Resisting the Urge to Build Another Wall

October 26, 2008

The other morning I stopped by our storage unit, filled up my car with Children’s Ministry materials and drove into Oakland where I donated it all to a neighborhood church. Most of the boxes were filled with teaching resources I’d accumulated in church work prior to coming out as a lesbian. Books with game, craft, and activity ideas. Bible Story coloring books. Preschool clip-art. Bible Story cartoon videos. Bible story picture cards. Ten boxes worth. I didn’t realize until I was driving away with an empty car and a lump stuck mid-throat that what I’d just done was a big deal for me.

I remember the day when I filled up all those boxes. It was a late night in 1994. I was alone in my office in the Children’s Ministry building of my church, sorting through piles of stuff I’d collected over the years. I sorted through the bookshelves, file cabinets and cupboards and gathered up everything I thought would be of use to me in the future when I would return to teaching children again.

As it turned out, the Sunday after I left that church, I was in another town, at another church, in another denomination, as an out lesbian, playing on the floor with a Sunday School classroom of three year old children. Since that first Sunday to the one coming up this weekend, I’ve been teaching children in one way or another but I’ve never used anything from those boxes. I haven’t used one children’s sermon idea or photocopied one activity page. All I’ve done is lug those boxes around with me from place to place, from garages to attics to shelves in another church office to the storage unit.

The stuff in those boxes represented a huge moment in my life. It was a time when I was, as PJ recently said, a big fish in a little pond. My theology was certain. My answers absolute. My calling clear. Brick upon brick. In the beginning, just as I thought I could hold onto these boxes of stuff and use them again on another day in another place, I thought I could salvage the wall of my theology. The mortar around homosexuality might have weakened and given way but I was committed to keeping the rest of the wall firmly in place. “Okay, they might have been wrong about homosexuality but everything else I grew up believing is right on target,” I told myself. “The rest of the wall is rock solid and sure.” And I did all that I could to shore up the remnants of my wall by clinging to all my set in stone ideas about God and what God required of us and we could in turn expect from God.

This was a problem on so many levels. Since I was no longer welcomed in church by those who had the same walls as I did, I found myself in a position to be among those other Christians, as opposed to the real Christians, which just so happened to be Christians like me. They sang unfamiliar hymns, prayed written prayers, dared to name God as He one minute and She the next, and seemed perfectly content to live with questions of faith and even more frustrating to me was their hesitance to being impressed by the spiritual truths I was so willing and ready to share. I was a little dumbfounded by it all. I felt my faith was being threatened when I found myself in a position where all other Christians didn’t unanimously believe as I believed and rather than examining the ramifications and motives behind my faith convictions, I grew increasingly defensive, adding layer upon layer of mortar over the cracks in the wall.

And that was the real problem. My wall was crumbling. Internal questions began to rumble around inside my soul on a fairly regular basis and then for reasons that remain in part a quirky mystery I applied for and gained admission to Pacific School of Religion, a seminary more liberal than the average bear and the theological conflict was amped up off the charts. Why did I make that choice? Maybe because somewhere in me I knew the time had come to examine my theology in a setting where I couldn’t hide behind the familiar easy answers but would be forced to abandon what no longer worked while learning to articulate with clarity and reason what remained true. I hungered for this to happen and was terrified by it at the same time.

And the wall went down one brick at a time. Slowly. Painfully. And then something unexpected happened. The process I feared became an adventure in faith that thrilled me. The more bricks that tumbled, the more God was freed to be more of God; more holy and just, more wild and passionate. In ways only those who’ve been there can understand, I fell in love with God all over again in the most incredibly real and head over heels kind of way.

I gave up those boxes of stuff the other day because they weren’t of use to me any more. I hauled them around from place to place for 14 years until I was finally able to let them go. And 14 years ago my wall of faith began to crumble and give way. In the years that followed I continued to gather up the old bricks as they fell, trying now and again to stick them back in place, to assure myself that yes, that brick remains and yes, that one still fits in its place.

And then there was 9-11.
And Darfur.
And Luther’s Commentary on Galatians.
And Philip Gulley’s “If Grace is True: Why God Will Save Every Person.”
And Micah 6:8.
And meaningful conversations of faith with Muslims and Jews and Buddhists.
And disillusionment with the church.
And the social gospel.
And process theology.
And the stories of the oppressed.
And God’s grace upon grace upon grace.

Rattle, rattle, shake, shake. No matter how hard I tried or how much I wanted to go back to the way it once once, God and the world made it impossible for me to restore my wall of faith to its original design.  For others it’s the death of a child, the end of a marriage before “death do us part,” memories of abuse, an unjust war, a medical diagnosis, a heart shattered in pieces, the inability to reconcile an omnipotent loving God in a world of suffering. These are the kinds of things that knock into our walls of absolutes and cause us to look long and hard at what we believe, that challenge us to let go of what no longer works and to hold on to what remains true.

I don’t need another theological wall to believe that God is and God loves but neither does that mean I don’t have any bricks or that I lack in theological convictions. Trust me, I have piles and piles of bricks. I just don’t have them locked in place with mortar like they once were, and if I have a wall of faith at all, it’s a wall constructed of Lego bricks. You put them together, you pull them apart, you try the red brick over here and then move it it over there. You pull out the green brick and replace it with the blue one. The Lego wall can be rebuilt a thousand times over and every time the pieces snap in place and fit together just as I believe all our theological bits and pieces should fit together well; joining together into a faith that’s consistent and holds together even as it remains flexible, able to give and expand, to be disassembled and built back up again. The wall changes form, the bricks come and go, but the foundation set in the love and grace of God known through Jesus remains. And that’s what Christianity is all about, being in a personal relationship with God grounded solely in grace freely given. Everything else has been added on and none of it is essential to a life held in Christ.

Sometimes we need to be reminded of that.  We just need to grab a sledge hammer, bust down the walls, clear away the rubble, let the dust settle and look once again at the glorious foundation; a foundation that we can never be driven from and that will never weaken and crumble under our feet. We stand on the grace of God and that foundation determines everything.

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Posted in Christian Living and Faith, Love and Grace