I had the opportunity to hear him speak on Thursday in a reflection on how Christianity's historical alignment with colonization has led to a perceived hostility both within and toward Christianity. And McLaren wants to rescue us from this hostility. I asked him about this during lunch on Friday, and he didn't have much to say to me on that point. He took my desire for direction and set it up completely opposite to the sense of loneliness and aimless wandering of some of my peers and couldn't speak to me thoughtfully. I crave some authority in my life. I crave a model to work towards or some line to draw that didn't originate in my petty and small mind--and McLaren couldn't speak to this need for questions to be directed somewhere. He could entirely affirm the neo-atheist in his or her lost-ness and uncertainty and crippling doubt, but as to someone who only wants this lost phase to be just a phase? McLaren had no response.
And I sensed no humility in him, no point of human frailty at which he could pause and truly evaluate the consequences of his system. To have questions is an inherently and importantly human necessity. And yet I want something more powerful than I am to come in and say "now, this is the way you should go." To be affirmed in my questions, and yet not allowed to wallow in self-pity and aimlessness. He undercuts and discards history, tradition--the good and the bad--and leaves God and Christianity floating as an idea in the ethos waiting for ANYTHING to come substantiate it and give it meaning, purpose and direction--and everything is fair game in this endeavour! To quote C.S. Lewis via Tal Howard, it's a kind of chronological snobbery to do this--to think it is the banal bits of history that we need to scrape away from the Christian story, and I think it's truly naive to think we would ever recognize the end product as something pure and unspoiled. I'm not even sure we're supposed to end up with something pure. I have a better example than McLaren's nautilus-and-the-growing-shell example. A COMMON TREE bares its entire life history to us. We see the frailty of bark, the change in skeletal structure as wind, rain or other stress caused movement and twisting. We see branches that have been supported and nourished, and vestiges of those that were not. We see the richness of the soil that allowed the tree to thrive--often with neighboring trees playing an integral role. And yet at the center of the tree is what is called heartwood, the most dense part of the tree--and it is this that forms the tree's skeletal structure and allows the rest of the tree to function as a thriving living thing. We don't discount the center of the trunk in considering the tree's development.
And at some point we stop doubting Galileo--and trust that he's right. And I don't think that's a vain hope! Are we so proud as to hold for nought the strife and struggles and deep longings of the ancient fathers? Do we presume to care more about the church and God's work in the world than Christ, who above all else exemplified humility and a constant submission to authority--even (perhaps especially) in his wisdom? A conversation with God characterized by questions isn't deplorable; remaining in conversation with my own sorry self probably is...and more than I know.
Bear with me here. This selection from T.S. Eliot's Little Gidding is long, but I think it has such a humble perspective on what it means to be lost and yet still feel as though there is something absolutely worthwhile to be sought.
If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.
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