Falling Pregnant

Fall is a mysterious springtime: there’s a feel of something arriving, of sudden light between the leaves. An old expression goes, “To fall pregnant.” Fall and falling may mean that new life is on the way, even as something old is dying.

Wood Hath Hope had a strange kind of summer. Some of my blogs now seem stratospheric. One was entitled “Summer Sublime!” Part of it had to do with completing the final chapters of my book and feeling the force of my own argument, like everyone had to be in on it. Now I know the published volume won’t hit shelves until the end of next year, it’s a little less the buzz for me. Another thing was some of us were committed to attending an evangelical reading group discussing Rob Bell and Don Golden’s Jesus Wants To Save Christians. For many this book was like being shot out of a cannon into completely new territory and it was exciting to be around the excitement. You could feel the world turning a little bit under you.

When the study came to an end we invited its members to attend a couple of Wood Hath Hope sessions billed as “An Introduction to the Bible as Peace.” The first thing to do it seemed was to set out the fundamental problem dealt with by the bible, its diagnostic so to speak. Was it “the disobedience of our first parents” and the personal attribution to us of guilt for their irresponsible eating habits? Or, was it/is it something more endemic, constitutive, part of the way we are self-set-up in chaotic desire and violence? Of course it was the latter that we presented, but sometimes it’s hard to let go of the inherited framework. When God is the judge and we’re all under judgment for a single huge fault then everyone knows where they stand and ultimate violence is the ultimate sanction. What’s not to understand about that?

Problem is Jesus didn’t talk this way. He didn’t begin from an enormous original fault that had to be atoned for. He began with a world of blessing, the kingdom of God. It’s only if you miss out on that that there is a problem. Missing out on the kingdom of peace will self-plunge the world into endless violence. And even then Jesus went to the cross to show the depths of the problem and the selfsame lengths he’s willing to go to in order still to call us out of them! Jesus absolutely does not begin from legal demerit that has to be paid out. If you want a diagnostic from Jesus go the Sermon on the Mount and you’ll see the problem is basically violence. But almost all of the time Jesus is simply active to change things in the here and now, to put things right in the dynamic core of our relationships, rather than discourse on what went wrong. (Yes, I know, there’s Paul also to think about—as if Jesus weren’t enough! But Paul is cool too and I will put something up in an On The Stump piece about "Paul and Adam.")

Anyway, you can see how the whole thing works. Inherited sinfulness is not the same as inherited guilt, but making it the same has given traditional Christianity enormous control over people’s identity and behavior. Except of course today that control is slipping and the question is whether we double down on the old methods, or reach out in the Spirit for a deeper understanding of the human condition and what Jesus so powerfully offers it today.

For Wood Hath Hope the studies were something of anticlimax. For a few weeks afterward there was only three of us, Heather, Linda and myself. But here’s the thing. This had the opposite effect from making us despondent. (Really!) We decided to double down on our own thing. It is not a matter of a doctrine or way of thinking which we want other people “to get,” but simply being true to ourselves, to the Spirit moving within us. So we decided to stop the talk and do something. We committed ourselves to sharing our evening meal and shopping for it together, splitting the expenses. Half the week one family would do the cooking , and half the week the other. (And we just bring the prepared food over to each other’s homes, each family dining on its own as usual.) We also figured out we would start a new study program in the New Year, but I’ll describe more of that in the future.

What is important is this change of attitude. We called it “making space for God.” Like prayer or fasting but in the area of food and table relationships. It’s the most natural thing in the world, sharing a table. But to do it as an act of surrender to a path of other-centeredness, this is to make space for God’s kingdom and the breath of God which moves it. And we try to do it with great humility, not as a big deal or as a gesture against contemporary social alienation and consumerism. Yes, it does amount to that, but we don’t do it for that reason, rather simply because it is what the Spirit is saying. We’re doing it to let God speak, and so for us to hear her beloved cadences of peace, forgiveness, gentleness, hope.

Perhaps this is what “fall” means, letting this new thing come to birth, as the old falls away.

Your brother,

Tony