I want to talk about witness. Can I get a witness? It’s churchy, right? It kind of reminds me of old time religion. Call and repeat. Can I get a witness?
I also think of a court. Witnesses being called to account for what they saw. Who did what, when, where, why?
When I was growing up in church we were told to be a witness. A witness to the goodness of God. To the redemptive power of Christ in our lives. Which was hard, because it felt so large, you know? It felt so weighty. I felt a pressure to have witnessed something to which I could attest. And so, not entirely unlike this essay project I’m working on now, I combed my life for anecdotes or little stories that would prove not only the goodness of God, but hopefully… his very existence?
I am a man whose faith in faith communities has been challenged. Things are weird for me in that area—you may have surmised. I have already talked about leaving a church community, and I’ve already talked about beginning to relate to a different one. This whole confusing process has been a confusing process.
I am, to add to my own confusion, a member of a lay monastic order. Stay with me. You’ve been with me for this long, stay with me. My path is my own, and I’m only sharing it. Not recommending it.
We have some friends. They are more like siblings. We choose our families. It’s a woman I grew up with, she was a little older than me. Her younger sister sang at my wedding and we remain close to this day.
This older sister joined a christian mission school a thousand years ago when we were all very young. She met a boy, as kids often do, and so on, and so on, and she married an Englishman living in Northern Ireland. There they planted themselves and put down roots. Their faith and their vision for the future carried them across oceans and across theologies until finally they landed back at home, in Northern Ireland, where they live today with a very different, (though very similar) vision for their community.
Our faith journeys are our own. And mine is no carbon copy of anyone else’s. But through life’s thick bits and thin bits we’ve become quite close with this couple from my past. They have, as I said, become like family to us. Quite dear. And part of that endearing has been some similarities in the wandering paths of wondering about God.
When my wife and I were beginning our long walk out of everything familiar to us, our friends invited us to spend time with them, ask questions with them, and tuck in a little closer with them.
They invited us to join the Order of the Mustard Seed. It is, as I said, a lay monastic order, which is really just a gimmicky way of organizing people who are loosely connected by thought and idea. The Order involves vows. If you can get your head around that.
The vows are simple, but they’re like mustard seeds themselves, full of potential meaning and potential application. The three vows are associated with six practices, and I will share them with you now.
A vow to be true to Christ
A practice of creativity
A practice of prayer
A vow to be kind to people
A practice of justice
A practice of hospitality
A vow to be a witness to the good news you know.
A practice of learning
A practice of mission
Now, what do you think of that? What do you think of those vows? What do you think of me having taken them?
Do you know me? Do you know my heart? What then, do you think of my having taken these vows? Am I fulfilling them?
I have fulfilled my vows. I have betrayed my vows. It has really depended on the day.
I am empty of the promises I made in my youth. I promised to be sold out and radical. And I’m not sure if I ever knew what that meant, anyway.
But am I a witness? What have I witnessed and will I testify? I am my own testimony. I am basically only a witness to my own life and circumstances. I am a witness to the mycorrhizae of relationships that have made me who I am, and I am witness to the transcendent power of community.
I am not the man I once was. I don’t think or behave like I once did, and I certainly don’t worship the way I once did. But.
Can I get on board with justice, hospitality and learning? I can. I can. As an act of worship to the God I’m no longer even altogether certain of, and as an act of love toward my fellow humans I can pursue justice, I can foster creative thought and action in my life. I can remember how much I must not know, and commit to learning where I can. And I can practice hospitality in my life, every day, with as many choices as I can muster. I can be a witness to these things.
“Now wait”, you may be saying. What about prayer and mission? I’m conveniently leaving out these two more Christiany terms. Well. I can testify to these things as well, though they do formulate differently in my brain now than they once did.
In season and out of season I find myself in prayer. I find myself tuning my ear toward the creator of the loved universe all the time, you guys. All the time. I ask questions, and I make my requests as I go about my day. I practice, (and it’s a practice), nonjudgmentalism, (knowing we judge ourselves most harshly), and I practice kindness toward others and gratitude. That’s prayer, right? Am I doing it right?
The Psalms, (silent “p”), are a huge book of poetry in the old part of the book. And in order to claim Clyde, my 10¢ goldfish who died in a house fire, I memorized the twenty-third Psalm.
I will again paraphrase. There’s a lot to unpack. It says something like,
Lord, you are my shepherd. I need nothing. You supply. You lead me to peace and still waters. You envelop and restore me. You lead me, quite naturally, on the road of righteousness–to you be the glory.
I can walk with confidence through the valley of death-in-life because I know you’re with me. Your direction and discipline are mine for the taking, and I drink it all in. You feed me, you feed my enemies–blessed is your name! You, creator of all things, have chosen to honor ME! I can’t contain the mystery of this. Surely your divine essence will permeate me and leak out of my pores every day that I’m alive, and when the day comes, I lay down and die, I will arrive in the great oneness of your presence for ever and ever.
Something like that. I could quote it from the actual bible if you wanted me to, but that’s not why you’re here.
This Psalm, this poem, and me running it through my brain backwards and forwards for forty years is my prayer, and so is my Values Deck. I’ll explain.
When you do the exercise with me, once you’re finished, I take a trophy. I snap a photo of you, of your beautiful values choices and I add it to a collection on my phone. I text you the photo, and then I hide it in my heart. I don’t show it off to people, and I don’t put them on the internet.
Periodically I scroll through the photos, and I might land on you, and if I did I would think kind thoughts about you. I wonder about you. I wonder what other choices you’d make today. Maybe I send you a text reminding you that I care for you. This is my act of worship. This is what passes for prayer in my life today.
Finally, I’ll talk about mission. I don’t want to, but I’ll do it anyway.
I am disgusted, outright disgusted with almost all of the missionary work that’s ever taken place on this God-loved planet.
For time immemorial it’s mostly been shitty white men who couldn’t hack it in the societies and communities in which they were born, trying to stroke their own fragile egos in someone else’s garden.
They drag their reluctant wives and their culturally fragile children around and in the absolute best of circumstances they tend to be paternalistic, rude expropriations of culture in favor of whiteness, Americanness, and a distinctly western flavor of the faith.
In the worst of circumstances, well. In the worst cases the missions industrial complex has been an exporter of the very worst we have to offer. Cruelty, sexual abuse, criminal behavior, circumvention of cultural norms and national laws—all routine. It’s nothing but a Tuesday.
I’ve seen. I’ve tasted that water. I won’t really be convinced that the net effect has been positive. The outliers, the true altruistic cases are the exceptions that prove the rule, and are very rare. I’ve known a couple, and inevitably they “fail” in fulfilling the expectations or demands of missions boards and sending bodies.
And when that happens they do something else, something more, sometimes more beautiful, sometimes something closer to home.
I mentioned in a previous essay, my first sojourn out of the United States. I was but fifteen years old traveling to far off lands on a missions trip.
I listened to a compact disc of the Supertones, a christian-dollar-store Mighty Mighty Bosstones on the flight over, and from my place of privilege I let a girl fall in love with me when I got there.
In truth I was as in love with her as a kid can be. Love is small when you’re young but it’s nimble. It moves fast. We wrote letters for a long time, and I know she expected me to grow into an honorable man, to come back for her and rescue her from poverty and abuse.
In the end I did not. Because I was fifteen. And I never should have been there in her community in the first place.
I broke that girl’s heart. I know because her brother told me so when Facebook was finally invented. In due course she married an abuser like some of the men she’d grown up with, and was eventually discarded with her children. I am not responsible for this.
I am not not responsible. I do not bear no responsibility.
I was there as an evangelist. A brutish occupation involving passionate preaching and threatening conversion techniques. I am ashamed. I was fifteen. Christ Jesus forgive me.
I was fifteen, but I am not not responsible.
So the word mission is quite loaded for me. I have not, in all my years, met many missionaries I didn’t want to shout down, and that includes, (begins with) my younger self.
However. Even this word, “mission”, fouled by greedy and narcissistic men, can be redeemed. Not the poor behavior of christian preachers who couldn’t get anyone to pay them to stay in their own hometowns, but the word. Mission.
What is my mission? This is not the first time I’ve written about this word in this essay series, though it’s the first time it’s come up in a religious context.
Our lived experiences, you may recall, according to my way of thinking, give way to our values, which either crystalize, (growth, strength), or calcify, (hardened, brittle, callous), into our beliefs. It happens naturally, there is no ceremony. We don’t notice it happening. We are simply born into the fish bowl we are, and one thing leads to another, and pretty soon we believe that we have any business whatsoever flying to Asia trying to convert teenage girls to your early Common Era cult.
Our beliefs then give way to what? Our vision and mission in life! Our vision is our what, it’s what success would look like for us. And our mission is our how. How are we going to get there, what is our way?
And then that leads, as we all know by now to our goals, tasks & time management. These are important and germane to the discussion at hand, but I’ll get back to mission.
I have taken a vow. To be on mission. A vow to be a witness to what I know. And so it’s incumbent upon me to figure that shit out. I know I don’t want to be an evangelist. Not in the way it’s understood by Christians. And I know I don’t want to hurt people in other countries or in my own backyard. In fact, I know I want to help and be a building-up to all mankind. So what’s my how?
We’ve all got to answer that. We’ll all have one. We’ll all have a mission. Regardless of whether we acknowledge it or think it through.
For me, for now, for today, I reflect again on the fruits of the spirit of God. I reflect on love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self control. I reflect, and I reflect and I reflect some more. I believe those nine words are enough to keep me busy for the next forty years or so. This is the how. This is the path I can walk without breaking other people.
