the problems posed by modernity, such as the attacks on biblical inerrancy by historical-criticism and evolution. For him, biblical inerrancy on history and science was not necessary to have a religious life, since religion wasn’t about that. Rather, it concerned us arriving at “God-consciousness.” If the Bible could encourage that through its stories, laws, poems, and prophecies, then it was doing its job.

One way I’ve changed over the past few years is that I’m more open to people drawing from different sources for their spirituality. Years ago at DePauw, I attended a forum of homeless people, and one of them remarked that he drew from all sorts of books (e.g., the Bible, the Tao) and went with what “worked” with him spiritually. That sounded to me like chaos! For me, one had to pick a book–preferably the Bible–and accept everything it said about God. Otherwise, that person was making God in his own image, and how could something he made up be reliable or trustworthy (as Tim Keller has pointed out)?

I still hold this view to a certain extent, but I saw that an eclectic approach to spirituality could work when I met an alcohol counselor. He said that he didn’t follow a specific religion but drew on a variety of sources. Two that he told me about were Nathaniel Branden’s book on self-esteem, and a tape series on anger and forgiveness. He called these sources “powerful.” He wasn’t necessarily accepting them as inerrant or authoritative, but he believed that they had a certain wisdom on how to approach life and live it successfully. I learned from him that having an eclectic approach to spirituality didn’t always have to mean total anarchy.

There are times when I feel as if my negative thoughts are “interrupted.” It occurs when I’m grumbling, and a thought enters my mind that’s actually constructive, or when I forget about my problems as I watch Lost or Desperate Housewives. I wish they could be interrupted more, to tell you the truth!

3. Cathleen writes about an elderly nun who admires Ingrid Bergman, notwithstanding her sexual scandal. I’m not sure why that stands out to me. Maybe it’s because it evokes for me a Reader’s Digest view on life–one that admires celebrities and looks for the good in them, even though they don’t always do the “right thing.” This sort of approach goes beyond the partisanship, cultural wars, and us vs. them mindset that pervades American life. I think of Reader’s Digest interviewing Julia Roberts about her family life. Reader’s Digest is very conservative, and Julia Roberts is far from being a Christian conservative Republican! Yet, they could see beyond that difference and interact with each other on a human level. Julia probably saw Reader’s Digest as an American institution, and Reader’s Digest viewed Julia as a part of America’s life and a mother who loves her kids. I’ve seen this sort of thing also among my relatives, many of whom are very conservative. Even they can still say something nice about Ted Kennedy or Al Gore!

4. Somewhere in the book, Cathleen talks about having writer’s block. In the course of her struggle, her mind turns to an episode of Friends, in which a character walks through the park in an eccentric manner. Cathleen decides not to worry about phrasing everything right and appeasing an audience, choosing instead to be herself and let the chips fall where they may.

That reminds me of the movie Little Women, with Katherine Hepburn. Jo writes mystery stories for publication, and a kindly middle-aged gentleman tells her that her work is bad. He encourages her not to write anything unless it comes straight from her heart.

Does this work in real life? Not always. Writing is a business, and people need to like someone’s work (or at least be affected by it) for the writer to be successful. Sometimes, that can lead to pandering to the least common denominator. At other times, as in Cathleen’s case, a person can write from the heart, touch a lot of people, and attain a great deal of success.

Good book!

Limp

Source: Cathleen Falsani, Sin Boldly: A Field Guide for Grace (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008) 175. Quotations are in italics.

After discussing her mother’s successful battle with cancer, Cathleen Falsani states the following:

So why with all the good news about Mom did I feel so thoroughly lousy? Don’t get me wrong. I was grateful, so grateful, to Mom’s doctors, who quite literally saved her life; to friends and strangers, who wrote to us reminding us that their thoughts and prayers were with us and, more important, that God was walking by our side–carrying us when necessary–through dark times. It’s just that I seemed to have come out of this ordeal with a pronounced limp, spiritually speaking. Having witnessed firsthand the power of faith and prayer to work miracles, I was limping along like a bear with a thorn in my paw.

A lot of people rejoice after God brings them through an ordeal. Cathleen Falsani, however, still felt the wounds.

I’ve had experiences like that. No, my mom doesn’t have cancer, but I’ve had times when God finally gets me through a situation, but only after I’ve been raked over the coals for a period of time. Things turn out all right in the end, at least for a little while. But the time leading up to that “end” leaves its scars and gives me a spiritual and emotional limp.

It’s hard to have faith during the ordeal, since there’s a lot of insecurity. I almost feel as if I shouldn’t cheerfully accept the axiom that “things will turn out all right in the end,” since that can easily become an excuse for apathy, inactivity, laziness, or just plain inertia. Plus, how do I know that things will turn out all right in the end? It doesn’t for everybody, does it? So not only do I have to deal with the ordeal, but also with the insecurity that is attached to it.

Cathleen concludes that we are broken for the benefit of others, meaning our lives are a sort of Eucharist. She may be saying that suffering enables us to sympathize and empathize with other people. I have difficulty with such a concept, for I do not see how my suffering places me in a situation in which I can help people. I’m shy, so helping others is hard for me! But maybe suffering shapes my thoughts so that I can do the right thing when opportunities arise. The focus here is on being and thinking, not necessarily doing, since right being and thinking can lead to right doing.

And maybe suffering can help us to root for other people. One of my favorite scenes in Desperate Housewives is from the last episode of the first season. In the series, Mary Alice Young shoots herself out of guilt, and her spirit is able to observe her friends and neighbors. She sees that they have a lot of struggles and problems that they conceal from others, as she hid her pain from them. But she says at the end that she roots for them, though she realizes that some of them won’t make it.

I hope to get to the point where I can root for people to survive and succeed rather than fail. I want to root even for those I do not like, as I see their humanity underneath what I dislike about them.

At the same time, I don’t want them to succeed while I do not. Then I’d be envious!

Cradling the Torah

Source: Cathleen Falsani’s Sin Boldly: A Field Guide for Grace (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008) 159. Quotations are in italics.

I’m not Jewish, and in that little [synagogue] gathering of a dozen or so people, I think everyone there knew it. Still, when the [Torah] scrolls got to me, the woman next to me, without a moment’s hesitation, placed them gently in my arms, like a newborn baby. I’ve yet to conjure up the words how that moment of inclusion felt.

I can identify with Falsani here, but I can’t explain why. There have been times in my life when I have been welcomed in this manner, but I don’t remember what those moments specifically were.

Many people love to share who they are with outsiders. I know this because I have attended two Jewish institutions of learning as a non-Jew (or so I am in their eyes; actually, I have Jewish ancestry). When I was at Harvard, I attended an independent Seventh-Day Adventist church that was predominantly Latin American and Caribbean, and the people there always made me feel welcome, although my race is different from theirs. Even when I visited an Ethiopian synagogue in New York, in which the rabbi called America “Babylon” and “Egypt,” the people there welcomed me, even though I couldn’t tell from the sermon if they liked white people or not.

I don’t experience that kind of welcome in all houses of worship, so I probably shouldn’t expect it everywhere I go. I know of one woman who visited an orthodox synagogue for a class, and no one talked to her. No one even came to take her money when the collection plate was handed out!

But Falsani is describing more than a welcome. There she was, an outsider in a synagogue. And there was the Jewish woman sitting next to her, who put in her arms one of the most sacred objects of the Jewish religion. That’s more than a welcome. I’d call it a welcome plus.

And that sort of incident doesn’t sound foreign to me, so I must have experienced it. I just can’t identify when.

There’s one moment I can think of that comes close, though: On Thanksgiving, my cousin’s one year old boy handed me his prized giraffe doll and said to me, “Raaa!,” which is his word for “giraffe.” He was sharing with me something that was special to him. Stuff like that has happened to me, when people could’ve easily looked on me as an outsider or a creature from outer space. I can still feel the effects of grace, but it’s not always clear to me what the act of grace was.

Just Love People

Source: Cathleen Falsani, Sin Boldly: A Field Guide for Grace (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008) 87. Quotations are in italics.

Cathleen Falsani discusses a conversation she had with Jean, who was helping people hurt by Hurricane Katrina.

[G]race[,] Jean explained, is like Narnia from C.S. Lewis’ allegorical fantasy books. “It’s all thawing and it’s all coming to life,” he said. “The rivers are flowing and everything is alive, and the grace is real and everything is real, but there continually are new places. The place God has led me in the last few years is taking me to the places in Narnia where I realize it’s OK not to be OK. The law could have just beat my ass telling me to love people, and grace took me by the hand and romanced me to Bay St. Louis and said, ‘Just love people.’”

This quote stood out to me for two reasons.

1. First, I identified with its criticism of law. I often feel that God’s standards “beat my ass,” for they seem to command me to suppress my humanity, to be something that I’m not, or to do everything with absolute perfection. “Reach out to people.” “Don’t hate others.” “Forgive others from the heart, or God won’t forgive you.” “If you say you’ve forgiven someone and still don’t want anything to do with him, then you haven’t truly forgiven that person.” “If you do good deeds grudgingly, or without the right motivation, then you might as well not do them.” “True Christians have this glow of love, joy, and peace that attracts others to them.” These are ideas that I’ve heard in various churches, or read in Christian writings (including the Bible).

No wonder people think that Christianity is a royal pain in the you-know-what! I can’t live up to that!

But Jean’s statement places the issue in a different perspective. Rather than focusing on if I’m loving others perfectly or even sub-standardly, why can’t I “just love people.” I may not love others all that well, but this doesn’t have to be a contest or a final exam. I may not even be able to do it all of the time. But I can still do something. I can smile at someone, or use the person’s name (which people like), or donate to charity, or visit a nursing home on a weekend. And if there are holier-than-thou religionists who want to grade me or beat up on me, let them do it! I don’t have to beat up on myself.

In Jean’s scenario, it’s not a matter of having to love, but getting to love. That allows me to love others without pressure, to seek opportunities to help or reach out to people, to be creative. That’s the difference between law and grace!

But I wonder if Jean’s view is biblical. I think that the New Testament presents a scenario in which God loves us first, then we love others. At the same time, the Sermon on the Mount presents commands of “don’t hate,” “don’t lust,” “forgive, or you won’t be forgiven,” and “be perfect.” And the Sermon on the Mount often acts as if we’ll go to hell if we don’t obey these commands. It’s hard to lead a pressure-free life when Jesus’ commands are beating me over the head! Is there a way to embrace Jean’s perspective, while being fair to the Sermon on the Mount?

2. Second, the quote got me thinking about the kingdom of God. In the first Chronicles of Narnia movie, the white witch (who represents Satan) traps all of Narnia in a harsh winter. Under her dominion, it is always winter, but never Christmas. But when Aslan (Jesus) is on the move, this very sign of her dominion begins to crumble. The ice thaws, as Narnia begins to return to its previous paradisaical condition. And Christmas arrives! Although the white witch is still technically the queen of Narnia, her tight grip on the land is starting to loosen, as it becomes subject to the righteous realm of its true king, Aslan the lion.

According to many Christians, something similar has been occurring since the first coming of Christ. We are in a state in which the kingdom of God is “already and not yet”: it’s here on some level, but not in its fullest form.

But I’ve often wondered what Jesus brought that did not already exist before he came. God forgave people before Jesus’ first coming! Jews before his resurrection believed in an afterlife! Also, did Jesus truly make things better? Is the winter of Narnia truly thawing right now?

In Matthew 12:28ff., Jesus brings the kingdom of God to people when he cast out demons, thereby binding the power of Satan. Elsewhere in the New Testament, the new things that Jesus brings include forgiveness (Romans 5; Hebrews 9-10), the hope of the resurrection (I Corinthians 15; Hebrews 2:14), a new creation accompanied by the death of the sinful flesh (Romans 6-8; II Corinthians 5:17), and spiritual enlightenment of the Gentiles (Acts 26:18; Ephesians 2:2ff.).

Maybe Jesus thaws out Narnia through his example, his presence, and the hope that he offers us. When Jesus showed us God’s love, he gave us a new paradigm of looking at life, one that differs from our usual selfish outlook. Narnia thaws when we help people and remind them of the love and reign of Jesus, in spite of whatever evil remains in the world. But Jesus is an integral part of all of this: he’s the one who empowers the church to free people from bondage (spiritual and physical), and he’s the one who is the ground of our hope, since he will one day overthrow evil and raise the dead. On some level, we have a right to dance and rejoice right now, whatever evil may exist! We can bring Narnia to people, as we offer them hope and concrete love.

Elvis the Spiritual Seeker

Source: Cathleen Falsani’s Sin Boldly: A Field Guide for Grace (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008) 22-24.

For background on this series, see Falsani Series. Quotations are in italics.

Did you know the only Grammy awards Elvis ever won were for gospel recordings?…Offstage, Elvis, who was reared in an Assemblies of God church in Tulepo, Mississippi, spent hours singing gospel tunes with his entourage as a way to relax and, perhaps, self-soothe. According to what his daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, says in the audio tour Bubba and I listened to as we spent a couple of hours moving reverentially from room to room in Graceland, Elvis was a real spiritual seeker, especially later in his troubled life. He was always looking for something and read loads of books on religion and spirituality

…On [Elvis' desk] were several spiritually themed books, including a copy of Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet and Erich von Daniken’s Gods from Outer Space. I guess he still hadn’t found what he was looking for…Many people–many Christians, for that matter–might scoff at the idea that Elvis, with all of his overindulgences, addictions, and peccadilloes, also could have been a believer. I think Bubba and I both left Graceland with the bittersweet impression of Elvis as an incredibly gifted, tragically flawed man who lavished love and outrageous gifts on his family and friends, desperately tried to reconcile staggering fame with personal heartache, but in the end felt alone, empty, and lost.

Yet the faith that Elvis had as a child, and that Bubba and I share, promises that it doesn’t matter whether he could pull it together in the end. Grace fills that gap. While it’s true that you may lose your religion during the course of a lifetime, you never lose your salvation. Once you let Jesus in your kitchen, he just keeps on making peanut butter and banana sandwiches, and he never leaves.

These quotes really stood out to me, since I can identify and not identify with them at the same time. Like Elvis, I am somewhat of a spiritual seeker. Spirituality is a good, clean way for me to self-medicate. I look for spiritual autobiographies whenever I visit my public library, for I’m interested in how people find meaning as they cope with life.

And the books that I read are not always Christian. I read one about an orthodox Jew who rediscovered his Judaism through a “Jesus year” of intense exposure to Christianity. I recently read a book about a Jewish man who studied the dominant non-belief in Sweden and Denmark, as he asked the people of those countries how they dealt with tragedy and death in light of their lack of religious faith. Right now, I’m reading a book by a Japanese brother and sister, whose spiritual perspectives are quite different from one another. The brother is a financial wiz who writes self-help books, and the sister is a Buddhist nun who was ordained by the Dalai Lama. Their book relates how they have taught each other and grown in the process.

For my daily quiet time, I have read the Bible, but right now I’m reading other books as well. I am about two-thirds of the way through the Koran, and I have books of Hindu and Buddhist Scriptures lined up for my next projects. I still read the Bible every day, however, through a daily Bible reading plan that enables me to read the whole Bible in a year. And I also do my weekly quiet time, in which I study a chapter of the Bible. I’m listening to a sermon on I Samuel 19 right now!

What am I looking for? One thing is consolation. For what I mean by that, read my Joan of Arcadia post, Joan of Arcadia: Desolation and Consolation. I desire inspiration, inner peace, wholeness, and wisdom about how I should live my life. Another thing I seek is knowledge. I wonder what other religions teach, how people find fulfillment in life, and if other religions are necessarily all about self-fulfillment (something tells me that Islam may not be). Sometimes, my search really inspires me. Other times, it does not. But the search is worthwhile either way.

Am I shopping for a religion? I’m not sure. I really did not know much about other religions when I became a Christian, and I naturally assumed that Christianity was right and other religions were wrong. Right now, I wonder if that is indeed the case. Some (e.g., John Hick) claim that God is present in other religions. Is he? I don’t know. I’m not even sure if I can know, since we don’t directly hear the voice of God, but rather competing claims about what God does and thinks. But I can learn about other religions and see what I find.

Christianity still inspires me on some level, especially when it focuses on grace, God’s love, wisdom, and personal growth. When it gets into Jesus being the only way to salvation, however, I feel rather uncomfortable. I was eating at Taco Bell this afternoon, and there was a poorly-dressed elderly woman eating behind me, as she sucked up her sinuses and made me sick in the process. She said “hi” to one of the workers and asked how he was doing, and he replied that he was being bad. She replied, “But that’s why Jesus came to earth–for those who are bad.”

I’m not sure why her statement turned me off. Part of it may have been that my reading of the Koran and portions of the Bible instills in me the notion that God accepts those who do good, while he punishes those who are bad. “Maybe it doesn’t matter if one believes in Christ,” I have thought in the past, “as long he or she lives a fairly righteous life.” Yet, at the same time, I’m still drawn to God’s grace and forgiveness. The idea that Christianity is about what Christ has done for us rather than what we can do for God actually appeals to me. I guess my problem with the woman’s statement was that it was so Jesus-specific, and I didn’t find it inclusive of people on other spiritual paths. But I think I was wrong to belittle her Christian faith in my mind. I don’t want to become hardened and condescending.

I don’t entirely care for Cathleen Falsani’s statement about salvation, since it evokes for me the Armstrongite stereotype of Protestantism: that one can babble a few words about accepting Christ, go out and live in sin, and still be assured of salvation after death. That’s not exactly what I find in the Bible, which emphasizes righteous living and perseverance in the faith (e.g., Matthew 10:22; Colossians 1:23). Plus, I didn’t care for Cathleen’s reference to “peanut butter and banana sandwiches.” That sounded icky and corny to me, and she comes across as much more level-headed on her YouTube videos (e.g., here).

But I’d like to think that God recognizes and honors our thirst for him, even though we are complex, messy creatures who are mostly mixtures of good and bad. Abraham Lincoln may not have been the most orthodox Christian on the face of the earth, but he still felt a dependence on God. Elvis had his hang-ups and looked to drugs to self-medicate, but he still wanted to feel the love, grace, goodness, and healing power of God. Doesn’t that count for something? Can saving faith be a thirst for the divine?

I hope so, but there are still plenty of passages about the necessity of believing in Jesus for salvation (John 14:6, Acts 4:12, etc.). I can’t just blow those off and remain a Christian in good standing.

Falsani Series

On and off for the next week or so, I will comment on my favorite quotes from a book that I just read: Cathleen Falsani’s Sin Boldly: A Field Guide for Grace (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008).

Falsani is an award-winning religion writer for the Chicago Sun-Times. She went to Wheaton College, and she’s an evangelical, though she appears to be rather liberal on political issues. She calls herself a “freelance Christian,” which somewhat resonates with me, a “sort-of” evangelical (loosely speaking) who has major, big-time problems with organized religion. And her book has endorsements from Lee Strobel, Jim Wallis, Tony Campolo, and Brian McLaren. But not only do evangelical celebrities like it. So does Rabbi Irwin Kula, president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership.

The book has plenty of good quotes that can help a lot of people, but I don’t want to focus here on a lot of people. I want to comment on what’s important to me! Consequently, I only plan to comment on the quotes that I found especially meaningful–to me personally. There are six quotes that particularly stand out to me. I’ll divide them according to the following titles: (1.) Elvis, (2.) just love people, (3.) holding the Torah like it’s a baby, (4.) God got me through, but the scars are still there, (5.) goodness, and (6.) God speaks.

I’ll start with “Elvis” sometime this week. Stay tuned!