Slight Return

I was a gangly skint-kneed sliver of a boy of eleven when I became a Christian. The term we used then was “getting saved,” and I got saved at a summertime Vacation Bible School worship service to which I had been invited by my best friend. Since that first terrifying moment when I stepped out into the aisle to make my way down front, feeling as if an invisible hand were pushing me along, my path has looped around to some interesting landmarks.

I started out at the Church of the Nazarene, then faded into twilight in my teen years as I visited but never committed to a number of churches, including evangelical storefront sites, Baptist, pentecostal/charismatic, and Lutheran. By the time I entered the U.S. Marine Corps, church was far down on my list of priorities. While in boot camp, I attended chapel on Sunday mornings, and most of the “liturgy,” such as it was, seemed familiar to me. Once I pinned on the Eagle, Globe, & Anchor, I never again attended a church service as a Marine, with the exception of weddings. Looking back, I realize that I attended a lot of weddings while in the Corps, several of them as best man or a groomsman. Marine Corps weddings are quite the gala affair, and more than once my noncommissioned officer’s saber made up part of the traditional arch of swords through which the new bride and groom passed on their way out of the church and out into the world of married folk.

After leaving the Corps and traveling around the world on my own, my restless spiritual yearnings led me back into the church, and I became an official Baptist. I undertook a self-imposed course of study and learned for the first time some elements of church history and systematic theology. Some years later, after pestering the pastor one too many times with questions, the deacons suggested someone with my temperament and personality might be more at home in the Presbyterian & Reformed world. Again, I launched into a curriculum of study, and I indeed found myself in the Reformed camp. The river of time kept on a-flowing, and I eventually found myself at odds with many of the spiritual heirs of Doctors Luther and Calvin, and I astounded myself by realizing that I was developing a deep affection for the doctrines of the traditional Roman Catholic Church. Part of my astonishment was in realizing that I had picked the absolute worst time in history to be interested in Catholicism.

When I revisit my church life, which I frequently do, I come up against the realization that I willingly subsumed my own personality in the collective personalities of whichever church I was attached to at a given period. When I was a Baptist, I worked hard to develop the hail-fellow-well-met joviality of the men around me (I worked hard at it, but I was entirely unsuccessful). I found myself falling into the speech patterns of those men, aping their facial expressions and tones of voice. I became adept at tsking while listening to someone else speak or pray. I acted as if a cigarette or a glass of beer was as evil as the Beast of Revelation. I kept my King James at hand at all times, and highlighted and underlined its passages to the point where it looked like an acrylic painting instruction manual. But over time, my peers grew annoyed with my rising discomfort with certain core Baptist doctrines. And I became aware of how narrow and ossified many of them were, and how they mistrusted the human mind and intellect, and how they emphasized conformity, conformity, conformity. And so I moved on.

When my tent was pitched in Calvin’s camp, I enjoyed the rigor of reading and analyzing doctrine. I developed the nasty little habit — modeled on my pastors and friends’ similar habits — of being ready to argue and debate at the drop of a hat (always having that hat held loose and ready to drop in my hand). But again, the years passed and I began to see certain things about my fellow churchmen, even as I was ordained an elder and participated in the behind-the-scenes dustings and sweepings of ecclesiastical life. I saw the theological belligerence, the robotic recitations of Scripture in casual conversation. I was forced to admit that most of the sermons bore no resemblance to Spirit-filled preaching, but rather seemed to be dry, academic lectures that bored me to the point of silently screaming my way through many a worship service, even when I was leading some of those services and preaching some of those arid “sermons.” And I caught myself wearing the narrow, grim scowl of my fellow Calvinists, realizing that we all really did look like Calvin himself, a scowl poor old Servetus likely had within his field of vision on the day he was killed by the church.

I’ve never been received into the Catholic church, have never seriously discussed doing so with a priest, and can count on one hand the number of Masses I have attended, so Roman Catholicism is the one area of Christian experience which has never taken over a part of my personality. But if given the chance, it probably would have. I suppose I will never know.

But revisiting my path since that long-ago altar call at that little Nazarene church, I am troubled by the ease with which I did subsume my personality beneath the collective personalities of my peers. I am also troubled by recalling how the very idea of a unique personality, while paid positive lip service by the church members, seemed to be highly suspect. There was forever a subtle pressure to act, talk, dress, and think like each other. Anyone who stepped out of his lane was quickly spotted, and the Peer Pressure Olympics got underway in earnest. The entire experience was similar to what I noticed in the Marine Corps, where lip service was paid to mavericks like “Chesty” Puller and General George S. Patton, Jr….but any Marine who actually tried to march to his own cadence found out in short order that this just wouldn’t do. Individual personalities, especially strong individual personalities, are deeply suspect in the church and in the Corps.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this. And I’ve been thinking of one possible latent effect of the current Wuhan flu idiocy.

It’s a plain fact that the Christian churches — all of them — have displayed contemptible cowardice in bowing to those who ordered them to close their doors, deny their flocks the sacraments they claim are salvific and efficacious, and hide in their homes like mice in a hay bale. Early believers in the Way held meetings in secret places to escape torture and death by murderous Romans like Caligula and Nero, but they met. Compare this to the ecclesiastical reaction when the government mouthpieces ordered churches to shut down their holy work this past spring. We’re told the early Christians went to die between the fangs of wild beasts on the sandy floor of the Coliseum while singing hymns. Today’s Christians sing their praise & worship songs through their capped and whitened teeth, behind masks, while livestreaming on some social media platform owned by people who despise them and the One they claim as Lord. And they do this in the belief that they are being good servants, rendering unto Caesar. And they do this alone, willingly cut off from those who share their beliefs.

Forgive me if my tone seems harsh. I believe most Christians simply do not know how to react to evil, or to government fiats that fly in the face of “We should obey God rather than man,” much in the same way that most men today simply do not know how to fight or how to respond to physical violence. Christians are now almost completely unprepared for real life, which means that anything unexpected throws them into a most terrible panic.

The current state of affairs is not going to improve. Things are not going to get better. There will be no return to what we thought of as “normal” in those halcyon days before March, A.D. 2020. But people will become acclimated to the status quo, and this acclimation will feel like settled dust, and in that state, some of them will begin to think through what has happened. And when this season of thinking reaches a certain point, some of the Christians will realize that they will be on their own from here on out, that their church is not going to spoon-feed or hand-hold them any longer, and that any spiritual insight will have to come from their own efforts, not from denominational HQ.

And when that happens, it just may be that individual personalities within Christianity will again begin to rise. It just may be that individual personalities may lose the whiff of rebellion and taint of sin. It may be that individual personalities come to be seen as important, even crucial.

I may be wrong about this speculation. Christians away from their flaccid and impotent churches may very well form small church groups where they will quickly proceed to…pressure each other to act, talk, dress, and think the same. But it’s pleasant to think that the insanity we’ve seen since last March might give rise to a new vigor in the chests of individual followers of Christ. I keep hoping that the people who are pining for how it once was will come to see the liberty they now truly have, and to discern the shackles they once had fastened on them by the churches who have proven that they don’t really believe what they claim to believe.

After all, when you’re on your own, you are free to be who you are. Did our Father in Heaven really want us to be bland copies of each other, each generation becoming less sharp and more fuzzy? Or did He want us to fully be and experience our individuality? Mind you, I’m not talking about atomized, fragmented, self-serving individuality, but rather a vigorous return to who and what each of us are, determined to walk our own paths with enthusiasm and the spirit of exploration we once had as children.

I am not a Baptist, neither am I a Presbyterian, nor am I a Catholic. I am the offspring of the living God, and I must make my own way on this journey, even while loving and helping those whom I should love and help. I might be the same man, but I don’t feel like the same man who used to read Stephen Charnock’s “Existence and Attributes of God” while sitting beneath the barber’s clippers and razors. Was that ever really me? I don’t think it was. I think it was my attempt to wear someone else’s personality.

What strange creatures we are. What a piece of work is a man. What a beautiful day it is outside.

~ S.K. Orr