Mama Maggie

          Willow Creek Church is not known for its mysticism, theological concerns or Charismatic piety. It gained its reputation from modeling church growth techniques, promoting leadership theory and demonstrating an interesting, media-driven post-modern Christian aesthetic.

I have never been attracted to that model.

Last week however, I found myself at a Willow Creek event. It was sponsored by People's Church in Franklin, Tennessee. While this is a community I respect, I actually attended the event because my friend, Bruce Grubbs, (who pastors a great church in Gladeville) invited me. He is a great guy. If he asks me to do something, I try to do it.

Anyway, there were several hundred people at People's Church when I arrived, all staring at the video feed from Willow Creek. I sat down and began watching the screen. After a short worship set, Bill Hybels, senior pastor at Willow Creek, began introducing the morning speaker.

"When we were planning this event, it was the following session that made me the most nervous," he said. "Leadership at high levels usually is packaged in highly driven and self- assured people. But Mama Maggie Gobran just doesn't fit that picture. I finally conceded because I believe I may have received a sign from God about it. She is often called the Mother Theresa of Cairo.  Please receive her."

                As the people clapped, a middle aged, fair skinned woman, dressed from head to toe in white, came to the podium. She paused, looked out over the crowd and bowed in prayer.

                She then spoke for about thirty minutes. She said some marvelous things that you can find easily enough on the internet. But it was not words that began creating a sense of awe among those who heard her. It was presence. Something was pouring out of her, through her, and into those who were listening to her.

                When she finished speaking, she said, "I don't know about how you work for God here. So I would like to end my presentation by blessing your church. I want to ask the Holy Spirit to fill you and your church." She then bowed to the ground, touched her head to the floor and lay there prostrate for some time.

                As she lay there, the congregation at Willow Creek (and at the People's Church) slowly began to rise to their feet. Soon, we were all standing silently, bathing in the holiness of the moment.

                Bill Hybels finally spoke, trying to control his emotions. His words were wonderful. It was obvious that he had experienced what we had all experienced in those few moments.

                In my last blog, Does God Exist, I asked whether it was fair that unbelievers should expect to observe some quality in those who believe God, and in those societies where believers predominate; that is different than in people and societies that do not believe. I asked if there was any other real “proof” of God’s existence.

                The morning after writing that blog, I prayed for guidance and help with that question.

                Maggie Gobran was my answer.

She is very smart.  But that is not the answer. She also helps people but that is not the answer. The answer to my question is holiness, the "whatever-it-is" that radiates from a person who decides to walk in humble submission in the ways of God. Mother Gobran did not scold or condemn, and certainly did not force her way. Nonetheless, when she finished speaking, everyone watching her suddenly wanted what she has and wanted it more than anything else on earth.

                "I was a very unlikely choice for this calling," she said. "I was wealthy, educated and loved high fashion. When my aunt told me that she thought God was calling me to ministry, all of my friends laughed out loud. So I decided to do two things: I would read the Bible from start to finished and then read it again, over and over, for the rest of my life. And, I would seek the presence of God. As I did these two things, I began to experience the Lord's guidance."

                "As you learn God’s Word, learn to enter the silence. Silent your body to hear your thoughts. Silence your thoughts to hear your heart. Silence your heart to hear your spirit. Silence your spirit to hear God."

                In the end, we must accept the fact that spirituality is either a way of comforting ourselves with fables and mythology or it is the core of reality. What cannot be true; what must be in fact utterly false; is a flirtation with spiritual things while living one's life as if spiritual knowledge and experience makes no practical difference. That path is increasingly repugnant to me. It may even be evil. It certainly bears bad fruit. But that is the path of much too much of the church stuff we Christian people experience.

                Our moralizing, programming, politicizing, power-playing, cliché-uttering,  church-as-corporation stance offers nothing to the world but the same sort of thing people already experience in any theater, rock concert, bank or political rally.  So learning to do what we already do, but better, is a bankrupt path. I don’t want any more technique that will help me do what I am doing, but better.

What I want to know is if any of this is real. And I want to have the courage to either give it up if it is not real or thoroughly embrace it if it is.

I want to stop “halting between two opinions,” as the prophet Elijah puts it.

                If the Bible is to be believed, we are amphibious creatures, sort of like frogs. We are made to live in this natural world. We are also made to live in a spiritual world, to periodically breathe the air of eternity. What we call that eternal atmosphere is “holiness.” When people breathe in holiness, whether saint or sinner, they become enchanted. It is the “what-I-have-been-looking-for-all-my-life-but-couldn’t-name-it” stuff and everyone recognizes it when he or she encounters it.

                But back to the question of my previous blog: Does God exist?

Yes, I saw him last Friday, peeking through the eyes of a beautiful Egyptian woman. He looked at me through her and then I looked back at Him. And I fell in love again with that other time and place that surrounds my early life.

                This holy enchantment is not meant to be an escape from this world; it's meant to be an orientation to true north as we navigate our journey through this world. It teaches us to delight in this world and make a meaningful contribution to it as we reach beyond it.  

                It's a glimpse of reality, a remembrance of all that matters.

                Cairo, a city of fear, oppression, poverty, rage and persecution of the saints; houses a secret. There is a woman there who represents a people in whom the God of glory shines. They are the children of another unlikely saint: a failed missionary once fired by the apostle Paul, never-do-well floundering young leader who let chance after chance go but who finally became the writer of the second gospel and gave his life on the streets of Alexandria.

                One of his daughters is doing it again. Through her life, the same Lord who peeks through the pages of St. Mark’s gospel, is touching the poor of Cairo.

Thank God, He doesn’t forget those of us who are poor in spirit.

This week he spoke through a woman from Cairo and said, “Come closer. Closer. Yet closer.

Now take a breath and live.

Does God Exist?

Could I have possibly asked a more provocative question?

“Yes!” says the believer.

“No!” says the unbeliever.

Then each begins accumulating evidence to support their conclusion.

For the most part, the argument between belief and unbelief does not advance much beyond this point.

I am a believer; I see evidence of God’s presence everywhere.

I can comfort myself that my view is decidedly the majority one. Probably, the percentage of people who have lived on this planet and who have believed in some sort of superhuman intelligence, force or Universal Being is over 99%. We seem hardwired to believe in God, or something like God.

However, I happen to be a member of the Western World. I also live in the 21^st century. In the small subset of human civilization in which I live, the percentage of people who disbelieve in God’s existence is quite high, relatively speaking. Furthermore, this group occupies the fields of human inquiry that require the greatest amount of raw intelligence and focused theoretical development: paleontology, neurology, physics, biology, and the like. They are really smart and informed.

Alarmingly for believers anyway, many people in such fields find no evidence for God’s existence.

I am not as intelligent or as learned as many of those people. However, I am learned enough and intelligent enough to realize it is not data alone that has convinced them there is no God. Like all human beings at all levels, these intelligent people have made an interpretive choice through which they now view the data.

Of course, believers do the same thing.

There is no scientific test or experiment which can prove or disprove the existence of God. That is a fact.

For example, scientists working on the genome project have come to different conclusions about God from the very same data. All of them have concluded that DNA is a complicated language constructed from four simple “letters.” These “letters” carry the blueprint of all living creatures. Language implies intelligence. Just as binary language (two numbers) is the root of all computer computations, DNA is the language for all biological development.  Binary is a language humans developed. But who or what constructed DNA? Some say Random Natural Selection; others say “GOD.”

Some believers are unhappy with either conclusion. After all, the believers who worked on the Genome project still insist that the earth is not young and that biological evolution is no longer a hypothesis. But we will leave that for now.

If I were to develop a test for the existence of God, it would be this: do people who know God flourish and develop in ways that those who do not know Him don’t? Do societies that contain large percentages of people who follow God’s ways flourish more than those that don't? Does this flourishing include all parts of life? Are Christian societies, or Jewish ones, or Muslim ones; more just, kind, intelligent, wise, well-ordered, or developed than humanist or agnostic societies? 

In other words, if the data of neurology, biology or other fields of human inquiry is inconclusive where faith in God is concerned, then should we not see in the societies developed by believers a different sort of quality, some sort of “cant-put-my-finger-on-it-but-this-is-better” quality? And wouldn’t that quality suggest the presence of some agent that is missing in other societies?

And yet, what do we see? In our country at least, we see believers avoiding more and more fields of human inquiry. We even see hostility among many believers for those fields. We experience reluctance among many believers to even converse about the possible implications of DNA, quantum mechanics, relativity – indeed for much of the discoveries of the twentieth century.

If God exists and wishes to be known, then there is no field of human inquiry that is not a godly vocation. And, there is no discovery made in those fields that are in opposition to God.  If continental drift occurred and is a clock by which we can measure the passing of geological time, then the discovery of continental drift is something our Creator wanted us to discover. If DNA is a language and we have found the signature of “the Word by which all things exist,” then a believer ought to rejoice. If molecules are constructed from sub-atomic particles that have only potential existence then we should laugh at discovering that we have been mistaken about the nature of reality. Such a discovery moves us to humility and awe. It also indicates that we are growing up and ready for such knowledge.

And if all of this forces us to take another look at the lenses through which we read scripture, then this too is something God meant to occur. He surely doesn’t mean for us to force ourselves to grit our teeth and live in the eighteenth century while using technological gadgets made possible by discoveries we are not allowed to acknowledge.

In fact, if I were an unbeliever, I would conclude from observing the reactions of believers to science and human advance a proof for the nonexistence of God. I would also conclude that since many places that believers dominate do not flourish, this too points toward a proof for God’s non-existence.

I began this reflection by claiming that the arguments for and against God’s existence are not much more complicated than “yes He does,” and “no He doesn’t.” For too many of us, the next step of the discussion is simply to yell louder or, if possible to pass laws that will keep one another from offering our different opinions in public.

But the argument is really simple: what difference does a belief in God make in the lives of those who serve Him? Is that difference positive or negative?

If Christians don’t face this argument head on; if we keep on entertaining ourselves by sending out louder and louder emails and dumber and dumber sermons; if worship is really a rock concert with a good light show; if a political party is the same thing as the kingdom of God; if we insist that dinosaurs lived at the time of Nimrod, about 5,000 years ago; if poor people are poor mostly because they are lazy; if it is God’s plan that my church have one race and one socio-economic group even though my church is surrounded by other kinds of people; if it’s OK that some of our most Christian influenced counties are the poorest and most intellectually backward counties in the nation: well, we are going to finally help settle the argument about whether there is a God.

We will have conducted the only experiment that is capable of proving the old argument one way or the other. We will then present our evidence: there is no visible sign of God’s presence anywhere, even among those who follow Him.  

He is just a concept that comforts people who are too frightened to face reality.

Betwixt and Between

A couple of weeks ago, Trish and I had lunch with Judy Merwin, a delightful character who exudes energy and optimism. She intended to take us to a Korean restaurant but it turned out that every Korean establishment in Nashville is closed on Tuesdays. (I don’t know if Tuesday is a Korean holy day of some sort or every Korean establishment in our area have made an agreement to be closed the same day. Perhaps there is no explanation.)  Anyway, Red Lobster was her second choice and so that’s where we ended up.

When we were seated, Judy pushed a book into my hands and said, “My children said that you need to read this.”

I quickly looked at the cover.

THIRD CULTURE KIDS: The Experience of Growing Up Among Worlds; by David C. Pollack and Ruth E. Van Reken.

I looked up at this woman, a widow now for many years, and veteran missionary to Korea. She and her husband spent twenty years in that nation. They sold their car to pay for passage on a freighter and arrived with fifty dollars and no promise of income.

That sounds crazy to most people now but I’ve know folks like that all my life. Missionaries used to go abroad with a one way ticket and a suitcase or two. Contrary to the way movies tend to depict them, most of these faith-based missionaries were adventuresome, broad-minded people who believed their faith could change the world. In most cases, they were less narrow-minded than their counterparts at home. Most learned the language of the country in which they lived, became well-read in its literature and history, and very often married their children to the people of their adopted country.

There are not many of them left and when I meet one of them, I listen. I have the very highest respect for them and their work. I know their story has not been depicted well by either religious or secular people. They are not the angels the religious press makes them out to be. They are not the crazy bigoted fools the secular press makes them out to be. They are just believers who like adventure and who are fascinated by other cultures.

“Read it!” She said laughing. “You’ll understand yourself better.”

So I did. I stopped reading everything else on my list and read Third Culture Kids, cover to cover, just because she asked me to. 

A third culture kid is someone who grows up significantly affected by two or more cultures. They can be missionary children, military brats, adopted into a family that is racially different, or have two parents of different nationalities or race. They often speak two languages or more.

They feel rather at home in more than one culture but not fully at home in any.

Check. Check. Check. I am definitely a third culture kid.

I am a patriotic American. My ancestors were all here before the revolutionary war. I love American history and am continually fascinated by the genius of the American political system. (Until this past month, when I began to ponder the advantages of a parliamentary system or perhaps even the return of the monarchy!)

My English is flavored with a slight Appalachian lilt. Who would suspect that sometimes I am searching for an English word that corresponds to the Spanish one that popped into my brain first?

There is no current word in English for example that can replace “asi.” “Thus” is somewhat an equivalent, but sound ponderous in spoken English. Also, there is no current word for tu. “Thou” doesn’t even make it past the spell check!

And what does one do about a craving for ceviche or for the smells of eucalyptus on a cool Andean evening? 

The trouble is, when I was living where all that was available, I missed hot dogs, rhythm and blues, and traffic lights.

Both the richness and the challenges of my life have come from being betwixt and between.

When I returned to live in my native country at age thirty one, I was delighted. This is my home. I love it here. I had no idea that my sojourn in Quito, Managua, Iquitos, and Montréal would never be over, that every part of my life there would live on in relationships; my tastes in food, music and architecture; and the way I experience and proclaim my faith.

I speak three languages in dialects Europeans find amusing because I learned them from farmers, taxi drivers and fellow church members in various parts of North and South America. These languages fight in my head like children: “choose me, no me; I was here first, and so forth.”

I have had the distinct feeling that sometimes people who believe nearly as I do about politics and religion still think I am not quite coming clean with everything. I see it in their eyes: I am holding back; not quite on board with all the things they are absolutely certain about. Something doesn’t seem quite right about the way I fit into a wide variety of worship styles and feel right at home in all of them. Why is it that I like the parts of town where there is a little bit of everything from everywhere? 

I’ve grown to like my globalized culture. Loren Cunningham once laughed at my depiction of feeling “betwixt and between,” and introduced me to the word glocal to ease my frustration. I looked it up. Glocal describes a globally minded person who is rooted in a local culture.

That’s much better than the word I once used to describe myself. A therapist once asked me to sum up my life in one word. Back then, I chose the word “exile.”

I explained that I had always choked up when hearing the 137st Psalm, “How can I sing the song of Zion in a strange land.” I also explained that when I read that Psalm, I hear Bob Marley singing: By the rivers of Babylon.” (If you haven’t heard it, stop reading this blog and go download the song! Goodness gracious, let’s keep our priorities right.)

I have decided that following Christ makes anyone into a third culture kid. We live as loyal citizens in our nation and participate in its culture. However, we are slowly acclimating ourselves to another culture altogether, one that does not always fit neatly into the political and social categories created by our native land. We fit and sometimes don’t fit. We belong and yet don’t belong.

Betwixt and between is the condition of all who take the gospel seriously. Gradually, our loyalties to that other country rise higher than our loyalties to the one in which we live.  Some people are OK with that, others not. And that’s just the way it is.

Ceviche, by the way, is raw fish soaked in lime, garlic and delectable flavors. It can only be properly mixed by a Quecha-speaking person in a bamboo hut as pork sizzles outside on a charcoal fire while a lady wails a melody from a loud speaker about “amor, alma and la vida amarga. “

This just doesn’t mix well with hot dogs covered with chili and slaw, consumed to the sound of Willy Nelson singing To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before.

Add Crêpes de Brittany to the sounds of Les Amants du Saint-Laurent  and you will have committed a culinary crime that will make the papers in Paris.

But it’s what makes people like Judy Merwin interesting. And me. And all the wondering nomads and their children and children’s children who make up our fascinating and sometimes difficult-to-navigate way of life.

Exile is not quite the right word. Oh, I found it! It’s E Pluribus Unim.