My Thoughts, They Are Provoked

WJT posted one of his singular pieces that troubled me, delighted me, and had me staring at the floor, lost in thought, long after I read it, just as his classic Supergod Delusion essay kept me chewing on his words for weeks after I read the post.

Reading this sort of material doesn’t finally answer any questions for me, but like a good Zen koan, the act of reading and the subsequent attempts to digest such things helps me see myself with greater clarity. For the majority of my Christian life, I saw myself as a pretty smart fellow. It was a liberating but excruciatingly painful day when I began to see that not only was I not very smart, but that I was helplessly deluded. Looking back, I see that I have faked it for almost all of the time since I first got “saved” at age 11. I learned to parrot the words and mannerisms of others, and more importantly, I learned to deflect questions that went beyond simplistic Sunday School musings. Like any good churchian, I learned to look with smoldering suspicion at the earnest souls who pressed questions as far as they could. “But why?” they would ask. “We’re just talking past each other…let’s move on,” I would reply.

Politics masks the innate dumbassery of almost all who are involved in it. Churchianity masks the flaccid mental abilities of too many of its leaders and teachers. The difference between the two is that at least politics demands a certain level of skin in the game, as they say. You want to go into politics, you WILL get out there and press the flesh and show up at events and get your photo taken and spend money on posters and bumper stickers and air time, and you will hold press conferences and give interviews and write position papers and open yourself and your family up to close scrutiny by people who don’t like you. But in church circles, to become a leader or teacher, all you have to do is display the willingness to do whatever is asked of you. Scripture warns against rashly ordaining green converts to positions of leadership, a warning devoutly ignored by all churches. Let some young man be converted to faith in Christ at a church service, and in the twinkling of a jaundiced eye, he will be asked to chair the Outreach Committee, or serve as a greeter, or even teach Sunday School if he’s particularly articulate and engaging. And this is heady stuff, and rare is the man who can be honest and self-aware enough to say, “Hey, pastor, I appreciate it, but at this point, I only know two things about Christianity: Jack and shit. But thank you, and check back with me after I’ve been in battle for awhile.”

I was not one of those rare souls. Flattery worked on me. I stepped over the threshold into leadership way too soon, and I cringe and blush to this very day at the number of people who sat under my “teaching.” If I am someday held accountable for how they lived their Christian lives because of my “leadership,” the end of this man will be far worse than the beginning of him.

WJT’s “All Is Permitted, Why?” is the sort of thing that should be discussed in Sunday Schools and bible studies and men’s prayer breakfasts. We are on the most solid ground when we are not fooling ourselves and when we are willing to be shown to be not as smart as we think we are.

The whole “smart” thing is personal to me because when I read the writings of men who are truly gifted and intelligent, I am filled with gratitude for my hope that God is not going to hold it against me that I simply cannot understand much of the spiritual and philosophical literature out there. I don’t have the natural intelligence nor the education to grasp most of it. I wasted too many years pretending that I did, and I was pretty adept at nodding in the right places and using the right buzzwords, and people thought I was pretty nifty-keen. But I wasn’t. And I’m not. For much of the time, when I am walking the mountain roads or pushing through the brush in the woods, I am thinking my thoughts and wrestling with my questions, and I don’t have clear, lucid thoughts. For much of it, I am a strolling, murmuring lump of “What the hell?”

Many thanks to WJT for making me once again say, “What the living hell?”

~ S.K. Orr