Christmas, Divorce, and The God who Caresses Me With Tenderness

Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. 

Isaiah 40:1

[I wrote this in January 2015. I decided to post it this year while reflecting again on the holidays.]

This morning I attended church in  Alabama, not my home state. The church has grown to 34,000 members since its founding in 2001.  The music and technology were so flawless that bands from three different locations lead our singing simultaneously, streamed live on twenty foot screens behind the stage. The pastor’s invocation called on the congregation to "go with gusto after God today, grab for and seek God enthusiastically in worship."  It was a blessing being with my people, God's people, while visiting a "foreign" land.

Sadness continues for me - perhaps it has deepened. The marriage dissolution is not yet final, as we work towards finishing the court paperwork by the end of the month. And there are so many papers to be filed; it is hard to navigate through a complex court procedure in the midst of grieving and upheaval. For example, at some point we had to complete a very long “Child Support Order.”  This meant taking two paragraphs of our own simple language and cramming it into a 15-page court mandated form which included, among other things, a check in the box “neither spouse is pregnant.” Welcome to the post-Christian era.

Christmas and New Year’s was a sad time of many firsts for me and my teens.  We walked in the dark, with no play book for a broken family living in separate households. We struggled with when to engage and when to extract ourselves from dad, when to speak and when to be silent. We also recently lost our home church due to schism, so on Christmas Eve we attended a service in a small Episcopal Chapel in an old neighborhood settled by Scottish immigrants. The homily was sadly lacking [1], so in the late evening hours before Christmas morning I read Pope Francis’ Christmas Eve sermon:

• “The people who have walked in darkness have seen a great light. God who looks upon us with eyes of love . . . God who is in love with our smallness . . . . Do I allow myself to be taken up by God? to be embraced by Him? or do I prevent Him drawing close? What is most important is not seeking the Lord, but rather allowing Him to find me and caress me with tenderness.  Do I allow God to love me?   . . . He is a God who made Himself small in order to better encounter us . . . “ [2] 

I don’t know which man of God was more theologically correct - Pope Francis or the Alabama mega-church preacher.  For a bleeding soul still in pain, chasing after God with gusto seems overwhelming, even impossible.  But a God who will find and caress me in my smallness says “comfort ye, comfort ye, my people.” [3]

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[1] See prior post about this Episcopal service: Christmas Eve and Cleaning Toilets (12/25/14)
[2] Pope Francis' Christmas Eve homily, 2014.
[3] Isaiah 40: 1-5 (KJV) (and the text from Handle's Messiah.)

Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.

Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned: for she hath received of the Lord's hand double for all her sins.

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain:

And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.

You Don't Have To DO Anything

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.  Ephesians 2:8-9

I have learned through marital crisis that theology becomes real in the heart, not the head. I have a degree in theology; I have been steeped in Christian catechism, Christian preaching, and 17 years of integrated Christian education. And yet God touches me with true truth in the most simple terms. Throughout my conversion journey, childlike expressions made God's heart more real to me than Calvin's Institutes ever did.

Can you be converted when you are already a Christian? Can you have two awakenings?  It is a mystery, but that is my story.  After my re-awakening, I read of Blaise Pascal's similar path - a Christian upbringing, then a first and a second more overwhelming conversion experience.[1] Even now I still find there are no words to describe conversion; I can only concur with a modern writer who said, "although grateful, I did not perceive conversion to be a blessing. It was a train wreck."[2]  I too found conversion to be more like a crash landing  - scary, unexpected, leaving one bruised and battered but ecstatic to be alive. It is life changing, but never easy.  It is extraordinarily private, yet somehow outward-facing.[3]

To explain my crash landing conversion, I simply explained to folks that God was taking very good care of me. There were so many blessings, so many people, so many activities set in place in advance to help me dig out of the avalanche of betrayal trauma. God had a plan to carry me through rejection, separation, and divorce from my spouse, my church, my denomination, even my heritage. Post-conversion, nearly everything was broken or breaking. But God strips us bare for His good purposes.

By confessing simply that "God is taking very good care of me" I was describing in elementary school terms what theologians refer to as His "faithfulness" and "providence." Even now, the simple words are more true to my ears.

Yesterday, I walked alone on a cold ocean beach praying, asking for discernment about where the Lord is leading me next, asking Him to show me whether this heart tug I feel to help a church plant is God's call or my own self-centeredness. Honestly, I confuse the two all the time. I was also repenting for being a disappointing daughter who took His care for granted, didn't stay in touch, didn't listen to His words. I repented for tasks I had not done, for failures as a wife, a church member, a peacemaker, a follower, a friend. But then I was given the words very clearly: "You don't have to do anything." For some reason these words kept pushing through my thoughts -  I believe they were from the Holy Spirit. They didn't even make much sense to me at the time.  But for some reason these words brought comfort and I wept.

English speakers often ask each other, "How are you doing?" or "How's it going?" Spanish speakers say instead, "how are you being?" It seems to me that "being" is more in sync with the Christian life than doing or even going. (Although Jonah did have to go at some point.)

I really don't have to do anything to be accepted by God. This deep realization sets me free - free to go where called - not because of my religious "to do" list, but because God accepts me, which paradoxically sets me free to serve as I am gifted, with whatever talents and resources I have, wherever He leads. Today I am finally free to say, "okay God, it's not rational, but I will go where you call me to go." Who knows if I will be of much help, or if I will accomplish anything tangible? Who knows if I will be busy for the Lord or idle for the Lord if I go?  But now I am convicted: I don't have to DO anything to gain God's acceptance, just follow and listen and walk.

Later I realized the fullness of these words gifted to me on the beach.  Martin Luther, a budding lawyer and later a monk, found Paul saying the same thing in Romans 1 and Ephesians 2: it is only by grace that we are saved, not by doing anything.[4]  For Luther also, the weight of the world was lifted when God made clear to him that he didn't have to DO anything.  Just BE a child of the King.  And then Luther went. Some might say he accomplished a few things along the way.
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[1] B. Pascal, The Pensees (The Memorial parchment) 
[2] Rosario Champagne Butterfield, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert (2015). p. 25
[3] M. Scott Peck, a famous psychiatrist,  has an equally humorous description of  religious conversion, written before he became a Christian: "We are accustomed to imagining the experience of conversion or sudden call to grace as an "Oh, joy!" phenomenon.  In my experience, more often than not it is, at least partially, an "Oh Shit" phenomenon." The Road Less Traveled, 1978, Walker & Co., p. 417. 
[4] See, e.g., Martin Luther, "Freedom of A Christian" on the concept of grace. (1520)