Hey Rev!

Sometimes I feel an overwhelming pull toward seminary. Other days I don’t. How do I know whether or not I’m supposed to go?

- Student

Dear Student:

“The place God calls you to,” Frederick Buechner tells us, “is where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

Discovering where that place may be for each of us is what we know as discernment. Discernment is often challenging work. That’s because God rarely calls us in a loud and unambiguous fashion: for every heavenly vision, God sends us thousands of holy whispers. Discernment is also challenging because God so often invites us to do things which, as Paul puts it, sure appear to be foolish. Anyone who has heeded God’s call — whether it be to having a child or changing careers or beginning retirement or going to seminary— will tell you that there are moments when she wonders if she isn’t doing something that is totally misguided.

Priest looking to sky in front of a church photo courtesy Shutterstock (http://shutr.bz/12WHl8j)

Discernment is more like searching for clues in a great forest than it is like pulling answers out of a box. Mercifully, however, the work of discernment does get easier with practice. Over time, you begin to learn where the clues are likely to be hidden.

Here are a few things, Student, that I have learned during my years of searching.

First, make sure that you talk with God about this decision. God enjoys having conversations such as this one. Share your anxieties, your passions, your uncertainties. Hold your questions before God. You may be surprised by what she has to say.

Second, be open to the people through whom God may give you advice. My experience is that God often speaks through the voices of friends and of teachers. Do the people whom you love, trust, and respect think that seminary is a great idea? Or are they saying “no” or, perhaps, “not yet”?

Third, use your imagination. Pretend that you have made the decision to go to seminary. How does that feel? And now pretend that you have said, “no thanks.” How does that feel? Which decision makes you the most free, the most passionate, the most energized, the most at home?

Fourth, allow yourself to sit with this question in abundant silence. God doesn’t like to shout. Laptops and smartphones are fabulous technology. But, if you rarely look away from your screen, you may not even notice God when she is sitting right beside you.

Fifth, decide that you’re going to make a decision. A clear ending is vital to any period of discernment. Without the promise of an ending, discernment will slowly ossify and turn into paralysis and regret.

Finally, Student, whatever decision you make, commit yourself to it entirely. This is a diving board moment. Like a marriage proposal, like the opportunity to move to a new city by yourself, like the words which you may or may not speak to a dying friend. The decision that you make is going to shape your life in profound, unexpected, wondrous, and permanent ways. Trying to do this partway won’t work.

Is seminary the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet? Is it where God is calling you to be? Or is that place somewhere else for you?

Whatever your answer may be, jump in. Give all of yourself to whatever you choose to do.

Have a question about life, love, or faith? Post it as a comment or email it to melfert@stjohns-cathedral.org, or submit your question online privately.

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Hey Rev!

I’m stuck. I’m in a loveless marriage. We get along OK, as friends. But we haven’t had sex in ages. I’ve cheated. I want out, I’m pretty sure she wants out. But we have young kids, which is a factor. The second factor is money. If I leave I pay alimony, child support, etc., which I can’t afford. So, here I am, stuck. Is there a solution, or do I just need to accept this reality?

Stuck

Dear Stuck:

I’m sorry that we’re not having this conversation over coffee — there are a few follow-up questions that I wish I could ask you.

First, how old are your kids? It’s pretty normal to have an exhaustion-induced sexless period when your children are small. If you’re not sure whether to count your youngest child’s age in months or weeks, then stop complaining: not having sex is part of having a baby. This too shall pass.

Second, is there some other catalyst which may have functioned as a cease-and-desist order on your sex life? Could prescription medication, for instance, be trashing your wife’s libido? Is she radically self-conscious about her body after two or more pregnancies? Have you gained a whole lot of weight?

Third, how does your cheating fit into this puzzle? Your affair(s) might well be 100 percent of your problem. A betrayal can sabotage intimacy for months if not years, especially if the cheater believes that he or she was entitled to sex somewhere else and isn’t working all-out to rebuild trust.

Finally, and most importantly, what does your wife have to say about all of this? You write that you’re “pretty sure” that she wants out. That suggests to me that you and she aren’t actually talking a whole lot. If there is to be any hope of becoming unstuck, Stuck, then you need to begin a conversation with your wife right now.

Here’s the good news hiding in your letter, Stuck: you and your wife get along OK as friends. That’s miles more than a lot of couples can say. So, give your friend the gift of speaking with her honestly. Tell her that you believe sex to be a vital component of how a couple connects with one another. Tell her that you respect and care about her too much to spend the two decades until your kids are in college watching the silent resentment between the two of you grow. Tell her that you need her to reciprocate your honesty, that you want to hear the unvarnished truth from her, no matter how much it may sting: what have these past few years been like for your wife? And then tell her that the two of you need to go to counseling.

A good counselor will be an enormous help in facilitating a conversation such as this one. Look for a counselor who is sex-positive (I found tons of resources just by typing “sex-positive counselor” into Google). Such a counselor is not going to be embarrassed, surprised, or judgmental about your situation. Indeed, the reason that such a counselor is gainfully employed is that she regularly sits with couples who are struggling with the very same problems as you and your wife.

I understand that initiating this conversation with your wife after so much silence may feel scary. There is a good reason for that: it is a big risk, a big act of vulnerability, to tell another person the truth. But it is a risk that is absolutely worth taking. The alternative, to keep on saying nothing, is going to wear you and your entire family down. The pain which is so evident in your letter is only going to be magnified by further weeks or months or years of inaction.

Let me end with a little theology, Stuck. Marriage is a commitment before God and to God. In it, you promise to love your partner as she is right now, not as she used to be or as you wish her to be or as you think she one day could be. God models this love for us: God loves us exactly as we are right now.

Now, that’s not to say that God does not call us to grow or that we may not help out partners to grow. But it is to say that genuine love is not conditional on that growth. In the words of Richard Rohr, “Most of us were taught that God would love us if and when we change. In fact, God loves you so that you can change. What empowers change, what makes you desirous of change is the experience of love. It is that inherent experience of love that becomes the engine of change.”

Now, for those of us who aren’t God, maintaining this change-giving love through the traffic of the years is a big undertaking. That’s what people mean when they say marriage is work. As hard as it may be, however, it is our calling as married people to do this work: to love our partners as they are now, to help them to become the joyous and purposeful people whom God wants them to be, and to be open to receiving the same love and help ourselves.

So, take the deepest breath that you can and tell your wife that you need to talk to her today. Your marriage, your children, and your own integrity demand nothing less.

Have a question about life, love, or faith? Post it as a comment or email it to melfert@stjohns-cathedral.org, or submit your question online privately.

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Image of Last Will & Testament via Shutterstock: http://shutr.bz/Zlug9p

Dear Reader:

Every now and again I’m going to answer a question that you didn’t ask me. This is one of those weeks.

It’s come to my attention that you don’t have a will.

You’re a smart person. I can tell by the letters that you send me and by the comments that you leave on this site. But not having a will isn’t especially smart.

When a person dies intestate (which, even though it sure sounds like a groin injury, actually means not having a will), the state ends up following a rigid set of rules to determine what happens to her money and her property. Those rules will not necessarily send her assets where she would like them. If, for instance, it’s important to you to make a gift to your worship community, to a charity, or to an obscure relative or friend, dying intestate means that the state is not going to follow your wishes. That’s not to imply that the people who work for the state aren’t good or honest. It is only to say that, unlike the little boy in that Bruce Willis movie, they don’t have a reliable means of asking dead people questions. You need to leave them a record of what you want.

In case that isn’t enough to persuade you, Reader, there’s still more. I heard from a mutual friend that you have children.

OMG, go write a will.

It is imperative that you make it clear how and when you want your children to have access to your estate. Spare your kids the painful burden of having to figure that question out in court or in some other kind of fight. And, if your children are minors, you need to declare who it is that you want to take care of them — and what use of your money that party will have — should all of their current guardians die.

Now, I understand that there may be questions that you haven’t yet worked out. Maybe you’re not entirely sure how you’d like to see your assets distributed. Maybe there is more than one other family whom you could imagine as the guardians of your children. These are hard decisions to make. So, here’s what you do: write a will and then keep on deliberating. When the time comes that you’ve figured things out a little better, you can write a new will. In the mean time, it’s miles better to have an imperfect record of your wishes than to have no record at all.

Before I wrap up, a quick word about magical thinking. I’ve spent my fair share of time avoiding cracks in the sidewalk in the interests of my mother’s spinal health. And I’ve been known to shout pleas and the occasional imprecation at the TV when the Vancouver Canucks are playing. (It hasn’t worked so far, but this is totally the year that they’re going to win the Stanley Cup.) So, I understand if you’re worried that writing a will means that you’re going to die.

You can power through that anxiety by doing two things:

First, have a look at the evidence: notwithstanding major advances in medicine over the last 100 years, the death rate remains pretty consistent at one death per person. In other words, while writing a will does mean that you’re going to die, not writing a will also means that you’re going to die. Given that your intestitude is not ramping up the odds of immortality even slightly, you might as well write a will.

Second, should you be given the diagnosis of a potentially terminal disease, the last thing that you’re going to want to do is write your will. It could well feel like giving up. So write your will now while you’re healthy.

I get that you’re not planning on dying anytime soon — most of us aren’t. And I totally hope that you live to be one of those biblical ages with three digits in it. But, as Ann Landers used to say, none of us has a contract with God. The people in yesterday’s car accident, the man who had an aneurism sneak up on him, the woman whose ladder was less secure than she imagined. Not one of those people was planning on being dead today.

There are plenty of resources in your state or province which are going to allow you to write a will cheaply or even free. Go look for them on Google. And then, Reader, get that will written. We’ll both feel better once you do.

Have a question about life, love, or faith? Post it as a comment or email it to melfert@stjohns-cathedral.org.

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A few weeks back you wrote a column about Paul’s letter to the Epistles in which you allowed for the possibility of error in Scripture. I’m guessing that you would not be willing to admit that the resurrection falls under the same possibility of human error as the letters of Paul. Why is that?

 - Consistent?

Dear Consistent:

I’m glad to admit that the resurrection falls under the same possibility of human error as the letters of Paul. Let’s talk about why.

Empty Tomb of Jesus at the Holy Land – Shutterstock.com: http://shutr.bz/YcIBks

To begin, I’ll invite you to go back and reread the resurrection stories in Scripture. Here we find the news that Jesus has been raised proclaimed by a man who looks like lightning (Matthew 28:2); here we see Jesus appearing “in another form” to two disciples (Mark 16:12); here we witness Jesus walking the earth but sometimes unrecognizable to his friends (Luke 24:16, John 20:14) and vanishing when they do recognize him (Luke 24:31); here is the paradox of Jesus fatally wounded and yet alive and well (John 20:27). Here, in short, is the account of a profoundly mystical experience.

And now, think about your own encounters with mystery. I bet that you’ve had a few of them, even if they weren’t as intense as witnessing Jesus raised. Maybe you have had the privilege of being present for someone’s death or birth. Or maybe you have had the joy of being startled by beauty in poetry or love or nature or art or still somewhere else.

Regardless of the precise circumstances, you will know that all these experiences of mystery all have at least one thing in common. They all defy words.

Now, the ineffability of mystery doesn’t stop us from attempting to share it with others: we have a deep need to tell our stories. And so, we reach for superlatives (it was awesome, amazing — maybe even terrifying) and metaphors and similes (his face shone, it was like she was on fire). But, ultimately, our words cannot exhaust the immensity of what we have experienced.

What Abraham Maslow calls a “peak experience,” what our friends in 12-step spirituality call a “moment of clarity,” what Dag Hammarskjöld knows as an occasion of “yes” — these encounters with the divine are always more than we can hold onto. Thus, telling the story of such an event can never yield a description which is literally true, or factual, or without error. To attempt to craft an errorless description, for instance, of sitting with a loved one during his dying or of giving birth to a child would be to lapse into absurdity. Similarly, to suppose that an ancient reporter hiding in a bush outside of Emmaus would have been able to record precisely the scenes that the John or Luke describes is to trivialize the Gospel.

Such thinking represents a category error. We cannot cram a mystery into a straitjacket. We cannot demand that a mystery give a deposition in court.

The resurrection might well be the greatest mystery that there is. Encountering it seriously and faithfully necessitates letting go of the need to tell its story without error. It begins with acknowledging that, in meeting Jesus risen from the grave, we find a story that is bigger than words.

Do you have a question about ethical decision making, living a faithful life or theology? Leave a comment below or send your question for Martin Elfert to melfert@stjohns-cathedral.org.

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Is coercive sex rape?

- Lost and Found

Dear L&F:

Yes.

Sex without informed consent given by a competent adult is rape. A rapist may deprive someone of her agency via physical violence or via threats. Or a rapist may choose to prey upon someone who is incapable of meaningfully assenting to sex, such as a child or someone who is inebriated. Regardless of the precise circumstances, it is the absence of a freely given affirmation to sex which defines rape. To put that thought another way, the gold standard for consent to sex is not “not saying no.” It is an enthusiastic “yes!”

If your Facebook feed is anything like mine, L&F, it has been lit up this past week with commentary on the convictions of the two young rapists in Steubenville, Ohio. A lot of folks are righteously angry at those news outlets which have framed the court’s guilty verdict as a tragedy for the perpetrators while remaining silent about the violence done to the survivor. (Laurie Penny’s article on the New Statesman and Kim Simon’s piece at Huffington Post, for instance, are both excellent.)

Part of me is hesitant to attempt to add anything to this conversation; what Penny, Simon, and writers like them have already said is both passionate and prophetic. However, I’m going to push through my reluctance for two reasons. First, it matters that men speak up against rape culture (i.e., the culture in which a blasé or permissive attitude towards rape is allowed or even celebrated). And, second, I’d like to suggest that part of what makes rape culture possible is bad theology.

A host of factors are operative in the psyche of someone who chooses to inflict sexual violence on another. While we cannot see into anyone else’s head, I agree with those folks who guess that the foundation for the rape in Steubenville was poured out of a mixture of male privilege, of the casual misogyny of jock culture, and of the frightening tendency of crowds to be stupid, impulsive, and cruel. A fourth element belongs in this poisonous recipe, however: rape is abetted by our collective reluctance to see God as feminine and God as victim.

First, God as feminine. We live in a time and place in which we picture the divine in overwhelmingly male terms: notwithstanding Paul’s insistence that male and female are one in Christ Jesus, God remains “he” in most dialogue, in most prayer, and in most liturgy. Feminist theologians (among whom I count many of my colleagues here at Spokane Faith and Values — see the excellent series of recent posts on the female aspect of God) have been helpful in pushing our boundaries. However, comparatively little of feminist theology has made its way into mainstream conversation. I remember, for example, being startled by the big laugh than the master of ceremonies at a music event got when he referred to God as “she.”

As Sallie McFague puts it, “many Christians use ‘God’ and ‘Father’ interchangeably as if ‘Father’ were a literal description of God.” That’s a big problem. For so long as the notion of God as mother or sister strikes us as silly or scandalous — for so long as God is invariably the old guy with the beard — we will continue to struggle to honor the full humanity of women. And, as a consequence, the balance of our empathy after a rape will continue to drift toward the male perpetrators.

Photo from Shutterstock.com: http://shutr.bz/YfanjZ

Second, I’d like to underline the important of encountering God as victim. There is a lot of complex theology around what happened as Jesus’ hung on the cross. However, the most basic element of the crucifixion is the one that we talk about least: the witness of the cross is that Jesus absolutely shares in our loss, our grief, and our pain. On the cross, Jesus embodied his teaching that, just as we have done to the least of these, our brothers and sisters, so we have done to him.

The cross testifies that God is always found with the suffering. The cross testifies that, in Steubenville, God was dragged unconscious from one party to another and raped repeatedly. For so long as we forget or deny this — for so long as we imagine God as the initiator of violence rather than its victim — the balance of our empathy after a rape will continue to drift toward the male perpetrators.

Now, none of this is to say that we may not have compassion upon the perpetrators in Steubenville: much as the tragedy of murder is not only that it makes someone dead but, also, that it makes someone into a murderer, part of the tragedy of Steubenville is that two young men have made themselves into rapists. Both have been diminished by their actions and both are in need of healing and of rehabilitation.

However, theirs is not the primary tragedy here. The principal injustice of the cross is not that the soldiers who crucified Jesus were traumatized by doing so: the principal injustice is that those soldiers murdered a man. The principal injustice of Steubenville is not that the perpetrators will never be the same after their conviction: the principal injustice is they raped a woman.

Rape culture is absolutely a social problem and a legal problem. But it is also a problem of faith. God who is feminine, God who is a victim, God who stands with the least of these, God who hangs on the cross. This is the God who demands that we bring rape to an end.

Do you have a question about ethical decision making, living a faithful life or theology? Leave a comment below or send your question for Martin Elfert to melfert@stjohns-cathedral.org.

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Clerical collar, courtesy of James Ogley/Flickr. http://bit.ly/WEqK8y

Hey Rev!

What job did you do before you became a priest?

- Wondering

Dear Wondering:

I was a stage manager before I was ordained. And I totally miss it.

Now, that’s not to say that I don’t love being a priest — it is a huge privilege to sit with people during times of love and loss, to nurture conversations about empathy and meaning and to have a couple of hundred people who are willing to listen to me wonder out loud about God for 15 minutes every Sunday. There’s not much about my life that I would change

But, much as I love what I do now, I still mourn for my old career. I suspect that I always will. That’s because there is nothing quite like the theater business. On and around the stage, I joined a community of marvelously eccentric people. Together, we created beauty inside a dark room. It was a divine enterprise.

I guess I’m telling you my story of joy and of endings, Wondering, because it illustrates one of the hardest and most important lessons of life: you can’t walk down every road there is. Sometimes — maybe even most of the time — the choices that we face are not as clear as picking between something good and something bad. Rather, a lot of our choices are between two or more good, but different things. We might have to choose, as I did, between two vocations that we love; we might have to choose between attending a couple of great colleges; we might have to choose between becoming a parent and leaving that calling for others. While it is enviable to have such great options, there is sadness in these choices as well: even as we invite one possibility into our lives, we walk away from another.

The road not taken hangs like a vapor trail in the blue distance of the sky. Or, depending on how much Stephen King you read, maybe the road not taken floats like a ghost ship on the waters of your imagination. Either way, that untrod road is out of reach. We can wonder about it. (And wonder we do — notice the popularity of stories about alternative universes.) But we can no longer walk on it. That time is gone.

I don’t know much, Wondering, but I do know this: you will feel homesick for the past even as you do something good and joyful right now. You will mourn for what might have been despite the generative witness of what is. This is part of the beautiful melancholy of life.

It’s okay shed the occasional tear for the road not chosen. But don’t weep so much that you forget to drink in the wonders of the road that you are walking upon right now.

Do you have a question about ethical decision making, living a faithful life or theology? Leave a comment below or send your question for Martin Elfert to melfert@stjohns-cathedral.org. 

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Photo courtesy of lorda/Flickr. http://bit.ly/W6fwL4Hey Rev!

How do free will and divine predestination coincide?

- Free — or Not So Much?

Dear FONSM:

There is a moment in Ronnie Burkett’s play, “10 Days on Earth,” in which the young protagonist, Darrel, is visiting the kindly and pious woman who lives nearby. Darrel and his neighbor talk about a great many things and, eventually, their conversation turns to faith. This prompts Darrel to volunteer the only theology he knows, “My Mom,” he tells his neighbor, “says that God is a jerk.”

I think about Darrel every time the subject of predestination comes up. That’s because it is one of those ideas about God that makes God into someone who is plain old hard to like.

There are a few different definitions of predestination kicking around. In broad terms, however, predestination is the notion that God has foreordained some or all of our lives and, in particular, that God has decided in advance who will get into heaven and who will not. Try as we might, there is nothing that we can do to change God’s mind and, thereby, to change our fate. Over the generations, lots of people have asked more or less the same question about predestination as you, FONSM: is there any way for this idea and for genuine human agency to coexist? Or, as it sure appears, does predestination reduce you and me to puppets dancing on the end of a distant God’s string?

I guess I could point you at a bunch of old school theologians — Augustine of Hippo, Huldrych Zwingli and John Calvin all have their opinions about how free will and predestination might live together happily ever after — but I’m disinclined to do so. That’s because there is nothing about being a person of faith which necessitates believing that God has a book with the rest of your life written down in it. Instead, I’d like to suggest that we may nurture a lively faith by understanding our relationship with the divine as being predicated not on predestination but, rather, on collaboration.

Among the several variations on Romans 8:28 which survive from antiquity, the one that I like the best reads, “God works together with those who love God to bring about what is good — with those who have been called according to God’s purpose.” In other words, while God does have hopes for us, and while those hopes find substance in our gifts and in that mystery known as a call, it’s still up to us to choose how we will respond. God has not predetermined what we will do.

I don’t know much about God, FONSM, but I’m pretty sure that God isn’t a jerk. To the contrary, I’m pretty sure that 1 John is right: God really is love. And love would never do something as cruel as giving her children the illusion of choice while actually tying us to the cosmic conveyor belt of predestination. Rather, like the fire which led the Israelite slaves out of Egypt, love would insist on her children’s freedom.

It is God’s hope that, in this broken world, we will become co-creators of beauty, meaning, healing and compassion. But God never insists. God leaves the choice to say “yes” or to say “no” to that calling to you and to me.

Do you have a question about ethical decision making, living a faithful life or theology? Leave a comment below or send your question for Martin Elfert to melfert@stjohns-cathedral.org.

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Man kneeling down in a field to pray, via Shutterstock.com. http://shutr.bz/W8gIw2

Hey Readers!

I’m going to stretch the rules for advice columns that I inherited from Ann Landers a little bit this week. It’s all Facebook’s fault. Recently, as I was reading a remark posted on a friend’s page, I thought to myself, “gosh, I wish that someone would write into FKB with that question.” And then I realized that, well, I could just make that happen.

Writing an advice column is already a pretty presumptuous act — I’m pretty sure that telling folks whom I’ve never met to dump their boyfriends or to stay in low-paying, but satisfying jobs qualifies as hubris. So, I figure that I may as well pile on the hubrisitude by answering a question that I found lying around on Facebook.

Let’s hope that no one notices.

Hey Rev! (that person on Facebook might have said)

A recent Pew Report found that 38 percent of people who identify as atheist/agnostic believe in God or a Universal Spirit. I have to scratch my head at that statistic. If we’re all going to assign our own idiosyncratic meanings to words, then what do they even mean?

- Facebook Friend

Dear Facebook Friend:

I’m so glad that you asked.

Maybe what that Pew survey means is that a name such as “atheist” might be the beginning of a conversation rather than the end of one.

A few years ago, I had the privilege of attending an afternoon workshop with a life coach and transgendered educator by the name of Renata Razza. Razza’s focus that afternoon was on what effective and meaningful ministry with GLBTQ people looks like. He gave my colleagues and me a big bucket of tools from which I draw on to this day. None of those tools were more valuable than a simple but profound piece of advice.

“People,” Razza told us, “are who they say they are.”

In other words, if someone tells you that he is a man, then that’s who he is. If someone tells you that she is a lesbian, then that’s who she is. It is neither helpful nor respectful to start cross-examining such a person to determine if he satisfies your criteria for maleness or if she meets your test for lesbianism. Naming is a vital act for human beings. And honoring the names which people choose for themselves is a profound and empowering act of empathy and of compassion.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that Razza’s words had big implications beyond ministry with GLBTQ folks. Walking with another person during a time of joy or change or learning or loss is made immensely easier when we err on the side of agreeing that such person is who she says she is. Now, that’s not to say that I never dispute the name which someone has chosen for themselves — to the contrary, I will gently but firmly challenge a label such as “unlovable” — but it is to say that we do well when our bias is towards respecting someone’s name or names. If a person says that she is an introvert or a conservative or a feminist or a Christian (or maybe even all of those things), then that’s who she is.

At St. John’s Cathedral in Spokane, where I serve as a pastor, there are two young people in the youth group who both identify as atheists and who pray to God with an inspiring passion and conviction. I guess I could argue with those youth. I could tell them that they aren’t really atheists. I could insist that, just like me, they are Christians who reject the often anti-intellectual, selfish and bigoted narrative of mainstream Christianity in favor of the generous love of the Gospel.

But I don’t do that. I want to respect the name that these two young people have chosen for themselves. I want to be in genuine conversation with them. They say that they are atheists. And, therefore, that’s who they are.

Jesus tells one parable after another about transgressing boundaries, about nurturing a kingdom in which we listen to and love our neighbors, irrespective of the categories which have been imposed upon them or which they have chosen for themselves. Our calling is to do the same. So, let’s not fret too much when we meet an atheist who believes in God. Instead, let’s take such a meeting as invitation into a place of generous curiosity about that person and about her story.

We may be surprised by just how much a prayerful atheist has to teach us.

Do you have a question about ethical decision making, living a faithful life or theology? Leave a comment below or send your question for Martin Elfert to melfert@stjohns-cathedral.org.

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This image available for Web publication. For questions, contact Sally Morrow.

Hey Rev!

As a single man and non-practicing Christian I had real trouble accepting Paul’s advice to husbands and wives. I said as much to the priest that presided over our wedding, because I did not want anything by Paul read during the ceremony. The priest agreed but he did encourage me to go back and reread that passage (Ephesians 5) as I grew both in my marriage and in my faith (I returned to the church around the time I met my wife). So, yes, as a married man and practicing Christian I sense something profound, when Paul writes that the relationship of the husband to the wife is as the relationship of Christ to the church, but I still get creeped out when he says “just as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their husbands in everything.” What is your take on this passage? And more importantly, what does your wife think of it?

- Confused about Paul

Scholarly consensus is that Ephesians was not written by the historical Paul of Tarsus. Rather, like the students of a master painter who sign their own works with the master’s name, most scholars figure that a subsequent individual or community wrote this Epistle and then attached Paul’s name to it. (Similarly, most New Testament experts agree that the infamous prohibition on women speaking in church in 1 Corinthians 14:34 is a later, non-Pauline addition.) This makes a seductive argument available to us regarding Paul: he didn’t write that sexist stuff, so put your mind at rest!

Appealing as it is, that line of reasoning has always felt like a cop-out to me. That’s because it has no fewer than two significant problems. First, while it helps us to feel good about Paul of Tarsus, it does nothing to help us feel good about scripture: whether we like it or not, the Christian movement has included all of the letters attributed to Paul in the Bible and, thereby, identified them as holy texts. Similarly, the “that wasn’t really Paul” argument is of no assistance whatsoever when we encounter other passages in the Bible which may be read as condoning or even celebrating misogyny (see, for instance, the stories which Phyllis Trible unforgettably named the “Texts of Terror”). Second, as you observe, CAP, there is often beauty and wisdom even in the creepiest parts of the Bible. Ephesians’ analogy between husband and wife and Christ and Church genuinely is inspiring.

These two problems put together tell us that, if we are going to take the faith which our ancestors preserved for us via scripture seriously, then we need to do better than writing off Ephesians as counterfeit. We need to wrestle with the Bible in its messy entirety.

My thinking around this act of holy wrestling has been profoundly influenced by Sandra Schneiders’ classic book, “The Revelatory Text.” Scheiders argues passionately and persuasively that agreeing with 2 Timothy that, “all scripture is inspired by God” does not mean subscribing to a “dictation” model, wherein the authors of the Bible were simply God’s stenographers. Rather, she invites us to understand “inspiration” as meaning that the Bible was written under “the influence of the Spirit of God.” Perhaps we could picture the individual or the community who wrote Ephesians working under a Divine gravitational pull.

What is liberating about Schneiders’ argument is that it leaves room for human participation — and for human error — in scripture. It insists that the creators of the Bible were, indeed, active artists rather than passive recipients of a Divine memorandum. As importantly, it insists that you and I are called to be active interpreters of scripture rather than passive consumers of God’s instruction manual.

“One can read [scripture],” Schneiders says, “primarily for information or in view of transformation, that is to be intellectually enlightened or to be personally converted.”

Her words are particularly helpful when we come to text such as Ephesians 5. That text is a disaster as information. But, as a vehicle for transformation, its reflections on mystery and on love hold huge potential.

All of this is to say, CAP, that Ephesians 5 is one of the many texts in the Bible which I believe that we are called to take seriously but not literally. As to what my wife thinks about it, I’m disinclined to speak on her behalf. After all, she isn’t subject to me. You may just have to ask her yourself.

Do you have a question about ethical decision making, living a faithful life or theology? Leave a comment below or send your question for Martin Elfert to melfert@stjohns-cathedral.org.

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Hey Rev!

Do you think feelings and intuition trump revelation?

- Mr. Trump

Dear Mr. Trump:

I think that feelings and intuition are among the tools which allow us to discern revelation.

In guiding our beliefs and our actions, a number of Christian teachers — John Wesley likely being the most famous among them — have suggested that we draw upon a balance of scripture, tradition, reason and experience. We might paraphrase Wesley and Co. by saying that we equip ourselves to hear God’s voice when we read the Bible, when we consider the wisdom of our ancestors, when we employ tools such as evidence and logic, and when we pay careful attention to the paths upon which we walk. I would be inclined to put feelings and intuition into the final category: they are a vital aspect of our experience.

Moments of revelation — those instances in which God speaks to an individual or to a community — tend to be subtle. God prefers to whisper rather than to shout. For every pillar of fire or voice thundering forth from a cloud, there are countless more moments in which we can only just make out God’s footsteps. Thus, revelation is something that it’s easy for us to miss or to misinterpret: we often don’t realize that we are standing before the shining face of the numinous until we discover how to look more deeply.

The gentle and surprising nature of revelation and the vital role which experience plays in it is attested throughout scripture and throughout our lives. Think of Jacob, who is startled to find God through the dream of the ladder; of Samuel, who doesn’t clue in that God is calling in the night until Eli invites him to listen with new ears; of Mary Magdalene, who mistakes the risen Jesus for a gardener until he speaks her name. In your own life, think of those moments of “yes” — to love, to vocation, to compassion — which arrive with sudden and quiet clarity through the voice of a friend, through an afternoon of solitude, through an experience of beauty, or through still another moment of simple understanding.

I suspect that John Wesley and his friends put experience last in their four-fold batting order not because it is the weakest hitter but, rather, because they knew from their own lives that it is the final place through which revelation must pass before we accept it into our hearts. (In the story of his conversion, Wesley famously spoke of feelings: “I felt,” he said, “my heart strangely warmed”). Revelation is always verified by feelings or intuition. That’s true even with respect to a religion’s most basic tenets. Consider, for instance, the Christian belief that the Bible is the Word of the Lord. Paul’s second letter to Timothy may testify that “All Scripture is God-breathed,” millions of our ancestors may agree, and the claim may pass the test of our reason. But, because belief is something that we may never incontrovertibly prove, it still remains for us to intuit whether or not Paul got things right before the Bible becomes integral to our own understanding of the divine.

When our intuition allows us to say “yes” to revelation, we enter into a place of humble trust in God. In this place, we are set free to say not, “I believe,” but, rather, “I know.” I can’t prove that I am loved by my parents, my wife, my children, or my friends: I just know. I can’t prove that the music of Benjamin Britten or the poetry of Emily Dickinson shines with a numinous truth: I just know. I can’t prove that we all are God’s beloved children: I just know.

When we find this place of gentle knowing, there is no need to speak of one thing trumping another. This isn’t a card game. Rather, we may speak of one thing completing another. In moments of revelation, scripture, tradition, reason and experience sing in harmony.

I guess that all of this might be mere intuition. But I have this feeling that intuition is a door which often reveals something extraordinary.

Do you have a question about ethical decision making, living a faithful life or theology? Leave a comment below or send your question for Martin Elfert to melfert@stjohns-cathedral.org.

The post Father Knows Best: Do feelings and intuition trump revelation? appeared first on Religion News Service.