TELESCOPE FAITH: Part III

This all probably sounds as if I despised my time at CFNI, which is actually far from the truth. I firmly believe that one can find God in any type of service or environment and I certainly had, what I considered to be, encounters with God—times during which I sensed His presence, leading, and still, small voice. Some of these times were when my life required scouring and cleaning. Other times it was a balm of peace and encouragement. But these times were far and away the exceptions. Still, I echo Dodd's sympathetic and kind tone. Like ORU, CFNI “is not a place of insincere devotion; it is a place of extreme devotion sincerely and frequently expressed.”

I had some phenomenal professors and mentors, especially Mark Marfisi and Richard Hanner, who showed me that passion does not exclude intelligence, research and plain old common sense. Their classes and most of all, their examples, inspire me still.

I met some fantastic friends, the majority of whom I am still very close to. My roommate, Eric Desormeaux, Chris Janda, and the Zint family stand out in my mind. Eric and I used to lie in bed till all hours of the night and early morning, giving voice to the haunting questions, nagging doubts and angry impressions of those days. These churning, frothing discussions, I now know, kept me grounded and vented, able to see a balance and a realistic equilibrium to everything going on around me.

The majority of my friends rebelled after CFNI. Some left Pentecostalism. Others left the Church all together. Still others, disillusioned and despondent, either questioned or forsook God’s call on their lives to be ministers. For me, it led to lethargy and a dull disinterest in the things of God. The questioning and even a hostility to my faith would come just a few years later while I was in the Navy. The road back would be a difficult and prickly one. Sometimes, it still is.

If I had it to do all over again, I really don’t think I would attend CFNI. I certainly wouldn’t at this point in my life. I’m not sure if attending Bible college did anything other than show me what I didn’t want, who I didn't want to become.

Growing up, I felt comfortable as a Charismatic simply because it was all I knew. It was how I was raised. But I was always uncomfortable engaging in its forms of worship. Prophetic utterances always made me uncomfortable. Gave me the heebie-jeebies, really. It was always the same lady in our church. Always the same message: God is doing a new thing or whatever. I spoke in tongues a few times or at least imitated what everyone else sounded like so I looked as if I knew what I was doing. Truth is, I hadn’t a clue. Still don’t. It was gibberish then and it’s gibberish now. How one gift of the Holy Spirit—a minor one at that—became the talisman and even the spiritual litmus test of an entire movement is beyond me.

Christianity--I have been raised in this. I have inherited this. And I do believe it. But I look around me sometimes and I think, “If this is what Christianity is all about; if this is all there is; if this is what a true Christian looks like—then I want nothing to do with it.”

I didn’t leave the Charismatic church right away. It took another decade after CFNI to begin to peel away from my birthright. My grandfather was a Pentecostal missionary and minister. So was my father. It wasn’t an easy transition. There have been many bumps and questions and confusion along the way.

I was raised as a Protestant (Protest-ent) which is to say I was raised to believe that Catholicism is not true Christianity and that anything even remotely smacking of popery is not to be given a second glance. Liturgical churches were declared lifeless, whitewashed tombs holding the dead carcasses of liberals masquerading as Christians.

And now, I’m one of them.

I began attending Grace and St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church a little over a year ago. I’d been feeling a deep yearning for a more structured, traditional, historical and dare-I-say-it, liturgical form of worship for some time. Stephanie and I were married in her father’s Lutheran church in a richly liturgical ceremony that we both adored. While she had grown up attending her father’s church a few times a month, I had never before encountered anything remotely liturgical.

The first Sunday I was overwhelmed. I also knew I was home.

One Sunday this past winter, we awoke to a massive snowstorm that shut down the city and made traveling impossible. Luckily Grace & St. Stephens is just across the street and Stephanie and I trudged through the snow to join a dozen or so other brave souls in the morning liturgy. Afterwards, as the congregation emptied out into the freezing mush, my wife and I stayed behind in conversation with Father Theron Walker, St. Stephen’s Vicar. He and I had spent some time together (remember that great U2 concert!?) and I was truly enjoying his insights into the Anglican faith and the way that faith is shaped and shared withh others. But I was not prepared to find that, while they were separated by many years, Father Walker and Patton Dodd were both alumnus’ of Oral Roberts University! I’m sure I sputtered something along the lines of, “You attended where?” as I stared at the priest in front of me, decked out in long, ornamental robes.

“Yeah, I was raised in the Assemblies of God. I discovered the Episcopal Church in my junior year at ORU and went to Episcopal seminary not long after graduating. You two are not unusual here,” he went on, saying, “You might be surprised to learn how many people attend here who came out of the Pentecostal and Charismatic traditions…or, who still consider themselves Charismatic, but who practice it liturgically.”

I’ve never felt comfortable in my own spiritual skin–until now.

The new face of my faith is humble. It freely admits it doesn’t have all the answers and doesn’t try to pretend that it does when cornered with questions or tragedies beyond its scope. It doesn’t deny that the answers exist, or Who has them, but simply that, as finite human beings, we cannot possibly understand the full mind of God. This is a church that takes religion seriously and itself lightly.

The new face of my faith is historical, building its strength on thousands of years of established and proven history instead of the whims and currents of fads. I can go to any another parish on any another Sunday and hear exactly the same chants and scriptural recitations. The liturgical calendar is one of the glories of the Church.

The new face of my faith is intellectual, realizing that God told us to love Him with all our hearts, souls and minds. Faith without reason is little better than divining God from a caldron full of bat wings and toad legs.

The new face of my faith is contemplative. It seeks after God not in the proverbial fire and wind but in the chattering brook and the breeze created by butterfly wings. God speaks, more often than not, in whispers, not in signs and miracles.

The new face of my faith is social as well as spiritual. God told us that we would be known as his disciples, not by the rules we kept, the politics we changed, or the prosperity we gained, but by our love. And that love is shown in how one cares for one’s less fortunate neighbor. I love this church’s emphasis on justice. I love its emphasis on peace. It’s a religion more interested in action than in mere professions of faith.

The new face of my faith is fluid and dynamic, allowing for a myriad of opposites—even political and, occasionally, theological opposites—in order to remain vital. It realizes that a system without opposition stagnates.

The new face of my faith is ornate. I find myself marveling at how easy it is to worship God and enter into His presence when the very ornamentation has been crafted as an anthem of praise and reverence. There is something about worshiping in a grand building that focuses your attention heavenward, that galvanizes your mind and wayward thoughts and compresses them toward into a single objective, a single entity. In such a setting, things begin to be striped away, namely the grime, the accumulated grit, the repulsive layers of self that act like heavy webs to stifle our reverie and suffocate our veneration.

I love the Eucharistic ritual, the colors and the banners and the music and the processions, communing with Christ in the company of others and uttering prayers that have been said millions of times spanning thousands of years. I love reading the words aloud together, integrating their message into all my senses. I love the bread and the cup, the linens and the vestments—their colors, materials, patterns, the care and honor that is taken with them.

I haven’t totally left my heritage behind. I still divide my time between the old Pentecostal church in which I was raised and St. Stevens. The A of G church is too authentic, too loving, and frankly, too un-Pentecostal, for me to abandon it altogether. If it wasn’t, I would have made a clean break ages ago. The rudder of this church, Pastor Rob Cowles just announced last week that he will be leaving the church to undertake a new vision elseware. It was a tremendous blow, like an atomic bomb had gone off in my face. I am not one for hero worship—I despise it actually—especially when it comes to those in ministerial positions, but Rob’s lucid teaching and gushing heart have done more to keep me from completely leaving my spiritual roots than anything else. His gentleness and wisdom, grounding and perspective, not to mention Charismatic doctrinal insubordination shows me that perhaps the chasm between these two worlds I straddle can someday be bridged.

In the end of his book, but still at the beginning of his spiritual formation, Patton Dodd, like myself, decides to break new ground within his own faith tradition. His faith transforms into something more liturgical. He paints a nuanced and multifaceted picture of an earnest quest for God: the appetite for genuine faith, the dark encounters with doubt, the consuming quandaries that defy the intellect and soul and the profound realization that questioning the Christian message is not the same thing as questioning Christ.

Frank, funny, and often challenging, Dodd’s irreverent and occasionally cheeky commentary offers a tremendously compelling argument for how spiritual and cultural formation actually takes place. He captures the often vulgar messiness of faith and the faithful without implicating the one in whom the faith is placed. “My Faith So Far” is much more than a spiritual biography or memoir, mapping the internal life of a single pilgrim. It is also a cultural commentary, deftly unpeeling the seemingly unending layers of this particular branch of evangelical subculture.

Rich Mullins once said, “You know, a lot of people think that the idea that there’s so many denominations is disillusioning. And I just kind of go, I’m glad the Baptists can go to their own place to worship, because I’m not sure I want to do it the way they do.” I say the same thing about Charismatics (and Baptists!), even while wrestling with a massive distaste and concern for their theology. I am glad that there is the sort of diversity of churches that fits the diversity of its congregants. No doubt, somewhere out there is a man who, suffocated and emaciated by years in a by-the-numbers liturgical congregation is getting his first taste of the freedom and expansiveness of a Pentecostal service. And he loves it. And he's finally found God.

Several years ago, I could never have dreamed of where I am now. And who can say that years from now I won’t be making the same comment. It’s sort of like those time-lapse pictures I was taking of the space telescope’s construction. Once the crew had finished, I packed up the camera and computer and ran back to the lab where the data was downloaded into an editing suite and played back. There, before my eyes, in stuttering steps, a pile of disorganized and untidy flotsam blossomed into a mechanism of beautiful form and symmetry. If, as I am dying, I am able to look upon the construction of my life much as I had the construction of that telescope, I am sure I would be equally bewildered and amazed by its unpredictable and seemingly erratic compositions. And yet, every piece fits perfectly. Without one particular armature, another could not be added, expanded or even built upon. What looks like a muddle of parts to the untrained eye makes perfect sense to the designer. And in the end, there rests an object of both beauty and utilitarianism, form and function—the product of the mind, creativity and love of a creator that ultimately smiles over his creation and says, “You’re perfect. Now go see what’s out there.”