September 12, 2004

• Chances Are, I'm a Bad Christian ...

  
  

  I've been reading Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies.  She admits right up front that she's a bad Christian.  Well, maybe not right up front.  By the time she gets around to her confession, I already had a pretty good idea that she isn't the typical, stereotypical, or in any other way readily identifiable breed of Christian. 

  
  

  Let me quote her ...

  
  

       "So there I was on a plane returning home from St. Louis.  Or rather, there I was in a plane on the runway at the airport in St. Louis with, I think, the not unreasonable expectation that we would be in the air soon, as our flight had already been delayed two hours.  I was anxious to get home, but all things considered, I thought I was coping quite well, especialy because I am a skeptical and terrified flier.  In between devouring Hershey's chocolate and thirteen dollars' worth of trashy magazines, I had spent the two hours of the delay trying to be helpful to the other stranded passengers: I distributed all my magazines and most of my chocolates; I got an old man some water; I flirted with the babies; I mingled, I schmoozed.  I had recently seen what may have been a miracle at my church and had been feeling ever since that I was supposed to walk through life with a deeper faith, a deeper assurance that if I took care of God's children for God, he or she would take care of me.  So I took care of people and hoped that once we were on board, everything would go smoothly.
       My idea of everything going smoothly on an airplane is (a) that I not die in a slow-motion fiery crash or get stabbed to death by terrorists and (b) that none of the other passengers try to talk to me.  All conversation should end the moment the wheels leave the ground.
       Finally we were allowed to board.  I was in row 38, between a woman slightly older than I, with limited language skills, and a man my own age who was readying a book by a famous right-wing Christian novelist about the Apocalypse.  A newspaper had asked me to review this book when it first came out, because its author and I are both Christians -- although as I pointed out in my review, he's one of those right-wing Christians who thinks that Jesus is coming back next Tuesday right after lunch, and I'm one of those left-wing Christians who thinks that perhaps the author is spiritualizing his own hysteria.
       "How is it?"  I asked, pointing jovially to the man's book, partly to be friendly, partly to guage where he stood politically.
       "This is one of the best books I've ever read," he replied.  "You should read it."  I nodded.  I remembered saying in the review that the book was hard-core right-wing paranoid anti-Semitic homophobic misogynistic propaganda -- not to put to fine a point on it.  ... the man with the book about the Apocalypse commented on the small gold cross I wear. 
       "Are you born again?" he asked, as we taxied down the runway.  He was rather prim and tense, maybe a little like David Eisenhower with a spastic colon.  I did not know how to answer for a moment.
       "Yes," I said.  "I am."
       My friends like to tell each other that I'm not really a born-again Christian.  They like to think of me more alone the lines of that old Jonathon Miller routing, where he said, "I'm not really a Jew -- I'm Jew-ish."  They think I'm Christian-ish.  But I'm not.  I'm just a bad Christian.  A bad born-again Christian.  And certainly, like the apostle Peter, I am capable of denying it, of presenting myself as a sort of leftist liberation-theology enthusiast and maybe sort of a vaguely Jesusy bon vivant.  But it's not true.  And I believe that when you get on a plane, if you start lying you are totally doomed.
       So I told the truth: that I am a believer, a convert.  I'm probably about three months away from slapping an aluminum Jesus-fish on the back of my car, although I first want to see if the application or stickum in any way interferes with my lease agreement.  And believe me, all this boggles even my mind."

  
  

     Traveling Mercies is not for the faint of heart or the delicate of ear.  I kind of amused myself by counting up the number of times I was either shocked or offended, but I quit that game after I got into the dozens in Chapter One.  Then I stopped snickering at the dirty words and started paying attention to what she was saying about living out a life of faith in spite of frequently falling into all manner of sinful behavior.  Lamott seems to have made a point of going through the list of seven deadly sins and asking with her life ... "Now that I've done this, God, can you still love me?"

  
  

       That's a question I understand inside and out.  I know what it's like to stand and wonder whether this time I've gone just a little too far.  I know what it's like to grit my teeth and steel myself to understand that this time, even the grace of God can't fix it.  This time the only way I'm going to make it is by finding a way to work myself out of the mess I've created.  Only, it never works to work because none of my works are every enough.  And I'm back again to seeing that I'm a bad Christian. 

  
  

       I said it to a friend the other day that it follows me like a shadow at the back of my mind, a little voice whispering in my ear "unconditional love is a nice idea ... that God reserved for other people."  And even after more than thirty years in the family of faith, I find myself far too often in the same place I've been so many times before, unhappy and anxious; unable to rest in grace; trying to figure out what else I can do.  Henry Blackaby says that God is crying out to His children, "Don't just do something, stand there."  But standing is hard.  Standing means that I have to be still and trust.  I'd much rather be busy and not think about it.  Yep, I'm a bad Christian.

  
  

      I'm reminded again of a story that I've heard used to illustrate a number of  wildly different points (so you might want to write this one down, I promise it's an all-purpose little sermon in a couple of sentences.)    Question: Do you know what they call the person who graduates at the bottom of his class in medical school?  Answer: Doctor. 

  
  

      I am a bad Christian, but at the end of the day, it isn't my goodness or badness that matters in the slightest.  The only thing that matters is that I am loved, and whether I can believe it or not ... unconditionally. 

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