Missional Postmortem: Some personal struggles, part 1
After reading last week’s installment Jenell informed me that I hadn’t been honest. She’s right. The truth is, I failed to mention that we face two of the most difficult personal hurdles of our lives during the past two years.
So here goes. A bit more honesty.
The first struggle – my two-year long effort to find solid work – was the least significant of the two. I’ve written a bit about this already, but I’ll confess that I wasn’t prepared for the emotional toll of being in prolonged unemployment and the crisis of faith it would trigger. Until June of 2008 (at which time I was 37 years old), I’d never applied for a job I didn’t get. I took pride in that.
No more. For over two years I submitted hundreds of resume’s without a meaningful response. I cobbled together a part-time income doing freelance writing, web work, and other odd contract jobs and temporary gigs, but was never able to fully provide. This seemed to flatly contradict the deeply personal sense of calling and promise I felt God had given us.
There were legitimate complications – I was a part-time student, I was looking for work outside my established career, our relocation coincided with the onset of the Great Recession – blah, blah, blah (quit yer whining). But despite ready rationalizations, I took this as confirmation of the lifelong fear that I am utterly inadequate.
How do I express this?
The need to fulfill (to fully fill) the daily renewing void of hunger and desire in oneself and those nearest your heart is intrinsic to being a human animal; but the need to do so creatively and productively – and (let’s face it) to be recognized for it – is intrinsic to being made an image (or ikon) of God.
The void itself is a gift, which anticipates the gift that fills it. This what we are: empty begging bowls; that are periodically filled to overflowing; that fill others from our abundance; that do it again. This is literally our human vocation. It’s a noble humility.
Imagine, then, the agony of pushing one’s empty bowl toward God, in faith – day after day and year after year – only to bring it back still empty, or merely dribbled with the spittle of one’s own desperation (some of you don’t need to imagine, you know this feeling). Now, faith itself drives you to a fairly limited number of unpleasant explanations for this cosmic stinginess.
My temptation is to suspect divine rejection, the emotional by-product of which can only be God-loathing, self-loathing, or both.
Don’t worry, I’m not there anymore and I do have a theology that helps me reconcile this (insert parable here about blindness and sight). But it turns out that rational convictions and irrational ones are rival siblings that rarely reconcile. Besides, I know what you’re thinking and you’re quite right: this is bigger than vocational angst. I have been looking for the epistemological bottom-line for quite some time now and I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.
So the loss of certainty is the price I’ve paid for a career in ministry, a theological education, and a long and painful walk of obedience to a God I seem habitually unable to disdain despite his apparent indifference. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to look people in the eye again and give easy answers. There’s no un-eating the apple. Yet that’s what most people want to hear from a pastor; the simple innocence of Eden before the fall, not the scarred wisdom of Jerusalem after the eschaton.
Still, I did gain something from the loss.
I’ve begun to see this sense of futility as one of the significant challenges to faith in the courtroom of postmodernity. Once you feel the agony of unrequited faith, I think you begin to apprehend the general perspective of atheism.
We tend to see Modernity as the age of anti-faith rationalism, but I think it was actually the age of mans most earnest supplications – risks of faith that largely went unanswered. ‘Postmodernity’ is the resulting malaise. Modernity’s bowl of faith was returned empty time and time again, and that emptiness indicts the cocksure certainty of our Janus-headed enlightenment cults of religion and science, which often conspired to deliver the emptiest promises of the past ‘Christian century.’
And I’ve begun to see that while atheists call religion a crutch, atheism itself is a big warm blanket, comforting its wearer from the bitter cold of an empty universe on the one hand and the horror of divine contempt on the other. I don’t mean that as a denigration. More than once this past year I begged for that blanket. But that bowl came back empty too.
In a world where the promises of gods and scientists fail to fully fill the empty ikons of the earth, what remains? For now it appears that ambition replaces creativity and entertainment replaces exaltation. I know because that’s what people I meet settle for. That’s often what I settle for. It doesn’t satiate, but for many it’s better than nothing.
And It just so happens these are the only two incarnations of science or religion that enjoy much popular currency today. Give them ambition and give them entertainment, for God or for profit, and you will earn a living.
I’m still not satisfied, but in a land of famine the one with a little eats like a king. So I keep pushing my bowl toward the sky, praying for a little to fill myself and a little to share.
