Just Another Line in the Sand

There's a well-worn Buddhist aphorism that compares truth to a boat that you might use to cross a river but don't need once you're on the other side (and certainly don't need to go toting across the desert). I think many of us can attest to things that felt true at the time -- things that we desperately needed to be true at the time -- but now don't seem as important. Some of them seem downright silly. And yet, in the moment, they felt very, very real.

I'm intrigued by the "emerging church" and particularly its elder statesman, Brian McLaren. I like McLaren's work. I've read nearly all of it. I'm impressed with his record of activism and his passion for social justice. He seems like a quintessentially nice guy, and very bright. His work is part of my dissertation, especially inasmuch as The Story We Find Ourselves In and Everything Must Change borrow heavily from radical rhetoric and theory (even if McLaren himself is more of a reformist). And at one point in my life this work was a lifeline, a boat to carry me, a beacon of hope that I wasn't crazy so much as I might be a "new kind of Christian."

Except I'm not.

I am fascinated by the varied and various experiments that constitute the "emergent" movement. I think they're doing good work and are a necessary voice in what they rightly understand as an ongoing conversation. There are many, many ways in which my own thinking might land me in the "emerging" camp (what British researcher Katherine Moody calls the "emerging milieu"). I even like lattes. The emerging church represents the front line in a necessary renegotiation of Christian belief in light of postmodernity. I can dig that.

But I don't want to go. I am more comfortable passing as an evangelical of a fairly mainstream variety. If I stop being okay with that, I'm much more likely to spend my Sunday mornings drinking coffee and doing the New York Times crossword puzzle (well, not really, but you get the idea) than I am to join a house church or an emergent cohort. Hell, I'm more likely to start going to Mass or finally satisfy my jones for being Episcopal (I think it's all the Madeleine L'Engle I read as a kid).

At least part of it is that I'm really not that into intimacy, and it seems to me that a lot of the emerging milieu's ecclesiological experiments are predicated on cultivating it. I don't want to "share my life" with people. Bare my soul in writing? Sure. In my living room? Not so much. I'm okay with being vulnerable and open and honest but not with just anyone, not up close and personal. On the page it's different. To be perfectly honest I kind of like going to a big(-ish) church where I pretty much determine how involved I want to be.

This may seem strange since I'm on staff, but I agreed to that. I'm not even a member, actually, and I have no intention of becoming one. In fact, being on staff is interesting because people pretty much assume that a) you're theologically on board, and b) too busy to get involved in a bunch of other stuff, with the end result that I almost get bothered less than if I were Joe Pewsitter, plus I get access to goings-on that other people don't, which can be interesting in and of itself.

For at least a decade, I've tried to find a way to bridge my skepticism and my apparent inability to escape the orbit of evangelicalism. I've tried "really believing" other things that were tangential but still related, but that didn't work. I've tried being a Christian radical of the kind I'm studying (which is part of the reason I started studying it), and then ended up trying to pass as a Christian radical passing as a regular evangelical. I've tried various configurations of that. There are a lot of resources for doing this sort of thing in the "emerging milieu." Lots of very interesting resources. In a way, though, it seems like too much work.

I think maybe I've finally reached the point of (pardon the language here):

Fuck it.

Not in the sense of being all pissy and walking away. Not in the sense of writing angry diatribes and making fun of evangelicals, though I sometimes do that. Just in the sense of no longer trying to pretend that I'm anything but a deeply skeptical kind of hyper-agnostic who happens to like religion and can't seem to stop going to church. For all my eye-rolling at evangelicalism, I like evangelicals, the flesh-and-blood people I rub shoulders with at church.

These are my people. I'm from here. And I keep trying to understand this place I come from, to the point that doing so might actually be my vocation (if I can say all of that and still use the word "vocation" meaningfully -- I think I can). I can't really be one of them anymore and yet I can't really claim not to be one of them, either. The only way to peace with this is not, for me, a new theology or new way of "doing church" or a new vision for the future.

It is, I think, to just keep writing.