Lenten Confessions

On the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, Scott and I attended the festival of Uzgevenis, which is the Lithuanian equivalent of Mardi Gras. People swaddled themselves in brightly colored, conflicting patterns of clothing. The men glued stringy mustaches to their upper lips and wore furry animal hides. The girls painted on harshly overdone strumpet make-up. Everywhere you could see masks with gaping mouths, red-rimmed eyes, and twisted sausage noses. Other masks looked like the empty-eyed heads of goats. Some people simply took Groucho Marx glasses and threaded pieces of yarn through the nostrils, and others dressed up like doctors and nurses, scary ones that you would never want to be alone with, much less naked. In one corner of the town square, children were getting their picture taken with a grim reaper and his real-life scythe, both splattered in blood. In another corner, children were climbing onto a heaping pile of grain bags only to be whacked off by a short man with bloodshot eyes who was taking his “King of the Mountain” title a bit too seriously. A little girl handed out cold, greasy palm-sized pancakes for 50 centas next to a line of dancing, masked characters who frequently paused to either take shots of hard liquor or to bully people into buying mittens and socks out of a beat-up suitcase.

I would try to explain the cultural significance of this to you, but I, unfortunately, have no idea what any of it means. All I know is that, at the end, after several sets of people had stood up on stage and tried to knock each other off a log, a parade of celebrators drug a giant-sized, cloth witch (representing winter) into the middle of the square, doused her with gasoline from a water bottle, and set her on fire. As she burned, they chanted, “Winter, winter, go away” in Lithuanian while they dodged the flaming chunks of ash that blew about the square. Then-what else?-they broke out dancing.

Now, perhaps it is coincidence, but the mountains of gray snow have begun to melt. The sidewalks swallow you in charcoal slush up to your ankles. Each passing car and bus parts a shallow sea of mud, spraying it sideways in arching fans. The heavy crusts of snow on the roofs have begun to fall in large, jagged chunks. From our apartment, they sound like bodies hitting the ground. I cannot think of a more appropriate time in the year, especially after the Mardi Gras spectacle, to give oneself over to the gray travail of Lent.

Lent, like Advent, is another mystery to me, one that I practice, but one about which I also wonder. It is a time to deny oneself, I am told. A time to practice the metaphor of death and resurrection. We march toward Jerusalem with the grim knowledge of what will come. In doing so, we practice dying to some old part of ourselves in preparation for the resurrection to the new. This cycle is part of the lifelong transformation to which God calls us. It is also a proclamation of a story both old and young. I understand that, to many of you, this makes as much sense as Lithuanian Mardi Gras did to me. That is, if you haven’t heard the stories and the language and the liturgy all your life, you have no basis for understanding it. It sounds like one big heap of crazy.

The truth is, I often get embarrassed about being a Christian. I also get embarrassed about being embarrassed about it. That, combined with a strong dislike of proselytizing, is why I don’t write about it very much. I’ve come to realize, however, that in a journey of faith, honesty with oneself and with others is a key element. So here are my thoughts, in all their honesty.

I have the tendency to try to look at things objectively, and when I do that to Christianity, it can seem like the most ridiculous thing on the face of the Earth. Ok. So God impregnated a virgin, and she gave birth to God’s son, and he went around and did all these miracles, but then he got killed, but then three days later he came back to life, and then he went back up to heaven, but at the same time he also started living in our hearts.

I’m not even exaggerating. This is what we Christians believe. But that’s only the New Testament. If you start with the Old Testament, you read about a God who commanded the Israelites to commit genocide and then punished them when they did not completely follow through, among other equally horrifying things. Then if you seek consolation in the Psalms, you might find yourself inadvertently praying that someone will pick up the babies of your enemies and dash their heads against sharp rocks. (Even during the Bush era, I didn’t get this angry.)

And then there are all of these social passages that are still used today to justify hatred and violence and oppression: passages about women submitting to husbands and slaves bending their backs in continued servitude and, in a couple tiny but widely-proclaimed verses, homosexuals committing abominations before God.

This is what we believe, and these are the things our holy book says. And we often don’t see why these things would be difficult for anyone else to swallow. Indeed, we sometimes claim that if someone doesn’t swallow them-hook, line, and sinker-then that person will be pitched into a fiery afterlife. FOREVER. Whoa! Hold up!

Once I read a Native American creation story. It was all about the great Creator making three other gods and those gods kicking around a ball of sweat until the ball expanded and finally became the Earth. And I remember thinking, “What do you think I am? Stupid? Come on!”

It wasn’t until I grew older that I realized people could have the same reaction to Christianity. The truth is, it is a difficult thing to believe if you are not culturally prepared to believe it. And even then, in a modern society, it presents some serious roadblocks to those of us who strive to be compassionate and rational. We see how the practitioners of Christianity have suppressed the discoveries of science. How they have justified feudalism and genocide and slavery and segregation and a whole host of other things. How they use it now to justify wars, to subjugate women, to condemn homosexuals, and to spread paranoid, fear-mongering delusions about those of other faiths. How they so often use it as a basis for division and violence rather than transformational love. Of course, those who do these things do not represent all Christians, but they are a vocal and riotous bunch; this, this, is what people see! And this is what makes me so embarrassed! It’s like constantly wearing one of those “I’m with stupid” shirts. Except it would instead read, “I’m with severely misguided.”

The strange thing is, though, I came back. After I turned from the fundamentalist beliefs of my childhood and unsuccessfully strove to live a meaningful life without them, God beckoned me back. As a homo-loving, war-protesting angry liberal feminist, God beckoned me back. And for the past four years, I have tried to follow Christ by living a life of love and service. I have also tried to reconcile the disparities between the world in which I grew up and the world which I now inhabit.

I am not a theologian or a philosopher, not even close. And I am misguided, too, I am sure, in even more ways than I know. But I do think, and I do also believe. And I want to explain how, for me, these things can go together. Because faith has been an inexpressibly precious thing in my life; indeed, it has become the page upon which my life is written. And this is such “good news” for me that it naturally desires to be shared. I’m not telling you that if you don’t believe these things, you will burn in hell, or if you follow a different religious path, I’m right and you’re wrong; I’m just telling you that these things have brought tremendous joy and hope and purpose into my life, along with a peace that passes all understanding.

Recently I’ve been reading Marcus Borg, a Bible scholar, and I discovered something very interesting. Apparently, only since the beginning of the Modern period have we begun to make truth synonymous with literal fact. That is to say, this over-stressing of the factuality of biblical events was a reaction to the Age of Enlightenment. Before the Enlightenment, to quote Borg, “it was not the literal meaning of the Bible that mattered most for Christians, but its ‘more-than-literal’ meaning.” By more-than-literal meaning, Borg is speaking about its metaphorical meaning. In other words, it is not so important whether or not God created the world in seven literal days, an issue over which (metaphorically speaking) we have been ripping each other apart. People get heated up on both sides, one side because it is completely contrary to heaps and mounds of scientific data, and the other side because they believe that if the Bible is not literally and factually accurate, it is not true. But what happens if we let that go, if we put aside that debate, and then read the passage in a search for its metaphorical meaning? What then do we find? Borg claims that we find the following messages, among others: “God is the creator of all that is. We are created in the image of God. We live our lives east of Eden; something has gone wrong. We long to return.” These messages are the crux of the passage, right? These are the foundational truths upon which we build our view of the world.

If you get hung up on trying to wrap your brain around something that it refuses to accept, from the creation story to the miracles of Jesus, give yourself some mental breathing space and instead focus on the metaphorical meaning of the passage. Let’s not talk about whether or not it actually, factually happened; what does it mean?

This continues to be a revelation for me: Just because something may not have happened doesn’t mean it’s not true. To go back to the Native American example, about which my young self was so incensed and perplexed, a storyteller about to tell his tribe’s version of the creation story began the following way: “Now I don’t know if it happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.”

But then what about the blatant contradictions found in the Bible? The turning the other cheek vs. the killing of every man, woman, and child, for example? The Bible, as archaic as it might seem now, was actually very progressive for its time. Women, for instance, were finally valued as individuals and deemed to be free moral agents instead of pieces of property defined solely in relation to their husbands. But then for some Christians it stopped there. From this ancient document, people pieced together a worldview complete with the one true science, the role of women, the justification of slavery, and the correct stance on homosexuality, among other things. Then they fired it all in an oven (after it was finally assembled hundreds of years after Jesus’ death) and expected it to stay that way. But the Bible is a historical document, conditioned by the cultures in which it was created, those two cultures being vastly different from our own. And men wrote it. Yes, men who were seeking God, yes, men who were experiencing God, but men. And men decided which books were in and which books were out. And as such, to reference Borg, the Bible is a human product, not a divine product. The Bible is not God speaking directly to us but these two cultures, as well as they can, expressing their experience of God. And through these experiences, God speaks to us, yes. But the Old Testament stories are Israel’s stories of how they experienced God. The laws of the Bible were not necessarily intended to be laws for all time (as anyone who has worn two materials woven together can relate); they were the laws of these communities, the way they responded to the call of God in their culture and in their time. The Bible is not an encyclopedia or a history textbook or a scientific treatise or even a precise set of rules. It is an abyss of mystery through which we humbly seek wisdom to follow God in our own culture and in our own time.

I wanted to share this because these thoughts have opened up a space in my head where I can more freely move about. This metaphorical and historical view of the Bible has also made it possible for me to read it again, something which I have had great difficulty with since my rejection of fundamentalism eight years ago. I have deeply yearned for a life of faith but was informed that, because I could not accept certain things, that world was closed off to me forever. Some of you may have no trouble accepting the Bible as literal fact. You may also have no trouble accepting every word as the inspired and inerrant Word of God. If so, if that works for you and leads you in the way you should go, then that is a wonderful thing. But some of you may understand how painful my experience is: to leave behind the very teachings that have formed your young mind. I now find, though, that it was not the foundations beneath those teachings that were to blame; it was instead the restrictions in which they were presented. I think I speak for many in my generation who struggle with religion, who seek desperately for faith but find that it is insupportable. I share these thoughts for them.

I do not believe that women are inferior to men. I do not believe that it is wrong to be homosexual. I do not believe that practitioners of other faiths are going to hell. But I believe in God, and I believe in Jesus, and I believe in the Bible, and I believe in the salvation of the cross. I am a Christian. And I have a hunch, when I reach the top of this mountain, that I will stand there with others whom I had not seen as I journeyed, others who shared my goal but not my path. We will stand there together, fundamentalists and relativists, Muslims and Jews, Buddhists and Hindus and Taoists. And together we will rejoice.