I was reminiscing yesterday about my high school summer adventures to CYIA — Christian Youth in Action — with Child Evangelism Fellowship. We were at Grand Rapids School of the Bible and Music learning how to conduct 5-day Clubs with Barth and Sally Middleton as the lead teachers. If you’re in CEF, you know them. They are legendary.

I was 16. I had been in a Christian school environment in Michigan which was, to put it as mildly as I can, harsh. It was like Little Marcy except without the sprinkle of saccharine. All my peers were going to the fundy WILDs camp wannabe — Co-Be-Ac — to fill up on the sadistic humor of the school’s up-and-coming-to-power assistant pastor, Les Ollila, or one of his proteges.

But my mother and father — my dear, dear parents had a different idea. They strongly encouraged me to be a summer missionary instead. See — mom and dad were on the state board for CEF in Michigan, and they knew that CYIA was a good thing.

So I went — somewhat in defiance of the send-your-kids-to-Co-Be-Ac-or-else preaching we were getting. And yeah, yeah, CEF is full of decision theology and Keswick formulas (when you teach teenagers to teach, that’s gonna happen). I understand that.

But you know what I really learned? Jesus loves me. I remember walking 18″ off the ground back to my room when I realized that. He loves me. Jesus. LOVES me!!

There I was among other high schoolers and college kids who were so unlike me. Most of the kids were from the inner city of Detroit or Flint. Most of them were not suburban white bread like me. Most of them sang Amy Grant songs. Most of them raised their hands when they worshiped.

And Jesus loved all of them. And He loved me too. That’s what I learned. And I got to repeat that over and over to children all over Michigan. And when I did, I heard Him whisper it to me too. Jesus loves me!!

I relished that adventure so much that I went back to CYIA the next year and was a summer missionary again. That was an equally exhilarating experience. Those summers I learned that I loved to teach. I learned that I was a good speaker. I learned that all people — whether 7 or 17 or 87 — need to hear that Jesus loves them. And they need to hear it a lot.

I was so full of non-fundy Jesus-love that the fundies around me were suspicious when I got back home. “You need to go hear Frank Garlock at Co-Be-Ac. Just to get things straightened out.” o_O My parents and I shrugged and said, “Okay. Whatever.” So I dutifully went that week. It was terrible. I hated it. I can now look back on that week as a microcosm of my life in fundyland. You get up early and get all dressed because looking perfect is the key to your righteousness (and because you aren’t actually doing anything actively except sitting and taking notes). Only to be doused by buckets of lake water during a pointless before-breakfast game of Big Ball Water Volleyball. I hated it. I hated the whole week. The preaching was the same way, too: “Be perfect! ::splash:: Now you’re not, see?”

That’s what counts as the Gospel in fundyland. That’s the metanarrative: “You must be perfect! But you can’t be.” Period. That’s the end. “Jesus? Who’s that? Oh yeah, you can’t be like Him. He was perfect. . . . Too bad. So sad. ::splash::”

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Outside of my home and family, I can count on the fingers of both hands the times I heard or felt Jesus’ unconditional love in forty years in fundyland: 1) From Pastor Sprunger, when I was baptized. 2) From the CEF director’s wife, Bernie Mason, when I was spending the summer with my mom at the CEF office in Tulsa. 3) From my second grade teacher, Mrs. Stover. 4) From my fifth grade Bible and music teacher, Richard Murray. 5) From Randy Merrill’s sermon on Elijah. 6) From Ed Dunbar, when Elise died. 7) From Dr. Juan Teruel.

The Good News was never part of any formal fundamentalist curriculum I got. Not from 1st grade through graduate school. I only got it in school when my teacher or colleague was moved by God’s love her/himself. You see, fundamentalism is not just Keswick piety because Keswickians, like D. L. Moody and even Billy Graham and every CEF missionary, at least get the Love right.

And fundamentalists never do. They actually think that the Love is “liberal.”

I did have a “material religion” counter-balance to the horror of Little Marcy — the Bill Gaither trio. You can hear It there. You can hear Jesus’ love.

]]> http://www.drslewis.org/camille/2010/09/its-a-miracle-the-good-news/feed/ 2 http://www.drslewis.org/camille/2010/08/this-is-how-it-feels-to-be-free/ http://www.drslewis.org/camille/2010/08/this-is-how-it-feels-to-be-free/#comments Fri, 13 Aug 2010 16:10:47 +0000 cklewis http://www.drslewis.org/camille/?p=2927 Friday the 13th is a sentimental and blessed day for me. Again. Thank you, Lord. For dragging me kicking and screaming toward your gift of freedom.

Click here to view the embedded video.

That your sex are naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute; but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up — the harsh tide of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend.

Why, then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity?

Men of sense in all ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the (servants) of your sex; regard us then as being placed by Providence under your protection, and in imitation of the Supreme Being make use of that power only for our happiness.

Abigail Adams to her husband, John Adams, 31 March 1776

So I’m a survivor who’s just now learning to make herself the subject of the sentence. A former ideological “battered wife” from a patriarchal Southern civil religion. A mom — the embodiment of all that is soft and nurturing and powerful and earthy and frightening. A writer-of-that-body who makes the myth-maker shake in his cuff links. A woman who’s taking an honest look at the facts.

The economic prospects for a mom in America aren’t great. But do you know where some researchers conclude she’s got a better chance of a loving life partner? You’ll never guess. . . .

Conservative Evangelicalism.

Studies of Christian women who actively embraced this ideal suggest that the ‘submission’ required of them was a minor concession for a divinely sanctioned domestication of their husbands. During its heyday in the early 1990s, the evangelical men’s organization Promise Keepers struck a bargain that may well have been the best offer for many women. By submitting, they were rewarded with ‘husbands and fathers who forswear drinking, drugs, smoking, and gambling, who lovingly support their families by steady work, and who even choose to go shopping with them as a form of Christian service.’

This was particularly attractive accord since ‘submission’ in practice boiled down to little more than a rhetorical gesture at the husband’s final say in major decisions. When asked how it played out in marriage, few conservative Christians seemed able to recall an example where husbands actually pulled rank in decision-making. Instead, the couples coded expressiveness — emotional labor — and family responsibilities — reproductive labor — as ‘leadership’ to make them newly palatable to men (113).

Abigail Adams said as much.

It’s sometimes called “soft patriarchy.” And it’s not just the ideology that offers a more mutual environment for mothers. It’s the devotion to the ideology. The men that attend such churches most regularly are the most attentive, the most appreciative, the most domesticated.

Through servant leadership, evangelical men made a measurable contribution to the ‘economy of gratitude.’ In this schema, the best predictor of domestic harmony was not an equal division of labor — that option has virtually never been on the table in American families — but rather husbands’ consistent expression of gratititude for the gift of domestic labor women made to them. Unlike their supposedly egalitarian male counterparts, conservative Christian men had at hand an ideology that allowed them to praise and acknowledge women’s work at home without thereby running the risk of being required to share it equally. In contrast, nonreligious men who paid lip service to formal sex-neutral rights had no alibi for their demonstrated failure to split the labor at home, and may have found it safer to ignore the work altogether. Between the two, many wives preferred the former — especially since they seemed to have little hope of achieving actual parity (115).

But if these “soft patriarchs” attend church sporadically, they are more likely to be abusive. In other words, if they are unlikely to submit themselves to a religious community, they are unlikely to (mutually) submit to their familial obligations.

That’s at least what the sociologists conclude from the statistics. Mind you, I’m not saying there’s not room for improvement or that this is perfection. But these are the facts.

Evangelical scholars offer a few more caveats. Soft patriarchy might domesticate muscular Christianity, but hard patriarchy is dangerous for women and children. And the lines between the two are too easily muddled.

Nearly all evangelical and fundamentalist leaders preach a hard patriarchy, but the nitty-gritty of daily life has permeated the evangelical culture and softened that hard edge. In other words, the evangelical marriage advice is often simply out of touch. But when fundamentalists emphasize separation and tout a life hermetically sealed from the culture at large, their patriarchy hardens and calcifies.

The scholars describe three family structures: 1) the wife/mother is on the same level with the children and the father is above all of them (hard patriarchy).

2) The children are below the wife/mother and the father is above her (soft patriarchy).

3) The woman is on an equal plane with her husband over the children (egalitarian).

The last option, researchers conclude, is the best because abuse is the least likely, and the second one is tolerable if the father does have regular external oversight.

But the first one is disastrous. It creates the greatest risk for incest since the wife/mother and the child are equals, so that either can be defined as a sexual “being” to the entitled patriarch.

The perpetrator of incest has been described as a man ‘who is devout, materialistic, and fundamentalist in his religious beliefs, coming from a background in which morality was preached in public and breached in private. In a large research study done on incarcerated sex offenders, more than half of all incest offenders were found to be devout in their religious practice (83).

In other words, while soft patriarchy might domesticate Evangelical men, hard patriarchy does nothing of the sort. Religion fixes nothing when there are no consequences for criminal behavior and when the woman and the children are not autonomous Image-Bearers.

And this isn’t just a theory. This is all too frequent and prevalent. And it’s happening right now.

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

John Milton

I have recently published on Scribd many of the official documents that led to our exodus from fundamentalism, including our resignation and other correspondence from the aftermath. If I mentioned them in my Ebenezer account, I linked to them there. I haven’t even had the guts to read one of them in its entirely yet — that’s just how painful this all is.

Be sure to read my valiant knight‘s theological tomes: specifically here to Stephen Jones and here to Gary Weier. It will do you good — for your heart, mind, and soul. John Milton would be very proud!

Consider the imagery of seed. First of all, seeds are disproportionately small compared with what they eventually produce. In the case of herbs — which, for some reason, Jesus took special delight in — they are in fact almost ridiculously small. Anyone who has planted thyme or savory knows the strange sensation of practically losing sight of the seed after it has dropped into the furrow: you might as well have sown nothing, for all you can observe. And what does that say about the Word of God that the Sower sows? Well, it certainly does not say what we would have said. Left to our own devices we would probably have likened the Word’s advent to a thunderclap, or to a fireworks display, or to something else we judged sufficiently unmistakable to stand in for our notion of a pushy, totally right-handed God. Instead, this parable says that the true coming of the Word of God, even if you don’t see it, doesn’t look like very much — and that when it does finally get around to doing its real work, it is so mysterious that it can’t even be found at all (67).

I was never satisfied with the way this parable was used in my former life — dirt striving to be less rocky or straining to be more fertile. Interestingly enough, the Mormons interpret the parable similarly. But it doesn’t work that way. Dirt is made. It doesn’t make itself. It doesn’t till itself. It doesn’t improve itself.

I made dirt this last year. Yes, I did. We have the lousiest soil in our backyard — red clay so hard that it surprised the contractors who built our retaining wall. I don’t understand this clay. It’s ugly, stinky, impossible. I sigh at the Midwestern black dirt we pass on our way to Missouri. It’s gorgeous.

So I made dirt this last year. Or rather — compost. I collected carrot shavings and strawberry tops, used kleenexes and coffee grounds, egg shells and dead heads, and I just let it sit. And rot. ::drumming fingers::

And this Spring there it was — black dirt. I included a hand-trowel-full with every seedling and transplant. I sprinkled it on the old plants. I brought a shovel’s worth to Grant’s trees. We’ll see if it works. Ask me in a few months.

But compost is like grace for garbage — turning my forgotten failures and castoffs into the best fertilizer for flowers. That’s what Capon is getting at too — at the mysterious left-handed power of the Gardener rather than the forthright right-handed power we humans crave. We want ex nihilo. We want lightning strikes and fireworks. We want pushy and unmistakable. We want a pre-made Miracle Gro that we can sprinkle on the red pan to POOF! make it soft and fertile.

We want a commodified garden. We want to shove blue “silk” flowers bunches in our azaleas to force them to look like May. We want control.

Every one of us would rather choose the right-handed logicalities of theology over the left-handed mystery of faith. Any day of the week — and twice on Sundays, often enough — we will labor with might and main to take the only thing that can save anyone and reduce it to a set of theological club rules designed to exclude almost everyone (25).

It just doesn’t work like that. God as Gardener doesn’t work like that. The process is slow. It’s indirect. Intuitive. Imaginative.

But Capon is talking mostly about the Seed — the Word. And contrary to the interpretation from my previous life, he insists that in this parable the Word is not the Bible per se. It’s Jesus, a la John 1. The Word who disappears in the earth, sleeps and rises only to grow His Kingdom-Plant grander and stronger than we could imagine.

I found a pumpkin seedling growing in the compost pile. I didn’t see the seed there when I combed through my black dirt, and it’s gone now. The plant is growing stronger and bigger than the ones I deliberately planted in a tidy circle in the clay-amended-with-compost. And I may just get the pumpkin I’ve been struggling to grow for years . . . all in a very left-handed way.

Missing the Joy from The Work Of The People on Vimeo.

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Or, conclusively, peel an orange. Do it lovingly–in perfect quarters like little boats, or in staggered exfoliations like a flat map of the round world, or in one long spiral, as my grandfather used to do. Nothing is more likely to become garbage than orange rind; but for as long as anyone looks at it in delight, it stands a million triumphant miles from the trash heap.

That, you know, is why the world exists at all. It remains outside the cosmic garbage can of nothingness, not because it is such a solemn necessity that nobody can get rid of it, but because it is the orange peel hung on God’s chandelier, the wishbone in His kitchen closet. He likes it; therefore, it stays. The whole marvelous collection of stones, skins, feathers, and string exists because at least one lover has never quite taken His eye off it, because the Dominus vivificans has his delight with the sons of men.

I just had my hands wrist-deep in chicken grease. The house is smoked up because a stray drumstick wouldn’t behave within its rotisserie prison. The counter top displays my weapons — shears and tongs and forks and even a dismantled coat hanger I thought I could bend into a skewer. I was wrong about that.

I could just throw the whole bird in the oven. But I don’t. My better half despises baked chicken. Hates it. And so I wrestle with the legs, cutting off what is misbehaving, splattering my party shirt with poultry goo, tripping over a licking-the-floor schnauzer, and opening windows upstairs and down. I dream up the broccoli salad he likes. The cole slaw recipe he prefers. The carrots my boys would choose. We’ll see if my efforts are successful in 30 minutes or so.

My kids think I am the best cook in the world. I’m not. . . . Well, I’m okay. I rely on pancake mix and low-fat turkey sausage enough to know that I’m no Martha. But I regularly get, “You make the best sausage in the world, Mommy!”

You have no idea how wonderful that feels. Because I know it’s not the food that they are enjoying. And it’s not just Mommy. It’s both. It’s the combination: the full tummy and the full heart.

My dear 86-year-old Dad insists that his mother was the best cook ever. My mom always retorts to me quietly, “She really wasn’t, Camille. She was terrible!” But Dad still goes on and on about the steak that was as tough as shoe-leather and the fried chicken Grandma made after she boiled the bird for its bone-broth value.

I realize that Mom’s right. But Dad’s right too.

Our world is an orange peel hanging on God’s chandelier. It’s good because He loves it and us. Just like boiled-and-then-fried chicken. Just like that dissected rotisserie project smoking up the downstairs. . . . at least, I hope.

There, then, is the role of the amateur: to look the world back to grace. There, too, is the necessity of his work: His tribe must be in short supply; his job has gone begging. The world looks as if it has been left in the custody of a pack of trolls. Indeed, the whole distinction between art and trash, between food and garbage, depends on the presences or absence of the loving eye. Turn a statue over to a boor, and his boredom will break it to bits–witness the ruined monuments of antiquity. On the other hand, turn a shack over to a lover; for all its poverty, its lights and shadows warm a little, and its numbed surfaces prickle with feeling.

Isn’t it amazing how God loves us when a pack of trolls were bored to tears with us and let us fall into disrepair?

I rediscovered this little song recently by Mr. Rogers, “It’s You I Like.” Remember it? If we can put aside the Gen-X visceral gag reflex we have to all children’s programming, this is one beautiful song. This is “being incarnational.” This is love!

In such a situation, the amateur–the lover, the man who thinks heedlessness a sin and boredom a heresy–is just the man you need. More than that, whether you think you need him or not, he is a man who is bound by his love, to speak. If he loves Wisdom or the Arts, so much the better for him and for all of us. But if he loves only the way meat browns or onions peel, if he delights simply in the curds of his cheese or the color of his wine, he is, by every one of those enthusiasms, commanded to speak. A silent lover is one who doesn’t know his job.

Ah, Capon. This paragraph speaks for itself, doesn’t it? You speak not because it’s right or is a right. His admonition is much stronger than that. You speak because you love.

Love is. And the speaking comes next. It’s not some Erasmusian, highly attenuated and stylized, Praise of Folly kind of speaking. It’s not covert. It’s full-throated and known. Otherwise, it’s not love. Or it’s at least incomplete.

So like Luther to the overly sagacious Melancthon, Capon to us is saying “love loudly.”