I. The Madman and the Arsonists: A Parable
Let’s say that you have lived your whole life in a small town well-known for arson cases. Let’s say your parents lived and raised you here, as did their parents, back and back to time immemorial, so that you really don’t know any different. Several times a year, for all of your waking memory, houses would burn down on nearby streets, and your childhood is full of memories of having taken in, often for days or weeks at a time, dear friends who lost their houses in such a way. This is as much a part of your life growing up, let’s say, as eating or sleeping or going to school. It is just considered a part of life in that town.
Now let’s say that the town government has, as a result, invested in highly effective architectural schemes over the years in order to mitigate such catastrophes. The town elders have spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on fireproofing buildings. They have discovered quite admirable ways of constructing homes that will hold up better to fire damage, and they are quite proud of all of this.
The town chronicle purportedly supports their views. This is an old book, a dusty volume that few have really read. Not that it is kept from the public. At one point, the book was kept under lock and key, allowed to be read only by the town elders, but a series of controversies and reforms far in the past led to the book being open to any citizen at all. In fact, the book, ever since those reforms long ago, has sat on a small podium in the corner of the town hall, open to anyone, but both its length and the antiquated language it employs, along with the abundance of far easier pleasures in the town itself, mean that few, if anyone, has read it. The only people who purport to have read the chronicle in any kind of depth now, in fact, are the town elders, and they assure you, year after year, that when reflecting upon the long and storied past of that illustrious town, the long-form efforts of your kind have resulted in a marked decrease in the number of arsons per year. Whenever another house turns to ash, the town elders are quick to redirect the conversation to this or that most recent plan for improving fire safety procedures and “building a safer community for all”. They assure you that the town is the safest it has ever been, and that patience is all that is required.
As a young person coming of age in the town, you consider it your duty, as you grow older, to work for the betterment of your birthplace, and the first thing you decide to do, once you’ve turned 18, is to make it your aim to read the town chronicle. When you announce this aim to your parents, they are a bit taken aback. While encouraged that you seem to take both your education and your citizenship so seriously, they are a little frightened at your deep sense of purpose. The town chronicle is famously long, spanning many leatherbound volumes across a number of shelves, and to read the chronicle in its entirety would be impossible for any one person.
I want to do something about the fires we keep having, you explain. And the best way to do that, you continue, seems to be to read the history, doesn’t it? Your parents smile at you sadly and nod, as if they admire something of your naivete.
Still, you have a sense that it is not just your desire but your duty to try, and so you spend the next four years of your life reading the town chronicle in your free time, taking vigorous notes. In your free time between work and play, romance and education, you read far and wide in the town chronicle, with the hope of gaining the widest survey possible.
After four years of careful study, you come away with an overwhelming conclusion: namely, that the number of arsons has not in the least decreased with time. While all available historical data shows that the nature of the fires themselves and the neighborhoods likely to bear the brunt of the damage have changed with time, there is scant evidence to suggest that the number of fires has decreased.
You come away from the chronicle with this conclusion. It is a disturbing one, because it means that the town elders are either liars or fooling themselves, and neither prospect is enjoyable to contemplate.
Then something horrible happens. In the house where you’ve been living since you moved out four years ago, a fire starts in the middle of the night. You wake in horror to find your room swallowed up in flame. So it has happened at last, you think to yourself. After years of watching this happen to other people, now it comes around to you. And somehow, it is surprising. Somehow it is unimaginable that tongues of fire should shoot up the walls of your bedroom, consuming everything that they touch. Of course, you had always suspected that this might happen to you, given the odds, but somehow the potentiality had never seemed quite real. By your bedside, you see the indentation of footsteps leading from your own bed to the little drawer by the window that you know holds the matches. The drawer sits open, and the matches are strewn across the floor, as if some crazed pyromaniac started the fire in a hurry.
All of this, you notice in a moment, less than a moment. Turning from the sight of your room, you climb out the bedroom window in a hurry, just saving yourself from the flames. You stand across the street and watch your house turns to ashes. Your neighbors come out of their houses to comfort you. I’m so sorry, they say to you. What rotten luck. Then they swiftly direct your attention to the new condominiums on the near horizon, built with completely modern fire mitigation strategies in mind. But something just isn’t right.
In the months following the fire, you move in with your parents. And as you try to piece together your life again, it strikes you just what is wrong with the situation. This is the first fire you have witnessed firsthand, and so it is the first time you have considered the glaringly obvious problem.
The problem is one of culpability. Who is it that has been starting the fires, and why is this something that has never been explored in-depth? It seems glaringly obvious to you, as well as several other young people in the town who have been through similar fires, that far more important than the issue of fireproofing the buildings is the issue of bringing justice to whomever has been causing the fires in the first place. Your education has made you skeptical that there are any less fires than there were a hundred years ago, but even setting this grievance aside, the current methodology of the town elders seems systematically flawed. After all, there is something suspicious about all of it.
Why is so little being done to find the arsonists themselves? Wouldn’t our time be better spent searching for the culprits of these routine attacks? Wouldn’t it be better just to find the arsonists and prosecute them?
Say you are bold and eager to help, and so you bring this up with some of the town elders in a moment of adolescent frustration. Say you are met with pale faces and hurried attempts to divert the conversation. Confused by the secrecy with which your perfectly justified complaints are met, you storm out of the meeting, distraught and angry. Surely someone must care about the answer to such a vital question, and surely the answer has serious existential consequences for the future of the town itself.
And then say, finally, that a messenger from a far country you have never heard of arrives in town with a strange message. He tells you that he comes from a place where there are no fires to speak of, and stranger than this, he informs you that where he has come from the arsonists were long ago uncovered. Your town is under a deep enchantment!, he cries out from the square. When asked about the nature of the enchantment, the madman – for surely he must be a madman to suppose that any town could exist where house fires are not a part of daily life – confidently explains: That early on, when the town was first founded, a spell was put upon it by a wicked magician so that the people of that town would forever be cursed to burn buildings in their sleep. The people of the village were sleepwalkers, after all, and at night, unbeknownst to themselves, they were setting fire to one another’s houses. Then they were waking again each morning with the inkling that something was wrong, going about their days, however, for the most part none the wiser.
Follow me to the country where there is no arson!, the madman shouts. For one day, sooner than you think, this entire town will be engulfed in flame, and these momentary arsons will become a ceaseless fire from which there will be no escape.
But no one, it seems, will believe him that such a country exists. The elders say that it is foolishness to believe in such a country, and moreover, the housefires are being taken care of at very satisfying rate. We are getting better at managing the fires, they assure the community, day by day. Pay no attention to this talk of “an enchantment!”
And as things return to status quo around your little village, you are left uneasy. Because you saw the matches by your bedside. You saw the marks left by feet quite like your own on the rug. Could it be that the madman was…correct?
I was recently asked to give a story to accompany my baptism this past March. Stories are vitally important to me. As an elementary-schooler I wrote long fantasy novels, spanning hundreds of pages (with large pictures drawn in crayon), and I never really stopped as I “grew up”.
I am one of those who have been given the strange calling of novel-writing. We will see where it takes me.
Given this background of mine, I tend to view the work of Christ on planet Earth and in the lives of individuals as a grand story, of the sort I always loved as a boy. Something like Tolkien’s hobbits, tramping into Mordor bearing the weight of human sin, or Dante’s journey into Hell, a tale that has always kept me spellbound since I first encountered the Divine Comedy as a fifteen-year-old.
It is my hope that the parable above illuminates the story I have been asked to tell: that of an overly thoughtful, ruinously sincere young boy trying desperately to find Christ in the midst of the very institution that crucified Him: religion itself.
I will refer to it throughout, as I believe it illuminates some events in my own life. But knowing that the less abstract-minded in my audience may crave concretes, I will provide two “ways in” to the parable, and what it can tell us about a Christian conversion:
One is that the character of the Christian message is of the same character as news. And as news it should be treated as such: true, and demanding action.
Second is that the joy that the Christian news promises seems entirely too good to be true. It is only when we gain its perspective, however, only once we declare our allegiance to that distant country, that we see that it is our own world of sin that is a fiction, bound to rules we have accepted out of habit, out of a failure to believe that better can exist.
How are we meant to respond to news of this character? The apostles seem to have made at least this much clear: Repent, and be baptized for the forgiveness of your sins. Repent. To do this, you must renounce all claims to self-sufficiency. Especially your religious claims. It is for this reason that Christians themselves can be quite poor at repentance, insofar as Christianity quite easily becomes a system of assuring oneself of preternatural goodness. After all, any testimony that begins “I was raised in a Christian home” and does not go on to talk about the need for personal repentance would seem to cut against the entire project of becoming a Christian.
To convert to Christ is therefore to undergo a change in citizenship. You must transfer your allegiance from the town of your birth to a country of which you’ve only heard news.
To convert to Christ is to take responsibility for your part in the infernos that rage across your town. It is to admit that you are under a kind of enchantment, destined to fail even when you are at your best, and that to undo this enchantment requires not greater steadfastness on your part, not greater fireproofing of your home or the homes of others, but to submit that you are fully culpable of arson as long as the enchantment retains its power, and to further admit that you require the powers of a far greater wizard to undo your enchantment and break the generational curse of sin.
“I was raised in a Christian home.” This is to say that the presence of madmen and lunatics have been a constant in my life, one I have not often welcomed. Pastors and preachers who burned for a country I could never quite see. I found myself keeping my eyes open when those around me prayed. Because it never stopped being strange to me, this faith, and in some ways, it never will.
I have been told, time and again, perfectly and imperfectly, of the existence of a country where arson is not such a constant as it appears in the town of my birthplace, and yet to really believe in that distant country, is another matter entirely, a grace of God, and the long-form work of a Christian conversion.
Towards the content of my conversion I will now turn.
II. Why I Am a Christian
I am a Christian chiefly because, shortly after graduating college and, feeling that I had already exhausted all available options as to how to live, I found myself alone in the world in a way that I had not been since age 17 and, standing beneath the Last Judgment of Christ by Michelangelo – for I happened to be in Rome at the time – something broke within me, and I wept uncontrollably because I knew that I was loved.
This is one way I could begin. I could tell you how the realization that I was loved destroyed me, and I did not know how to respond to it for years because it seemed like too great a thing to carry. I could tell you that, despite the fact that to be loved is a fundamental human need, every bit as crucial to our survival as food, water, and shelter, it also seemed to me a ponderous burden. The problem with being loved, really loved, after all, is that it asks nothing of you. It asks only that you receive it. And this I could not accept. A love so gratuitous, entirely unearned, has a tendency to paralyze the beloved, after all.
I could say that I am a Christian because I have been loved, riotously loved, by a whole host of people, none of whom I did anything remarkable to deserve. I have been loved gratuitously. Romantically, once. And I have been loved by dear friends and family countless times. And so perhaps it seemed plausible to me that God, too, should be love.
Or I could start another way. I could say that I am a Christian because I was raised by parents who, whatever their flaws, put inordinate amounts of effort into communicating to me a narrative for human thriving that escaped the taut constrictions of the political metanarratives of the day. That, having exhausted Marxism as a meaningful solution to the American malaise, I read St. Augustine at age 21, and I began to identify as a citizen of a far country, finding our earthly country’s politics to be in a state of disarray.
I could say that I am a Christian because watching my grandparents pass away impressed upon me the fact that death is real, and therefore life, too, is very real. And therefore everything we do, from the smallest act of unkindness in the grocery store checkout to surprising a coworker with flowers, is gravely consequential.
I could say that I am a Christian because experience seems to square with Scripture in that sin runs through me like the grain in a piece of wood.
I could say that I am a Christian because I am weak, or because I simply cannot bear the thought of being cosmically alone.
I could say that I am Christian because I am a poet, and, believing wonder to be the most profound of human emotions, I find bare scientific naturalism boring. Without transcendence, the poets aren’t really writing odes to the flowers or the trees, after all; insofar as nature is nothing to the scientific naturalist but an endless, inconsequential movement of matter across a void, the poet without transcendence is just writing odes to his own projecting mind.
I could say that I am a Christian because I find Christianity to be the only real allowance for true freedom of thought, a virtue I prize above all others. Thus I could begin not with events from my life at all, but by affirming juxtaposed assertions that are taken by too many to be mutually exclusive of one another, and which my faith alone makes possible. In this way, I could state that my cursory understanding of quantum physics – in particular, indeterminacy – has made me a fierce Trinitarian, or that my early fascination with postmodern experimental fiction has made me a defender of the Bible as the most beautiful story in human history. I could explain how the sight of an albatross resting upon the thermals above a Caribbean island has converted me quite as effectively to Christ as John 3:16. I could note how the phenomenon of natural selection has confirmed my belief in the Fall, or how Beckett, Sartre, and Nietzsche, of all writers, opened my eyes to the beauty of the Incarnation.
Whatever the case, however, I am probably a Christian simply because Christianity is true. Maybe this is the best place to start. This will be satisfying to very few people who do not already believe, of course, and I realize this with strange joy. Christianity is simply true. It is, after all, ‘news’, and news of the best kind. When we cannot believe, we do not succeed in escaping its narrative grasp, as so many so-called “agnostics” assume. Christianity, to paraphrase G.K. Chesterton in his work Orthodoxy, is the only religion that boasts a God who for one moment seems to become an atheist. Here Chesterton refers to Gethsemane, when God Incarnate begs to have the cup of suffering pass over Him, wishing that there were some other way. Only this God could experience something like doubt. Only this God, the human God, could weep at the tomb of a dead man. Only this God grew tired of crowds and retreated to a mountaintop to pray.
III. “O the Mind, Mind Has Mountains”
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed…”
— Gerard Manley Hopkins
Christianity is true entirely outside of my ability to believe it, and this has come as a comfort to me chiefly because knowing myself has often seemed difficult enough. From early in my high school years, I have routinely faced crippling anxiety attacks. I call them that, because that seems to be what we call them in our secular age, but the name is too clinical and detached for the vast psychodrama that each entails. In times less therapeutically inclined, it is my belief they would have been called simply “dark nights of the soul”. A student of English literature during my undergraduate years, I found great affinity with the “Terrible Sonnets” of priest and posthumously lauded poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. In his poetry, I found that others, too, had felt what it felt to “wake and feel the fell of dark not day”.
The attacks begin like this: My heart rate picks up, my breathing speeds up, and I have the sensation of staring into a void. For several hours, nothing is true in the world except that the human experience is desolately lonely, hardly worth sticking around for. That I am a failure, a disappointment to humankind, and largely incompetent at all that is set before me. These are the thoughts that find their way to me, completely unasked for.
There were several occasions upon which I found ceiling fans absolutely terrifying. Spinning ceaselessly above me in the sweltering darkness of the small-town apartment in which I lived by myself one summer, the fan seemed to be a symbol of the raw indeterminate thing that Being is, when understood from the inside. The skull seemed like a tight fit on nights like these, and the tidal flow of consciousness itself upon the beaches of my subjectivity struck me as interminably repetitive. This mind of mine has always been boiling over, and at times it has been my fear that I simply haven’t been given the same equipment for basic human functioning that my friends have. (Paradoxically, of course, loneliness is nothing if not the most shared of human experiences, something we always find it difficult to believe.)
Where are these attacks coming from?, I have learned to ask. No doubt they were accelerated by a particularly shattering heartbreak several years ago (about which more will be said later on), but these attacks ultimately pre-date any ill-fated romance in my life. They come, ultimately, from a fear that I am cosmically, ineffably, alone, and that there is no salve, “no balm in Gilead”, that can suffice.
I begin with these attacks not because they mark the chronological start of my understanding of God but because they seem to mark out the crux of my struggle with trusting Him: Why does he allow these inner storms to rage? Granted, the Father made the mind of Stewart Lindstrom “fearfully and wonderfully”. And, if all appearances are correct, He said to himself, as He made it: “Let him experience seasons of doubt so deep and lonely, spells of utter self-revulsion, that he will question whether it was not better to leave this world entirely.” (And there was evening and morning, the sixth day.)
In fact, however, appearances are not correct. This has taken me embarrassingly long to discover for someone who has been as loved as I have been, but then, we must forgive the empiricist in me: the dark seasons have been many, and not as far between as I would like. But if there is one thing I have learned in this life, ever since a particular year passed in which two friends of mine attempted suicide, it is this: That it remains an altogether unfathomable truth to most people that they could be loved. Really loved, I mean.
Do you know that? I have listened to friends recount their lives to me, and I have stared at them as they spoke about this or that trauma, and I have stopped them, mid-sentence to tell them they are lovely. They have beautiful hearts. They are infinitely precious.
And then I have watched the light change in their eyes. I have watched them shrink back, smile as if apologizing. And that is how you know they don’t really believe that. They don’t really believe that they are loved.
For most of my young adulthood, I can confidently say that I did not believe that. I lived in a country where arson was a constant, and though news kept coming to me from a country with different rules, I had great trouble in believing in it.
IV. Fearsome Objectivity
Anxiety has been the most constant of conflagrations, recurring at steady intervals throughout my life. My anxiety has stemmed from a deep fear of being cosmically, ineffably alone. That resting loneliness, which I began to experience early on, I projected onto a girl I loved for several years, throughout college.
We were long-distance for huge portions of our relationship. Some of the worst anxiety attacks of my life hit during a summer when we were away from one another. I was relatively alone in my college town, working three jobs for close to 60 hours a week. Night after night I would wake to the sound of the train horn, and then, for a whole host of reasons, I would sob for whole hours, horrified that I was both alive and completely baffled by life itself. It utterly confused me that my friends seemed to know how to live. They were not terrified by existence, so what was my problem?
What I needed – and in fact what the anxieties of the postmodern have consistently demanded – was the assurance of a fearsome objectivity, something “out there”, beyond the reaches of the skull. For a while, I tried to make politics the site of objectivity, and I became a Marxist. I believed, after reading Marx, Guy Dubord, Herbert Marcuse, and other writers of the “New Left” of the 1960’s, that consumer capitalism was destroying us, and therefore capitalism had to be overthrown. (A partial truth, of course.)
Eventually, however, after I watched my childhood neighborhood of St. Paul burn during the summer of 2020, I became exhausted with politics, and I realized that my own increasingly anarchic political views would not suffice in saving the world, precisely because they were mine.
I have rarely heard Christianity framed as an objectivity in recent years. I grew up with the culturally mainstream, Baptist-Evangelical “Jesus who lives in your heart”. It was an important truth to me from the outset that Christ was, in a sense, coming to live in my heart, but unfortunately, it dovetailed with my postmodern cultural catechesis, which rigorously informed me that issues of ethics, morality, and indeed, truth itself, were entirely relative. After all, if Jesus is just in our hearts, then it seems he often conveniently sanctifies any and all our baser impulses.
But I call the later discovery of Christ – staring up at the Final Judgment in the Sistine Chapel – the discovery of a “fearsome objectivity” because it was the confirmation of what several years of odd and terrifying experiences throughout my early twenties had been pointing me towards. Here was Christ, depicted as a man, through and through. God, in a body like mine. The challenge was put to me: Could I believe that God Himself lived a human life, in the flesh, full of all “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to”?
What was the boy staring up at The Final Judgment thinking about, you ask? This part of my life is a fever dream. I have difficulty relating its content to anyone. Top of my mind, however, was a particular heartbreak. This I remember clear as day, a pain that stamped itself firmly into the soft clay of my soul: A girl I had loved dearly and desired to marry for several years had broken up with me via phone call. I was in Italy alone, but less alone, somehow, staring up at The Final Judgment, than before. I was beginning to understand what St. Augustine meant when he wrote, in his Confessions: Interior intimo meo et superior summo meo. God is nearer to me than I am to myself.
It is this very God, the Incarnate God of love, to whom I was converted when I stared up at The Final Judgment and wept.
Once I finish this essay, I will send it to some of my friends, and I can already hear what they will say: “I’m so glad you have that.” “Your faith is so inspiring.” “I love that for you.” “Your story is powerful.” Whether Christian or agnostic, they will make it about me and my personal experience of God.
As if God were a Being I willed into existence by sheer effort. And I will shake my head. As if this God, this faith, can be called in any way mine. This faith is not something that has somehow emerged from within. I did not will it into being. This Jesus of Nazareth is entirely outside of me, and I thank God profusely that, though He is writing his commandments on my heart, He does not really live in my heart at all. He is firmly beyond the bounds of my anxious mind.
The Incarnation is, after all, no futile act in human wish fulfillment, a benevolent escape from fact. The Incarnation is, on the contrary, the single objective fact upon which all history turns. I often wish it were not the case. From the deepest well of my being, it would be better to be left alone. By our own merits, we could then believe ourselves righteous. But in fact, the Incarnation did take place. This means that regardless of my acceptance of Christ, regardless of my ability to see Him, He is coming again to judge all the living and the dead. Justice will be done, and what a relief that is. This, I think, is what is meant when people speak, too infrequently these days, about the fear of God.
V. The 3-5 Baptisms of Yours Truly
Allow me to backtrack a little, now that the basic facts have been laid out. To speak of baptism, I admit I have been baptized no less than four times. We’ll call it three-and-a-half. The first time I was baptized, I did so because I was 16 and I couldn’t think of a reason not to do so (the same reason why many vaguely unhappy people seem to get married). The second and second-and-a-half times – a spiritual detour, shall we say, though not without positive consequences for my life – I did so because my brother told me I needed to in order to receive the gift of tongues. And the third time, I did so because I knew, finally, that I needed to be saved, and that, moreover, it was not enough to love Jesus. I had, in actual fact, to need him, the way a tree needs water, for the actual forgiveness of my sins.
How can one be both religious and an unbeliever? A great many will fail to understand what I mean. I mean that it is entirely possible to be raised in a pious, churchgoing environment and yet to have never really understood the Gospel. Moralism is the opposite of grace. And in a country where Christians so often pride themselves on how “moral” they are, grace is usually more proximate to the prodigals than it is to the pious.
I have been such a prodigal. So often isn’t it precisely the pastor’s kids and the missionary children that most need to hear the Gospel? I was raised in an international Church by two parents who worked in full-time ministry to Chinese students at the University of Minnesota. My father had a pastor’s heart, and he put great effort into shepherding myself and my two younger brothers. But as I’ve said, all that grace can paralyze those within close proximity to it. A love of such weight and magnitude cannot leave us the same. It either drives us straight to the arms of Christ or it cripples us.
It is not fair, after all, that Christ died for me. For the longest time, I resented this on the part of the Creator. As I understood it, Jesus needed nothing from me. (Though he wanted my entire heart.) He only asked that I transfer my allegiance to an altogether better country and allow him to work his counter-enchantment upon my arson-prone soul.
Given how overtly religious your upbringing was, how could it have taken you so long to accept the love of Christ?, you might ask me. I would answer first that, very simply, Heaven is a far country, and news from a far country takes a long time to reach us. Second, however, I would ask you to consider whether it wasn’t precisely the religious childhood that so often stood in the way of grace.
We are all born pagans, after all. To say I was born in a Christian home is only to say that the grave sins I struggled with tended to be the sins that religious people struggle with, the very sins Jesus seems to have most come to eradicate: pride, self-justification, judgmentalism, and a tendency to look down on others for things they cannot change. These are the sins of the Pharisees, the sins of the Older Brother in the famous parable, and they are every bit as grave as greed, sexual immorality, and gluttony. (Not to disqualify myself from these sins as well, which I have lavishly engaged in as well.)
I loved Christ from my boyhood. But I confess to having hated religious people, and therefore myself, for the reasons just stated: What I perceived as their self-righteousness and pride. My experiences at a Chinese church growing up were nothing if not positive. The Chinese church I attended was not trapped inside the trite political dualities in which so many denominationally similar white suburban American churches were, which seemed to tacitly encourage if not outright preach a Christian Trumpism.
Once I moved to college, I saw this politicization of the church firsthand. Living in the middle of the rural Midwest during the most politically divisive times in modern memory, I was forced to confront the great blindnesses of religious people and reckon with the gross specter of closedmindedness and bigotry that animated a very insular Christian environment during a turbulent time.
My college town was a very culturally Christian place. In the rural Midwest, in recent years, this has tended to mean that Jesus came in the flesh chiefly in order to sanctify whatever profanity you would like to join to Joseph Biden’s name on a massive 10’ x 20’ flag in your front yard.
I am being facetious. Even now, I feel the bitterness of those days creeping up, and I must pray as I write that I do so with deep sobriety and conviction about the false gods of the Christian Midwest, yet without bitterness, and entirely with love. It is, after all, too easy to miss the trees of the Kingdom of God through the forest of human bigotry – a vice we are all too prone to today.
But we must reckon with the facts of our time, much as Bonhoeffer reckoned with the facts of his own time, and the facts were these: that these profane political flags were the first thing you saw driving into that town for several years, and that the central identifying feature of those who waved them, that is, the thing they most wanted to be seen for, was their Christian-ness. Notice that I did not say Christianity. I mean Christian in an American sense, which often has everything to do with culture, a lot to do with “being moral”, and only a little to do with Christ. (This is true in almost every place where Christianity becomes mainstream, and if it were not true of contemporary America, our fair republic would be a mighty exception.) The cultural idols of this particular brand of suburban and rural Christianity in which I was now swimming since moving to college, are well-established at this point: Retirement funds, two to four children, and a three-car garage. A pontoon on a lake, and recently the right, apparently, to hate your enemies.
I’d rather not harp on this any further. I feel it’s been done to death. Suffice it to say that, as a boy who had been raised in an international church by parents whose faith had been radically altered by the global missions movements of the 1980s, to the point that they became full-time missionaries to Chinese students, I thought that the Religious Right and this news from a far country – that Christ died for the ungodly – seemed odd bedfellows to say the least.
Unquestioned belief is an intellectual vice I find it difficult to forgive, either in others or myself. I have learned to understand it as a product of being a wounded human being. The unquestioned, uninformed assumptions people make – about God, about their neighbors, about science or culture or government – often have everything to do with a specific way in which they were hurt, and almost nothing to do with a rigorous epistemology.
So we must have mercy on those who believe ludicrous things. They are often suffering. And sin is, after all, blindness. At the same time, you are never absolved of thinking things through, regardless of your level of education, and so many Christians in this town did not seem to have done so. In fact, in that town at least, intelligent thought was actively discouraged by some of the faithful.
I fail to understand this Evangelical aversion to education since, as I have stated earlier, Christianity seems to me to be the only solid basis for true freedom of thought. After all, only the Christian can really take or leave developments within secular or scientific thought. While secular people cling to various social or scientific theories and projects to make meaning of their lives and are therefore loathe to abandon projects that are only half-working, the Christian already has found meaning, and so she can take or leave various developments in secular and scientific thought, safeguarded by the conviction that the world is Good and yet Fallen. Some of what comes out of the research universities will therefore be useful for human thriving; some will not. That Christianity is, instead of this, taken to be somehow constraining, both by the pious and the piously atheistic, is something I will never quite grasp.
The conservative Christian biases against education in my college town were not helped, of course, by the deliberate closedmindedness of so many Humanities professors to questions of transcendence. What made my college town such a strange place was that, on one hand, you had the townies, who were an eclectic bunch, difficult to categorize, but were, in general, socially and fiscally conservative religious people, and on the other hand, you had the professors, who were, for the most part, agnostics and atheists.
Here is an apparent paradox: One of my most devout professors was an atheist. I say he was devout because, contrary to most Humanities professors these days who, in their stern avoidance of moralizing, turn the text into a dry tome to be written about from this or that critical perspective, he had a deeply ingrained sense of social justice that ran through his whole philosophy. He loved to moralize. He taught in the African-American Studies department, and formative for him were a great number of black atheistic thinkers. It was in his courses that The Color Purple became one of my favorite novels. It was also in his courses that I was asked to consider the sins of religious people in great depth: the Congolese genocide, chattel slavery, and other looming atrocities. His goal seemed to be, as with all great professors, to shake you out of dogmatic certainty and get you to think critically. As with so much of postmodern thought, however, the endpoint of his philosophy was not a humbler apprehension of truth in the manifold, but a somehow far more arrogant defense of total confusion. Whatever my disagreements with him, I admired him. He acted from a belief in justice and a deep conviction that Christianity too often became a system for the subjugation of peoples or the justification of various sins. Of course, the belief in universal justice is always ultimately a belief in what else but God? This is why I say that he was quite religious in his atheism, and that is why I liked his classes so much. He was, in a strange sense, an old-school literature professor, who thought that the teaching of novels was a way of teaching people how to live. (Though often, this also became a way of teaching students how to vote, which I found it difficult not to roll my eyes at.)
These were the cross-currents in which I lived during the pandemic. Though I attended church, I had difficulty finding it meaningful, given how strongly I disagreed with the politics of the loudest Christians in town. And, spiritually weak, I began to internalize the critiques of my professor. I became very religious for a while, but Godless. Which is only to say, given my background in the schools of contemporary American Literature, that I became some kind of Marxist.
I found myself hating religious people. The “Godly Citzenship” riflery classes, the “Purity Balls”, the “Let’s Go Brandon” signs, and the voting guides passed out after 10am service were a great part of this. But another reason for this was broader in scope, less bound to the late days of the crumbling GOP and its last Evangelical adherents. My hatred of religious people had more to do with an abiding suspicion that they did not really know how to love.
Now, I am convinced that to love is, at bottom, a very simple thing. It may be the easiest thing in the world, in fact. Children excel at it. To have loved, on the other hand, is a very grave thing, at least in part because it means that you cannot really love anyone else, however hard you might try. We must imagine God in a constant state of heartbreak about the world’s rejection of Him. We must imagine him tossing and turning and going through the chain of what-if’s that usually accompany a breakup. This is at least one side of our Creator. He has loved us, and He doesn’t move on.
There is a very specific sense in which it is harder for Christians to love someone, just as they are, than it is for secular people. This is particularly because Christians have the unfortunate excuse of being able to baptize their selfish, all-too-human hopes for whom another person could be.
Before you accuse me of having a low view of the Church, however, please understand that this suspicion, like many of the most important convictions men develop over the course of their lives, has a lot more to do with a very specific girl than it does with any sweeping set of beliefs. In this case, it has to do with a very specific girl.
In short, I once loved a free-spirited girl who thought Church was an odd pageant to be putting on. She thought the Church didn’t really love people as they were. She thought it tried too hard to constrain the untamable in each of us, and sitting next to her in the pew, listening to a message delivered to the be-flannelled pious of West Central Minnesota by a pastor who had considered it important to use a particular epistle, on the one Sunday I decided to bring my girlfriend, a girl who, like many upper-middle-class white, educated young people, gun shy about organized religion because of its unsavory union with politics, to tell his anxious, fearful flock why cross-dressing was sinful, something they all already quite firmly believed, shortly before handing out “voting guides” that labeled Joe Biden’s party “Radical Marxists”, I began to feel the same.
The world is called Good in Genesis. God so loved it. To love someone is to accept them just as they are. God must love the world as it is. Why then do Evangelicals go around trying to change people all the time? Why are we then so loathe to be at peace in the world. Why then did I long anxiously for her conversion? And why did it break my heart when she, after four years, finally told me, over the phone, that she would never be someone who regularly attended Church?
Because there is another part of love: the hope that we have for whom someone could be. If religious Westerners fail to understand that to love someone requires radical and total acceptance of who they are right now, then secular Westerners fail to understand that love cannot exist without hope for who they could be.
But while God’s hope is always and only for our good, our human hopes for others are usually at least partly selfish. In romantic love, it is especially recommended that you rid yourself of any illusions, precisely because it is most in romantic love that you tend to form them. In my case, I fell in love quite early and lived in a dream for four years, praying for selfish reasons, related at least in part to my own infatuation, that the girl I loved would start to love God in the intimate way in which I’d been raised to know Him, longing for a relationship with her Creator.
Here again, note the sins unique to religious people. They come to the fore particularly in what has been called “missionary dating”: Pride, Self-Righteousness, a tendency to judge. They come from believing that you are in possession of the whole truth, and that conversion is a matter of converting to all the convictions of the other. I wish I had taken to heart 1 Corinthians 3: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase. So then neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase.”
But in fact, I did not take it to heart, and this is largely because I did not understand the extent of my own sinfulness. I could not believe in judgement. I could not really believe in sin. My peers at this school were primarily the children of comfortable white professionals’ children, and though, like most of the Upper Midwest, our childhoods were Christ-haunted, very few of my friends went to church regularly, or had close and formative relationships with members of a church body. My dearest friends seemed like good people, and they did not appear, at the very least, to need Christ to live.
Neither did I really believe in my own sinfulness. During the pandemic, my brother, with whom I had always been close, experienced a dramatic conversion and began to speak in tongues. I can’t explain how terrifying this was, really. One day, he was a rather lonely boy who whiled away long evenings in Moorhead playing Pokémon Go, and the next day, he was full of an entirely other-worldly joy, praying for me in tongues.
Neither my girlfriend at that time, who had known my brother since elementary school, nor I myself, could fail to admit that a deep change had been wrought upon his life from the outside. He came to visit us in our college town, and I have an absurd memory of him clapping his hands in worship to the hymns at the outdoor ELCA church service, which had a stoic, elderly population of laconic Swedes – for I had by this time stopped going to the Evangelical church, given the loatheness of its congregants to abide by the mask mandate. (This was early on in the pandemic.)
I also switched churches because it seemed that the girl I loved would go with me if she could attend a more progressive church, and that was quite fine by me. As the Sundays wore on, however, and her attendance waned because Saturday nights tended to bleed into Sundays for most sports players at that school, it became clear that my desires for her were burdensome: She did not understand my insistence on finding a church. Nor did she understand the deep intimacy with God I had been taught to seek.
And to be fair, I did not understand either.
At any rate, following my brother’s conversion, which, if my brother were the sort to write, would make a far more interesting essay than this one, he convicted me of deep sins in my life, and I bristled, though knowing he was right. Aware of sin in my life but unwilling as of yet to repudiate it, God seemed far away in a way He never had in childhood. I began to experience anxiety attacks and strange visions.
This was when my brother tried to baptize me. Twice. Whatever his doctrinal errors at the time – I will resist going on a tangent about the errors of ‘Oneness Pentecostalism’ – his heart was in the right place. God had changed him, and this I found horrifying. My best friend since childhood was now given to glossolalia! What could be more horrifying to a budding English major than senseless syllables sent straight from Heaven? Though his association of the gift of tongues with assurance of salvation was odd, God used him to convict me of sin. Through the anxiety attacks, through the visions in which I lay paralyzed before the majesty of God, I slowly came to my senses. I confessed sin.
And yet it still came as a great shock to me when, four years after I had taken her to prom, I stood on the lawn of a mutual friend and listened to the girl I loved tell me that she was not sure she wanted to marry me, given what she saw as my apparent hatred of the body, given that we did not seem to share a faith. The years flooded upon my mind: The first time she and I really met, over the art table in ceramics class, she had been making a topographical sculpture of her favorite place in all the world: Lake Superior. I thought of our trips to the North Shore. I thought of the long days we had spent playing mandolin in a hammock, crooning out tunes by Glenn Campbell, Tanya Tucker and Emmylou Harris. I thought of her father playing dobro on the porch while the sun set in summer, and I thought of her sister’s abiding mischief and love of the Montana wilderness. I thought of the town of Ely, her favorite place, and to this day, years later, I can’t really drive up the North Arm without crying.
Weeks after that breakup, I headed to Italy for a study-abroad trip. I stood in the Sistine Chapel weeping. I stood beneath the David in Florence, weeping. I stood in the Uffizi Gallery beneath The Birth of Venus, weeping. I stood beneath Tintoretto’s Crucifixion in Venice, weeping.
And I must say: crying in Italian art museums is incredibly cathartic. The Creator seems to have understood that, consistent with my background in high school theater and my continued attempts to become a writer, I was a highly dramatic, self-absorbed young man requiring dramatic experiences of transcendence in order to cease my rebellion. Crying in Italian art museums became the chief characteristic of that strange and awful July, wholly consonant with my classical education and my literary predilections. I was staying in the Alps for a study-abroad program I had signed up for months in advance, living in the personal home and castle of the late and controversial poet Ezra Pound. Each morning, I would rise early, eat Tirolian yogurt and stare out over the valley with the Gospel of John open in my hand. (In particular, John 11.) Each morning, I would weep and pray, sometimes for two hours or more, and I understood that Jesus wept first for me.
Jesus, the God-Man, wept for me. It is horrifying, really. God cares. God is not indifferent. My choices have dire consequences.
But after the horror comes a peace that transcends understanding. Because this means that regardless of my acceptance of Christ, regardless of my ability to see Him, He is coming again to judge all the living and the dead. Justice will be done, and what a relief that is. The fires will end. We are not stranded here. We are going to a town where there is no arson. And we are being gradually transformed into He who founded that very town. All we must do, first of all, is believe the news that such a town exists.
VI. The Real Work Begins
Believe, and then the real work begins. The real work of accepting the painful suture-work of grace. God is a surgeon skeptical of too many analgesics, to use another analogy. The greater awareness we gain of our sin, the more painful the process of becoming like Christ really is. And yet that pain is necessary: It is a way of reminding us how glorious we will one day be. How much better that country is, to which our souls will one day return.
In the wake of that first breakup, I saw the matches by my bedside. I saw the footprints in the carpeting, and only the most ludicrous avoidance of fact could have driven me any longer to ignore what was now glaringly obvious: That I had sinned. That sin was a part of my very being.
This was the news, arriving from a bizarre country whose laws I could not fathom: That I was culpable for a great number of things, including idolatry, sexual immorality, greed, gluttony, avarice, the list went on. The idea that I had really chosen these things, freely, was a radical discovery, as I had always believed myself in some manner to be bound to the same mistakes ad infinitum.
In many translations of the parable of the Prodigal Son, it is said that, in the pig pen, the boy “came to his senses”. The conversion of Saul seems to have been effected when “something like scales fell from his eyes”. This is to say that conversion takes place in spite of ourselves. And without sounding too Reformed – I would like to shirk any specific confessional associations, at present, in the service of reaching as wide a number of skeptics as possible – it is hard to avoid the conclusion reading the New Testament in particular that conversion is entirely a work of God.
And then you are weeping in the Sistine Chapel, trying to understand why it is such a human thing to fail to love someone right. To have lusted after, instead of loved someone, hungered instead of feasted. It is the most pervading human sin to love wrong, but this does not make the realization any easier. It has to hit home at a certain point.
And when it does, it tears you apart. That is when grace comes in. That is when you feel a strange lightness overtake you, and the world becomes possible in ways that it never was before. You are wounded, but free. Radically both.
If I had but world and enough time, I would go deeper into the specifics of what transcendent grace looks like in the quotidian of church life, but this would have to be the subject of another essay, as this grows long enough, as it is.
Suffice it to say that, though the news from a far country is itself good news, the counter-enchantment can take years of suffering to effect. You were born in the town of arson, after all, and its laws, its rules and ways of being have been etched into your brain. This is why conversion is a life’s work, and the grace of God is so painful in its slow but steady work.
I still struggle with seasons of loneliness and deep anxiety. And after all, to be lonely is something very different when you have loved someone and had that love taken from you. Singleness is one thing, but singleness after you have given your heart and had it rejected is of an entirely different character.
This is all because Christ begins by giving us news. His immediate balm to our problems is epistemic, which is to say, He begins by telling us something that is simply true and must be accepted as true, and it is this: That you don’t have to live like this. That you are riotously loved, regardless of what you do or omit to do. That the fires which rage are just as awful and abnormal as they seem. It is the work of a Christian life to believe that truth, at a positively subterranean level, to the point where its truth animates your entire Being.
VII. A Story Too Wonderful to Be True
Before you know it, two years have passed. You have probed deeper into your recurring anxiety attacks. The feelings of worthlessness, the thoughts that in your darkest moments have brought you to weigh the potential benefits of non-Being. Yes, even there. And it is quite offensive, these Thoughts, to anyone who loves you, but still, it must be said out loud. You must admit it to those who care about you.
And you cry out to the ceiling fan once again: Lord, why? Why did you make a mind so incapable of basic functioning? Why did you give me life when life is so unbearably lonely?
And it dawns upon you, in a way that it never did before this year of your life, that the cry itself is your answer. Yes, the cry towards a silent Heaven is itself the answer. It is Christ Himself crying when you cry. God is not the parody put together by the 18th-century deists, some being extrinsic to your nature, a puppet-master bent on wrath. But rather, he is right here. Near to you. Weeping with you. You can know Him better than you can ever know yourself.
Heaven is a far country. And on dark nights, it is more remote than a distant star. Maybe this is why, when you receive the news, from good college friends who come from far beyond the country of your skull, it still seems too good to be true.
What they tell you is past fathoming. And yet it is so simple.
You are loved, they say. The influence you have upon the world is incalculable, they continue.
And you sort of swallow. Blink a few times.
But I’m a failure, you whisper. My life is a shambles. I’ve broken the heart of someone I wanted to love my whole life. I am an imposition. A blight upon the world.
You should learn to distrust those thoughts, they say. Because the truth is this: that you are loved. Have you forgotten that?
But that can’t be it, you say. It can’t be so simple as that. It isn’t fair. I haven’t proved myself. I haven’t…written any great novels yet. I’m a middle school teacher at a small charter school with few financial prospects, an abysmal love life, and –
And you are loved.
I am looking at you now, reader. Yes, you.
You are loved. Against all appearances to the contrary, despite how things may seem. Despite what it feels like to live inside this body that never seems to do what you want. Despite the, yes, Thoughts, that come unannounced from the desolate corners of your mind, you are, nevertheless, loved.
And you don’t believe that, do you? Not really, anyways.
I don’t blame you. It seems like fiction, not fact. But news from a far country always sounds like a fairy tale.
But what if it is both fairy tale and fact? I mean: the best of both.
I am telling you now that, despite how things may feel, despite what you’ve been told, you are loved.
You are loved.
You are loved you are loved you are loved.
I wish you could see yourself, really. How beautiful you are. But you can’t, can you? And after all, isn’t that why we need one another? I’m here to tell you that you’re loved. I’m here to say that to you until one day you believe it. Can you trust my opinion of you for a moment?
And sure: Maybe it’s just the lighting, or that self-denigrating smile of yours, as you recount your life’s unalloyed pain, but your eyes look so full of tenderness.
I wish you could see how easy a thing it is to love you. I mean really love you.
Ask anyone. Anyone who knows you. And they’ll tell you: You’re lovelier than life itself.
Can you try to believe that?
I know it seems ludicrous, but it’s true.
And then Heaven is not so far a country as you’ve been taught to believe, but rather, it is right here, in the silence after the rainstorm, when you begin to laugh out loud coming in from your afternoon run like one of the madmen of your childhood, the madmen you so used to resent, because you now know, finally, what it means to be cherished.
An author once described marriage as ‘two people being in on a wonderful joke that no one else seems to understand’. It is like that with God. He is nearer to you than any friend can be, precisely because He made you. “Fearfully and wonderfully,” he formed you.
What a wonderful story, you say to me. If only stories so wonderful were true.
But what if it were, dear reader? Have you considered if this wonderful story were true?
